To the New Owners, page 22
The project is being reviewed by the ZBA (height of railings on flat roof portion), BOH, ConCom. We urge each entity to do a site visit and to review this project very carefully in the context of its very fragile location. We believe that there is ample room on the property to locate the structure completely out of the various overlay districts and we urge that the driveway also be located to minimize danger of storm surge flooding.
Our old house—exasperating, endearing, cranky, creaky, dusty, demanding, ours—would be no more.
Our friend Leslie was right when she wrote: “Best beach house ever. RIP, Thumb Point.”
Fortunately, whenever I lost perspective, I had the perfect move on my chessboard. I would reread what Anne had written in the log on September 9, 2012, a few months after her father died.
John’s father always said there might be many places on the earth as beautiful as the Point, but none more beautiful.
I would say there might be people who loved the Point as much as Anne, but none more so.
This island has been a part of me since before I was born. I often picture my beautiful mother so fully pregnant with her last child that summer of 1959. How could she, how could my sister and my brothers, how could my father, imagine what a gift they were going to give me for the next fifty-plus! years. My connection with Martha’s Vineyard is my point of balance—here the scale of life, worries, love, happiness doesn’t move. The water, the wind, the sand, the sky erase all turmoil, all worry, and bring a happiness to the deepest part of my being. Every sunset—thunderstorm—every beach rose blooming in June, the filling and emptying of the pond when the cut is open and when it closes—these are the things that are more significant markers in my life than birthdays or anniversaries. They underscore the inevitable changes that life brings. Happiness, sadness, changes that we never forget and those that elude us, insignificant in our day-to-day lives that somehow become important on the day we realize we will no longer record them in a log like this.
I am crying. Thank you, Mom and Dad. Thank you for showing me how to love a place, how place stands in for those you love and how it makes you who you are. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for the sand in my shoes, for teaching me to swim and sail and paddle a canoe. Thank you for lobster dinners, swimming naked in the ocean, for letting me sit at the grown-up table, and letting me grow to be an adult here on Thumb Point. Love to Dad: I miss you so. Love to Mom: You and your stubbornness made Thumb Point happen. Love to my brother John. To all the folks that have passed this way. I thank you.
To all the dogs that have had the time of their K-9 lives here, I thank you for showing us clueless humans what joy really is.
Today I stood on the deck at five p.m. in the bright sunshine with rain pouring down and saw a rainbow stretch from beyond the outdoor shower to the other side of Thumb Cove. It was perfect in its arc, vibrant in its colors, and enormous in its reach. All I could think was: Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I counted.
Anne used the word “happiness” not once, not twice, but three times.
Madame de Gaulle would be so pleased.
John had the honor and the obligation of writing the absolute final entry on the last page of the log, as if all the years on the Point had led to this one blank page, waiting to end the ambiguity inherent in its blankness with a message for one and all. It was so perfect that there would be but one page left. It reminded me of the time John’s dad took his car in for a thirty-thousand-mile checkup at exactly thirty thousand miles, and the young attendant told him, sweetly, hesitantly, that it didn’t have to be on the dot to qualify for an oil change, as if Nick were so superannuated he had nothing better to do than drive his car around with the express aim of hitting the perfect mileage for a tune-up.
John wrote:
In my writing life, I have written many endings, some of them quite notable, some forgettable. But when it comes to writing an end to our time on the Point, I am at a loss for words.
So I won’t try to write what this place meant to me, to my family, to Maddy, Nick, and beautiful Jussie, or to our friends who have visited here.
And in truth, the memories of this spot really defy any ending coda. So—no final this or that. Good luck to the new owners. I can only hope they have a taste of the joy this spot has provided all for us for so many years. Me—well, Montana? The Adirondacks? Key West? The Glacier Mountains? I’ll figure something out.
Montana, the Adirondacks, Key West, the Glacier Mountains: all terrific places, but none is Martha’s Vineyard.
Recently, I thought back to two of the books I gave to Mrs. Graham when she was writing her memoir: This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff and A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. The first book is a perfectly observed story of a child who, despite his mother’s best efforts, cannot find a place where he feels safe or welcome, with prose that ranges from the flippant to the lyrical, as in “My first stepfather used to say that what I didn’t know would fill a book. Well, here it is.” And “This is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.” The second book, by an old man looking back, recognizes that place can be portable if it manages to seal itself in one’s memory with an adhesive force that no tool ever invented (maybe not even senility) can dislodge: “There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other.” You don’t need to be Lydia the analyst to figure out why those books mean so much to me.
The first summer after the sale, I was already making plans to return. We were invited to visit two sets of friends in July, and that September we attended our first wedding at the Allen farm when Molly Grand-Jean married Greg Heller, who, though both are from New York, met as teenagers working at Larsen’s Fish Market, adding a solid island note to their nuptial pedigree. The following summer, in 2016, we returned as renters for a week in June, for Claire Lawlor and Alex Riley’s wedding in the same primo venue. (Claire, to whom family friend Phil said upon learning that she was studying medicine, “But you look so young. Who would go to you?” is now an otolaryngologist.) Her engagement to Alex occurred at the lighthouse in Aquinnah: another solid note. They asked John to be their minister for a day. In helping John prep for his talk, the young couple requested that he not discuss medical school, sex, siblings, money, religion, future progeny—topics he then threatened to embrace with brio.
