Sudden Sea
Copyright © 2003 by Chapter & Verse, Ink.
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First eBook Edition: December 2008
“We Have Seen the Wind,” from
Collected Poems 1930–1993
by May Sarton. Copyright © 1993, 1988, 1984, 1980, 1974 by May Sarton.
Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-316-05478-2
Contents
Chapter 3: A Shift in the Wind
Chapter 8: Upside Down, Inside Out
Chapter 9: Battening the Hatches
Chapter 10: A One-Hundred-Year Storm
Chapter 11: How Do You Lose a Hurricane?
Chapter 12: The Long Island Express
Chapter 13: Crossing the Sound
Chapter 14: The Atlantic Ocean Bound Out of Bed
Chapter 15: The Dangerous Right Semicircle
Chapter 21: The Last of the Old New England Summers
also by R. A. Scotti
The Kiss of Judas
The Devil’s Own
The Hammer’s Eye
Cradle Song
For Love of Sarah
(as Angelica Scott)
Lal,
to your bright eyes
The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds, And ’twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault Set roaring war.
— William Shakespeare,
The Tempest
Gone with the Wind
J
uly 14, 1938, was a scorcher — 90° in the shade, air like pond scum. At New York’s Floyd Bennett Airfield, men in shirtsleeves and loosened ties, jackets slung over their shoulders, fanned themselves with their straw hats. Women pinned up their hair to get it off their necks and shimmied their skirts to stir up a breeze. Anticipation was so keen that in the midst of the Great Depression, thousands had spent precious fuel to drive to Queens. When the sun dipped over Jamaica Bay, they still held their places, pressed against the wire fences along the runway. Maybe there was nothing else to hold on to, no work, no prospects, and nothing better to do that day. Maybe they wanted to say they were part of history. Or maybe they’d given up on their own dream and were grabbing on to the kite tail of somebody else’s. New York bookies were giving even odds this one would come true, and even money is better than no chance at all.
At eighteen minutes after seven, a lanky young man shambled onto the runway, stride unhurried, shoulders hunched, eyes on his scuffed shoes, his lucky hat — a battered brown felt fedora — set a little rakishly. The way he walked to his plane, he could have been going to the corner for a two-cent newspaper instead of embarking on an aerial argosy to challenge Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic record. From Paris, he planned to keep on flying, around the top of the world, faster than anyone had ever flown. The silver wing of the Lockheed was burnished gold in the setting sun. He climbed into the cockpit, slid open the window, and waved, one quick awkward motion.
The big monoplane —sixty-five feet from wingtip to wingtip — lumbered down the runway, its huge aluminum belly filled with 1,500 tons of flammable fuel. Any glitch and it could explode as the
Hindenburg
did the month before in New Jersey. Lifting over Long Island, he turned the plane and followed the Sound. In his breast pocket was a note from his girl, promising an answer when he returned.
From the pier in Fenwick, an exclusive seaside enclave that curls around Old Saybrook, Connecticut, a slender redhead watched the darkening sky. Over the sound of the sea came a distant purr that deepened into a roar. A silver bullet shot out of the west. Katharine Hepburn began waving both arms over her head. The Lockheed streaked along the Connecticut shore, dipped a wing over the Fenwick pier, then headed out across the Atlantic. She waved until the sky was empty.
Hepburn’s affair with the dashing young pilot Howard Hughes was as romantic as a Hollywood movie. Hughes wanted to marry her and he was flying around the world, 14,716 miles over some of the roughest, most remote terrain, waiting for her answer. Actress and aviator were two of a kind — handsome, high-spirited, and iron-willed. He called her “the most totally magnetic woman in the entire world.” She said their affair was “sheer heaven! I was madly in love with him, and he about me.”
In the summer of ’38, Hughes was the more famous of the two. At thirty-three, he was one of the richest, most glamorous bachelors in America. Hepburn’s career was in free-fall. Declared box office poison by the press after seven straight flops, she had bought out her studio contract and moved home to her family’s summer retreat on the Connecticut shore.
If Hepburn was daunted, she didn’t let on. The movie version of
Gone With the Wind
was going into production, and she had set her sights on playing Scarlett O’Hara. The quintessential Connecticut Yankee playing the ultimate Confederate belle might seem incongruous, but Hepburn identified with Scarlett. The Fenwick house was her Tara.
Hepburn was author Margaret Mitchell’s first choice for the role, and director George Cukor was squarely in Kate’s corner. But producer David O. Selznick wanted a Scarlett with sex appeal, and he didn’t think Hepburn, all angles and arrogance, had any. Frankly, my dear, he would tell her, “I can’t see Rhett Butler chasing you for twelve years.”
By the time Hepburn received his ultimate rejection, it was the end of September and Fenwick, like Tara, was gone with the wind.
