Come to the Edge: A Memoir (13 page)

S
lowly I began to meet his family. A cousin here and there. Easter with his sister. And on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, after stopping for the night at Brown for Campus Dance, we were on our way to Red Gate Farm, his mother’s 464-acre retreat on the southwestern end of Martha’s Vineyard. I had been there once before, but it was in winter, and we had been alone. On a morning when the sky was bright, he had taken me to the cliffs and told me the Indian legends—how they buried their dead facing east to the sun. Ancient graves had been found over the years, he’d said, in the tangled briar of his mother’s property.

This time I would meet his mother. There had been greetings and goodbyes at holiday parties, and polite conversation, but nothing that she would have recalled. And even if she did, this was different. I was the girl he’d done the play with. I was nervous and anxious, and I overpacked.

On the Steamship Authority ferry from Woods Hole, we inched across Nantucket Sound to Vineyard Haven. We’d rushed from Providence up Route 195 that morning to make an early boat. Friends he’d invited caravanned behind us. We rallied in the ferry parking lot, and the cars stayed on the Woods Hole side. It was that time in late spring that aches with possibility, the time when it’s forever cold in the shade, sometimes warm in the sun, and hovering always is the errant promise that there will be more.

The
Islander
was clean and smelled of diesel. It was windy on board, but none of us stayed below. Excited for the weekend ahead, we planted ourselves on the upper deck looking for sun. Halfway across, John disappeared, and I lay sprawled on a bench in the center of the midsection—one leg bent, the other dangling out of a summer skirt, an arm propped over my eyes. Heat rose from the metal and wood, and my back was warm with it. I felt the engine’s droning hum, the shift of pitch and drop over water.

A trickle of air buzzed in my ear. It stopped, started, then stopped again. I opened my eyes to find John crouched beside me, his face close to mine.

“You’re sweet,” he said loudly when I groaned. “Are you grumpy? Hmm? Just a little?”

I shook my head, and he watched me yawn.

“Oh, so sweet. Did anyone ever tell you you’re sweet? Don’t be
too
sweet, or I’ll bite you. Come on, get up, get up. No breaks for you,” he half-sang. “C’mon—I’m the boss of you.”

I rubbed my eyes and tried not to smile. “You are
not
the boss of me,” I insisted. But, laughing, I followed him around the pilothouse to the breezy side of the boat.

We were almost there. White houses and low green hills. He turned, his hair already salty from the air. “See—aren’t you glad you’re here?” It was my first ferry ride there, and the first time for anything is an occasion, he said. He pointed out the places. West Chop Light, the yacht club, the sails of the schooner
Shenandoah
—and that way, down and around, to Oak Bluffs and the storied gingerbread cottages.

“What do I call her?” I asked. I knew the answer but wanted to make sure. He didn’t dismiss the question. He may have anticipated our meeting, just as I had, but for his own reasons. He considered it for a moment—eyes on the shore, on the busy wharf that was coming pristinely into view.

“Call her Mrs. Onassis. Call her Mrs. Onassis unless she says otherwise.”

We were supposed to be met at the dock by Vassili, a short, wiry Greek from Levkás. He’d worked for years on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht and was now in John’s mother’s employ. Instead, there was a rounded man in a striped shirt with a most engaging smile.

“Maurice, what are you doing here!” John looked pleased.

“I’m surprising you,” the man said brightly. I liked him immediately. Maurice Tempelsman was a financier, a diamond trader, and Mrs. Onassis’s last love. Rob, John’s friend since college and current roommate, knew him, but for the rest of us, there were introductions all around. He had come by boat, he said, and thought it would be fun if, instead of driving the thirty minutes to Gay Head, we continued on by water, anchoring at Menemsha Pond, a stone’s throw from Red Gate Farm.

After lunch at the Black Dog, we piled into the open Seacraft. As the waves kicked up, Maurice pointed out the landmarks. When he saw me shivering in a jean jacket, he gave me his windbreaker and had me sit in the captain’s seat behind him. I caught sight of John. He was perched up front as far as he could go—his face leaning hard into the wind.

