To the New Owners, page 18
Boiling the lobsters was our annual marker.
Before the sacrificial crustaceans were dropped in the huge pot, we named them after players on the world stage.
“Ross Perot.”
“Rush Limbaugh.”
“Bob Dole.”
The honorees on this virtual hit list varied from year to year, though Ken Starr, to his distinction, made it twice.
So once a year, on an appointed summer’s evening, our hearts and minds filled with the weight of tradition and the desire for ceremony, we gathered for the execution of a horde of orange animals with claws cuffed by rubber bands, scuttling as best they could to avoid their fates.
Lydia supervised the bestowing of the names.
One year it was Florida representative Katherine Harris.
Another time: “Antonin Scalia.”
You could also name a lobster after a sweeping category if you wished.
“Corporate executives who deprive workers of a living.”
“The Supreme Court, most of the time.”
“Religious fundamentalists.”
“All pharmaceutical companies.”
Of all the boilees, the most controversial was the Supreme Deity.
When Lydia threatened to drop a lobster named God into the pot, there was a stunned stricken silence among her guests.
(Later my nephew asked, “Is she a Satanist?” “No,” John told him, “she’s an analyst.”)
After God almost got boiled, I did start to worry.
What if she branched out and starting boiling people I had no grudge against?
Say, Mother Teresa, that thin wisp of a woman, of all the people to pick on. It did console me to think that Mother Teresa might not mind her night as a lobster, offering it up as one more indignity on the road to canonization.
Surely, Lydia had limits.
Sometimes my Catholic upbringing would intrude upon our exchanges and I would, to my surprise, hold my ground in fond, fierce, and loyal memory of what that world once meant: the incense and the kneeling, the wafer and the chalice, the priest and the cross, the sermons and the penances, all of it coming toward me in a jumble of images and memories. No, no, not the pope.
Lydia told me not to worry.
“I’ve given up on naming the lobsters.”
“Why?”
“It hasn’t worked. Most of the people I boil are still here. I think, instead, we should make up colorful curses each time we drop a lobster in the pot.”
She is the author of one of the best curses ever, a vintage curse, with pitch-perfect cut-to-the-chase venom.
One time the house was robbed, and as so often happens the worst aspect was not the items that were missing (trinkets really, worth nothing on the open market) so much as the sense of violation.
Lydia filed her version of a crime report in the log:
The weekend we discovered the break-in was so awful. We spent the time venting our frustrations and irritations, getting mad at each other. What stupidity arguing whether Nick was right that they were an off-island couple taking our stuff for resale or I was right they were an island couple decorating their shack for the summer.
They wiped out most of the books, tapes, record player, salad bowls, cooking pots, children’s toys. Everywhere we looked something was missing.
Then the curse, which in an outburst of discretion I shall not repeat: suffice it to say it caused our friend Phil to whistle in admiration when he heard it. His eyes lit up, and, grinning, he offered his highest compliment, “That’s positively Sicilian.”
Chapter Thirteen
“She Is Not
So Young Now”
Despite the idyllic veneer, the Vineyard is not without troubles and not without sorrow.
A commentary by Jim Malkin in the Gazette made note of the local tendency to “‘special’ this place to death,” quoting West Tisbury selectman John Early.
“Yes,” Malkin wrote, “we are lucky to live on this Island. It is special. But sometimes our focus on the special ignores the other side of this Island’s coin. Life here is not all farm fresh eggs, salty fishermen, fresh venison and generous camaraderie. There is life here with domestic violence, alcohol and substance abuse, hunger, cold and untreated illnesses.”
Every year, every summer, every winter, the worst happens. Tourists crash on their mopeds, an island landscaper succumbs to tularemia (an acute infectious disease also known as rabbit fever), or high school kids, thinking they have an age-related immunity from danger, engage in a drag race in which a high-speed passing maneuver causes their car to flip four times over a distance of 320 feet before stopping (no seat belts). A man, a trusted island worker, caught out in an elaborate Peeping Tom scheme involving a video camera trained on a shower in a rental unit he owned, kills himself rather than face the consequences. A drunk luxury boater runs over his friend in Edgartown Harbor.
The Vineyard shoreline is where the effects of JFK Jr. and his wife and her sister washed ashore after their plane crashed. After several days of false hope, someone said, “Kennedy, whose fate has been to be born into a family with everything and live life with a constant losing of everything, yet to still have everything expected of them.” A stranger at Alley’s, shaking his head at the headlines: “And I thought my heart could not be broken again.” Ted Kennedy eulogized his nephew: “We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But like his father, he had every gift but length of years.”
The greatest source of pleasure is also the greatest source of menace, the water itself. Riptides occur with some frequency, and most people make the mistake of fighting them when the best approach is to go with the flow and, once you have been swept up to hundreds of yards out to sea and the rip expends itself, stay afloat parallel to the shore until you have the energy to swim back.
