Gold Coast

by Nelson DeMille

  I turned the Bronco into Stanhope’s gateway and waved to George, who was on a ladder cutting some low branches on a beech tree.

  As I headed toward my house, I tried to put myself in the right postbellum, precoital mood.

  Susan swung open the door, wearing nothing at all, and called out, “Jerry!’’ then put one hand over her mouth and the other over her pubic region. “Oh . . . !”

  “Very funny.”

  Dinner was indeed cold—a salad, white wine, and half-frozen shrimp. Susan has never taken to cooking, but I don’t fault her. It’s a wonder she knows how to turn on the oven considering she never even saw Stanhope Hall’s downstairs kitchen until she was twenty. But dinner was served in the nude, so what could I complain about?

  Susan sat on my lap at the dinner table and fed me icy shrimp with her fingers, poured wine into my mouth, and dabbed my face with a napkin. She didn’t say much and neither did I, but I had the feeling everything was all right. It’s quite pleasant to eat with a naked woman on your lap, especially if the meal isn’t so good. I said, “Well, so much for the cold dinner. What’s for dessert?”

  “Me.”

  “Correct.”

  I stood with her in my arms.

  She shook her head. “Not here. I want to make love on the beach tonight.”

  Some women change partners for variety; Susan likes to change the scenery and costumes.

  “Sounds fine,’’ I said, though, in truth, I would have preferred a bed, and I would have preferred it in the next two minutes.

  Anyway, Susan dressed and we took the Jag. I drove and put the sunroof back and let in the spring air. It was getting on to that moody time of the day, twilight, when the long shadows make a familiar world look different. “Do you want to go to the beach now?’’ I asked.

  “No. After dark.”

  I drove generally south and west toward the sinking sun, through a lovely landscape of rolling hills, shaded lanes, meadows, ponds, and pockets of woodland.

  I tried to sort the events of the last few weeks, which compelled me into the wider subject of my life and my world. There still exists here, less than an hour’s drive from midtown Manhattan, this great stretch of land along the northern coast of Long Island, which is almost unknown to the surrounding suburbanites and nearby city dwellers. It is a land that at first glance seems frozen in time, as though the clocks had stopped at the sound of the closing bell on October 29, 1929.

  This semi-mythical land, the Gold Coast, is bordered on the north by the coves, bays, and beaches of the Long Island Sound, and on the south by the postwar housing subdivisions of the Hempstead Plains: the Levittowns, the tract housing, the “affordable homes,’’ built in cookie-cutter fashion, ten and fifteen thousand at a clip where the famous Long Island potato fields once lay, a fulfillment of the postwar promise to provide “homes fit for heroes.”

  But here on the Gold Coast, development has come more slowly. Great estates are not potato fields, and their passing takes a bit longer.

  I said to Susan, “The interesting Mr. Bellarosa dropped by my office today.”

  “Did he?”

  She didn’t pick up on the word interesting, or if she did, she let it slide. Women rarely rise to the bait when the subject is jealousy. They just ignore you or look at you as if you’re crazy.

  We drove in silence. The sky had completely cleared, and the sunlight sparkled off the wet trees and roads.

  The Gold Coast, you should understand, encompasses not only the northern coastline of Long Island’s Nassau County, but by local definition includes these low hills that run five to ten miles inland toward the plains. These hills were left by the retreat of the last Ice Age glacier, some twenty thousand years ago, and are in fact the terminal moraine of that glacier. I will explain that to Mr. Bellarosa one of these days. Anyway, when the Stone Age Indians returned, they found a nice piece of real estate, abundant with new plant life, game, waterfowl, and fabulous shellfish. Nearly all the Native Americans are gone now, their population probably equaling that of the remaining estate owners.

  Finally, curiosity got the best of Susan, and she asked, “What did he bring you this time? Goat cheese?”

  “No. Actually, he wanted me to represent him on a real estate deal.”

  “Really?’’ She seemed somewhat amused. “Did he make you an offer you couldn’t refuse?”