Red Gate Farm was off an unmarked dirt and gravel road. If you continued on the main route as it swung north, you would come to the end of the island—the cliffs, the redbrick lighthouse, a small cluster of shops—and when the road wrapped back inland amid fieldstone fences and stunted sea-bent shrubs, there was a small library, a firehouse, and a town hall. But if you turned before the road curved and entered a weathered wooden gate that in those days was rarely locked, you would have found it. The land, a vast parcel of the old Hornblower estate, was wild with scrub oak, native grape, poison ivy, and deer ticks. It bordered Squibnocket Pond and a spectacular swath of private beach. Mrs. Onassis had bought the property in 1978, and the traditional cedar-shingled house—a series, really, of adjoining saltboxes with clean white trim—had been finished in 1981. There was a garage, a vegetable garden, the caretaker’s lodgings, and tennis courts hidden by hedges. A short distance from the main house, there was a guest cottage, known as the Barn. Next to this, designed with John in mind, was an attached faux silo with a bedroom at the top that we called the Tower.

Wherever you looked you sensed proportion—a symmetry between what she had built and what had always been. It was there in the way the lawn ended and the wild grasses began, in the slant and angles of the saltbox roofs, in the cut trails that wound their way through dense brush to the beach, and in the pensive space between the fruit trees in the orchard. It was there in the wildness she left, there in the stillness. She had built her house in agreement with the land, and the Tower, where we stayed, stood sentry.

The years that I visited, she remained on the island for most of the summer, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, returning for meetings in the city only when she had to. With her were Efigenio Pinheiro, her elegant, earringed Portuguese butler, and Marta Sgubin, who had begun as a governess to John and Caroline and was now cook, confidante, and cherished part of the family.

On moonless nights, the sky there was so black, even with a riot of stars arched above. In August, when the grass was parched and the sea untroubled like green glass, we often went up with friends, staying in the Barn and cranking the stereo. But when we were there alone, it was quiet in the Tower—the wind, crickets, a bird’s call, and the oblivious blanketing beat of the waves. At sunset, there was a ruffle of scarlet in the west before the shadows came.

Being there felt like you were in someone else’s dream—one created for pleasure, not to impress. Everything was pleasing to the eye. Things were in their place, without fussiness or clutter. Rustic New England pieces mixed with comfortable chairs and couches, and the rooms unfolded like a story. In her house, the intangible quality of light and color conspired to shift you to yourself, and what you felt was peace.

I remember looking in the kitchen for a glass one morning. Instead, I found vases and, attached to the inside of the white cabinet door, an unlined index card in her hand—which flowers in which vase in which room. It surprised me. When I saw a small carafe of sweet peas or a clutch of dahlias in a room, it seemed unplanned—as though they had just happened there, as though they belonged. Or there’d be a path that appeared to go nowhere, but when you reached the meandering end, you felt its purpose. What seemed happenstance was crafted, chosen by her unerring artist’s eye.

Dinners were announced in the Barn by a buzz on the intercom, and showered and changed, we’d gather in the main house. No matter how glorious the day had been, this was the time I loved best. The dining room was simple: a plank pine table with candles sheltered by hurricane glass, a framed schooner above the mantel, and Windsor chairs. She sat at one end, and Maurice, with his back to the window, sat at the other. Nothing was formal on those nights when her table was full—it was happy and festive, although she rang a small silver bell between courses and placed each of her guests with a seer’s sense of how the conversation would flow.

She was curious about John’s friends and could pry a witticism from even the most tongue-tied. Talk centered on the day’s exploits, a bird that was spotted, current events, a book read, an exhibit or play someone had seen in New York. And woven through were the family stories. Stones of remembrance for his father laid at a friend’s cattle ranch in Argentina; John’s fall into a fire pit in Hawaii when he was five and his rescue by Agent Walsh; summers on Skorpios—the Molière plays directed by Marta that John and Caroline put on for their mother’s July birthday. If the story warranted, she would mention with ease and fondness his father or Mr. Onassis, and I began to feel as if I knew them. When his cousin Anthony was there, they would tandem-tell their tales of a dreadful English camp in Plymouth and spar over who pushed whom down a glacier in the Alps when they were teenagers. One year, by force of argument, John would win. The next, it would be Anthony, winking over the candlelight when he had claimed the last word. At the end of each meal, after chocolate roll or berry pie, there was lavish praise for Marta, who appeared from the kitchen smiling.

After dinner, there might be a game—Bartlett’s or charades, maybe. John and Caroline were both fierce players and in the spirit of fairness were often relegated to different teams. But always, we moved to the living room for mint tea or coffee. Waiting were the fluffed sofas and the cashmere throws, a wall of books, a fire if it was cool, and, in the dark distance, the far-off sound of the sea.

