Gold Coast

by Nelson DeMille

  “How are they?’’ I asked.

  “Fine. They missed us at Easter.”

  “It seemed different without them,’’ I said.

  “Easter certainly was different this year,’’ Susan pointed out.

  I let that alone. As for my children, Carolyn is a freshman at Yale, my alma mater, and I still can’t get used to the fact that Yale has women there now. Carolyn went to St. Paul’s, also my alma mater, and that’s even harder to picture. But the world is changing, and for women, perhaps, it’s a slightly better place. Edward is a senior at St. Paul’s, which appeals to my male ego, but he’s been accepted at Susan’s alma mater, Sarah Lawrence. I suppose I should be happy that my children have chosen their parents’ schools, but how my daughter has wound up at Yale and my son at Sarah Lawrence is beyond me. In Carolyn’s case, I think she is making a statement. Edward’s motives, I’m afraid, are a bit more base; he wants to get laid. I think they’ll both succeed. I said, “I came home every holiday when I was at school.”

  “So did I, except one Thanksgiving I’d rather not discuss.’’ She laughed, then added seriously, “They grow up faster now, John. They really do. I was so sheltered, I honestly didn’t know a thing about sex or money or travel until I was ready to go to college. That’s not good either.”

  “I suppose not.’’ Susan actually went to a local prep school, Friends Academy here in Locust Valley, an old and prestigious school run by Quakers. She lived at home and was driven to school in a chauffeured car. Many of the rich around here favor the austere atmosphere of Friends for their children, hoping, I suppose, that their heirs will learn to enjoy simple pleasures in the event the market crashes again. Indeed we all try to raise our children as if our past experiences are important for their future, but they rarely are. Anyway, I’m glad Susan learned austerity between nine A . M . and three P . M . on school days. It may come in handy.

  Susan said, “Your mother called. They’re back in Southampton.”

  My parents are not the type to call to announce their movements. They once took a trip to Europe, and I didn’t know about it until months afterward. Obviously, there was more to the phone call.

  Susan added, “She was curious about your Easter behavior. I told her you were just having a few bad days.”

  I grunted noncommittally. My mother, Harriet, is a rather cold but remarkable woman, very liberated for her day. She was a professor of sociology at nearby C.W. Post College, which was once the estate of the Post family of cereal fame. The college has always been somewhat conservative, drawing its student body from the surrounding area, and Harriet was usually in some sort of trouble for her radical views in the 1950s.

  She didn’t have to work, of course, as my father did well financially, and there were people at Post who wished she didn’t work. But by the 1960s, the world had caught up to Harriet, and she came into her own, becoming one of the campus heroes of the counterculture.

  I can remember her when I was home from St. Paul’s and Yale, running all over the place in her VW Beetle, organizing this and that. My father was liberal enough to approve, but husband enough to be annoyed.

  Time, however, marches on, and Harriet Whitman Sutter got old. She now disapproves of four-letter words, loose sex, drugs, and sons who don’t shave or wear ties at Easter. And this is the same lady who approved of co-ed streaking. I said to Susan, “I’ll call her tomorrow.”

  Susan and my mother get along, despite their social and economic differences. They have a lot more in common than they know.

  We slipped back into a companionable silence, and I turned my attention back to the scenery. It seemed to me that a traveler who put down his road map and looked out his window as he drove along these country lanes would not mistake his surroundings for some west-of-the-Hudson backwater, but would in some socially instinctive way know that he had entered a vast private preserve of wealth.

  And as this traveler’s car navigated the bends and turns of these tree-lined roads, he might see examples of Spanish architecture, like Alhambra, half-timbered Tudor manors, French châteaux, and even a white granite beaux-arts palace like Stanhope Hall, sitting in the American countryside, out of time and out of place, as if the aristocracy from all over Western Europe for the last four hundred years had been granted a hundred acres each to create an earthly nirvana in the New World. By 1929, most of Long Island’s Gold Coast was divided into about a thousand great and small estates, fiefdoms, the largest concentration of wealth and power in America, probably the world.

