'Really? How do you know that?'
I explained that while I was out driving, I happened to see an Easter bunny and two goons at the gates to Alhambra. Susan thought that was funny. 'So,' I said, 'I pulled over for a minute, and this man, Mancuso, approaches me and identifies himself as an FBI agent.' I didn't mention that I was considering going to Mr Bellarosa's Easter thing.
'What did this man say to you?'
I related my brief conversation with Mr Mancuso as we drove past the Piping Rock Country Club. The day had turned out fine weatherwise and otherwise, and there was that fresh smell in the air that comes after a spring rain. Susan seemed intrigued with my story, but I resisted the temptation to embellish it for entertainment purposes and concluded, 'Mancuso knew what capozella was.' She laughed.
I turned my attention back to the road and the scenery. Not far from here is a huge rock, cleaved in half, with the halves sitting on each side of a tall oak, in the Indian fashion of burial sites. On the rock are engraved these words:
HERE LIES THE LAST
OF THE MATINECOC
The rock is in the churchyard of the Zion Episcopal Church, and at the base of the oak is a metal plaque that says PERPETUAL CARE. So after thousands of years in these woods and hills, that is all that is left of the Matinecocs, swept away in a few decades by an historical event that they could neither resist nor comprehend. The Colonists came, the Dutch and the English – my forebears – and left their marks on the maps and on the landscape, building and naming villages and roads, renaming ponds and streams and hills, though sometimes letting the ancient Indian names stand. But today, ironically, these place-names evoke few memories of Indians or Colonists, but are inextricably associated with that brief fifty years called the Golden Age. So if you say Lattingtown or Matinecoc to a Long Islander, he will think of millionaires and mansions, and more specifically perhaps the Roaring Twenties and the final frenetic days of that Golden Age and the Gold Coast.
'What are you thinking about?' Susan asked.
'About the past, about what it must have been like, and I was wondering if I would have liked living in a great house. Did you like it?' She shrugged.
Susan and her brother, Peter, as well as her mother and father, had lived in Stanhope Hall while her grandparents were alive. You can get a lot of generations comfortably in one house if it has fifty rooms and as many servants. After Susan's grandparents died, both in the mid-1970s, the inheritance taxes that existed then effectively closed down Stanhope Hall as a fully staffed estate, though Susan's father and mother continued on there until the price of heating oil quadrupled, and they headed off to a warmer climate. I asked again, 'Did you like it?'
'I don't know. It was all I knew. I thought everyone lived like that… as I got older, I realized that not everyone had horses, maids, gardeners, and a nanny.' She laughed. 'Sounds stupid.' She thought awhile. 'But without sounding all pyschobabbly, I would have liked to have seen more of my parents.' I didn't respond. I had seen enough of her parents, William and Charlotte, during the years they played lord and lady of Stanhope Hall. Susan's grandparents, Augustus and Beatrice, were alive when we first married and moved into Susan's wedding gift – deeded solely in her name as I have indicated. Her grandparents were old then, but I had the impression they were decent people, concerned for the welfare of their dwindling staff, but never really coming to terms with the dwindling money.
I asked Susan once, in perhaps a tactless moment, where the Stanhope money had originally come from. She had replied, truthfully I think, 'I don't know. No one as far as I know ever actually did anything for it. It just existed on paper, in big ledger books that my father kept locked in the den.' Susan can be somewhat vague about money like many of these people. I suppose the definition of old money is money whose origins, whereabouts, and amounts are only dimly understood. But from 1929 through the Depression, the war, and the ninety-percent tax rates of the forties and fifties, there was less and less of this paper, and it finally vanished as mysteriously as it had first appeared. Susan, as I indicated, is not poor, though I don't know how much she is worth. But neither is she fabulously wealthy as her grandparents were. I asked her, 'How do you feel about a man like Bellarosa being an illegal millionaire, while most of the Stanhope money was lost through legal taxation?' She shrugged. 'My grandfather used to say, 'Why shouldn't I give half my money to the American people? I got all of it from them.''
I smiled. 'That's very progressive.' On the other hand, some of the rich managed their assets and tax planning with far more care than the Stanhopes, and they are still rich, albeit in a quieter way. Others of the rich around here, the Astors, Morgans, Graces, Woolworths, Vanderbilts, Guests, Whitneys, and so on, were so unbelievably buried in money that nothing short of a revolution would put a dent in their fortunes.
I said, 'Do you ever feel you were cheated? I mean, if you were born, let's say, eighty years ago, you would have lived your life like an empress.' 'What good does it do to think about it? None of the people I know who are in my circumstances think like that.'
It's true that Susan doesn't talk much about life at Stanhope Hall. It's considered bad form among those people to bring up the subject of estate life with outsiders, and even spouses can be outsiders if they don't have an estate in their past. Sometimes, however, the rich and former rich can be prompted to talk if they don't think you're being judgemental or taking notes for publication. I inquired, 'Did you have a groom and stableboy for the horses?' 'Yes.'
The 'yes' came out sounding like, 'Of course, you idiot. Do you think I mucked out the stables?' I then asked, 'Did your grandparents see many of the old crowd? Did they entertain?'
She nodded. 'There were a few parties.' She volunteered, 'Grandfather would invite a hundred or so people at Christmas, and they would all dance in the ballroom. In the summer, he would have one or two parties out on the terrace and under tents.' She added, 'The old crowd would sometimes gather in the library and go through photo albums.'
We drove in silence awhile. There wasn't much more I was going to get out of Susan.
George Allard is a better source of information whenever I get interested in the subject of the old Gold Coast. George's stories are mostly anecdotal, such as the one about Mrs Holloway, who kept chimpanzees in the sitting room of Foxland, her estate in Old Westbury. From George, you can piece together what life was like between the world wars, whereas Susan's stories are mostly childhood memories of a time when the party was long over. George will sometimes tell me a story about Susan as a child that he thinks is funny, but that I find is a clue to my wife's personality.
Susan, by all accounts, was a precocious, snotty little bitch who everyone thought was bright and beautiful. That hasn't changed much, but the extroverted young woman I first met has become increasingly moody and withdrawn over the years. She lives more in her own world as the world around her closes in. I would not describe her as unhappy, but rather as someone who is trying to decide if it's worth the effort to be unhappy. On the other hand, she is not unhappy with me, and I think we're good for each other.
Regarding our current lifestyle, like many other people around here, we enjoy the good life, though as I said, we live among the ruins of a world that was once far more opulent. Susan, I should point out, can afford to provide us with more hired help, gardeners, maids, even a stableboy (preferably an old gent), but by mutual and silent agreement we live mostly within my income, which, while extravagant by most American standards, does not allow for live-in servants in this overpriced part of the world. Susan is a good sport about doing some house and garden chores, and I don't feel insecure or inadequate regarding my inability to move into Stanhope Hall and hire fifty servants. Susan asked me, 'What beach do you want to make love on?'
'One without razor clams. I had a serious accident once.' 'Did you, now? That must have been before my time. I don't remember that. What was her name?'
'Janie.'
'Not Janie Tillman?'
'No.'
'You'll have to tell me about it later.'
'All right.' In our pursuit of fidelity within a twenty-year-old marriage, Susan and I, in addition to the historical romances, sometimes talk about a premarital lover as part of our foreplay. I read in a book once that it was all
