Amagansett

Twenty-Nine

Conrad checked his watch. Ten o’clock. Time to make himself scarce.
He allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness outside, then headed for the beach. He walked west along the shore, the sky dirty with stars. He searched for distraction, but it was hard to find. The night, after all, had been theirs, the only time when they could roam freely, without fear of being seen together.
They had never discussed the need for discretion, it was a given from the first, the way things had to be. The world wasn’t ready for them yet. The secrecy wasn’t without its satisfactions, though. It added a spice to their encounters, an edge of illicitness.
At Lillian’s suggestion they had sometimes met openly in public, as customers in a general store or as moviegoers obliged to sit next to each other. On these occasions they rarely spoke, except to apologize as they brushed past each other, or to exchange pleasantries about the weather under the unsuspecting gaze of a counter clerk. One time, Lillian had ‘dropped’ her purse while paying for some goods, obliging Conrad to crouch at her feet and gather up the scattered coins. And she had made no attempt to deny him the lingering view up her linen skirt of her nakedness beneath.
The anticipation that went with these encounters was maddening, too maddening on one occasion, and they’d been unable to wait till later, Conrad’s hand delving beneath Lillian’s jacket, strategically folded on her lap, during a night sequence in The Imperfect Lady, the auditorium of Edwards Theater cast into welcome gloom. And with the giant faces of Ray Milland and Teresa Wright looking down on them from the screen, he had brought her to a rippling climax—bearing out her claim that she could reach her peak in total silence, a skill acquired in the dormitories of New England boarding schools, she maintained, where the slightest gasp in the drowsy darkness would attract howls of ridicule.
There was another side to the clandestine nature of their affair that they both welcomed. There was never a wasted moment, no time-consuming introductions to each other’s friends, no social gatherings where both were present yet not together. It seemed that they had somehow managed to distill a year, more, into a few brief months. They were never lost for things to talk about, arguing for argument’s sake about books and ideas, trading stories about their lives. She told him about her dream of becoming a theater actress, and how it had slipped away from her with the onset of war and the death of her mother, her ally. She said she had moved up to East Hampton for the winter to recover from the split with her fiancé—one part of the truth, he now suspected; her claim that Penrose had left her for another woman probably a lie.
They felt no compulsion to remain indoors once darkness had descended. Sometimes they would swim in her pool, then make their way across the sandhills to the beach, where they’d cook up whatever fish he’d brought with him that evening over a driftwood fire. Other times, when she visited him, they would strike out on foot, heading north over Montauk Highway, crossing the railroad, disturbing the snakes warming themselves on the tracks in the cool night air. Napeague was his world, and he shared it with her as they wandered. He pointed out the spot where he and Billy used to gather coal from beside the tracks during the early years of the Depression, big bituminous lumps tossed from the tender by sympathetic railroad men. He drew her attention to the best cranberry bogs and to the osprey nests, platforms of sticks and bone and rope and other debris, perched precariously atop the telegraph poles. They strolled the skirts of the salt meadows, and they pulled blue-claw crabs from the channels with scoop nets.
By flashlight, they foraged for Indian artefacts in the soft sand just back from the beach on Gardiner’s Bay, unearthing shards of broken pottery and arrowheads discarded many centuries before. And though he never took her there, not wishing to tempt the fates, he told her about the whale skeleton buried beneath the straggle of bearberry bushes.
On windless nights they would take the cat-boat out and go firelighting for fluke. Sometimes they made love in the cockpit, rocking on the gentle swell. One time, the sounds of some event at the Devon Yacht Club had drifted across the water towards them—a Cole Porter number carried on the night breeze—and it struck Conrad that Lillian had chosen to be with him, lying in his arms, rather than consorting with her own kind. And though this puzzled him, he never questioned her motives, he never doubted her desires.
But that had all changed since her death.
He now saw himself as a figure in a bigger picture, the full and proper dimensions of which she’d chosen to keep from him. She had been party to a crime, a killing; and just as her move to East Hampton for the dead winter months could now be seen as part of an instinctual penance, some need to atone, so too could her relationship with him.