  As we drove along a narrow lane, bordered by estate walls, I saw six riders coming from the opposite direction. Susan and I waved as we passed, and they returned the greeting.

  She said, “That reminds me, I want to move the stable now that the good weather is here.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “We’ll need a sideline variance.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I checked. The stable will be within a hundred yards of you-know-who’s property.”

  “Damn it.”

  “I have the paperwork from Village Hall. We need plans drawn up, and we’ll have to get you-know-who to sign off on it.”

  “Damn it.”

  “No big deal, John. Just send it to him with a note of explanation.”

  It’s hard to argue with a woman to whom you want to make love, but I was going to give it my best shot. “Can’t you find another place for the stable?”

  “No.”

  “All right.’’ The idea of asking Frank Bellarosa for a favor didn’t appeal to me in the least, especially after I had just told him to take his business elsewhere. I said, “Well, it’s your property and your stable. I’ll get the paperwork done, but you take care of you-know-who.”

  “Thank you.’’ She put her arm around me. “Are we friends?”

  “Yes.’’ But I hate your stupid horses.

  “John, you look so good when you’re naked. Now that the weather is warm, can I paint you outdoors in the nude?”

  “No.’’ Susan has four main passions in life: horses, landscape painting, gazebos, and sometimes me. You know about the horses and about me. The Gazebo Society is a group of women who are dedicated to the preservation of the Gold Coast’s gazebos. Why gazebos? you ask. I don’t know. But in the spring, summer, and fall, they have these elaborate picnic lunches in various gazebos, and they all dress in Victorian or Edwardian clothes, complete with parasols. Susan is not a joiner, and I can’t fathom why she hangs around with these ditsy people, but the skeptic in me says the whole thing is a front for something. Maybe they tell dirty jokes, or exchange hot gossip, or aid and abet marital infidelities. But maybe they just have lunch. Beats me.

  As for the landscape painting, this is for real. Susan has gained some local notoriety for her oils. Her main subject is Gold Coast ruins, in the style of the Renaissance artists who painted the classical Roman ruins, with the fluted columns entangled with vines, and the fallen arches, and broken walls overgrown with plant life: the theme being, I suppose, nature reclaiming man’s greatest architectural achievements of a vanished Golden Age.

  Her most famous painting is of her horse, stupid Zanzibar, who if nothing else is a magnificent-looking animal. In the painting, Zanzibar is standing in the moonlight of the crumbling glass palm court of Laurelton Hall, the former Louis C. Tiffany mansion. Susan wants to do a painting of me, in the same setting, standing naked in the moonlight. But though Susan is my wife, I’m a little shy about standing around naked in front of her. Also, I have the bizarre thought that I will come out looking like a centaur.

  Anyway, Susan’s clients are mostly local nouveau riche who live in those tract mansions that cover the old estate grounds. These clients buy everything that Susan can paint and pay three to five thousand dollars a canvas. Susan does two or three landscapes a year and supports her two horses with the money. Personally, I think she could do another two or three and buy me a new Bronco.

  “Why won’t you pose in the nu
de for me?”

  “What are you going to do with the picture?”

  “Hang it over the fireplace. I’ll give you another three inches and we’ll have a cocktail party, and you’ll be surrounded by admiring women.’’ She laughed.

  “Get hold of yourself.’’ I headed in the direction of Hempstead Bay, where there are a few secluded beaches, on most of which I’ve had at least one sexual experience. There’s something about the salt air that gets me cranked up.

  I thought about Susan’s paintings of the old estates and wondered why she chose to record and preserve this crumbling world in oil, and how she makes it look so alluring on canvas. It struck me that a painting of an intact mansion would be dull and ordinary, but there was an awful beauty to these fallen palaces. On the lands of these estates one can still see marble fountains, statuary, imitation Roman ruins such as Alhambra’s, a classical love temple such as we have at Stanhope, gazebos, children’s fantasy playhouses such as Susan’s, teahouses, miles of greenhouses, pool pavilions, water towers built to look like watchtowers, and balustraded terraces overlooking land and sea. All of these lonely structures lend a whimsical air to the landscape, and it seems as if someone had built and abandoned a storyland theme park many years ago. Susan’s paintings make me see these familiar ruins in a different way, which, I suppose, is the mark of a good artist. I asked her, “Have you ever painted a man in the nude?”

