Lapham Rising

by Roger Rosenblatt

  That was when the Hamptons still served as the salty spa of the old-money rich (including Lapham’s ancestors, no doubt), whose convoys of black-and-maroon Packard limousines and woody station wagons crept out along the Montauk Highway in late May, not to return to the brass-plated doorways of the Park and Fifth Avenue apartment houses and maisonettes till after Labor Day. Today Hector and I ride an old bus on an old road known as Old.

  The bus shimmies to a muffled ticking, steady as a metronome. Tick tick tick. Our only fellow passengers are a pair of day laborers, too exhausted to speak, in paint-splattered jeans. One slaps at a fly that has landed on his knee. They slump and stare. We roll past tiny houses with cobwebs in the corners of their windows, where retired insurance agents live with their complete sets of the Book of Knowledge and bathrobes pilfered from a Marriott. At night their TVs flicker blue.

  On the shoulders of the road are women, mostly, walking slowly and alone or burdened with plastic grocery bags and children. In Africa or in the Caribbean, they would be carrying their goods on their heads. They are pin-spotted by the midafternoon sun, whose light grows weaker as the clouds thicken. They move in a platinum haze. Back they go to their rooms with plywood walls above the tanning salons and stores that sell painted chambered nautiluses, or to their trailer parks, discreetly screened behind a bulwark of foliage.

  This is the other life of the Hamptons, the life that is neither the leisured life nor the life that supports it. This is the single-mother life, the life on the dole, of Social Security checks and retirement checks, and rented bedroom sets with pineapples carved in their headboards, and bargain coupons clipped from newspapers for Goya beans and Fresca. It hangs its head and goes about its business like a secret government agency, as hidden as, yet less essential to the lives of other Hamptonites than, propeller blades on boats or the linings of private jets.

  Hector sits and takes it in. The bus bumps east from Quogue, and in and out of East Quogue, a town that has gussied itself up over the past few years with turn-of-the-century street lamps, craft shops, frequent street fairs, a shop that sells expensive handmade dollhouses, and a village green dotted with old-fashioned benches with wrought iron arms and featuring a spiffy playground for toddlers. For life’s other extreme, a development for “lively adults” (which I assume means that no wheelchairs or walkers are permitted) crowds the cleared acres north of the highway. Brand-new, it nonetheless gives off the aura of an abandoned Massachusetts factory that once produced hats or shoes on an assembly line alongside a polluted river.

  Motels named Something Cottages and Something Court, a miniature golf, a Sunoco station, a Citgo, King Kullen and his Dairy Queen, Beach Limos, Beach Chiropractic, Sandy Man (cleans private beaches), a day spa, a spa store (offering “leak detection and liner replacement”), a car wash, a place that sells Bilko doors, and an Al-Anon center. Brief flashes of goldenrod, beach plum, and pepperbush. We enter Hampton Bays, which changed its name from Good Ground in 1922 to Hamptonize itself. Fortunately for the citizens, the name-change did not do the trick. Today the town encompasses a new shopping mall and old Italians who still live to fish. At night in the summer, teenage boys with sideburns shaved above their ears loiter around the entrance to the movie theater, while girls with matted mascara and cotton-candy hair lean against the wall of the pizzeria, waiting for the scuba instructor of their dreams. The sidewalk wobbles with weekend celebrants from share houses, and the whole town stinks of beer. But on the quiet little streets south of the highway are real people doing real things and leading real lives with real problems. And at the tail ends of those streets that drop off into Shinnecock Bay, Hampton Bays becomes an old gentleman with impeccable manners dressed in a black suit, ready for Mass.

  No homeless people to be seen today, strangely enough. They exist in Hampton Bays, but are almost nonexistent in the posher villages. Several summers ago a homeless man was spotted wandering on the grounds of the Meadow Club in Southampton. The members did not know what to do with him, so they threw him a party.

  “Which Hampton is your favorite?” asks Hector, not faintly interested in my response. He does this sort of thing often—plays the innocent acolyte in pursuit of instruction when he seeks to distract me from a mission.