  I smiled, despite myself, and replied, “Sort of. But I did refuse.”

  “Was he annoyed?”

  “I’m not sure.’’ I added, “It sounded like a legitimate deal, but you never know with these people.”

  “I don’t think he would come to you with anything illegal, John.”

  “There is white and there is black, and there are a hundred shades of gray in between.’’ I explained the deal briefly, then added, “Bellarosa said that he had made his best offer, and he had to show the owners that it was their best offer. That sounds a little like strong-arming to me.”

  “Perhaps you’re overly sensitive to the situation.”

  “Well, the deal aside, then, I have to consider my reputation.”

  “That’s true.”

  “My fee for the contract and closing would have been about sixty thousand dollars.’’ I glanced at Susan.

  “The money is irrelevant.”

  I suppose if your name happens to be Stanhope, that’s true. And that perhaps is the one luxury of the rich that I envy: the luxury to say no to tainted money with no regrets. I, too, indulge myself in that luxury though I’m not rich. Maybe it helps to have a wife who is.

  I considered telling Susan about my Easter morning at Alhambra, but in retrospect, the whole incident seemed a bit foolish. Especially growling at that woman. I did, however, want Susan to know about Mr. Mancuso. I said, “The FBI is watching Alhambra.”

  “Really? How do you know that?”

  I explained that while I was out driving, I happened to see an Easter bunny and two goons at the gates to Alhambra. Susan thought that was funny. “So,’’ I said, “I pulled over for a minute, and this man, Mancuso, approaches me and identifies himself as an FBI agent.’’ I didn’t mention that I was considering going to Mr. Bellarosa’s Easter thing.

  “What did this man say to you?”

  I related my brief conversation with Mr. Mancuso as we drove past the Piping Rock Country Club. The day had turned out fine weatherwise and otherwise, and there was that fresh smell in the air that comes after a spring rain.

  Susan seemed intrigued with my story, but I resisted the temptation to embellish it for entertainment purposes and concluded, “Mancuso knew what capozella was.”

  She laughed.

  I turned my attention back to the road and the scenery. Not far from here is a huge rock, cleaved in half, with the halves sitting on each side of a tall oak, in the Indian fashion of burial sites. On the rock are engraved these words:

  HERE LIES THE LAST OF THE MATINECOC

  The rock is in the churchyard of the Zion Episcopal Church, and at the base of the oak is a metal plaque that says PERPETUAL CARE .

  So after thousands of years in these woods and hills, that is all that is left of the Matinecocs, swept away in a few decades by an historical event that they could neither resist nor comprehend. The Colonists came, the Dutch and the English—my forebears—and left their marks on the maps and on the landscape, building and naming villages and roads, renaming ponds and streams and hills, though sometimes letting the ancient Indian names stand.

  But today, ironically, these place-names evoke few memories of Indians or Colonists, but are inextricably associated with that brief fifty years called the Golden Age. So if you say Lattingtown or Matinecoc to a Long Islander, he will think of millionaires and mansions, and more specifically perhaps the Roaring Twenties and the final frenetic days of that Golden Age and the Gold Coast.

  “What are you thinking about?’’ Susan asked.

  “About the past, about what it must have been like, and I was wondering
if I would have liked living in a great house. Did you like it?”

  She shrugged.

  Susan and her brother, Peter, as well as her mother and father, had lived in Stanhope Hall while her grandparents were alive. You can get a lot of generations comfortably in one house if it has fifty rooms and as many servants.

  After Susan’s grandparents died, both in the mid-1970s, the inheritance taxes that existed then effectively closed down Stanhope Hall as a fully staffed estate, though Susan’s father and mother continued on there until the price of heating oil quadrupled, and they headed off to a warmer climate. I asked again, “Did you like it?”

  “I don’t know. It was all I knew. I thought everyone lived like that . . . as I got older, I realized that not everyone had horses, maids, gardeners, and a nanny.’’ She laughed. “Sounds stupid.’’ She thought awhile. “But without sounding all psychobabbly, I would have liked to have seen more of my parents.”