It seems as if every year someone writes a letter to the editor thanking a stranger for quick action in the face of danger, such as this one addressed to “The Man Who Saved a Life,” which appeared in the Gazette on August 9, 1994:
Thursday, late afternoon, my daughter nearly lost her life in the strong and unpredictable surf at the ocean beach locally called Painted House off Moshup Trail in Gay Head. If not for a man who heard my daughter’s cries and saw her useless struggle against the ocean’s current, she would be gone.
He went into the surf to pull her out. She had swallowed water, was panicking, out of breath and way too far out to swim in. She said he was very strong. He was also very lucky and courageous because the sea can take anyone, quickly and without warning.
While she thanked him profusely and assured him she was all right, in her anxiety and fear, she did not ask his name . . . I would like very much to thank you.
You saved many more lives than you know. You saved a young woman, full of life and opportunities, preparing to leave home in three weeks for college. . . . She is not so young now.
One August day began in a spirit of jubilation: we stood on the deck gazing through binoculars at the commotion on the distant lip of beach. The cut was being opened! Trucks had assembled; equipment was readied. To be there at its inception and to have that coincide with the start of our two weeks was a singular stroke of good fortune. For years we had been accustomed to experiencing the cut at the tail end, for a few brief days or so. But now we would have the greedy all of it.
After the usual scramble for sandwiches, drinks, towels, life jackets, water shoes, and sun block, we parceled ourselves out to the various modes of transportation. My favorite was a series of maneuvers that involved swimming a few hundred yards with a towel and hat and sunglasses on my head from one bank of the pond to another; walking across a sandbar filled with muck; passing the house with its pile of rocks in the water covered with netting to preserve its shoreline, past the house that retail genius Mickey Drexler built when he was CEO of the Gap, which resembled (on purpose) an upside-down boat with the rudder on the roof, past the staging area for where the Trustees of Reservations run kayak trips on the pond, clinging to the shore’s edge and avoiding the sharp edges of oyster shells and crunchy ignominy of crab carcasses; and finally after twenty minutes or so arriving at the beach on the pond side.
Others took kayaks, canoes, motorboats, Sunfish, or even swam.
When we all got there, we observed that instead of the benign trickle we expected, the water in the cut was similar to that of class five rapids, resembling a bowl of disembodied fists flailing at one another. We told the children, who kept their grumbling to a minimum, that they had to swim on another part of the beach until the water calmed down. It would probably take days.
Not much later, we saw a crowd gather with stricken expressions, hands over their mouths, and others pointing out to sea with looks of mounting horror.
The next half hour passed both in slow motion and with excruciating swiftness. Some stood by, helpless. Others attempted to rocket out by boat to where a man who had fallen in the cut had been tossed to sea. When it was obvious the man did not make it, we all, strangers and friends and family alike, left slowly by common assent, in clumps, moving toward the sailboats or canoes or the path that brought us there, in silence.
Later, a guest named Dan Halgin (now a professor at the University of Kentucky) wrote:
At the time of the tragedy, I was boogie boarding with Jason G. and Nick. I noticed that a mob of people had assembled staring out into the horizon. Thinking that I had a chance to see a whale I quickly made my way to the collection of boys on the shore. I grabbed the binoculars only to see the people weren’t staring in amazement. They were staring in fright at the head of a man in the distant sea.
Within minutes a young man (earlier mocked for his haircut and clothing) was able to row out to where the man was last seen. The current’s strength was far too strong and within minutes the head was no longer visible.
As the facts were being compiled, I could only think of who the man was. An hour earlier I was talking with an older man that asked me about the cut. The man even joked about jumping in to save a young girl that was walking too close to the water. It was all amusing then. The waves seemed like an amusement park ride, and even though the sheriff had advised people not to go into the water, no one seemed to be in any danger or to view the cut as anything that could hurt someone. Things quickly changed.
Jason, Nick, and I all contributed to the rescue effort. We helped drag boats from the pond to the ocean. We did everything we could but our efforts could not save the man.
The next day going to the beach had an eerie feeling. The tracks from trucks and four-wheelers reminded us of the previous day’s trauma. A life had been taken and the ferocious cut was back to being like a carnival.
After entering the cut, the man stumbled, then appeared to regain his footing several yards offshore, only to be overcome by a strong wave that quickly carried him out to sea. Emergency calls were made on cell phones, rescue boats launched, and a Jayhawk helicopter was dispatched from Otis Air National Guard Base on the Cape. A rescue diver jumped from the helicopter as it hovered ten feet above the water and then was hoisted back on board in a sling carrying the man. CPR didn’t work. The victim turned out to be a much-loved high school teacher of mathematics on the island known for quoting e. e. cummings and Dylan Thomas and for reciting Dante from memory in Italian, according to the Gazette, which also reported that he inspired the college admissions essay of a former class valedictorian who went on to Duke. He ran the scoreboard for the ice hockey games. He drank beer with the Portuguese fishermen. He was cited as the reason many of his former students became teachers.
A week or so later at the same beach, we saw some men from a distance, awkwardly overdressed in shoes and slacks. They were approaching other bathers, gesturing with their hands.