  “None of them,” I tell him. “That’s why we live in Quogue.”

  “Isn’t Quogue a Hampton?”

  “By general location, yes. But Quogue is too dull to qualify as a real Hampton.”

  In a way, it is snobbish and preposterous to favor one village over another; all have the same money, put to the same uses, though there are small distinguishing characteristics. Remsenberg has the enchantment of a hotel corridor; Westhampton, of a demimondaine who has come into money; and East Hampton, of one’s exotic first lover: wears short skirts, speaks French, and dumb as a post.

  Quogue remains the best of the lot for me, because it still honors privacy. To the citizens of Quogue, “How are you?” is intrusive. They greet one another with “Morning” because they do not wish to commit themselves to the prefatory “Good.” Of course, Lapham’s rollicking presence will change all that.

  “You’re telling me, it’s dull,” he says. “That’s why we’re there, isn’t it? Because nothing ever happens.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Why do you suppose Mr. Lapham is settling in Quogue?” He knows I resent the “Mr.” “And please don’t tell me he’s there to destroy the universe.”

  “I don’t know. Quogue is WASPier, I suppose.”

  “What does that mean, ‘waspy’?”

  “That’s what we are: WASPs.”

  “I’m a wasp?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m a wasp like Mr. Lapham?” He goes quiet. His silences are more unnerving than his talk. “What goes on in East Hampton?” he asks.

  “Noise, gossip, and construction.”

  “What goes on in Bridgehampton?”

  “Noise, gossip, and construction.”

  “And Westhampton?”

  “Westhampton has noise and construction.”

  “Why no gossip?”

  “Periodontists don’t gossip. Say, isn’t it time for one of your thirty daily naps?”

  “Actually, I’m feeling quite awake today,” he says, shaking himself off as if he were wet. “Quite peppy! Full of life! It must be something I ate.” I am very glad he cannot smirk. “Why isn’t there a Northampton?” he asks.

  “Because it’s against the law to locate a Hampton north of the highway.” I make a show of turning away from him. We tick tick tick past shrink-wrapped powerboats stacked like dead great whites at the edge of the road. They create their own fluorescence. I feel a pang of discouragement.

  The final leg of the twenty-minute trip covers a stretch of road that runs over the Shinnecock Canal, created when the hurricane of 1938 cut a chunk out of the base of the southern jaw, and then another stretch where the Old Montauk Highway becomes Hill Street, a sudden boulevard with trees that bloom like broccoli and many substantial homes on both sides built in the idiom of the region. Hill Street constitutes the gateway to Southampton as well as the northerly border of what is probably the ritziest estate section on Long Island and second only to Newport as the birthplace of American hoity-toity. Here one may drive through alleys of linden trees, Bradford pears, and maples, all the same sculpted height, then turn left or right and crawl another quarter of a mile down white-pebble driveways to arrive at imitation Monticellos that were the precursors of Lapham’s current imitation. Only eyes clouded by sentiment see these pillared show-offs as being less outlandish than Lapham’s. Architecturally more pleasing, they nonetheless arise from the same wolfish appetite.

  In this estate section, as in similar select spas throughout the country, originated the summer “cottages”—a name that once accurately described modest bungalows attached to grand resort hotels in the 1870s and 1880s. These bona fide cottages became so popular that when the exceedingly rich deci
ded to build their own vast homes in the quasi-pastoral idylls, they retained the generic designation. The new cottages were given names that contradicted their cottageness—Bellefontaine, Sans Souci, and Beaulieu—which eventually evolved into awkward little joke names such as Casa Ra Sera and Me and My Chateau, and further down the ladder, to Villa Ever Payphor Dis. (In Gresham’s Law of House Names, stupidest drives out stupider.) I heard that Lapham, as a gesture of familial gratitude, intended to name his cottage either Holy Moses or Tongs a Lot.

  “Tell me about the Hamptons again. Tell me about Southampton. We haven’t spoken of Southampton.”

  “Perfumed candles and fudge,” I tell him.

  “That’s all you have to say about Southampton?”

  I nod.

