Sudden Sea (22 page)

In the tons of wreckage, in the salt ponds and bay waters lapping docilely again as if nothing terrible and extraordinary had occurred within their banks, the search for the missing was under way. It started as soon as the sea retreated, and continued through the night and for days and weeks to come.

Along the South County shore, beacons flashing on Block Island were mistaken for distress signals from Charlestown and Misquamicut. Searchers waded out to the beaches with flash-lights. What they found was stunning: “Not a vestige of any habitation was left, not even a foundation of any cottage. All that could be seen was a bare flat stretch of sand.”

More than fifty bodies were recovered from Charlestown Beach that first night — neighbors and friends, entire families lost in an unguarded hour. The corpses were lined up on the sand for identification, and a makeshift morgue was set up in the high school in Westerly.

Timothy Mee of Charlestown Beach, whose wife and two little children were torn from his arms, described the harrowing moments: “I was tossed about beneath the water and kept going down and down and down. Then I started to come to the surface. It seemed an eternity. When I reached the top, I looked around, and there was no one in sight. Debris struck at me from all sides as I was hurled wildly along with the waves. Finally, I landed on the shore of Green Hill Pond. I staggered to my feet but the force of the wind knocked me down time and time again.

“Shortly afterward, I saw my dog Buster, swimming for the shore with our maid holding on to his collar. She was badly bruised, but safe. My wife, children, and companions were all lost. My car is in the pond. It can stay there. I never want to see Charlestown Beach again.”

For days after the hurricane, Mee stayed in the makeshift morgue at Charlestown day and night. The Red Cross workers could not get him to leave. He viewed every body that came in, looking for his wife and children. Only the body of baby Jean was recovered.

September 21, 1938, was New England’s darkest night. The Northeast coast was as black as mourning. From Long Island to Cape Cod, candles, like tentative rays of hope, flickered in windows in the suddenly silent night. Once the manic roar of the hurricane ceased, the silence seemed intrusive, the absence of sound itself a voice that demanded attention. After the storm’s incessant din, the silence was unexpected and unearthly.

In the predawn hours, the Great New England Hurricane crossed the border into Canada. The three-thousand-mile marathon that had begun twelve days before in the tropical sea off northwest Africa petered out in the chilly northern latitudes at 2
A.M.
Thursday morning. The Hurricane of 1938 had made the final leg of its trip — the surprising sprint from the Carolinas to Canada — in a single day. When it staggered into Montreal, it was still blowing at gale force.

Throughout the devastated areas, there was a surreal quality to those predawn hours. Deer and elk bounded from their cages and roamed Roger Williams Park in Providence. In Newport, lobsters by the thousands escaped from broken traps and swam down Thames Street, so many that the street looked like a massive lobster tank. A river in Massachusetts flowed with tapioca from an adjacent pudding factory, and at East Hampton’s posh Maidstone Club, the swimming pool was crowded with bluefish and striped bass.

Dazed survivors wandered the beaches. They haunted hospitals and makeshift morgues, looking for missing family and neighbors. “It felt just as though you’d been through hell and back again,” one said. Others were scavenging. As the waters ebbed, hordes of looters flooded in. At the beaches, they cut fingers off corpses to steal the rings. In the towns, they cleaned out stores.

From his vantage point in downtown Providence, author David Cornel de Jong watched the looters descend:

They came neck deep or swimming, holding flashlights over their heads, rising out of the water and disappearing through demolished store windows. Hordes assisting each other piled goods into rowboats or stuffed them into burlap bags. They seemed organized, almost regimented, as if they had daily drilled and prepared for this event the like of which had not happened in one hundred twenty years. They were brazen and insatiable; they swarmed like rats; they took everything. When a few policemen came by in a rowboat, they did not stop their looting. They knew they outnumbered the police; besides the latter were intent on rescue work.

The National Guard was called out. By midnight, Providence looked like a city in wartime. Armed soldiers patrolled the streets, and antiaircraft lights illuminated the night. Looting was so rampant throughout the state that Rhode Island remained under martial law for weeks, and National Guardsmen were ordered: “shoot to kill.”

