To the New Owners, page 8
They married in June 1946, a year that had the largest marriage rate per capita in the United States up to that point: if you got hitched, you were a demographic cliché.
For once in her life, Lydia was thrilled to be trite.
Then law school at Yale, a Rhodes Scholarship to England, a professorship at the University of Chicago, a Ford Foundation grant for a year in Switzerland, a call from the White House to join the best and the brightest, a move to Highland Place and the District of Columbia. Four children born between 1949 and 1959.
From their young years as a married couple, this story, a family staple:
While at Oxford, very early in their time together, living in a Quonset hut, Lydia decided she needed to demonstrate all the necessary wifely skills (beyond getting pregnant), so while her husband was in class, she spent the day preparing a most special dinner, aware that only a few years earlier he had been starving.
Roast beef with all the sides.
Vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce for dessert.
She slaved all day in the barely functioning kitchen, and when he came through the door, the feast was on the table. She had made one small miscalculation. She had placed the chocolate sauce for dessert in a small container that looked eerily like a . . . gravy bowl. Before she could stop him, he had poured chocolate sauce all over the roast beef and the mashed potatoes.
Lydia was about to dissolve into tears of failure.
Nick, recognizing his mistake, said nothing.
He tucked in his napkin, lifted his fork, and proceeded to eat the entire plate of food.
And then, at the end, he said it was the best meal he had ever had.
As deputy attorney general under Robert Kennedy, Nick was sent to the University of Mississippi to escort James Meredith to class and to the University of Alabama, where he stood in the schoolhouse door staring down Governor George Wallace who was intent on preventing Vivian Malone and James Hood from attending classes. You can see him in film footage from that era, telling Wallace the time had come to integrate the University of Alabama—a moment that lives on as a cultural wink in the movie Forrest Gump. He used to joke that he was the only one in the family to make it to the big screen.
Under Lyndon Johnson, he was the principal writer of the Voting Rights Act. And when the law passed, he used his high office to ensure that it was enforced, sending examiners to the South to protect black citizens registering to vote.
Vietnam created moral quagmires like a kind of kudzu. No one was immune. Called upon as attorney general to render an opinion as to whether the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was a legal declaration of war, he said it was. On August 25, 1967, a group of prominent islanders took out an ad condemning his judgment in the Gazette.
Early on, I recognized the subject of this ad was best avoided.
The signers were all people of consequence, and as far as I know, Nick and Lydia never socialized with any of them again.
Kingman Brewster, former president of Yale, defended Nick.
From a book titled The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment by Geoffrey Kabaservice:
Debates over the war, whether in faculty gatherings or around the dinner table, became sharper, and took a toll on personal relations . . . Brewster wrote a critical letter to the literati. He did not defend his friend Katzenbach’s position, but called the ad “bad manners at best” and “an offensive infringement of the long standing ethic of the Vineyard as a place where even a public man’s life can be quietly lived.” That summer, Brewster and Mac Bundy criticized Brustein over cocktails for breaching long-held (though unwritten) gentlemanly rules of etiquette. Brustein retorted that to keep silent in the face of the war was tantamount to being a “good German.”
Lydia had a special place in her heart for Art Buchwald, the rumpled-faced humorist who became island royalty in his later years as he presided as the lead auctioneer at the annual Possible Dreams Auction, always capping off the evening literally by doffing his cap and taking bids on it.
He wrote this column shortly after the ad appeared:
Although we’ve had a certain amount of inclement weather up here, Martha’s Vineyard has had a long hot summer. In previous years the great issues at stake on this tiny island off the coast of Cape Cod have had to do with zoning laws, protection of wildlife in the ponds and debates on ways of saving the sandy cliffs at Gay Head.
But this year the Vietnam war has raised its ugly head. The big “gut” issue on Martha’s Vineyard is: Do you or do you not spoil the vacation of the United States undersecretary of state who happens to vacation up here in the summertime?
What happened was that Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach testified a few weeks ago before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington on the legal aspects of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution. As might be expected, he defended President Johnson’s policies. This incensed a group of Martha’s Vineyard summer people and they decided to take a full page advertisement in the Vineyard Gazette to write an open letter to Katzenbach.
The letter, expressing shock at the testimony, called on Katzenbach to “stop playing the functionary and speak out against President Johnson’s indefensible diplomacy of violence.”
According to Buchwald:
The gut issue at stake was not the question of the right to dissent—most people agreed that dissent on Martha’s Vineyard is a healthy thing, particularly during the rainy season—but rather, should people have the right to ruin a man’s vacation by writing an open letter to the local newspaper on a subject that the poor official comes up to Martha’s Vineyard to forget?
