Sudden Sea (12 page)

Gretchen and Gair woke up Wednesday morning feeling as sulky as the weather. Cooped up in the house again! There were no books to read and no games to play that they had not read and played a million times. They could recite whole pages of their favorite books by heart.

Thirty-year-old Tot Greene was as fed up with the miserable weather as her children. Pouring a second cup of coffee, she gazed out the breakfast room window, trying to think of something fun for them to do. Unlike the fine weather in southern New England, the twenty-first was another dismal morning on Long Island. Outside, the beach was empty. Not a soul, not even a bird. The sand was dark from the overnight rain, and the long blades of dune grass were bent almost parallel to it. The wind must be nasty. Not a day to go beachcombing, searching for sea glass, shells, and stones to bring back to the city.

Long, restless hours yawned ahead of them. Tot didn’t want to hear another “What can we do now, Mom?” But she could not blame her children. When you’re ten and eight, being house-bound for weeks can make you antsy and irritable — even if your house is in the dunes of Westhampton Beach. Tot stepped to the phone and made some calls. She didn’t want the summer to be a complete washout. Rain or no rain, the Greenes were going to have a party — an end-of-summer party. It would be a distraction for Gretchen and Gair and a chance to say good-bye to their summer friends until next year.

A couple of towns away in Bridgehampton, Ernest Clowes was watching the day closely. Clowes, a volunteer observer for the Weather Bureau, did not like what he saw. The morning had dawned misty and pale along the Long Island shore. Smothering air as thick as a poultice pressed down on the island. Overnight thunderstorms had brought no relief. The grand elms on Southampton’s main street were dripping like showerheads. Even the easterly wind that was chopping at the waters of the Sound was blowing hot and sticky.

Offshore, the weather appeared benign enough. The Montauk fleet had gone out at dawn. But across the Sound at Stoning-ton, Connecticut, a brickred sunrise, the third in three days, kept the Portuguese fishermen in port mending their nets. To a fisherman, superstitions aren’t so much ungrounded fears as a mixture of lore and experience — stories passed down with the requisite embroidering at every retelling, knowledge born of bad luck, or sage advice once brushed aside in the bravado of youth. Fishermen at the mercy of the mercurial sea learn caution and the perils of imprudence. In the lore of Portuguese fishermen, three consecutive red sunrises meant a wicked storm was on the way.

Clowes was not superstitious, but by noon he was apprehensive. The barometer was skidding down and the easterly wind had puffed up to a gale. At Moriches Inlet, between Fire Island and Westhampton, the Coast Guard was on patrol, warning the few hardy beachgoers to keep out of the water. Out at Westhampton Beach, parents dropping their children off at the Greenes’ party stopped to admire the towering surf. They never thought that they were delivering their children into the clutch of a treacherous sea.

Because September often brought high winds and raucous seas, most Long Islanders assumed that wet and windy Wednesday was “a bad case of normalcy.” Arthur Raynor, a year out of high school and still looking for work in 1938, put it this way: “Gray skies are no novelty in this part of the world, particularly at the fall equinox. ‘Line storms’ were an expected feature. The wind would haul around to the northeast, the rains would come in cold, nasty squalls, and once in a while a branch would break off somebody’s tree. The leaves which were about to hit the ground were accelerated somewhat, and fall came in like a lion.”

As skies glowered and winds howled, Ernest Clowes began to keep a detailed record of the day: “A little after one o’clock, it began to rain heavily,” he noted. “By two o’clock gale winds were blowing and the barometer was sliding down.” In two hours, the barometric pressure dropped from 29.78 to 27.43, and wind velocity soared. The warm noontime zephyr rose to forty miles an hour by 1:30
P.M.

Clowes telephoned the Weather Bureau station located on the Battery in Manhattan. Although he still had no thought of a hurricane, he wanted permission to spread the word that a serious September gale was approaching. While he was on the phone requesting authorization, the storm was rattling windows and generally causing havoc in Lower Manhattan. Even then, no one at the station had a clue that the rumpus outside was a hurricane. The two o’clock advisory from Washington — with the word
hurricane
deleted — reached the Manhattan weather station in tandem with the storm.

According to Ernest Clowes’s time line, he phoned the Manhattan station at two o’clock. By 2:30, the storm was engulfing Fire Island, cutting a wide channel through the town of Saltaire and marooning residents. By three o’clock, the first trees were falling on Long Island, and at approximately 3:30, the hurricane arrived “in all its power and fury.”