  Southampton has the seductive apathy of a debutante, but none of the appealing cruelty. I have always pictured the world ending there: the doors of the shops squawk on their hinges. The eaves of the roofs sag with debris. The druggist’s shelves are covered with thick dust caught in a prismatic light, and the white and pink summer dresses in the dress shops sway on their racks. Nothing remains of the bank but its vault, the door open, the cash in a flutter. Nothing remains of the schoolyard but the jungle gym and the chain-link fence that has been yanked from its stanchions. The distant ocean hisses like steam in a pipe, and a fragment of a red merino sweater clings to a bush.

  “I like Southampton,” he says.

  “Good. We’re almost there.” Sensing that I am about to solve the horsehair problem, he hopes we’ll miss our stop.

  “What do Hamptonites do in the daytime?” he asks.

  “They speak of their careers.”

  “Why do they do that?”

  “It makes them happy. Sometimes they advance their careers by speaking to other Hamptonites. That’s why they live here.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “But isn’t a career important?”

  “Not when it interferes with a life.”

  “What else do Hamptonites do in the daytime?” He appears puppylike when it suits him.

  “They make themselves beautiful.”

  “And what else?”

  “They prepare to go to parties, or to throw parties.”

  “And what else?”

  “They dream up great works.”

  “What comes of them?”

  “Nothing.”

  “And what else?”

  “They hope that other Hamptonites are thinking of them. And that everyone is thinking well of them.”

  “And are they?”

  “No and no.”

  I don’t want to go into it with him, but as the Bittermans’ dinner party demonstrated, the thinking can get unusual in places like this. In any discriminating society, my behavior on that evening ought to have led to my permanent expunction from any and all future invitation lists. Instead, it ensured my popularity, and since that time I doubt there has been a single Hamptons event—including the highly selective DeMott Club’s “Tribute to the Fox-trot” and Mrs. Epstein’s “Night of New York Geniuses”—to which I have not been asked. (The Bittermans themselves have come close to begging.) Had my case of typhlitis improved, of course, I would gladly have attended them all.

  “Tell me about other places.”

  “That’s enough.” I let the driver know that we’re about to get off.

  “Tell me about Massapequa.” He knows the name of the midalligator town only because he was born there and that was where I acquired him. I have always wondered if his breeder knew more than he let on; he charged me half price.

  “Tell me about Shelter Island.”

  “Look.” My exasperation clearly gratifies him. “They’re all the same. The Hamptons are all the same. And that includes the towns that you have not yet mentioned but undoubtedly intend to, Water Mill, Sagaponack, Wainscott, North Haven, North Sea Harbor, Noyack, and Amagansett.

  “Basically, they are all the same. The same shops, the same roads, the same trees, the same geraniums in the same pots, the same Sub-Zeros and Wolfs, the same inlaid tile, the same recessed lighting, the same photographs of families at play in the same pickled wood frames, the same people wearing the same outfits, the same prattle, the same shellacked faces, the same howler monkeys brachiating from event to event, the same opinions on the same issues, the same hummus with the same chips, the same unconscious despair crouching behind the privet hedges.”

  “Oh, no!” he says. “Not another lecture. Can’t you save it for the Chautauquans?”

  “You brought up the subject, so you get the subject.”

  “I was only trying to pass the time on a summer’s day,” he lies.

  “That’s right. The Hamptons are all the same, and all of America is the same, and all the world wants to be like all of America so that it too can be the same.” He covers his ears with his front paws. But I persist: “The same definition of happiness, the same personal lusts, the same idea of what passes for achievement, the same disregard for value and virtue and honor, the same hollowness at the core.

  “And do you know who embodies, who symbolizes, who generates and perpetuates this universal vacuity?”

  “I do, but you’re going to tell me anyway, aren’t you?”

  “Correct. It’s Lapham!”

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  “Such a lovely day!” He sticks his little head out the bus window and contemplates the heavens. The tuberous clouds have closed ranks, and the sky is shut as tight as the hatch on an army tank.