Chapter 19

All Quiet

H
ard rain was bouncing off the glass dome of the old Pennsylvania Station and sliding down its steel ribs when Tot Greene’s husband, Norvin, caught the train to the Hamptons about two o’clock, as he did every summer Wednesday. The weather was miserable and getting worse, but the train left on time. Wind and rain played a steady beat against the windows. Greene settled in with the day’s papers. He had saved the morning
Times
and
Herald Tribune
to read on the train. The headlines in both were grim: more saber rattling in Europe.

The
Trib
had a glowing review of David Cornel de Jong’s new novel. Greene might have glanced at it, thinking that Tot would enjoy the book. On the editorial page of the
Times
there was a brief item slugged hurricane:

The hurricane that happily spared our southern shore struck terror into the hearts of Floridians and reminded even the far-away New Yorkers that nature is not to be trifled with when she is in one of her angrier moods. If New York and the rest of the world have been as well informed about the cyclone, it is because of an admirably organized meteorological service.

Greene may have read the editorial and then dozed off. The next thing he knew, the train was jerking to a stop. The crew ran through the cars, cracking open the emergency cases and grabbing axes and saws. The hurricane “that had happily spared our southern shore” had reached Long Island, and a tree was blocking the tracks just outside of Manorville. It took an hour to clear. By then, the wind and rain were torrential. The train continued as far as Speonk, about fifteen minutes from Westhampton, and stopped again. The tracks ahead were washed out. One train had already derailed.

In the furious gale, Norv Greene had one thought — to reach his family on Dune Road in Westhampton Beach any way he could. When the train could go no farther, he hired a cab. When the road became impassable, he got out and walked. About nine o’clock, he reached Quogue, one town away from Westhampton, and learned that there was no more Dune Road. Like Fort Road on Napatree, the hurricane had wiped it clean. What bridges there had been were down, and breachways had opened, turning Westhampton Beach into a strand of islands.

Greene was directed to Quogue’s Patio Restaurant, where an emergency police station had been set up. It consisted of a chair and a table. On the table were a lined yellow pad with the names of the survivors and a candle to read them by. No Greenes were listed. Norv went into the bar for a drink. There was no water because the mains had burst, but there were plenty of bottled drinks. He was ordering when he heard from the other end of the bar “… and that lovely Mrs. Greene with her two children, all washed out to sea.”

The hurricane in Long Island had ended by 5:30
P.M
., less than three hours after it landed. The search for the missing and dead began immediately. As the victims were recovered, they were brought to the Westhampton Country Club and lined up on the floor of the ballroom, where many of them had danced over the Labor Day weekend. Norv did not go to the club Wednesday night. “I couldn’t face it if they were there,” he said.

The only way to reach Dune Road — or what was left of it — was by boat, but locating a boat that could still float was a challenge. The Coast Guard took cutters from the Battery, loaded them onto trucks, and drove through the night, navigating the obstacle course from Manhattan to the Hamptons. When the first rescue boat set out at dawn, Norv Greene was on board. He saw a small bedraggled group struggling toward the bay, carrying a crippled man on a wooden door. The Schmid group had been found.

Annie Seeley, the Schmids’ maid, drowned in the hurricane, but her desperate phone call very likely saved the lives of Mona and Joan. If they had not tried to reach Annie, in all probability they would have died, too. Peggy Connolly Brown, the friend they had been visiting, was lost with her baby. Rather than let go of the child’s body to save herself, mother and child drowned together. The baby was never found. The friend in the house across the road who called to Mona and Joan to come in out of the storm also died with her mother.

The Coast Guard brought the bedraggled survivors back to Westhampton Village, where one young admirer bought the Schmid sisters their first shot of whiskey. Another flew to their rescue from Yale. When he landed in Westhampton, he scooped up the girls, told them they looked awful, and ushered them into the drugstore to buy a comb and lipstick.

Although they had never been susceptible before, both Mona and Joan were covered with severe poison ivy and oak. It must have been carried on the wind, and the force of the gale embedded the poison in their bodies. They were sick for almost three weeks. Everything they owned — including their clothes, from underwear to outerwear — was gone. Their mother telephoned B. Altman, where they often shopped. The store knew their sizes and hand-delivered everything to their Brooklyn Heights apartment. “We were B. Altman people to the bitter end,” Mona said. The genteel Fifth Avenue department store closed in the 1980s.