He was her link to the place, to Lizzie Jencks—a tool, perhaps, in the purging of her own guilt. Could he safely assume she would have struck up a relationship with him under normal circumstances? It was unlikely.
Worst of all, though—and it was this that had robbed him of all but the most fitful sleep for the past week—was the creeping realization that he might actually have been responsible for her death. She had changed, he had witnessed the change, just as she had watched him recover his footing in the world. But had he unwittingly given her the strength to act, to make a stand, to jeopardize the conspiracy of silence surrounding Lizzie Jencks’ death?
It was a question he would never know the answer to, never shrug off, and that realization gnawed at him, the corrosive acid of doubt.
His one satisfaction was that those responsible for her murder were now experiencing a torment of their own, inflicted by him. And though they might suspect they hadn’t seen the back of him, they had no idea just how far he was willing to go.
A few unforeseen developments aside, his plan was on course, moving ahead, narrowing down to the fine point. The policeman, Hollis, had taken the bait, and seemed intent on keeping it to himself. That was good, essential even. Whether he had judged Manfred Wallace correctly remained to be seen. He’d know soon enough.
He glanced at his watch, calculating the hours left to kill. He wasn’t tired, the prospect of the looming conflict sharpening his mind, blowing away the clouds of light-headed exhaustion.
He veered away from the water’s edge, up over the frontal dune into Beachampton, the grid of cheap new summer homes that lay beyond. The development was spreading at an alarming rate. Skeletal structures loomed around him, the building stock destined to flesh out their timber frames heaped up in piles. A bulldozer stood abandoned at the end of the narrow swathe it had punched through the dunes to the east—a new road yet to be named—reshaping in a few hours a landscape sculpted over centuries by the wind and the ocean.
Had the bulldozer completed its task, or were its instructions to keep right on going? If so, it should be showing up at his place somewhere towards the end of the week, huffing and puffing and coughing black smoke, its current course destined to take it right through the middle of the barn, ever onwards across Napeague, little shingle-clad homes mushrooming in its wake, all the way to Montauk Point.
If it was a vision of the future, then thankfully it was a future he wouldn’t live long enough to witness.
He kicked the Beachampton sand from his heels, heading west on Bluff Road past the big houses with their commanding views over the Glades towards the ocean. Nearing the Kemps’ house, he glanced up at the roof, fearful that Rollo might be watching from the ‘widow’s walk’—the little scuttlehole beside the chimney from which the women of the house once scanned the ocean for their husbands’ safe return. It could only be accessed via Rollo’s attic bedroom, and Rollo had always spent an inordinate amount of time peering down on the world from his crow’s nest, as he liked to think of it. Fortunately, he wasn’t there, and Conrad turned in to the leafy, tenebrous cool of Miankoma Lane.
The doctor from Manhattan and his family were in residence. The landing light was on and there was a car parked in back of the house near the barn. He noticed that they’d removed the old hitching-post that had always stood out front. The wooden go-kart lying abandoned near the front porch had been Conrad’s, hammered together from fish crates around the time of his tenth birthday; and while he felt a slight pang of possessiveness on seeing it there, he was pleased it was being used.
He trod lightly up the driveway, round to the back of the house. The barn was as good a place as any to hole up for the night. Maybe he was being too cautious, but he somehow doubted it. They would have to take action against him. And soon.
He noted, a little sadly, that the garden had changed almost beyond recognition. There was a carpet of lawn where the fruit and vegetable patches had once stood—their stepmother’s pride and joy, where she’d spent so many of her waking hours, growing pole beans and peas, carrots and cabbages, cucumbers, marrows and beets. She planted pumpkins around the small stand of corn so that the sticky vines would deter the raccoons, she built strawberry frames sheathed in condemned Promised Land bunker net, and her back grew strong from hauling up buckets of water from the well.
As young boys they’d never understood her obsession with cultivation. Only later, when they realized she was unable to bear children, did her endless planting and tending and reaping make any sense.
