Lapham Rising (9 page)

G
et your leash.”

“I hate that,” he says.

“You hate your leash?”

“I hate the fact that I automatically obey certain things you say. That you programmed me when I was too young to resist.”

“Those were the days.” I have no time for this. “Get your leash. We’re going to town.” I climb in the boat.

“‘Get your leash,’” he grumbles. “‘Get your leash.’ ‘Lie down.’ ‘Heel!’ Imagine ordering someone to heel! ‘Beg!’ Imagine ordering someone to beg!” One day I taught him about Pavlov, and he hit the ceiling.

“Are you coming or not?” I know he is; he lunges at any opportunity to get off the island. He crouches where the platforms meet on the dock, then springs into the rowboat, seeming briefly like an ordinary dog. “Good boy!” I tell him,
though I know I always have to pay, one way or another, for needling Hector.

The phone rings as I am about to untie the ropes from the cleats on the pilings. Maybe Kathy’s calling back. Leaving Hector in the boat, I move as quickly as I can up the beach, up the lawn, and into the house. I get to the phone on the seventh ring.

“Well? Have you changed your mind?” I ask.

A strangely arresting silence follows. “Not bloody likely,” says the voice at the other end of the line.

“Chloe?” I find myself standing straighter.

“Harry, the children called me about your e-mail. They’re very worried, and so am I.”

“Oh, no no no no, Chlo. Everything is great.”

“Joel is worried too.”

“I’ve never met Joel,” I say, as if that comes to her as news. “But if the event I’m planning requires a professional touch, I’ll be sure to let him know.”

“He’s worried because
I’m
worried,” she says, putting me in my place. “Harry, please try to focus. You’re sounding crazier and crazier. I don’t know what you’re planning, and I know you won’t tell me, but promise me you won’t do something stupid or dangerous.”

I remain quiet.

“Harry?”

“Chloe, I’m very grateful for the call. Give my thanks to Joel too. And I apologize for the wisecrack. But I was just about to go off island. May I call you back tomorrow? We’ll have a nice long chat.”

“That was both gracious and coherent, Harry. Now you’ve
really
got me scared. I hardly need to remind you that you’re the last one to determine that you’re okay.”

I’d put up an argument if she were wrong.

“Harry, I love you. The children love you. Whatever it is you’re doing, please remember that there are people who care about you.” Her voice cracks. “I’ll leave it at that.”

“Got to go, Chlo,” I tell her, my voice also cracking. I’ll leave that at that, too.

As I’m about to climb back into the boat, Hector looks up. “I heard you say Chloe. Did she mention me?”

“Yes. She asked if you were still alive.”

“Praise the Lord!” he says. “She was thinking about little Hector!”

I guide us outside the
L
of the dock, brace my feet against the ribs of the boat and ply the oars with deep and even strokes. Four minutes from shore to shore across the Styx. Dave, Jack, and the Mexicans declare their surprise at the sight of us, since I only ever leave Noman to buy provisions,
twice a month. The Mexicans greet Hector as they might Zapata. He in turn does his usual Mexican hat dance of excitement. Their fondness for him is ethnic-based; I once told them I’d named him after all of them.

Even when I do go off island, I rarely travel far. Usually I shop either at the little country market in Quogue, to which I can easily walk once I get across the creek, or at the supermarket in Westhampton Beach, to which I can hitch. Ravioli and Devil Dogs, I have discovered, are obtainable everywhere. Today, however, I need Southampton, second to Riverhead as largest town in the area. Like most Hamptons towns, it has been manufactured for people at play, and is the likeliest place, I have reckoned, to find a solution to my problem.

Tied up at Lapham’s dock, which is sufficiently large to accommodate six Love Boat cruise ships complete with viruses and rapists, is a sleek forty-foot job of blue fiberglass and radiant teak and cherry. I put in next to it, jetsam beside the
Isle de France
.

“You know what that is?” Dave asks. Of course I do not. “It’s a Hinckley Picnic Boat, the best powerboat in the world. Draft is six inches. Has both gas and jet engines. Costs four hundred and fifty thousand bucks.”

“Put me down for two,” I tell him.

Up close, Lapham’s construction site appears more menacing than it does from Noman. It is worse than a mythical animal. It is real, and has grown into a village; no, a city; no, a nation-state erupting from the soil to assert its dominance and flex its muscle. The eyeless cavities of the windows await glass. The vast, mouthy entranceway is ready to receive the double portals. The steps to the Parthenon are in place, as are the chimneys, all twelve of them. It goes on forever, the flagstone pathways leading to outbuildings and more outbuildings, including an indoor basketball court (heated, says Dave) and a garage for fifty cars (also heated). A putting green. A tower. A moat. A chapel. The bomb shelter. Where are the slave quarters? Where is the prison? And off to the side of the pool house, the Tilles Blowhard, dark and lethal, points its black hole at me like one of the guns of Navarone. Krento was right: the house is nearly done.