  “I’m not telling.”

  I noticed the gates to the old Foxland estate ahead, now part of the New York Technical University. A number of these larger estates have become schools, conference centers, and rest homes. A few intact estates are owned by the county, as Lester and I discussed, and some of these have been restored for visitors, instant museums of a period in American history not quite dead yet.

  Among the most enduring and useful structures of this Golden Age are the gatehouses and the staff cottages for gardeners, chauffeurs, and other servants who did not traditionally live in the great house. These quaint quarters are now occupied by former servants whose masters were good enough to deed them away or give them rent free—as in the case of the Allards—as a reward for past service, or occupied by people who have bought or rented them. They are quite desirable as homes or artist studios, and a stone gatehouse such as Stanhope’s can sell for several hundred thousand dollars. If the Allards ever move on to their final, final reward, William Stanhope will sell the gatehouse.

  An estate’s guesthouse is an even more desirable home for a modern upper-middle-class family—perhaps because there are no working-class associations. It is in Stanhope’s guesthouse, of course, where Susan and I live, which might be appropriate for me, but is a long step down for her.

  As we came to another new subdivision, Susan said, “Sometimes I can’t remember the names of the old estates or their locations or what they were called, unless the builder uses the same name for his development.’’ She nodded toward the new homes going up in an open horse meadow surrounded by wrought-iron fencing. “What was that place called?’’ she asked.

  “That was part of the Hedges, but I can’t remember the last owner’s name.”

  “Neither can I,’’ she said. “Is the house still there?”

  “I think it was torn down. It was behind those blue spruces.”

  “That’s right,’’ Susan agreed. “It was an English manor house. The Conroys owned it. I went to school with their son, Philip. He was cute.”

  “I think I remember him. Sort of a twit with terminal acne.”

  Susan punched my arm. “You’re the twit.”

  “I have clear skin.’’ We headed due west now, and as the last rays of the sun came through the windshield, I put the visor down. Sometimes these rides are pleasant, sometimes they aren’t. I asked, “Have you thought about moving?”

  “No.”

  “Susan . . . I give this place another ten years and you won’t recognize it. The Americans are coming. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “The hamburger chains, shopping malls, twenty-four-hour convenience stores, pizza parlors—they’re here already. There will come a day when there won’t be a secluded beach left for us to make love on. Wouldn’t you rather remember everything as it was?”

  She didn’t reply and I knew it was no use trying to introduce reality into her world.

  In some ways, this place reminds me of the post-Civil War South, except that the decline of the Gold Coast is not the result of military operations, but of a single economic catastrophe followed by a more subtle class war. And whereas the ruined plantations of the Old South were spread over a dozen states, the ruins of this fabled world are contained within an area of about ninety square miles, comprising about a third of the total area of this county.

  Most of this suburban county’s massive population of a million and a half people are contained in the southern two-thirds, and very close by are New York’s teeming eight million. These facts—the numbers, the history, the present realities of population, taxes, and land development—color our world and explain, I hope, our collective psyches and our obsession with wanting to freeze a moment in time, any moment in time except tomorrow.

  I glanced again at Susan, who had her eyes closed now. Her head was still tilted back, and those magnificent pouty lips seemed to be kissing the sky. I was about to reach out and touch her when she seemed to sense my look or perhaps my thoughts, and she laid her hand on my thigh. She said, “I love you.”

  “And I love you.”

  Susan caressed my thigh, and I shifted in my seat. I said, “I don’t think I can make it to the beach.”

  “To the beach, my man.”

  “Yes, madame.”

  • • •

  The sun had set now, and here and there I could make out the lights of a big house through the newly budded trees. I got my bearings and headed north through the village of Sea Cliff, then west to Garvie’s Point, the former estate of Thomas Garvie, and the site of an old Indian camping ground, now returned again to nature as a wildlife preserve and an Indian museum, which was sort of ironic, I guess.

