To the New Owners, page 10
For some, the island was one huge nature fix: they knew that if birds are diving in the water, a school of fish is swimming beneath, and they knew what a north wind means and what a southwesterly wind means as well. They have combed the sixty acres of the Polly Hill Arboretum. They have signed up for kayak tours of Tisbury Great Pond, and for snake and turtle tours at the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary, and for birding expeditions with Susan Whiting in order to hear about brown thrashers with their apparently impressive repertoire and to discover the differences among juvenile sanderlings and semipalmated plovers and ruddy turnstones. They embrace everything about the natural world, even “rocks and hurricanes,” as one deceased islander liked to say.
Someone else was entranced by the llamas at various farms on the island, and she once pasted into the log a brochure of “Llama Facts” to answer frequently asked questions regarding these members of the camel family, who are primarily beasts of burden, with a life span of about fifteen to twenty years and an average weight of 280 to 450 pounds. This person, quoting the brochure, claimed that llamas are intelligent and easy to train, and that their grease-free, lightweight wool is warm and luxurious. We also learned that llama stomachs have three parts; they communicate through a series of ear, body, and tail postures; and spitting is their way to say, Bug off.
Some guests wanted to go on erosion tours. One stunning example is the Wasque Reservation, which has lost forty of two hundred acres to ocean waves that have guzzled cliffs, forests, and even parking lots. One house, a fifth of a mile from the ocean when it was built in 1984, is now about twenty-five feet from a cliff. The owners have removed the furniture and the propane tank and are hoping for the best. Another house, built in 2007, was moved intact—including the bowling alley, movie theater, and main house (which weighed 1,200 tons)—230 feet away from the edge in the summer of 2013.
Other guests preferred organized events: gospel music in the tabernacle at Oak Bluffs, concerts of sea songs, the Fourth of July parade, the antiques show in Edgartown, the annual road race in Chilmark, music at the Hot Tin Roof, ghost tours of Edgartown and Oak Bluffs. Someone else liked yoga: hot yoga, yoga for osteoporosis, yoga in the grass, yoga in an exquisite place, yoga on a paddleboard (though not on a kayak, at least not yet). She also inhabited an artist’s Vineyard and knew all the people who dyed cloth and made paper and blew glass.
A neighbor spent her time volunteering at the Dumptique, the shed at the landfill where you can drop off and/or acquire castoffs. Her house had hand-carved wooden birds and a landscaped lawn, but she seemed most joyful when orchestrating rags and trinkets. Another neighbor loved to “shop” at the Dumptique and later report on the value of her loot:
A copy of Loose Change by Sara Davidson, SKU 76993641; Hardcover; First edition; used, good condition/no dust jacket/beginning to yellow; retails on Amazon.com for $2.11 plus shipping costs.
Anne’s husband, Steve, took on the shed and its level of hygiene and organization as one of the unsung challenges in all his visits.
You could hear him mumbling, “Eleven-year-old phone book.” Thump.
“Splintered oar.” Thump.
“Leaky bucket.” Thump.
Mostly, he liked to take it easy.
Steve wrote the most laconic log entry ever:
Pump works.
I don’t.
Little kids lived for catching crabs and for naming them, in the demented belief that crabs have true pet potential. They schemed to get the brass ring at the merry-go-round in Oak Bluffs or to sleep on the top bunk. Young teens lived for the video arcade in Oak Bluffs and later for driving around, trolling for other members of the adolescent tribe. One summer we were plagued—or was it blessed?—when a group of the teenaged girls (Justine, Jen, and Claire) showed an unwavering infatuation with a certain all-male a cappella group called Vineyard Sound. Founded in 1992 by students from Wesleyan, Connecticut College, and Skidmore, the group, which has expanded to include members from many mostly East Coast schools, provides concerts all over the island, all summer long. Dressed in pastel shirts, ties, shorts or khakis, the performers specialize in a range of songs from “Southern Cross” to “Zombie Jamboree,” which were two of the selections at the best party ever on Thumb Point, when Lydia turned eighty.