Rain kept us from the sweeping green expanse by the water, where white-cushioned chairs had been assembled in the event of decent if not perfect weather. Relegated to the cocktail tent for the ceremony, the guests maintained a spirit of typical New England fortitude: “At least it’s not a nor’easter; at least it’s not a hurricane.”
John began with a joke about how pleased he was to be the o-fish-iant. As so often happens, the best moment of the ceremony was unscripted. When the time came to place the ring on the groom’s finger, it was nowhere to be found. Shrugged shoulders, panicked expressions, and whispered directives followed. Finally, the mother of the bride realized it was in her pocketbook, in the main tent, a hundred yards away. From afar, using hand signals, she mouthed the word “purse” and gestured with a downward fist hoisting an invisible object to the wedding planner, who then took off on a dead run to get it. During the prolonged silence that followed, Claire announced, “This is a hiccup,” to which John replied, “I prefer to think of it as a mystical moment,” both of which got a big laugh. Then, in a wondrous turn, the bridesmaids eyed each other. And yes, the catchiest of all bridal songs, the one that the young women had been singing during the hairdo and makeup session earlier in the day, took hold, as if by spontaneous combustion: “Chapel of Love.” Many in the tent chimed in, and when the out-of-breath wedding planner sprinted back with the groom’s ring, the stage had been truly set for getting married.
Vows were spoken.
The couple kissed.
We were all figuring on happily ever after from this point.
As I listened to the beat of the storm, I trained my eyes on the bride, the groom, and the ocean in the gray sodden distance and thought about how lucky I was to be in this setting and to witness all this beauty mingled with goodwill and hope.
The day after Claire and Alex’s wedding, Nick flew out, passing over our old property. Nick said it looked like a ton of construction was under way.
A week or two later, I e-mailed an old neighbor: “I can take it: Am I right that our old house is being torn down? I am wondering because when we last spoke, the new owners had gone before the board with their proposal but I had no idea how it turned out.”
The reply:
“Ah, I hate to tell you but yes, your wonderful camp is no more. And in its place, a 5,000 sf one-floor (meaning very long) high-end home shoehorned into the wetland boundaries with 5 bathrooms and . . . are you ready . . . a lap pool.”
Okay, ouch, but not a surprise. In any event, the property is now theirs to have and to hold.
As for me, the grip of the island on my psyche has not diminished with time and I do not expect it will. The house is no longer ours, yes, but the island will never end. And besides, a loss of property is not a loss of life. We should be grateful for all the times we lose land and things and ballast and stuff and merchandise for being stand-ins, for keeping us from the sadness of more profound loss. Anyway, just think: every year, a new summer, coined for us by the earth on its axis, composed of sunshine and indolence, beckons.
I know where I will be, one way or the other.
Acknowledgments
As anyone who has read the foregoing has likely observed, I am possessed of an archival mentality and I have cited many texts besides my own in the creation of this work. I would like to thank all who gave permission to share their words, especially Ron Rappaport, Joel Harrison, Jen Tyson, and the estate of Art Buchwald. Hilary Wall, librarian at the Vineyard Gazette, was especially helpful.
Having trained in the world of newspapers, back when they roamed the earth, I am well aware there is no such thing as somewhat accurate. I have done my best to be totally accurate and totally factual. Any mistakes are mine and mine alone.
I have many people to thank for encouraging me in this endeavor. My husband, John, of course, who is a thriller writer. I probably should have mentioned earlier that he set one of his scariest scenes on the Point in a novel called The Traveler. My daughter, Justine, proved an astute and exacting early reader, and my son, Nick, gave me his blessing, though he did say that if he were to write a book it would be called “Not for Sale” and it would consist of two words, “The End.”
I want to give particular praise to my sister Jacqueline. How many writers are lucky enough to have a sister who worked for twenty-eight years as an editor and writer at Gannett and even in retirement has an apparently undiminished desire to hunt down a missing ellipsis or a misplaced comma? As she is two years and six weeks my junior, this affords her the double pleasure of being both right and superior.
Thanks also to my agent, Andrew Blauner, who is so good at what he does that all my friends have agent jealousy, even the ones who are not writers. He was the force behind my reunion with Morgan Entrekin at Grove Press, who in turn handed me over to editor Jamison Stoltz. Jamison’s attentive readings went way above the call of duty. He is tough, but he knows what he is doing.
Finally, I want to thank Nick and Lydia Katzenbach, and their children Chris and Mimi and Anne, and, of course, all their dogs, past, present, and future. They are a remarkable family, and I am proud to be part of them.
Madeleine Blais, To the New Owners