They wanted to talk to anyone who had been on the beach the day of the drowning. They wanted to see the cut for themselves. Before they got there, they could not understand how a man had drowned when there had been so many people on the beach. It helped them to see the terrain and gauge for themselves how long it would take for even strong men to hoist a boat from the pond side to the ocean, and then power it through the water to where a person might be in trouble, and how rough the water could be, even on an unrough day.
They were the brothers of Louis Toscano, asking why.
Later Justine wrote about what she recalled from the day in an essay titled “On the Beach,” inspired by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in which Mrs. Gibbs offers her daughter the chance to relive a day of her choice after she had died: “Choose an unimportant day. Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”
The essay:
Since seeing that play with my family last winter, I often wonder what day I would relive if I were to die tomorrow. Given the opportunity, I would be tempted to choose a day that I remembered clearly, like a wedding or championship soccer game. Suppose I chose a day that seemed to contain no importance to the mind’s eye, a day that started as substantial solely because it was just like yesterday, or tomorrow, or even today? But then something happened which gave it meaning.
In my play, the day is a Tuesday—late August, 1995, the beginning of an annual two-week visit to my grandparents’ house on Martha’s Vineyard. The sky is blue and the sun is hot against my nine-year-old bony and undeveloped shoulders. My hair is knotted and tangled, my face a bright shade of fluorescent red. I am the definition of happiness. I remember waking up at eight o’clock that morning and running down to the shore to put my feet in the warm water. I dug my toes deep into the mud and watched the black sand that lay underneath its lighter brother erupt in clouds of confusion.
It was a summer of youthful fun: potato salad and corn on the cob with cousins, playing tag with new friends, or throwing sand on my brother’s friends as they slept on the beach. Later there would be summers of love or summers of adventures, but this summer was one of innocence.
When I was nine, I thought that in my past life I was a seal and that that was the reason why I loved the water. On that particular morning, as I watched the sky and the ocean blend into a similar shade, I noticed that the water was lower than usual. It didn’t take me long before I knew why. The cut was finally opened.
When the water level gets too high in the pond by my grandparents’ house, a cut is made in the strip of beach that separates the ocean from the pond. This creates a rush of water, moving so fast that it forms what my mother used to call nature’s amusement park ride. When I was nine, I lived for this day when pond and ocean united as one.
By the time my family arrived at the beach, it was about noon. Boogie boards and sand castles littered the sand. I remember seeing a teenage boy flexing his muscles at the girls that surrounded him. At the time I made a face and repeated in my head how I never, ever, ever wanted to grow up.
This day I chose, this late August day when I was almost nine and a half years of age, was perhaps more significant than your average day on the beach.
This day at the cut, I saw a man drown, who was but a few years older than my own father, whose hair had only begun to turn the silver shade of gray that marked aging.
This sunny, perfect day, I saw a man lose his life to the water which I thought I knew so well. I would imagine that when most people see a man drown their hearts fill with anxiety and they work in a panicked fashion. But my reaction was different.
I was the only person to move closer and closer to the shore, drawn down to the edge in the moments after his head slipped from view. People shouted, people cried, people dashed to get boats for a rescue, but no one noticed me sitting with my feet stuck in the mud and my hands over my ears. It was a moment of many things: fear, anxiety, stress, but mostly of death.
This is what I remember with my nine-year-old eyes: I saw the man get caught in the current created by the cut. For a second he seemed to lose his balance, and then suddenly he was swept away from the beach by a riptide. His arm came up once as if pleading for help, and then he disappeared. Time on the beach went from benign and joyous to terrifying. In the churning water, could he have lived thirty seconds? A minute? Five minutes?
It wasn’t long before the Coast Guard helicopter roared overhead. It was still too late. When they lifted the man’s body from the water, I could see his limbs hanging limply, lifelessly.
Most people felt sadness, worry, disbelief, when they saw the man slip from the water’s surface and plunge deep into the darkness of the unknown. I, however, felt only betrayal. The ocean had cheated me of my trust. It had shown me that a current has two personalities, the lion and the lamb. That night I went home, listening to countless reconstructions of the story from my parents or my brother and his friends. Telling their own variations, making themselves become the heroes, describing emotions which seemed far from the truth. I spent the night quietly. But in the morning when it became time to go back to the beach and the cut, I was unsure if I ever wanted to go back again. But the day was hot, the sun was strong, and the water glistened in the distance. And before I knew it, I was back on the beach, with my feet buried in the sand.
In Our Town, Emily Gibbs relives her twelfth birthday, and when she looks back on it, she realizes that life is filled with moments of importance that go unrecognized. The reason I would go back to the day I saw a man drown when I was only nine years old is because I saw it for what it was. A moment filled with life’s lessons—what was ordinary became extraordinary. It was the best day, it was the worst day, and in some ways, it was a day that taught me to see things for myself.
Chapter Fourteen
Time to Leave
Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach’s death in May 2012 was not unexpected.
