©2014twmcdermott
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| Rogers Beach Club, Westhampton |
When I first heard someone talk about a "Hampton," I was still
too young to know how adults could use the secret language of summer places to
register people socially. Each “Hampton” signified something or other about a
friend or their family. For those headed to Southhampton, it was definitely a
money and gin & tonics on the porch kind of thing. Westhampton evoked
something simpler, people who liked the beach and disliked longer drives. Quogue?
What’s a Quogue?
Back in the 50s and early 60s, when I was growing up in
Forest Hills, the locals who spent their summers on eastern Long Island never
referred to a place called “The Hamptons.” Instead, they told friends they were
going to particular places, East Hampton, Westhampton Beach. And, those friends
didn’t go weak at the knees believing the lucky few might be hobnobbing with
Hollywood or Wall Street.
My earliest encounter with the area still connects me to
feelings of loneliness and loss. My best friend, Kurt, spent the summer in a
house close-by Rogers Beach Club in Westhampton. At home, he lived in an apartment at
one end of a long first floor hallway, and I at the other. He was my older
almost-brother by a mere 17 June days. Within a week after school closed, he
was gone for the summer.
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When I was six or seven, my own family spent summers at the
farm where my maternal grandfather had lived as a boy, in Matawan, New Jersey.
You want to get a universe away from Hampton life? Try an old farmhouse with
two small barns on Texas Road; up the hill from the railroad and the proverbial
roosters who woke me early, circa 1955. And the saltwater pool where my mother drove
us to go swimming bore little relation to Kurt’s Dune Road.
There were no other kids around our “farm,” except my sisters,
and they did not play ball or understand comic books; they had not mastered the
art of hopping about while making galloping noises with your tongue and holding the reins of a broomstick horse between your legs. They had no clue about Hopalong, Wild Bill, or the Lone Ranger.
While Kurt was lazily walking 100 yards or so for an
after-cereal ocean dip, I spent my Texas Road days with a gallop, lying in my pup
tent upon pine needles, reading comics. Or, sometimes I played with my land
turtles captured in the blackberry field where my sister and I squatted to you
know what when the old house’s plumbing quit, a not infrequent occurrence.
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| Matawan Station |
At summer’s end, when Kurt returned, I listened to his summer
tales told in his raspy voice. Mostly we talked about Little League games he
played. He convinced me that one boy had been born with three eyes and you
could still see the scar in the middle of his forehead where it was removed. I
still
remember the boy’s name – Jay
Beaton – Jay, if you’re reading this, true story or not, apologies for bringing
it up.
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At long last, we discontinued our farm trips after much lobbying by me and my older sister. We began spending the summer at the beach clubs of Atlantic Beach, at the extreme opposite end of Long Island from Westhampton. One year, Kurt and his family returned home at mid-summer – his mother, Meg, had TB or maybe cancer.
The year we turned 13, Kurt’s mother died, and I think he
stopped going to Westhampton shortly after that. Maybe his heartbroken dad, a
big man who wore small bow ties with his suit, simply couldn’t bare it. Nobody
explained that kind of thing to kids then.
But, a couple of years later when we were in high school,
his aunt invited a few of his friends, including me, to stay at her rented house
on Cox’s Curve Road in Westhampton.
Driving on Montauk Highway with my own family these days, I cannot
resist calling out some of the stations the way that conductor did on our teenage journey out east. I did it again with only my
wife in the car recently. “Speeeooonk!” “Ronnnnkooonnkkaamaaaa!” Walt Whitman,
eat your heart out.
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There was a little croquet club on Cox’s Curve Road when we
were teens. But, we weren’t much interested in croquet after discovering that club
members living there had teenage daughters; we became very interested in them.
One day, we rented a small boat in Hampton Bays, a rowboat
really with a small engine, and took it through the Shinnecock Canal. Quite an
adventure, for city boys who knew nothing about boats or the difference between
bay and ocean currents.