I always brought a stack of books. When Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead came out, Lydia and I were tripping over each other as we agreed about its delights and subtleties.
Lydia’s mini-review:
Who would have thought it possible? The voice of God throughout. It was brilliantly written, so much so that the context and the content barely mattered. To think that the author was able to keep the voice of the minister completely authentic throughout. A remarkable feat, as I was waiting, even hoping, perhaps she’d slip up so I could chortle, ahah!!!
Someone tore about ten pages out of one of the logs, the jagged edges of the remnants looking like shark’s teeth, not the most consoling image. Their absence remains a mystery: Who wrote what to cause such a savage gesture of regret?
From time to time, we reread entries from friends who vanished from our lives and wondered: Where did friendship flee? Did it hide its head amid the cloud of stars above or did it go to some creepy warehouse for lost connections between people? What happened to the couple with twin toddlers whose rocky marriage came along with their luggage and their double stroller, to the child who had only one trick (shoving jellyfish down people’s bathing suits), to the woman whose idea of vacation began and ended with a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin and who conscripted her daughter at every turn to bring her drinks while she sat on a lounge chair reading a Tom Clancy novel? Where are they now? Most likely at their own summerhouses, entertaining their own guests who in turn will disappear into the dunes of time, kidnapped by the gods of memory.
The logs helped us recollect the small details and also the big themes: the Summer of All Fog, the Summer of the Board Games, the Summer of Hurricane Bob, the summer when Timmy Murphy, a friend of my son Nick, landed in jail for a couple of hours for having trespassed on Jim Belushi’s property by (somewhat) total mistake in the dark in the middle of the night, the summer of Phil’s first visit, the Summer of Obama fund-raisers, the summer when the stranger drowned in the cut, the summer when Kay died, the summer of Lydia’s eightieth. Thanks to the logs the muddle of time was less muddled.
Eventually, we ordered new books. “The Ghost of Thumb Point” was changed to “The Host of Thumb Point” when someone’s then young son was frightened by the word “ghost”: his mom blotted out the G and then tortured the h into becoming a capital letter. In an effort to keep the peace, Lydia volunteered to be the ghost, saying she would be happy, when the time came, to come back and haunt everybody. You had to admire this woman.
“Pug Haiku and Poodle Prose” was a natural title, given how much the Katzenbachs loved their dogs. I was the one who did the ordering, and I recall feeling on edge about the possibly sacrilegious connotations of “A Lobster Named God” and of “Boiling the Pope and Other Vineyard Recipes.” When the salesperson at A.G.A. Correa & Son sounded flummoxed—“‘Boiling the Pope’? Are you sure?”—I assured her: “It’s the family’s favorite casserole, heavy on the monkfish.”
“Sounds delicious,” she said politely.
We kept other potential titles in a kind of mental layaway. I liked “Boats against the Current” (literary!) and “Never Write the Ending,” the latter expression for Lydia’s belief that bleak moments often yield to better fates in the fullness of time, a conviction she often shared with her patients and which I have adopted as yet another mantra. Someone suggested “Idyll Speculations” or “What Is This Property Actually Worth?” We also considered “Famous Vineyard Curses” and “Oh, Well” in honor of the summer when there was no water.
(The Summer with No Water: not all our memories are pristine. We arrived on the island one day where we were met at the ferry by John’s parents as they were leaving. His dad warned us that we would be facing “typical Vineyard problems,” which, we discovered later when we tried to fix dinner, translated to no water at the house. First we called “the well guy,” who arrived early in the morning and (a) got the pumped fixed, (b) left, and (c) came back the next day and redid everything when we complained that instead of water, brown sludge emerged from the faucets. It was August during a drought, and part of the problem was that because the house lay low by the pond, it was hard to get a generous flow of water. Even when we did have water, it was often brackish though it always tested as potable. The well was now sucking up sand and mud from the bottom, so our savior dug down even more, saving the day and the vacation, but the event underscored for us just how fragile Thumb Point was ecologically.)