  I didn’t respond. I had seen enough of her parents, William and Charlotte, during the years they played lord and lady of Stanhope Hall. Susan’s grandparents, Augustus and Beatrice, were alive when we first married and moved into Susan’s wedding gift—deeded solely in her name as I have indicated. Her grandparents were old then, but I had the impression they were decent people, concerned for the welfare of their dwindling staff, but never really coming to terms with the dwindling money.

  I asked Susan once, in perhaps a tactless moment, where the Stanhope money had originally come from. She had replied, truthfully I think, “I don’t know. No one as far as I know ever actually did anything for it. It just existed, on paper, in big ledger books that my father kept locked in the den.”

  Susan can be somewhat vague about money like many of these people. I suppose the definition of old money is money whose origins, whereabouts, and amounts are only dimly understood. But from 1929 through the Depression, the war, and the ninety-percent tax rates of the forties and fifties, there was less and less of this paper, and it finally vanished as mysteriously as it had first appeared.

  Susan, as I indicated, is not poor, though I don’t know how much she is worth. But neither is she fabulously wealthy as her grandparents were. I asked her, “How do you feel about a man like Bellarosa being an illegal millionaire, while most of the Stanhope money was lost through legal taxation?”

  She shrugged. “My grandfather used to say, ‘Why shouldn’t I give half my money to the American people? I got all of it from them.’”

  I smiled. “That’s very progressive.’’ On the other hand, some of the rich managed their assets and tax planning with far more care than the Stanhopes, and they are still rich, albeit in a quieter way. Others of the rich around here, the Astors, Morgans, Graces, Woolworths, Vanderbilts, Guests, Whitneys, and so on, were so unbelievably buried in money that nothing short of a revolution would put a dent in their fortunes.

  I said, “Do you ever feel you were cheated? I mean, if you were born, let’s say, eighty years ago, you would have lived your life like an empress.”

  “What good does it do to think about it? None of the people I know who are in my circumstances think like that.”

  It’s true that Susan doesn’t talk much about life at Stanhope Hall. It’s considered bad form among these people to bring up the subject of estate life with outsiders, and even spouses can be outsiders if they don’t have an estate in their past. Sometimes, however, the rich and former rich can be prompted to talk if they don’t think you’re being judgmental or taking notes for publication. I inquired, “Did you have a groom and stableboy for the horses?”

  “Yes.”

  The “yes’’ came out sounding like, “Of course, you idiot. Do you think I mucked out the stables?’’ I then asked, “Did your grandparents see many of the old crowd? Did they entertain?”

  She nodded. “There were a few parties.’’ She volunteered, “Grandfather would invite a hundred or so people at Christmas, and they would all dance in the ballroom. In the summer, he would have one or two parties out on the terrace and under tents.’’ She added, “The old crowd would sometimes gather in the library and go through photo albums.”

  We drove in silence awhile. There wasn’t much more I was going to get out of Susan.

  George Allard is a better source of information whenever I get interested in the subject of the old Gold Coast. George’s stories are mostly anecdotal, such as the one about Mrs. Holloway, who kept chimpanzees in the sitting room of Foxland, her estate in Old Westbury. From George, you can piece together what life was like between the world wars, whereas Susan’s stories are mostly childhood memories of a time when the party was long over. George will sometimes tell me a story about Susan as a child that he thinks is funny, but that I find is a clue to my wife’s personality.

  Susan, by all accounts, was a precocious, snotty little bitch who everyone thought was bright and beautiful. That hasn’t changed much, but the extroverted young woman I first met has become increasingly moody and withdrawn over the years. She lives more in her own world as the world around her closes in. I would not describe her as unhappy, but rather as someone who is trying to decide if it’s worth the effort to be unhappy. On the other hand, she is not unhappy with me, and I think we’re good for each other.