  Twelve

  It is uniquely irritating for me to walk with Hector in public places because inevitably there will be people who recognize him and call out his name in affectionate and admiring tones. This is due to the lamentable fact that shortly after I acquired him, I made the error of writing an essay about him for The New Yorker, which drew him considerable and undeserved attention. Because the essay appeared in The New Yorker, people who wished to seem sophisticated felt they had been extended an intellectual invitation to participate in it. And because I portrayed Hector as being exceptionally intelligent and adorable (this was before his religious conversion) and cast myself as his amused factotum, total strangers have ever since felt free to address him on sight and to ignore me. Only the latter treatment has been welcome.

  So it is, as we proceed down Main Street, that several people shout out “Hector!” (His name seems to require a shout.) And “Hector, old buddy!” And “Hector, my man!” To all this he responds with the fluffy narcissism of an entrant in a dog show, which consigns me to the vassalage of one of those mute and buoyant trainers in sneakers trotting by his side.

  He takes a leak on everything vertical that is not human, including but not limited to trees, telephone poles, wooden posts, hydrants, and bus stops. “I’m going to own this town,” he says.

  “Just make sure all your expulsions come from that orifice.” I forgot to bring baggies. “I’m going in here.”

  He sniffs up. “Reigning Cats & Dogs? Great!” He likes pet stores because he views them as opportunities to proselytize the other animals.

  “I’m going. You’re staying out here in the street.”

  “But why?” he asks, cocking his head in the How-Cute-Am-I? tilt.

  “Hector! You the man!” An aging male zeppelin in a green tank top floats by, too cool for words.

  “See?” says Hector. “I’m the man.”

  “You are nothing like a man, Mr. Tail. That’s why you are not coming into the pet store. See that sign?” He can see it, but he can’t read it. “It says: ‘No food or drinks, no bare feet, no evangelicals.’” He sits down on the sidewalk outside Reigning Cats and Dogs, turns his head away from me, and welcomes additional shouts of fealty from passersby.

  “Do you carry horsehair, or something close to it?” I ask the Orville Redenbacher behind the counter.

  “‘Close to it,’ you mean like the horse?” A kindred spirit. “What are you
looking to do?”

  In broad terms, I tell him about the torsion spring.

  “We have plenty of dog and cat hair. But that’s not what you need.” He frowns like a drowned cigar. “Know where you can find horsehair?” I do not. “In the walls!” He swings an arm to indicate the walls of his shop.

  “What do you mean?” It is chastening for me to meet a genuinely crazy person. I ask him to clarify his statement.

  “In the nineteenth century,” he explains, “they used real plaster on walls and ceilings.”

  “And?”

  “And to keep the plaster intact and make sure it would adhere to the frame, they stuck in horsehair as it hardened.”

  “You’re kidding. So any house more than a hundred years old will still have horsehair in its walls right now?” I ask him.

  “That’s right. Take a sledgehammer to any nineteenth-century house—any original nineteenth-century house, not one that’s been renovated—and you’ll find all the horsehair you could ever need.”

  So taken am I with this information that upon returning to the sidewalk, I make the mistake of relating it to Hector. He overreacts. “Terrific!” he says. “By all means, let’s knock down the walls of the house so you’ll have everything you need to commit a crime.” I try to pull him along by his leash, but he digs in with his hind feet. “The wages of sin,” he says. “‘Maketh a plan for revenge and bringeth thine own house down upon thine head.’”

  “Or upon thine,” I cheerfully point out.

  We walk past desultory tourists deep in private prayer that they will catch a glimpse of Renée Zellweger. A Piper Cub drones overhead, trailing a long red-and-black pennant advertising Live for Today, which I interpret as a personal communication until I see that it’s an ad for the morning television show. Gulls turned buzzards screak on the rims of the village trash cans, flap their aggressive wings, and do not scare. People pause before the windows of a shop displaying paintings of lighthouses and in front of the cheese shop. A man has sundered himself from his strolling party to gaze at a display of Stilton. Shuffle and stop, stop and shuffle. It all feels like a muffled dance of the dead, intensified, not relieved by, an occasional outcry of greeting. I hear lifers calling to one another from the caged windows of their cell doors. But that’s just me.