“The sky was darkened,” Clowes wrote, “and the warm air was thick with a smother of rain, spray and all sorts of small items going by, almost horizontally, principally shreds of leaves torn in pieces from the trees. A barn, a chicken house, would lift from its foundations and collapse or burst into fragments that flew away down the wind.” Toward four o’clock “the final catastrophe occurred. The sea surged. The whole barrier of the dunes crumbled. In a few minutes, houses from Quogue Village to Moriches Inlet were wiped out.”

Pat Driver has been to many parties in her seventy-five years, but the one she remembers most vividly is the Greenes’ end-of-summer party on Westhampton Beach when she was ten years old. “At first, the weather didn’t stop the fun we were having,” she recalled. “But as time went by, into the early afternoon, the storm increased and the noise of the wind became quite frightening.”

Tot Greene grew apprehensive. As the afternoon turned nasty, she decided to ask the parents to pick up their children early. She was making the first call when the phone died. The electricity failed next. Then the wind tore off the garage doors, dropping them like a thunderclap in the driveway. Tot was supposed to meet her husband Norv at the train at 3:30
P.M.
, but now she could not get her car out.

While she was wondering how to pick up Norv and how to explain to him that their garage was wrecked, there was a pounding on the front door. The bell, like everything else electrical, was out, and at first Tot thought it was the wind knocking. As the sound persisted, she peered out.

A wet, windswept, clearly terrified group shivered on her doorstep. Tot counted ten: the young couple who lived in the oceanfront house across the street, their two crying babies and the babies’ nursemaid, their cook and her husband, and three local movers who had been packing up the family for the move back to the city. The group had fled across Dune Road, with the Atlantic at their heels. The surf was breaking over the beach and flooding the houses on the ocean side. Along Westhampton Beach, the tide would rise as high as thirty feet.

Within a few minutes, waves were flattening the dunes and advancing on the Greenes’ house. Pat Driver heard one of the grown-ups say, “‘Don’t let the children see.’ Of course, we ran right to the windows and looked out, and at the awful sight, we all burst into tears. I will never in all my life forget the sight of the huge wave rolling over the dunes, coming right for us.”

Within minutes, the ocean was banging on the Greenes’ front door. It pounded on the windows and stormed in. Tot and her “houseguests” all fled to the second floor. Tot asked the men to each take a child in case the house fell, only to discover that none of them could swim. She could find only one life preserver. “I could not in all conscience give it to one of my children. Taking advantage of my indecision, ten-year-old Margaret Bradley grabbed it and put it on. ‘Don’t you think your little brother Otis should have it?’ I asked. The answer was, ‘No, girls first!’”

Waves crushed the Greenes’ front staircase and washed away the living room wing and the master bedroom above it. The wing had been built on piles. The rest of the house and the garage were anchored in concrete. Tot watched her living room disappear. Parts of other Dune Road houses whizzed by, too, driven by a screaming wind. The sea smashed against what remained of the house as if demanding more. When it reached the second floor, the group escaped to the attic. The nursemaid began to wail, “We will all be drowned.” Tot told her in no uncertain terms to pull herself together. She was frightening the children.

The Greenes’ attic was dark and cramped. “It was a very small space for so many very frightened people,” Pat Driver remembered. “Everyone was quiet, while the noise of the storm was terrible. We children, especially the younger ones, were in tears and sobbed continually. Someone said, ‘We’ve done all we can; now all we can do is pray.’ And so we did. I repeated over and over again the only prayer I knew, ‘Now, I lay me down to sleep.’ It seemed very inadequate to the situation.

“The scene around us in the attic was unbelievable. The waves, at the level of the attic floor, beat unceasingly against the house, which trembled and shook. It was as dark as night, and we all thought our last moment had come.”

The men punched a hole in the roof. They thought the house would go at any moment, and when it collapsed, they could ride the roof over to the mainland. The plan was no sooner hatched than, to their horror, a similar roof from a nearby house collapsed and disappeared into Moriches Bay.