A Perfect Day
A
t the tail end of the bleakest summer in memory, weeks as gray as weathered shingles and drenching downpours, September 21 arrived in southern New England like a gift from the gods. The surf was spectacular, the best of the season — long breakers rolling in, crescendos of sparkling foam, the water temperature surprisingly warm, and no pesky seagulls to swoop off with lunch. Silky cirrus threaded across a pastel sky, and the tang of salt was on the hot air, the air itself motionless, as if time had paused to savor the moment. For vacationers lingering after Labor Day, this was the reprise they had hoped for —a last perfect beach day.
The morning began softly on Narragansett Bay — just the flat, steady slap of the sea against the wooden hulls of the fishing boats easing out of the harbors of Rhode Island at first light. Through a thin morning fog, the sun was a silver-white dollar, promising a bright day. The beam from the Beavertail lighthouse at the southern tip of Jamestown Island guided the boats out. The gooselike honk of the lighthouse horn and the random shout of one fisherman to another carried across the water. Otherwise, the bay was strangely silent. No gulls trailed the wakes, calling to one another and diving for breakfast. There was no birdsong at all.
Carl Chellis, the lightkeeper, was up with the dawn, watching the boats glide out. There were swordfish boats, forty- or fifty-footers with long pulpits and high lookouts so they could sneak up on their catch, and big trawlers, holds packed with ice, crews curled up in the cabins or sprawled on deck sleeping off the night before. Striped bass and blues, the catch of weekend fishermen, were running off Block Island, so plentiful you could almost lean over the side of the boats and scoop them up. But the big trawlers were in the hard, dirty business of commercial fishing. They bottom fished, dragging for halibut, skate, cod, haddock, flounder, the white fish served at the meatless Friday supper tables of Catholic families throughout the Northeast. The old-guard Yankees were becoming a minority in southern New England. Irish, Italian, and Portuguese immigrants were changing the demographics and politics of the larger cities.
Out on the bay, handliners, two guys in a dory working maybe a dozen lines over the side, slapped the wakes of the big fishing boats, and in his lone rowboat, a single fisherman leaned into the oars, pulled back, leaned in, as rhythmic as the tide. Chellis recognized the young Greek — Gianitis, his name was. Nobody knew much about him. He had come to Jamestown in early September, against the summer tide. How he had gotten from Ionia to the shores of a small Yankee island in Narragansett Bay was anybody’s guess, but for two weeks he’d been living in a fishing shack a couple of miles north with his wife and two boys. One of those real estate operators who peddle swampland in Florida as beach estates might describe it as a rustic bungalow. Rudimentary, bordering on squalid, would be a truer description. The shack had outdoor plumbing, no heat, and walls like cheesecloth, yet in the Great Depression, four flimsy walls and a leaky roof could be a blessing. The Gianitises mostly kept to themselves, although some mornings Chellis would see the young wife out on the rocks with her sons, a pair of sweet, serious-faced little boys who looked like twins. They were five and six years old, with eyes as black as kalamata olives.
Chellis had two boys of his own. Bill, sixteen, was mellow and even-keeled like his father. In another year he would join the navy and serve for thirty years. Clayton, eleven, was the wild one who would do anything on a dare. He was a seal in the water and a handful anywhere. Then there was seven-year-old Marion, the family sweetheart. Her mother, Ethel, dressed her like a princess and wrapped her blond hair in rags to make banana curls. Everybody said Marion looked like Shirley Temple.
Jamestown is Newport’s sister island. The two sit side by side at the entrance to Narragansett Bay, and like many sisters, they share a history and little else. Jamestown is a place to live. Newport, with its fabled estates, is a place to visit. Just nine square miles of rugged beauty, Jamestown is formed by a pair of long ovals — Beavertail to the southwest and a much larger oval to the northeast. A narrow causeway created by a low-lying sandbar links the two. Mackerel Cove, the town beach, is on one side of the causeway; Sheffield Cove, an excellent spot for clamming, is on the other.
Jamestown was founded in 1656 when Benedict Arnold, first governor of Rhode Island and the staunchly upright great-grandfather of the notorious Revolutionary War traitor, led a group of Newport families across the bay. They bought the island from the Narragansett Indians and divided it into twenty-two farms. Arnold chose Fox Hill Farm for himself. It was one of the most beautiful spots on the island, one thousand acres with pastures that slope to the edge of the coves.
Beavertail hadn’t changed much since Governor Arnold lived there: open fields as far as the eye can see; sweeping views of the ocean in every direction; and along its rugged banks, glacial out-crops — slate ledges and sea-bleached shelves of rock and shale above the tide line, slimy green slopes below. It is a dangerous spot for swimmers, a paradise for fishermen. The Beavertail light was built at the southern tip in 1753. It is the third-oldest lighthouse in the country.
The village of Jamestown grew up in the larger, northerly section, which looks across the bay passage to Newport. In the Gilded Era, when fortunes were truly fabulous, Newport became the playing field of New York’s Four Hundred. They moved from Fifth Avenue to Bellevue Avenue for the season, arriving with steamer trunks and servants by private railcar and yacht. Their favorite sport was one-upmanship, and in the spirit of the game, Vanderbilts and Astors built summer palaces, one more grandiose than the next.