What she wore on those evenings I imagined belonged to this place, as if the fabric and metal existed only in her Up Island sphere. Large hoop earrings, a gold snake circling her wrist, an inexpensive necklace of silver and blue stones that John had brought from India and that she treasured, long-sleeved black T-shirts with jeweled necks, and slim printed skirts that fell to her sandaled feet. She was always radiant at dinner—hair pulled back, sun-kissed by the day.

The second summer, she lent me books. Some she had edited—I especially liked
The Search for Omm Sety: Reincarnation and Eternal Love
by Jonathan Cott—and others she picked from the shelf: a psychology study on family constellations, a collection of poems by Cavafy, Edith Hamilton’s
The Greek Way
, Jean Rhys’s
Wide Sargasso Sea
, and a first edition of Lesley Blanch’s
The Wilder Shores of Love
, its cover somewhat crumpled. She smiled when she handed me the book of tales of Victorian adventuresses. “I think you will like this one.”

The next summer, John and I lived in LA, near Venice Beach in a blue-gray house with a white picket fence. I was doing a play at the Tiffany Theater, and he was a summer associate at Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg & Phillips, and we’d fly back whenever we could. John had become an uncle for the first time when Caroline’s daughter Rose was born in late June. I was carting around
Timebends
, Arthur Miller’s 599-page autobiography, and one afternoon while I was submerged in the McCarthy hearings and
The Crucible
, his mother asked if I liked the book. I did, I said. Had she read it? “No, I haven’t.” She beamed like a child stealing candy. “But I’ve heard it’s good—I just looked up the parts about Marilyn Monroe.”

If I wanted to go off to the beach on my own, she would let me use her jeep. This incensed John, who, though a better driver, was relegated to one of the older vehicles. I had just gotten my license, but I still couldn’t parallel park. (The driving lessons had been a prodding gift from John, and he’d written on the card, “Merry Christmas Baby! May the rest of us beware.”) When he complained, she held firm. “She won’t get my jeep stuck in the sand and you will.”

On occasion, we’d venture off to the tamer parts of the island for Illumination Night or the Agricultural Fair, or for a concert at the gazebo in Oak Bluffs. One night, we went with his mother into Vineyard Haven for ice cream. We browsed the paperbacks at Bunch of Grapes, and caught an early showing of
Roxanne
at the Capawock. (I liked it, Mrs. Onassis didn’t, and John was indifferent.) But as I recall, she rarely left the environs near Gay Head, and her life there had its own rhythm.

If I was up early, I’d see her biking along Moshup Trail—sometimes with Maurice, sometimes alone—her head kerchiefed, maybe stopping off with her binoculars to spot a warbler or a Cooper’s hawk. Some days after lunch, if the water was flat, she’d water-ski at Menemsha or join us at the beach to swim laps in her cap and rubber fins. Other afternoons, she would read outside in the quiet, bricked corner behind the library. There she was sheltered from the wind and could look out over Squibnocket to the sea, with a view of the changing dunes and the empty island just off her shore called Nomans.

By then I knew not to disturb her.

…

On the second morning of Memorial Day weekend, there was a big breakfast, and afterward John and Rob set up a net in back of the house. With Ed Schlossberg, who would marry Caroline that July, they measured out the boundaries for the 1986 inaugural summer volleyball game. It was an especially sporty crowd that weekend, and Mrs. Onassis, Marta, and Maurice stood by and cheered. Even Efigenio came out in his trim, striped apron to watch.

John was big on “Do your best, win or lose,” and that day I tried. Despite my lack of ability, he was my own private coach. When I sent the ball sailing into the net and it ricocheted back to our side, he called a time-out to clue me in on exactly what I’d done
right
. “Just aim a little higher.” When my rusty underhanded girls’ school serve made it over but landed in questionable territory, he argued fiercely with Ed at the net until the point was called. Swept up by his enthusiasm and the constant pep talks, I almost believed that if I just harnessed my inner jock, one day this might actually be fun. I kept my knees bent, like he said, and my hands prone, but I eyed with gratitude the skinny girl across the court who was as disinclined as I was. After several hours and heated rematches, most of us lost interest and returned to the Barn, but John wasn’t done. He corralled whomever he could for water sports at Menemsha. I took off for the beach. Like sleep, sex, and food, time alone was a requirement.