If she was upset by the barrenness she carried inside her, she never allowed it to interfere with her devotions to them. They, on the other hand, were less than fair in their dealings with her, certainly at the beginning, their young minds unable to grasp the idea—sprung on them one evening by their father—that their teacher was to become their mother. Miss Elliott, with her long wavy hair and her sticks of chalk and her constant talk of Regents exams and passing grades and the Palmer Method of handwriting? It just didn’t make any sense.
Miss Elliott was a ‘peach’, an upstater, who boarded with a local family during school terms. She wasn’t around a whole lot, and their father, it seemed to them, did nothing but fish from dawn till dark. How had they even met? The critical encounter, it soon emerged, had taken place at a dance held at Miankoma Hall by the Ladies’ Society of Busy Workers. They knew their father was good on his feet, they’d seen him dance in the barroom at Valentin Aguirre’s in New York, surprisingly nimble for such a big man, proudly presenting the steps of their region to the other Basques—the kaskarotak, the volontak and the maskerada. And now it seemed he had won Miss Elliott’s heart with his glides and his shuffles, his spins and his leaps.
Their housekeeper, Miss Smarden, promptly resigned in disgust—the first and only sign that she’d been carrying a torch all of her own for their father. They’d become so accustomed to the strict regime at home that they thought Miss Elliott must be joking when she insisted they invite their friends round to the house whenever they wanted. She rigged a rope from the tulip tree out back and the grass beneath was soon worn away to dirt by small feet. She accompanied them on the great spring and fall cattle drives along the ocean beach to and from the sweeping pastures of Montauk. On winter weekends she drove them to watch the gaff-rigged ice-boats rattling across Mecox Bay at improbable speeds, and she took them by ferry across Long Island Sound to the amusement park in New London. It was all too good to be true, and they suspected that it was just a ploy to win their hearts and impress their father, that it wouldn’t last.
She proved them wrong over and over again. With time they learned to return her hugs and other displays of affection, and they marveled at her ability to treat them no differently from the other kids once they’d crossed the threshold of the little white schoolhouse each morning. She drove them hard, Antton less than some because of his difficulties, Conrad far harder than most, slipping him extra books to read after school. She did this, she said, because she believed he had a gift.
To Conrad’s mind it was a thankless gift if it kept him from the new fishing shanty their father had built at the bottom end of Atlantic Avenue. Raised a few feet above the shifting sands on locust posts, it was little more than a long wooden box with a shingle roof and a pot-bellied stove. But to Conrad and Antton it was a palace, a place of wonderment, a symbol of their father’s advancement in the world.
Together with Billy, they would hurry there as soon as they’d wolfed down their supper, Maude shouting after them that exertion on a full stomach was a sure way to an early grave. If they were lucky they’d arrive breathless before the dory had come ashore, and they’d watch it negotiate the thundering surf, their father and Sam bent at the oars, moving in unison. In summer their father and Sam hauled seine and set bluefish nets way out beyond the bar, two or three miles offshore, and they would help lug the fish from the boat to the shanty, threading beach grass through the gills, their fingers too tender still for the sharp plates. They learned to dress and pack the catch, their clothes crusted with scales, the boards of the shanty slick with gurry beneath their feet. The big treat was to be taken a little way out beyond the surf—squeezed in together in the bow, white knuckles on the gunwales—and go drop-lining for fluke.
Held back in school, Antton was fifteen years old when Conrad joined him in the eighth grade. At the end of the school year Antton failed his Regents for the second time, but with his sixteenth birthday falling in August, he had seen through his obligations to the law. The same week that Conrad started at East Hampton High School, Antton joined their father on the beach, set-netting for the last of the bluefish. Times were tough—the fish had been down all season—and they worked long hours, longer still when the cod appeared around Thanksgiving.
On those gray winter mornings Conrad would wake to the sound of an icy nor’wester rattling the windows and he would know that his father and Antton were already on the ocean, setting trawls way out beyond the bar: well over a thousand fathoms of line carefully coiled down in the tubs the evening before, hundreds upon hundreds of hooks baited with steamer clams. And while they fought their way back to the beach, bucking the offshore blow, the cod in the bilges already stiffened out solid from the cold, he would breakfast with Maude in the warm glow of the stove. This was where she wished him to be—he could sense it—far from the sea’s toss and the wind’s kick, talking of other matters, of his studies, of his new friends and of books.