The pro-vacation people maintain that Martha’s Vineyard should be considered a safe port-of-call for all those caught up in the storms of official controversy, while the pro-anti-Vietnam war factions on the island maintain that since Katzenbach spoiled their vacation by his testimony, they have every right to spoil his.
Tragically, the argument has split the island down the middle. Cocktail parties have become so acrimonious that hostesses are now asking their guests to wear life preservers at all times. Tennis games have taken on a new ferocity. Crews on the same sailboats are not speaking to each other and people are sneaking out at night and wrecking each other’s sand castles.
It is hoped that some compromise can be worked out before next year. Cooler heads on the island feel that while Katzenbach has every right to defend his President’s policies, he should refuse in the future to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the month of August.
But so far nobody seems to want to compromise. The pro-Katzenbach people maintain that what the undersecretary of state says in Washington is his own affair and that he should not have to defend his statements on the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard.
The anti-Katzenbach faction retorts by holding up a photo of the undersecretary and asking, “Would you buy a used vacation from this man?”
John’s view of the ad, in the fullness of time:
“It has been fifty years and it still rankles. The fact was that everyone in our family, including my father, was against the war, but it was not as easy as announcing, ‘Let’s get out of Vietnam.’ Of all the names on the list, the one that really gets me is Brustein in particular, head of the Yale School of Drama. I don’t know why. Is taking an ad out in the Gazette really such a profound way of standing up for your opinions? And why pick out my father when there were plenty of other members of the administration and numerous editorial board types vacationing on the Vineyard? In his testimony on the Hill, my father told a bunch of lawyers in Congress that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was the legal equivalent of war, and they got angry because they hadn’t understood or weren’t smart enough to realize that was what they had voted for in the first place. Guys like Brustein, who, parenthetically, spent World War II on a merchant marine vessel, thought they were somehow taking a brave stand when it was pretty damn easy to be against the war at Yale.”
To the degree that Nick and Lydia were hurt by the attack, they hid it.
After all, they had each other.
Like water seeking the right level, every couple finds its own way to happiness. One of the curiosities about the house is that despite the hard use it got in its heyday, there never was a dishwasher. John’s parents claimed they love doing the dishes, finding the task romantic. She washed; he dried. If doing the dishes during their two weeks every summer on Martha’s Vineyard was the secret glue, who were we to question their customs?
On a major anniversary, Mimi once made for her parents a hand-painted bowl in which she wrote their responses to the question: Why had their marriage lasted as long as it did?
She said the reason was he made her life possible.
He said it was the one thing he never needed a reason for.
Chapter Five
Summer Notes
From the beginning, the logs we ordered from A.G.A. Correa & Son in Maine—eight in all—were intended as more than just a simple guest register, although we never suspected how meaningful they would be. In the time since we began ordering them, the price has quintupled. Each clothbound volume is 8½ by 11 inches with two hundred interior pages made of 100 percent rag paper, which is considered as good a paper as money can buy. The canvas covers are a tasteful taupe.
In its product description, the manufacturer emphasizes that if you hold the paper up to the light, you can see the watermarks, and that the logs are often used by artists as drafting paper and by real-life navigators to record wind direction or to map a shoreline. The paper is “guaranteed not to bleed through, even with India ink,” and on the spine is a small design consisting of two concentric circles with a vertical and horizontal line so that each volume is “readily recognizable on your bookshelf,” a selling point emphasized on the company website along with the information that the design, called the Center of Effort, is a nautical term for a moment in physics similar to the sweet spot in a golf ball.
The company claims there was no reason to “worry about mildew or moisture. Our log is easy to maintain, and as impervious to weather as paper can be.”
Judging from the number of nights various logs spent being drenched on the deck, we can testify to the accuracy of that statement.
At first we were self-conscious about defiling the pages of the ship’s logs like the pang you get when you cut a ribbon on a present.
Then John’s father broke the ice with an entry about the opening of the house:
The dogs and I arrived on the last ferry. Could not get the stove to work. I ate a can of cold chili and went to bed. Dogs ate raw hamburger—more acceptable to them than to me. Weather so-so. Pump still doesn’t have a cut-off, but it appears to be half-installed and perhaps will be fixed by next week. But who knows? The wood stacked to the left is fully seasoned and should be used first. Boats are rigged. Outboard can be picked up, but they want two days’ notice. Today is starting slowly, but should be okay. The trees have grown and another year gone by.
It is easy to picture him, awakening to the sound of gossiping geese, wearing his dress-down uniform of a holey shirt with baggy jeans cut off at the knees, pink calamine lotion smeared proactively on arms and legs, writing at the dark, frail servant’s ironing table, the one that Lydia rescued from her family’s camp in the Adirondacks. By waiting until after daybreak, he would not have to rely on the kerosene lamps for light, with their constant threat of calamity.