  The park was closed, but I knew a way in through the adjoining Hempstead Harbor Yacht Club, where we parked the car.

  I took a blanket from the trunk, and Susan and I held hands as we made our way down to the beach, a narrow strip of sand and glacial rock that lay at the base of a low cliff. The beach was nearly deserted except for a group of people a hundred yards farther up who had built a fire.

  There was no moon, but the sky was starry, and out on Hempstead Bay, powerboats and sailing craft headed into the yacht club or continued south toward Roslyn Harbor.

  It had gotten noticeably cooler, and a land breeze rustled through the trees at the top of the cliff. We found a nice patch of sand that the outgoing tide had deposited between two large rocks at the cliff ’s base. It was a well-sheltered spot, and we spread out the blanket and sat looking at the water.

  There is something about the beach after dark that is both calming and invigorating, and the majesty of the sea and the vast sky makes anything you say sound feeble, yet any movement of the body seems graceful and divinely inspired.

  We undressed and made love under the stars, then lay wrapped in each other’s arms in the lee of the cliff and listened to the sound of the wind through the trees above us.

  After a while, we dressed and walked along the beach, hand in hand. Across the bay I could see Sands Point, once home to the Goulds, the entire Guggenheim clan, August Belmont, and one of the Astors.

  When I walk this beach and look across to Sands Point, I think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, the location of whose mythical house is the subject of some local theories and literary essays. My own theory, shared by some others, is that Gatsby’s house was Falaise, Harry F. Guggenheim’s home in Sands Point. The colossal house that Fitzgerald described sounds like Falaise, including the coastline and high bluffs of Sands Point. Falaise is a county museum now, dark at night,
but if it were lit in all its glory, I would be able to see it from here.

  And on this side of the bay, up the beach on the next point of land, there is a big white colonial house which still stands and which I am certain is that of Gatsby’s lost love, Daisy Buchanan. The long pier behind Daisy’s house is not there any longer, but locals confirm that it existed, and the haunting green light at the end of the pier that Gatsby would stare at from his mansion across the water—well, I’ve seen it from my boat on summer nights, and Susan has seen it, too—a spectral glow that seems to float above the water where the pier must have ended.

  I’m not sure what that green light meant to Jay Gatsby nor what it symbolized beyond the orgiastic future. But for me, when I see it, my worries seep away into the sea mist, and I feel as I did as a child one summer night many years ago when from my father’s boat I watched the harbor lights playing off the sparkling waters of Hempstead Bay. When I see the green light, I am able to recall that innocent hour, that perfect, tranquil night with its sea smells and soft breezes, and the sound of gentle swells lapping against the swaying boat, and my father taking my hand.

  Susan, too, says the green light can bring on a transcendental moment for her, though she won’t or can’t describe it precisely.

  But I want to tell my children about this; I want to tell them to find their green light, and I wish that for one magic hour on a summer’s evening, a weary nation would pause and reflect, and each man and woman would remember how the world once looked and smelled and felt and how nice it was to draw such supreme comfort and security by the simple act of putting one’s hand into the hand of a father or mother.

  The green light that I see at the end of Daisy’s vanished pier is not the future; it is the past, and it is the only comforting omen I have ever seen.

  Thirteen

  By Wednesday, I had gotten the necessary paperwork together to apply to the Village of Lattingtown for a building permit to erect a stable on Susan’s property. I did not specifically state that the stable to be built already existed on Stanhope property, as the Stanhopes, of course, owe the village, the township, and the county a lot of money, and I suppose that the part of the stables that we were going to chop off and spirit away could be considered an asset on which there are tax liens. But if it’s legal to tear down structures to save taxes, I guess it’s legal to move them to property on which the taxes are paid, and will, in fact, go up because of the stables. I honestly don’t know how anyone functions in this society without a law degree. Even I, Harvard Law, class of ’69, have trouble figuring out legal from illegal, as the laws pile up faster than garbage in the county dump.