Sometimes when my children and their cousins were little, I would fast-forward and imagine them tall and grown, friends I hoped, maybe at the same colleges, in each other’s weddings, coming to the island with their own children, the cousins and second cousins, quarreling with their own stubborn toddlers about the necessity of wearing life jackets in the cut, and then the vision would vanish, unsubstantial, false and silly. I would be drawn back into the current of the dense present, back on duty, with the light on and the flag up, supervising après-beach snacks of chips and sliced apples or searching for tweezers as I nattered on about how people didn’t listen, because if people did listen people would know better than to go barefoot on the deck, and wondering who removed the aspirin from its proper place in the green unit in the living room. And so the days blurred and blended. Without these books, who would ever remember anything about what happened where or when or to whom? I am so grateful we persisted in taking notes on ourselves. In a culture that worships the delete button, there was something comforting about the indelibility of these words. Much of what appeared was unguarded and sometimes even dull, but, oddly, that was part of the appeal. The logs were a tribute to what is best about summer, its power to lull, its essential sleepiness. We took photos too, of sand mummies and of dune-diving and of people cavorting in the surf wearing that universal expression of pure yikes, but words are images too, and in this house they counted just as much.
Chapter Six
The Jaws Effect
Today we think of it as the playground of presidents and movie stars, so it may be hard to believe but Martha’s Vineyard used to be a well-kept secret, a lonely postscript to the Cape, favored by people with an ornery streak because it was such a pain to get to: Who wanted to take a ferry—all that waiting and all that bother—when you could simply drive down Route 6 and land in Wellfleet or Truro or Provincetown?
A tragic accident in 1969, the release of a movie in 1975, and a series of presidential visits, beginning with Bill Clinton and his family in 1993, changed the profile of the island forever.
The accident occurred in the summer of Woodstock, the moon landing, and Manson, on Chappaquiddick, known as “Chappy,” an island across the harbor in Edgartown. With a year-round population of about two hundred, and a small convenience store that is open from time to time, it feels like a secret. Its residents call Edgartown “the mainland.”
Ted Kennedy, the senator from Massachusetts, spent the night of July 18, 1969, partying with a group of young women, known as the “boiler-room girls,” who had worked in the presidential campaign of his brother Robert. They gathered with Kennedy and some of his aides a year after Robert Kennedy’s assassination to renew ties and to lament the horror of events of the preceding year. Ted Kennedy left the festivities in an Oldsmobile at around eleven at night with twenty-eight-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne. Shortly afterward, his car drove off Dyke Bridge, a wooden platform without guardrails, and sunk into the water. He escaped from the mostly submerged vehicle and, dazed and drenched, he ended up (the stories vary as to how) crossing the harbor into Edgartown sometime between midnight and dawn, claiming to have swum across despite a bad back. Mary Jo Kopechne was later found in the backseat of the car, drowned, after the pocket of air, to which she had apparently scrambled, gave out. A cartoon at the time showed the car with its trunk barely poking out of the water with a license plate that read: future presidential prospects.
During an inquest, he denied being drunk at the time of the accident.
The Court: Were you at any time that evening under the influence of alcohol?
The Witness: Absolutely not.
The Court: Did you imbibe in any narcotic drugs that evening?
The Witness: Absolutely not.
The Court: Did anyone at the party to your knowledge?
The Witness: No, absolutely not.
The Court: In your opinion were you sober at the time that you operated the motor vehicle to the Dyke Bridge?
The Witness: Absolutely sober.
On the day that Kennedy pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, he addressed the citizens of the Commonwealth:
There is no truth, no truth whatever, to the widely circulated suspicions of immoral conduct that have been leveled at my behavior and hers regarding that evening. There has never been a private relationship between us of any kind. I know of nothing in Mary Jo’s conduct on that or any other occasion—and the same is true of the other girls at that party—that would lend any substance to such ugly speculation about their character. Nor was I driving under the influence of liquor.