He helped out down at the shanty whenever he could, but he felt foolish and alone. Elevated to the rank of surfman, Antton was eager to drive home his superior knowledge and expertise. Their father, sensing Conrad’s frustration, told him to be patient; in a couple of years he too would be part of the crew.
This was not a consolation he relayed to Maude.
The showdown, when it came, was explosive, and all the more shocking for the fact that he’d never known their father and Maude to argue before. The thump of the exchange carried clear through the woodwork to his attic bedroom. He only made out one word, and only then because it was repeated several times—aintzinekoak—‘those who have gone before us’. Or in this case: what was good enough for me and my father is good enough for him.
Maude urged Conrad to fight his corner, to insist on seeing through his studies, to eighteen and beyond, on to college. What could he say? He couldn’t betray the vision that had come to his father all those years before on the Amagansett sands, made concrete with the money from Eusebio—a man and his two boys fishing side by side, following the sea. Besides, he was threatened enough already by his father’s special relationship with Antton. It had always been there, but it had deepened considerably of late. Foolish though it now seemed, he could remember thinking at the time that even his name was proof of his father’s favoritism—Conrad, his mother’s father, the only non-Basque anyone could recall on either side of the family.
Maude withdrew in order to fight another day, but she hadn’t counted on her husband’s stubborn Basque temperament, and her cause wasn’t helped by the onset of the Depression. Along with a number of his Amagansett friends, Conrad exchanged the classroom for the fish shanty.
His time on the ocean beach was sweet and very brief. A third set of hands was not always required. It became an indulgence as the Depression deepened, and Conrad was dispatched to join the pack of other local men roaming the South Fork in search of work at a few dollars a day. He helped pour the first concrete sidewalks in Amagansett, he filled holes in the cinder roads, and he cut ice from the ponds during the winter freeze. He teamed up with Hendrik on laboring jobs, he crewed with Billy on the draggers out of Fort Pond Bay from time to time, and almost everything he earned went into the family purse. He fished with his father and Antton whenever they needed him, but it was his friendships with others that sustained him. And this is how it stayed, right up until Antton was taken from them by the sea.
It was a January morning, not so different from any other, raw and gray. The wind had come around northwest, stiffening overnight, and everyone knew the cod bit best in a nor’wester. When the wind was off the land it usually flattened out the surf, but that day there was a strong ground swell running, driven by some force far out in the ocean, and the seas rose up in defiance, breaking over the outer bar, their crests whipped into white mares’ tails of freezing spray. By the time they’d loaded the tubs and dragged the dory down to the water’s edge both the wind and the swell had eased a little, and some of the other crews were going off through the clean, sharp breakers curling toward the beach.
There was no question of not following suit.
They gritted their teeth against the jolt of that first dowsing and wrestled the dory through the white water, their woollen mittens already beginning to harden with ice. Hauling themselves aboard, Antton took the bow oars, Conrad amidships, both setting their stroke, their father still in the water, gripping the bucking transom to keep the dory headed seaward, his eyes reading the surf.
‘Pull, boys, pull!’ he yelled, shoving off and hooking a leg over the port gunwale. The oars bit in unison; the dory surged forward, gaining headway, rising up the face of the capping sea. The bow split the wave as it broke around them, green water tumbling and crashing past on both sides, a fair quantity of it finding its way over the boat’s high sides and down the back of their necks, washing into the bilges; but nothing unusual, nothing that couldn’t be bailed out easily once they were clear of the break.
The bow dipped into the trough, nosing into the next sea as they bent their backs into the stroke. The dory rose and fell, clearing the wave as it crested, shipping less water this time. None the next. The surf line receding behind them.
He saw it first in his father’s eyes, a cloud of confusion that also furrowed his brow. A moment later, he felt it beneath the boat, a building swell that should have dropped away. But didn’t, it just kept on coming, surging up from below. His father gripped the gunwales, the confusion in his eyes now replaced by the unmistakable glare of fear. And Conrad turned.