When the power went out on the South Shore of Long Island about 2:40
P.M.
, Dr. Leray Davis’s Oldsmobile was suspended on the pneumatic lift at the local garage. Davis, one of the town’s two doctors, borrowed his wife’s Chevy to make house calls. But first, he swung by the local school, picked up his son, Lee, and dropped him off at home. Dr. Davis went in for a minute to check his barometer. It was a handsome instrument, shaped like a silver ship’s wheel. He shook it, angry with Okey Overton, the local jeweler who had sold it to him. The indicator was frozen at the bottom of the scale in the area marked hurricane. Still annoyed, Dr. Davis left to make his calls.

Although he was only eight years old, Lee Davis remembers every detail of that afternoon from the moment his father drove away in the family’s only functioning car: “Priorities have a way of arranging themselves along the rim of disaster. They did that day. The dog had disappeared. I couldn’t decide which comic book to save. My mother was ordering me to put on my rubbers. By contrast, my grandmother, who the day before had just been released from the hospital, was as calm as a clearing in the woods, while my grandfather bundled her into her black Persian lamb coat.”

The Davises lived in Westhampton Village, a block south of Main Street across from the country club. With no car, everyone in their household — eight-year-old Lee; his mother; his grandparents; two domestics, Minnie and Louis; and Lee’s dog, Toby — set out on foot.

“My mother grabbed my free hand and pulled,” Davis recalled, “and together we stumbled forward, bullying our way through the water that splashed against the stone steps of the house, gurgled in the cellar window wells, and seemed to be constantly, breathlessly in motion. The sky was still a grayish green, reflecting the water, and beyond it, bouncing off the surface of the sky, was the wind.” The Davises reached the highway, with the Sound foaming behind them.

Two cars stopped. “The doors of both opened, and like gathering arms, drew in first my grandmother and then my grandfather and Minnie, then my mother and myself. By now the water was above the running board of the car. Holding a protesting Toby next to my chest, I piled into the back beside a thoroughly terrified woman. My mother climbed in after me. Louis reached for the outside handle of the passenger side of the front seat. The driver, a slight, immaculately dressed man with a sallow complexion, reached over and swiftly locked it. ‘No niggers ride in this car,’ he said calmly, and gunned the motor. The car skidded sideways, forcing Louis to leap backwards.

“‘You can’t do that,’ my mother screamed. The driver glanced over his shoulder. ‘You want to be with him? Get out.’

“My mother settled forlornly back in her seat. I twisted around and looked through the rear window at the second incredible scene of that day, one that would remain as vividly with me as if it happened within the last five minutes.

“Louis, his coat plastered closely to him from the driving rain, my father’s best hat on his head, was running behind the car, waving his arms, yelling silently. The water was swirling around his ankles as he drew farther and farther behind the steadily accelerating car.”

Sometime later, Dr. Davis was administering first aid to survivors. He looked across the street and saw Louis wandering through the wrecked village, wet and dazed. Lee Davis said, “My father was wondering why in hell Louis was there, and where in hell the family was, and why in hell Louis was wearing his best hat. Then the two of them set off on the heartbreaking task of tending to the wounded and gathering up the dead.”

Many of the “colored help” who had been left behind to close up the summer estates did not know how to swim. In the toll of dead and missing published in local newspapers, the victims would be identified by name and color. At least one fleeing family piled into the car and left the help behind to fend for themselves. Others risked their lives to save them.

Mona and Joan Schmid were convent girls, graduates of Maple-hurst and Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, the privileged daughters of a prominent Brooklyn attorney. In spite of the dismal weather on Wednesday, their mood was as light as the frothy Astaire-Rogers tune from
Top Hat,
“Isn’t This a Lovely Day to Be Caught in the Rain.”

Both girls were popular, but Mona was a beauty. She had small, delicate features, a peaches-and-cream complexion, and raven hair. The Schmids came to Westhampton every summer, staying from May through October. They rented a house nestled behind a high dune on the bay side.

“Life was quiet and fun,” Mona remembers. “Nobody cared who anybody was. President Roosevelt was a frequent Westhampton visitor, but no one made a fuss.” He stayed with his friend and former law partner Basil O’Connor. That same year, the two men organized the March of Dimes, the first charity radiothon. It raised millions for the fight against polio. Comedian Eddie Cantor, who emceed the show, coined the title “March of Dimes,” playing off the famous “March of Time” newsreels. In a strange twist of fate, Basil O’Connor’s daughter would contract polio, too.