I knew even less about the currents flowing through me whenever
I saw a certain one of those girls, an Upper East Side private school
heartthrob if there ever was one.
I immediately fell overboard in love, and upon my return
home would call her nearly every night from a pay phone, since I was too
embarrassed to use our family phone. Her father conveyed a long sigh over the
phone line to my corrugated booth, from where I could hear him call her in from
the croquet lawn to speak with me.
The highlight of that first Hamptons’ trip, besides the girl,
was seeing “Dr. No” at the cinema in town. After that, life pretty much became Before and After Ursula.
I managed exactly two “dates” with my summer love, one during
that same summer when she had “things to do in town,” and I give thanks to her
for introducing me to the Met and for a memorable, for me, modest kiss. The
other took place in the fall, a birthday celebration for her friend whose
parents took me and another boy for dinner at the tony Embers restaurant in the East 50s.
Before, during, and after dinner she spoke not a word to me, sitting there in
my best DePinna madras jacket and knit tie. I could tell that her friend was kicking her under the table. Some summers do end. With a thud.
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My other summer love had been tennis, discovered when I was
eight with my first taste of the “Nationals,” the Open’s forerunner, which took
place at West Side Tennis Club, whose entrance was 50 yards from my bedroom.
After Wimbledon, a number of men’s and women’s satellite
grass tournaments took place, including ones at Maidsone in East Hampton or Meadow
Club in Southhampton.
I especially remember reading about and imagining events at
Meadow Club, a place that seemed geographically and socially beyond reach to
me. I could imagine the girls of August, and the Triumphs and Morgans parked
beside the tall privet hedges. The girls, of course, wore cotton summer dresses,
perhaps with a bright cardigan or a Shetland tied around their tan shoulders. I
imagined them having club sandwiches or consommé
Madrilène
for lunch on the porch, drinking Gin & Tonics by the bar in the
evening with their parents or boyfriends after play had ended for the day.
In September, after returning home to the city or Greenwich
or Far Hills, they would come to the Nationals, and I would see them sitting on
the West Side’s slate terrace, wandering the field courts, and sitting in the
boxes.
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In 1990, a year after beginning a new job, my boss invited
my family to her house in Bridgehampton, on Pointe Mecox.
Sadly, the year before, Kurt was tragically killed in an
accident outside Candlestick Park near San Francisco. He and I had renewed our
friendship shortly before the accident and, returning to the Hamptons still
reminded me of him and his stories.
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| Meadow Club |
Ro, my boss, and her husband, Charles, had just bought their
second home in the area. The new one was truly spectacular, with open views
across the inlet and out to the ocean. The kitchen had a long marbled counter and was huge by my
family’s standards; Ro had every inch of the refrigerator packed, and then
some. My kids were immediately smitten with Ro and Charles, their house, and
pool. This, at last, was the real Hamptons.
Charles had a shop in town called Country Gear, which we
loved to visit, and I also loved riding a bicycle over to the Sag Store. I am incapable
now of visiting the East End without thinking about Kurt and those wonderful days
with Ro, who died a few years ago, and Charles.
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In late June this year, my wife and I attended a wedding in
Quogue. Once again, it was summer love at first sight: the seaside church, the
little Q44 shop run by a friend, the Field Club on a clear, warm, dry summer
day, an iced tea at the Country Market.
I immediately decided to live there, although it wasn’t
exactly clear how I would do that.
Quogue seems like a kind of un-Hampton. Hard to imagine Hillary,
Spielberg, or The Donald venturing west of the canal. Quogue seems like the
perfect summer solution.
I’ve never heard anyone from Quogue say they were going to
“The Hamptons.”
Meanwhile, the home team hits a homer, Van Morrison wants "to be born again," and in the evening Erroll plays soft, Oscar plays impossibly fast, and Nat rides Route 66 one more time in a voice and style that Chuck Berry couldn't catch in a Speedster running at 4,500 rpm.
And then, there is always an outdoor shower late in the afternoon with the breeze coming up, and the "no service" on the phone.