A wall of water already making up about eight feet reared up behind Antton, a glassy ridge, deep green in color, shutting out the ocean beyond. And he could recall his sense of indignation. It had no place being here, no right.
‘Eyes in the boat!’ screamed his father.
Conrad yanked on the oars as he turned back, fear running through his arms now, and his starboard oar popped clear of its oarlock.
Later, he would spend endless hours reliving the next few moments, clinging to the fractured memories, replaying them in his mind, refiguring them: both his oars in the water this time, that instant of hesitation written out, along with the moment he committed the cardinal error known to all surfmen, the moment he turned to look at the ocean.
He would try to factor in the words of consolation from those who actually saw that freak sea, that rogue wave which had started life hundreds, thousands of miles away, and which only found some meaning to its existence in its dying moments off the ocean beach. They said they’d never seen the like before, they said no crew on the beach would have cleared that wave, they said popping an oar had made no difference to the outcome.
The dory was near-vertical when Antton leapt clear, passing by Conrad’s right shoulder. Conrad released the oars and made to follow him, but he was too late. The dory, snatched up in the curl, pitchpoled backwards, stem over stern, upended with such force and speed that Conrad had no time to set himself for the impact with the water. He hit it face on while still drawing breath.
He spun and twisted in the darkness beneath the upturned boat, lunging for a hold. He seized what must have been the thwart, but it was wrenched from his grasp as the wave powered on inexorably towards the beach. Something struck Conrad a blow in the side of the head: a limb, an arm or a leg belonging to his father. He pawed helplessly, trying to latch on, but it was past him now, leaving him tumbling in its wake, all sense of orientation gone.
He felt a line whip past him and he clutched at it. It was the cod trawl, unraveling from one of the tubs. It offered no purchase, though; it simply began to wrap itself around him, the barbed and baited hooks at the end of the little snood lines catching in his oilskins, binding him up tight.
That’s when he felt the downward drag—the weight of the water filling his waders—and he knew then that he was done for. Even if he hadn’t been ensnared by the trawl, it was too late to kick them off. And as he sank away, his lungs gave up the fight, allowing the ocean to flood in.
There was no tunnel, no shining light to guide his path. Nor was there any pain. Only blackness, sudden and absolute.
The Kemp crew was fishing just to the east, and it was Rollo—relegated to the beach as always—who was first to arrive on the scene. He pulled Conrad’s father, unconscious but alive, from beneath the dory and dragged him up beyond the wash. Seeing that the other rescuers were still some distance off, stumbling along the shore, Rollo stripped off his oilskins and his waders and struck out through the breakers. It was a foolhardy thing to do, suicidal even—he must have known that just as well as the next man—yet he managed to snatch at some lines of cod trawl before being driven back by the cold and the surf.
So it was that Rollo hauled Conrad’s lifeless body from the ocean, reeling him in, hand over hand, oblivious to the hooks tearing at his bare hands, his flesh. He later claimed that he’d only done as his grandfather, Cap’n Josh, had once instructed him: forcing the drowned man’s knees to his chest and bearing down hard on his midriff.
Conrad came to, the last of the water convulsing from his lungs, to find Rollo’s blurred face filling his field of vision.
‘Hello,’ said Rollo through chattering teeth, while rubbing Conrad furiously with his hands.
It soon became clear that Antton was lost. They searched for his body, handlining with grappling hooks, setting gill nets straight offshore and hauling seine. At midday the swell picked up again, dangerously so, and even Conrad’s father was obliged to concede defeat.
Conrad was warming himself at Doc Meadows’ hearth, nursing a mug of steaming broth, Maude at his side, when his father showed up. That’s when Conrad saw the look, the one that said more than any words: ‘You were to blame.’
It was a fleeting moment, and the question of Conrad’s responsibility for the tragedy was never once voiced by his father. Indeed, he laid the blame squarely at the feet of that freak sea. But Conrad always knew what he believed in his heart, and it stood between them like a mountain range shrouded in mist.