  Regarding our current lifestyle, like many other people around here, we enjoy the good life, though as I said, we live among the ruins of a world that was once far more opulent. Susan, I should point out, can afford to provide us with more hired help, gardeners, maids, even a stableboy (preferably an old gent), but by mutual and silent agreement we live mostly within my income, which, while extravagant by most American standards, does not allow for live-in servants in this overpriced part of the world. Susan is a good sport about doing some house and garden chores, and I don’t feel insecure or inadequate regarding my inability to move into Stanhope Hall and hire fifty servants.

  Susan asked me, “What beach do you want to make love on?”

  “One without razor clams. I had a serious accident once.”

  “Did you, now? That must have been before my time. I don’t remember that. What was her name?”

  “Janie.”

  “Not Janie Tillman?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll have to tell me about it later.”

  “All right.’’ In our pursuit of fidelity within a twenty-year-old marriage, Susan and I, in addition to the historical romances, sometimes talk about a premarital lover as part of our foreplay. I read in a book once that it was all right to do this, to get the juices going, but afterward, as you’re both lying there, one partner is usually sullen and the other is sorry he or she was so graphic. Well, if you play with fire to get heat, you can also get burned.

  I asked, “What did you do today?”

  “I planted those vegetables that what’s-his-name gave us.’’ She laughed.

  “In the rain?”

  “Don’t they like the rain? I planted them in one of the old flower terraces in front of Stanhope Hall.”

  I thought old Cyrus Stanhope, as well as McKim, Mead, and White, must be spinning in their graves.

  I turned into an unmarked road that I don’t think I was ever on before. A good many of the roads on the North Shore are unmarked—some say on purpose—and they seem to go nowhere and often do.

  A modern map of this area would not show you where the great estates are; there is no Gold Coast version of the Hollywood Star Map, but there did once exist privately circulated maps of this area that showed the location of the estates and their owners’ names. These maps were for use by the gentry in the event your butler handed you an invitation reading something like, “Mr. and Mrs. William Holloway request the pleasure of your company for dinner at Foxland, the seventeenth of May at eight o’clock.”

  Anyway, I have one of these old estate maps in my possession. Mine is dated 1928, and I can see on it the location of all the estates, great and small, in that year along with the estate owners’ names written in. I said t
o Susan, “You never met the original owners of Alhambra, did you? The Dillworths?”

  “No, but they were friends of my grandparents. Mr. Dillworth was killed in World War Two. I think I remember Mrs. Dillworth, but I’m not sure. I do remember when the Vanderbilts lived there in the fifties.”

  It seemed to me that the large Vanderbilt clan had built or bought half the houses on the Gold Coast at one time or another, allowing realtors to say of any great house with fifty-percent accuracy, “Vanderbilts lived here.’’ I asked, “Then the Barretts bought it?”

  “Yes. Katie Barrett was my best friend. But they lost the house to the bank or the tax people in 1966, the year I went to college. They were the last owners until you-know-who.”

  I nodded, then said to Lady Stanhope, baitingly, “My grandfather once told me that the coming of the millionaires to Long Island was not looked on very favorably by the people who had been here for centuries before. The old Long Island families, such as my own, thought these new people—including the Stanhopes—were crass, immoral, and ostentatious.’’ I smiled.

  Susan laughed. “Did the Sutters and Whitmans look down on the Stanhopes?”

  “I’m certain they did.”

  “I think you’re a worse snob than I am.”

  “Only with the rich. I’m very democratic with the masses.”

  “Sure. So, how will we treat Mr. Bellarosa? As a crass, unprincipled interloper, or as an American success story?”

  “I’m still sorting it out.”

  “Well, I’ll help you, John. You’re as relieved as I am that Alhambra will not become a hundred little haciendas, which is very selfish but understandable. On the other hand, you’d have rather had someone next door whose crimes were not so closely associated with his fortune.”

  “There are people out there who earn their money honestly.”

  “I know there are. They live in Levittown.”

  “Very cynical.”

  Susan changed the subject. “I heard from Carolyn and Edward today.”