There was speculation at the time that the Air Force had been taking advantage of the base’s secluded location to conduct experiments on the population of Montauk (2,800). Unconventional psychological warfare, time travel, electromagnetism, invisibility. In 1978, it wouldn’t have been impossible to fill most of the seats in the ballroom at the Montauk Yacht Club with members of the populace who claimed to have been abducted and forced to participate in those experiments.
On the Friday before the party at the Vornados’ penthouse, I’d taken a train to Montauk with my parents. They’d kept me home from school and we’d caught a cab to Penn Station for the long ride out. For hours I’d been in stasis, suppressed to a near-narcoleptic state by the blurred rhythm that train windows impart on the world, but as we approached the station, the train slowed and the trees thinned to offer flashbulb views of Napeague Bay. Then the woods fell away entirely and there was the insinuation of a body of water to the south, Fort Pond, its presence marked by a void brighter than the snow. Even if you couldn’t see it, you could feel the immense presence of the sea surrounding the place, but it was the infinite white ceiling of the sky, its sovereignty unbroken by office towers or billboards, that was unsettling to a child accustomed to the gray canyons of the city.
My father stepped down from the train first and reached up for me, and I fell forward into his outstretched arms for the short flight to the platform. My mother came down. My skin tightened in the cold. At the other end of the car, a lone passenger climbed aboard. A conductor’s blue-capped head popped out, dipped back inside. The doors clicked shut and the train pulled out the way it had come in, terminus turned origin.
We stood on the platform setting down and picking up luggage, adjusting our coats and scarves. My father had his Olivetti case and a beaten leather valise, an artifact from his youth that I had stuffed with paper and colored pencils, assorted jewels, a plastic cup bearing the faded logo of the New York Yankees, and because the bag was also the permanent residence of a rock collection, two yo-yos, a Slinky, plastic plates, teacups, dollhouse furniture, hair bands, pennies, and a battered Etch A Sketch, it weighed almost as much as I did. I had made it as far as the apartment door before surrendering it to my father. He had a small gym bag, as well, containing his personal effects. My mother, in addition to her own bag, carried two more, one primarily stuffed with winter clothing for me, the other with board and card games. I was their only child; they were older parents; one might say they intended to treat me with great care, if not indulgence.
When my father looked at the sky, the gray, muscular shadowing of the clouds stretching toward the horizon, only the constant stitch of the power lines kept his sense of complete insignificance in check. It was nearly silent after the train had gone. A halyard tinged against the mast of a flagpole, the standard’s fabric popping in the wind. Sound was swallowed up into the mass of the sky, and when he turned to say to my mother, There they are, his voice was carried away. She slipped her hand around his neck and pulled him to her ear and he repeated it, though she’d already seen.
Out in the lot, Jane Vornado was waving at us from behind the wheel of her Land Cruiser, its mint-green chassis spattered with mud and road salt. My mother and I climbed into the front and my father accordioned into the back, among fishing tackle, a flare kit, our luggage, and situated himself on a bench, atop a coil of marine rope. The vehicle smelled like gasoline and bilgewater. Jane took it easy out of the parking lot and ambled along at thirty-five, but even at that speed my father couldn’t hear what was happening up front. The dash blowers didn’t do much, and what little heat they did produce leaked out of the cab before making it to him. The whole thing rattled like a box of tools.
My father knew Sid Feeney would be there. The Feeneys owned the house next door, a white saltbox with a flagpole in the front yard. In the summer a ring of whitewashed rocks surrounded a bed of red, white, and blue flowers at the base. He supposed Feeney was out there at the first melt, touching up the rocks with a bucket and paintbrush, shimmying up the pole to polish the finial. Feeney wrote military histories, broadly researched hagiographies of Allied commanders that never failed to make the bestseller lists. He appeared never to have been troubled by a moral decision, which is to say that he knew inherently right from wrong and felt that it would be treasonous to question his self-assurance, installed as it had been by God Almighty himself. Feeney depressed the hell out of my father.
The tire treads sang on the pavement. Every pothole rattled his teeth, and when they plummeted from the pavement onto the dirt road that led to the house, he bashed his head against the steel roof.
Full of bile on most subjects, my father was especially sour about this setup. Supported by the pylon of their immense wealth, the Vornados rusticated on the weekends inside a full-scale reproduction of bygone days, playing out a fantasy of Life on the End, where they dried fish from the shed rafters and wore waxed canvas jackets, chopped wood, made venison stew, attacked the house’s curling cedar shakes with antique shingling hatchets, at night slept under mounds of Hudson Bay blankets, refusing heat unless it came from a hot brick. They spoke of the land and sea as though