The Schmids did not return to Westhampton. Joan married and lived in Islip, but for Mona, “the hurricane was the end of my Long Island era.” Sixty-five years later, she has never been back to Westhampton Beach.

Once they had deposited the Schmids safely, Norv Greene and the rescue party crept out again. The wreckage in the water made for rough going. The biggest worry was the fallen telephone wires. If they tangled in the propellers, the boats would be useless. As the cutter moved slowly along the shore, the small hope that Greene had clung to faded. Westhampton Beach was a wasteland. The occasional house still standing was not much more than a shell. Finally, he recognized his own battered home. Jumping over the side of the boat, he waded to the beach. There, walking through the sand toward him, looking as if they had stepped out of the pages of
Robinson Crusoe
, were his wife, Tot; his children, Gretchen and Gair; and maybe a dozen others.

The Greene family and the neighbors they had sheltered had waited out the end of the hurricane in their precarious attic room. But Tot was afraid the house would fall if another monstrous wave came in on the evening tide. When the storm quieted, she fed the children bread with ketchup, which was the only food she could salvage, then she and her “houseguests” wandered through the desolation of Westhampton Beach, looking for a more substantial shelter to spend the night. The shore was a snarl of debris — downed power lines, shifting sands, and ruined homes. The men carried the children piggyback, picking their way cautiously in the twilight.

About a quarter of a mile down the beach, they came to one of the few houses still standing. It was built of concrete and stone and was closed for the season. The men broke in and built a fire, burning books and furniture because the logs in the cellar were saturated. Tot couldn’t find any blankets, so she took down some curtains, wrapped the children in them, and bundled them all into one big bed. Pat Driver, one of the children at the Greenes’ end-of-summer party, remembers lying “side by side for warmth, shivering and still terribly frightened.”

Once they were safe in the village, the Greenes read the morning headlines: broker’s wife and children’s birthday party swept out to sea. The story in the
New York Sun
said, “The names of many children appeared on the missing list after the home of Mrs. Norvin Greene, who was giving a party for her two children, was swept away in the deluge. Not a single member of the gathering at the party was seen again.”

When the sun rose Thursday morning, the Moores saw for the first time what a wreck they were — muddied clothes; clotted, bedraggled hair stuck with hay; faces blackened with grime; legs bruised and scraped. Jeff’s woolen shirt had shrunk to half its size, so it looked like a bolero. Four-year-old Margaret, the only one who had no trouble sleeping, woke up and asked, “What’s for breakfast, Mummy?”

Catherine laughed. “Help yourself to a little hay, darling.”

Geoffrey, whose bare chest was crosshatched with scratches, found a mirror in the wreckage and as the sun brightened, he began sending signals. In no time, the refugees spotted a trawler. Calling and shouting, they picked their way down to the shore. Thorns and splinters pierced their bare feet, and they stepped gingerly. Old Mr. Scott, a lobster vendor from the nearby town of Avondale, was nosing his boat through the rubble. “If it had been the most palatial yacht ever to sail the seven seas,” Catherine Moore said, “it couldn’t have looked more beautiful that morning.”

Scott had to lower a dinghy because his lobster boat could not maneuver close enough through the shallow, wreck-filled water to reach them. It took three trips to ferry all ten. Once they were safely on deck, the Moores looked out on the empty beach that yesterday had been Napatree. Nothing remained except the old fort.

“We glanced over the bay at the place we had loved so much, the place we had often called Heaven on Earth,” Catherine said. “It just wasn’t there. A strip of sand and a few telephone poles were all that remained to mark the place that was known as the Fort Road.”

Chapter 20

The Reckoning

T
hursday, September 22, was another perfect day. The sun was warm, the water sparkled, and the sea was back in its bed. Everywhere else was desolation. People woke up to an unfamiliar landscape. Nothing looked the same. Streets they had walked all their lives and beaches where they had learned to swim and had taught their children to swim were unrecognizable. Harbors, normally crowded with boats, were empty lakes that glistened in the sunshine. Main Streets were marinas. Boats were everywhere except at their moorings. Yachts, trawlers, sloops, barges, were beached on village greens, in backyards, on front porches, across railroad tracks. One Long Island family who lived three-quarters of a mile from any navigable water woke up Thursday morning to find five fair-size boats in the backyard.