“Yet another room?” I ask. On the left wing of the monstrosity, Dave’s men are hammering away at a structure in the shape of a top-heavy
X
, with circles at the shorter tips. It looks like a distorted pair of scissors.

“Uh-huh,” says Dave. “At the last minute he decided he wanted a special room to exhibit his collection of antique asparagus tongs, if you can believe it.”

“I can.”

“Leave Hector with us,” says one of the carpenters.

“Only if you promise to mistreat him.” Hector and I skirt Lapham’s property and head for the road, where we’ll catch the bus to Southampton.

“Be careful, Harry,” Dave calls after us. “You’re going out into the world.”

“Das right,” says José. “Ees not like your island. Ees a jungle out there. Anything can happen.”

“True. I may run into some Mexicans.” They talk to me as if I were a child. I may not be as smooth as some, but I can certainly handle myself in Southampton, for God’s sake.

We leave the Lapham empire and walk along Quogue Street, or as it was known in my youth, Main Street, which, in the eighteenth century, served as a wide, flat drag for sheep and cows when Quogue was a patchwork of farms. Past former boardinghouses for seaside seekers in the 1920s and 1930s since gutted and remolded into bulbous single dwellings. Past more grand houses under repair, or in the ecstasies of expansion, or wholly new constructions wrapped in white Dupont Tyvek building paper, used to repel moisture and dampness, and me. Tyvek. The word covers the Hamptons. The signature of King Tyvek the Mummifier, the Mummy himself. Bandages shredded and askew, he bursts from his sarcophagus and mauls the wooded lots. The deer flee, crazed.

The constructions rise on brown, yet-to-be-landscaped grounds among the building permits, contractor signs (“You Dream It, We Build It”), and a thinned-out forest of green Porta Pottis. One fine day, a million sprinklers will erupt in unison and announce the houses’ grand openings. Like Lapham’s, these junior mansions all have massive (if fewer) fieldstone chimneys, Potemkin porches on which no one ever will rock, and rococo balconies over their front doors. Interspersed among the older houses, they stand looking vaguely related to one another, like the overweight children of a demented family.

Past the khaki-shingled Church of the Atonement (Episcopal, 1884), with its stained glass saints and angels, where my mother prayed, mainly for my father, who would not have set foot in that or any other “house of superstition” if his life had depended on it. Past the Inn at Quogue, which changes management every year or so in search of the perfect Bloody Mary.

Past Jessup Avenue, Quogue’s one-block “business section.” When so much is new or renewed in one’s hometown, one feels the imprint of places no longer there—more pentimento than palimpsest. That’s where the schoolhouse used to be. That’s where Tommy Trudeau, my boyhood buddy, lived, before his family moved back to Indiana. And so on. Now one in three buildings houses a real estate broker. I pull
Hector quickly past Polite for the Elite so that we can avoid the haranguing voice of Dixie.

Past the Quogue Free Library, before whose entrance lies the great rusted iron anchor from the schooner
Nahum Chapin
that went down off Quogue Beach in 1897, all hands lost. Mrs. Damato the librarian sees Hector and me walking by as she is about to enter the building. It was she who gave me my first library card, led me to Swift, scolded me for doing cannonballs from the Post Bridge, and stood beside my parents at the train station when I went off to college. She served the same purposes for Charles, Emma, and James. I nod to her respectfully. She smiles sardonically.

“You used to be such a sweet little boy, Harry. What happened?”

“The war,” I tell her, and move on.

“Tell me again,” Hector says impatiently as we arrive at the highway and wait for the bus in the dense afternoon heat. “We do not own a car because…?”

“Because we don’t need one,” I explain for the hundredth time.

“Oh yes! The bus is so much more convenient. Why can’t we take the bus with the hair dryers?”

He’s referring to a special luxury jitney that runs between New York City and the Hamptons, a mobile beauty parlor where women get peeled, waxed, manicured, pedicured,
massaged, and blown dry for the evening parties they are riding toward.

“Because it doesn’t use this route. And it’s idiotic,” I tell him.

“To you, everything comfortable is idiotic.” He rubs the side of his head with his paw. “When we’re in town, can I go to Puppy Pompadour?”

“No. You look fine.”

“Can I ever go to Puppy Pompadour?”

“No.”

The county bus system on the East End may be a pathetic enterprise, as he suggests, but it affords useful transportation for those of us whose Bentleys are in the shop. A wounded fleet of small and scarred buses—steel-blue, pea-green, and dirty-white in color—sputters up and down the northern and southern jaws of the alligator all day long, like pacing penitents. On the southern jaw they rattle along the Old Montauk Highway, so called to distinguish it from Route 27, Sunrise Highway, which runs roughly parallel a few miles to the north. As late as the 1950s, the Old Montauk Highway was the main road out to the Hamptons; the Long Island Expressway, known as the LIE, did not extend this far east until 1972. The drive from the city to Southampton took between four and five hours, and getting to East Hampton, which seemed as distant as Portugal, required much of the day.

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.