Little over one mile away, the car that I was driving on an unlit road went off a narrow bridge which had no guard rails and was built on a left angle to the road. The car overturned in a deep pond and immediately filled with water. I remember thinking as the cold water rushed in around my head that I was for certain drowning. Then water entered my lungs and I actually felt the sensation of drowning. But somehow I struggled to the surface alive.
I made immediate and repeated efforts to save Mary Jo by diving into the strong and murky current, but succeeded only in increasing my state of utter exhaustion and alarm. My conduct and conversations during the next several hours, to the extent that I can remember them, make no sense to me at all.
Although my doctors informed me that I suffered a cerebral concussion, as well as shock, I do not seek to escape responsibility for my actions by placing the blame either on the physical and emotional trauma brought on by the accident, or on anyone else.
I regard as indefensible the fact that I did not report the accident to the police immediately.
Instead of looking directly for a telephone after lying exhausted in the grass for an undetermined time, I walked back to the cottage where the party was being held and requested the help of two friends, my cousin Joseph Gargan and Paul Markham, and directed them to return immediately to the scene with me—this was sometime after midnight—in order to undertake a new effort to dive down and locate Miss Kopechne. Their strenuous efforts, undertaken at some risk to their own lives, also proved futile . . .
Instructing Gargan and Markham not to alarm Mary Jo’s friends that night, I had them take me to the ferry crossing. The ferry having shut down for the night, I suddenly jumped into the water and impulsively swam across, nearly drowning once again in the effort, and returned to my hotel about 2:00 a.m.—and collapsed in my room. I remember going out at one point and saying something to the room clerk.
Then he asked the citizens of the state to decide his fate.
The people of this State, the State which sent John Quincy Adams, and Daniel Webster, and Charles Sumner, and Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Kennedy to the United States Senate are entitled to representation in that body by men who inspire their utmost confidence. For this reason, I would understand full well why some might think it right for me to resign. For me, this will be a difficult decision to make.
It has been seven years since my first election to the Senate. You and I share many memories—some of them have been glorious, some have been very sad. The opportunity to work with you and serve Massachusetts has made my life worthwhile.
And so I ask you tonight, the people of Massachusetts, to think this through with me. In facing this decision, I seek your advice and opinion. In making it, I seek your prayers—for this is a decision that I will have finally to make on my own.
Kennedy eventually was given a suspended sentence of two months in jail.
In the years that followed, Ted Kennedy stayed in office. His public persona prospered, but his personal life was a wreck. His wife, Joan, who suffered her third miscarriage soon after the incident, left him, and for years he pursued a reckless besotted social life until finally settling down in 1992, when he married his second wife. The story of the scandal resurfaced during each of Kennedy’s presidential bids and left him mute during the 1991 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who was charged with sexual harassment by Anita Hill. Kennedy died in 2009.
As much as Chappaquiddick drew attention to the Vineyard, the book and the movie Jaws bear even more responsibility for the island’s fame. Peter Benchley had been mulling the idea of a shark frightening a resort community for years, carrying in his wallet a newspaper clipping about a 4,500-pound shark that had been captured off the coast of Long Island in 1964 to prove to any potential publishers that the story was not so preposterous: it had an antecedent in the real world of fact.
Benchley kept a running list of possible titles, each clunkier than the next, including “The Edge of Gloom,” “Leviathan Rising,” and “Tiburon.” He also envisioned “Jaws of . . . Despair, Anguish, Terror” (take your pick), shortening it at the last minute to the one-word wonder by which the book became world-famous.
When Benchley wrote the novel, he considered himself a failure. He and his family had moved from New York City to Pennington, New Jersey, which his research revealed was the least expensive town in the tristate area where one could still reasonably commute to the city. With mortgage payments and tuition looming, the advance of $7,500 sounded good.