Two services were held for Antton—one a memorial, the other a burial some three weeks later, when a few scraps washed ashore near Gurney’s Inn. During this period there was not one day when Conrad’s father didn’t walk the beach, searching for the remains of his firstborn son.
Close-knit as they were, the fishing families were hit hard by Antton’s death. But things picked up again, as they had to. Come May, when the first of the striped bass appeared and struck in at the beach, Conrad found himself hauling seine again, with Sam and Billy Ockham making up the rest of their crew.
Conrad’s father shrugged off his mantel of gloom. Conrad did his best to mimic the charade, but it was over a year before he was able to visit Antton’s grave, by which time the arguments for and against America’s entry into the war were on everyone’s lips. Pearl Harbor settled the matter. Conrad was drafted and ordered to report to Camp Upton at Yaphank. The day his parents saw him off at East Hampton railroad station he sensed it was the last time he’d ever see his father.
The letter from Maude arrived during his recuperation at Barton Hall in England. Conrad had recovered sufficiently in the eyes of his doctors to be allowed out from time to time, along with a couple of the other patients. He carried the letter with him on the bus to Norwich, opening it in the shady cool of the Cathedral cloister while his two companions prayed inside.
He felt curiously removed from the words on the page—the stomach pain, the diagnosis of cancer, his father’s sudden decline. Maude said she was putting the house on the market, but that she would deposit the greater part of the proceeds with the Osborne Trust Company for his use. Her brother had suggested she join him in California. He was wealthy, quite capable of supporting her, and she intended to take up teaching again. She urged him to reconsider a college education on his return, to which end she would be leaving him her library of books.
He could tell from the deterioration of her normally neat italic hand that she was devastated and fighting hard to hold herself together.
When his companions joined him in the cloister, Conrad made some excuse and went in search of a pub. He drank several pints of strong Norfolk ale then picked a fight with a loud American bombardier on twenty-four-hour stand-down from one of the local airbases.
It was a few weeks before he realized that the greatest fear of his childhood had finally come to pass, that as he waited in line at Ellis Island, fresh off the boat from France, the doctor had indeed marked him with that stick of blue chalk, leading him away, never to see his father and Antton again.
It came to him then that he was alone in the world.
Conrad woke with a start, orienting himself. He brushed the straw from his clothes and climbed down the ladder from the hayloft. He had planned on slipping away a little before daybreak, but the morning sun was already casting long shadows in the garden as he crept from the barn.
He could make out the sounds of the doctor and his family stirring in the house, obliging him to duck below the level of the window sills as he left.
He felt sharp, alert, which was good. The sleep had helped, sweet and unexpected.
He asked Earl Griffin to drop him off at the head of the track, and he settled the fare.
He saw the tire marks in the sand immediately. Closer examination revealed that there were two sets—the same vehicle coming and going, suggesting that the visitor had left. But his hand still closed around the gun in his hip pocket as he set off through the pitch pines towards his house.
The vehicle had pulled to a halt just before the trees gave way to the dunes. The track was too narrow at this point to turn a motor car around, and the visitor had been obliged to reverse it back to the highway, but not before abandoning it first and continuing on foot.
The footprints stood out clearly in the sand, the area around them smoothed unnaturally flat by Conrad the evening before. It hadn’t taken him long to perform the task: simply a matter of dragging some heavy, tarred pound-trap netting behind the Model A.
The footprints veered off to the right, into the dunes, but Conrad made no attempt to follow them. Neither did he glance in their direction in case he was being observed. It wasn’t important; he knew where they were headed.
He picked them up again in the broad sweeps of leveled sand in and around the buildings. The visitor had entered the compound from the west, skirting the shack, making for the whaleboat house. He had then crossed to the barn, entering it. From here he’d returned to the shack, circling, keeping his distance, approaching only twice—once to examine the small lean-to at the back which housed the generator, the second time to inspect the corner of the roof where the telephone cable entered the building.
Conrad knew then that, if they had to, they were willing to go all the way in order to silence him.
He should have felt fear, some modicum of anxiety at the very least, but he didn’t. It was with a pleasing sense of anticipation that he reached for the phone and asked the operator to put him through to a number in Sag Harbor.