Another entry, typical in its simplicity:
There are compensations to getting older. I received a senior citizen shellfish license, no charge, never needs to be renewed, and good, I assume, until . . .
A code governed what went into the logs and what did not, an underlying censor that discouraged grocery lists and other daily drivel even though some squeaked by, such as “Empty lint panel on dryer; it is a fire hazard” or “Bottles and cans in Massachusetts are now returnable.”
Many entries erred in the direction of glossing over the bad times, overemphasizing the good: photoshopping before there was photoshopping. Tributes were a mainstay: passages so purple, so rooted in the “oh flora, oh fauna” school of writing, that they constituted what one teenager called “clichéd cheesy blah,” such as:
I’ll never forget the way the ocean roared
Nor the way the delicate birds soared.
Getting to the island, and the relief that usually followed, was a common theme. At its worst the ferry was an equalizer, slow but dependable. Flying was not always an appealing alternative.
From Anne:
Don’t, as I did, sit directly in back of the pilot on one of those munchkin-size planes favored for midweek jaunts. Why? All I can say is that the feeling that overcame me was not confidence . . . as I watched the pilot pull a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket in order to fix the fuse that ran the landing gear. You get a very clear view of the house . . . which I did three times as the pilot fiddled with the wheels that were to determine our fate.
Recipes were acceptable: the food of summer, when abundance marries taste, is best of all. In the logs you will find instructions for my chicken fajita casserole (feeds thousands), Jamie Harrison’s smoked bluefish dip, Ann Banks’s painkillers (a drink), Amy Kaufman’s Swiss chard risotto, Alex Auriema’s mango salsa, Sioux Eagle’s low-fat balsamic chicken, and the wild rice salad served at the memorial service for Linda Lewis. The aromatic thought of that salad, with feta and mint and pecans, brings back an image of the deceased’s very young granddaughters, Miranda, Thea, Bea, Evie, Zoe, and Lily, at the outdoor service, whispering to themselves to be quiet as they tumbled in the scrappy grass. They seemed, as little girls so often do, otherworldly, composed of stares and sighs and somersaults. (A final grandchild, a boy named Jack, joined them a few years later.)
Clippings from the newspaper and drawings also welcome. Low expectations prevailed, as when a child dashed off some squiggles and a parent (me) promptly labeled them “waves.”
The most common tone in the logs is one of pure praise, gleefully exaggerated.
I have never played so many games of gin rummy in my life. This is the way I want to live, and want to die.
One child wrote:
There’s so much to do. Who needs TV, toasters, videos, and microwaves when you have the ocean, lots of books, the dirt road, flying horses, restaurants, the bike path, big waves, and the ferry?
Mimi’s former husband, Jamie Harrison, wrote:
Two days of Vineyard’s finest. Friday: a beautiful day at the beach with post-hurricane waves of six to eight feet making body-surfing feel more like tumbling. Dinner of swordfish, corn, and new potatoes. It can’t get better. Early morning bluefishing. As easy as getting a dog to bark. Twenty-five in a morning and leaden arms and sunburned backs. If this is a dream I hope never to wake up.
Even when the fishing is terrible and more about hope than conquest, gratitude abounds:
I can think of no other place I’d rather go out and not catch fish.
If exclamation points are a form of verbal littering and if everyone should be limited to a lifetime supply of no more than twenty, the log is filled with the work of contributors who have exceeded their allocation, as in:
I love everything but the splinters!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
More tributes; these from children:
Martha’s Vineyard has given me so many memories that I almost can’t remember them all.
On Martha’s Vineyard I am having the kind of childhood people used to have before I was born.
“Today is a historic day,” began many of the entries, and it turns out that what constitutes History, that grand force of storytelling that pickles the past, was often in the eye of the beholder: who was finally old enough to drive the motorboat or go to mini-golf after dinner or able to catch minnows. “Last night,” wrote my father-in-law, documenting his idea of a historic day, “I skunked Lydia in cribbage.”
Tips:
Don’t canoe home from the beach in the fog.
Just so you know: new kitchen faucets on backwards.
Avoid Alley’s and up-island as much as possible: President’s entourage creating havoc.
A surefire de-skunking formula:
Take ¼ cup baking soda, one quart three percent hydrogen peroxide, one teaspoon liquid soap. Mix all together and wet dog with solution. Let stand two or three minutes. Wash off. Hose best. It works.
The secret to a long life for cut flowers:
Remove leaves below water line; change water daily; add aspirin to water.
Riddles:
Somewhere on this property a time capsule is hidden. Only four people know of its whereabouts, and they are sworn to silence. Its contents include crayons, various coins, a Ninja Turtle, and a plastic frog.
Warnings:
Active wasp nest outside sliding door to the back bedrooms. Other nest spotted above woodpile.
