Sue

I assumed, of course, that Susan had recognized my handwriting, i replied:

Sue,

Ten minutes.

Jerry

On the way home, I saw that the sky was clearing rapidly with wisps of black cirrus sailing across a sunny sky as the southerlies brought the warm weather back. Long Island is not a large land mass, but the weather on the Atlantic side can be vastly different from the Sound side, and the East End has its own weather patterns. All of this weather is subject to change very quickly, which makes life and boating interesting.

I turned the Bronco into Stanhope's gateway and waved to George, who was on a ladder cutting some low branches on a beech tree.

As I headed toward my house, I tried to put myself in the right postbellum, precoital mood.

Susan swung open the door, wearing nothing at all, and called out, "Jerry!" then put one hand over her mouth and the other over her pubic region. "Oh..!" "Very funny."

Dinner was indeed cold – a salad, white wine, and half-frozen shrimp. Susan has never taken to cooking, but I don't fault her. It's a wonder she knows how to turn on the oven considering she never even saw Stanhope Hall's downstairs kitchen until she was twenty. But dinner was served in the nude, so what could I complain about?

Susan sat on my lap at the dinner table and fed me icy shrimp with her fingers, poured wine into my mouth, and dabbed my face with a napkin. She didn't say much and neither did I, but I had the feeling everything was all right. It's quite pleasant to eat with a naked woman on your lap, especially if the meal isn't so good. I said, "Well, so much for the cold dinner. What's for dessert?" "Me."

"Correct."

I stood with her in my arms.

She shook her head. "Not here. I want to make love on the beach tonight." Some women change partners for variety; Susan likes to change the scenery and costumes.

"Sounds fine," I said, though, in truth, I would have preferred a bed, and I would have preferred it in the next two minutes.

Anyway, Susan dressed and we took the Jag. I drove and put the sunroof back and let in the spring air. It was getting on to that moody time of the day, twilight, when the long shadows make a familiar world look different. "Do you want to go to the beach now?" I asked.

"No. After dark."

I drove generally south and west toward the sinking sun, through a lovely landscape of rolling hills, shaded lanes, meadows, ponds, and pockets of woodland.

I tried to sort the events of the last few weeks, which compelled me into the wider subject of my life and my world. There still exists here, less than an hour's drive from midtown Manhattan, this great stretch of land along the northern coast of Long Island, which is almost unknown to the surrounding suburbanites and nearby city dwellers. It is a land that at first glance seems frozen in time, as though the clocks had stopped at the sound of the closing bell on October 29, 1929.

This semi-mythical land, the Gold Coast, is bordered on the north by the coves, bays, and beaches of the Long Island Sound, and on the south by the postwar housing subdivisions of the Hempstead Plains: the Levittowns, the tract housing, the 'affordable homes', built in cookie-cutter fashion, ten and fifteen thousand at a clip where the famous Long Island potato fields once lay, a fulfilment of the postwar promise to provide 'homes fit for heroes'.

But here on the Gold Coast, development has come more slowly. Great estates are not potato fields, and their passing takes a bit longer.

I said to Susan, "The interesting Mr Bellarosa dropped by my office today."

"Did he?"

She didn't pick up on the word interesting, or if she did, she let it slide. Women rarely rise to the bait when the subject is jealousy. They just ignore you or look at you as if you're crazy.

We drove in silence. The sky had completely cleared, and the sunlight sparkled off the wet trees and roads.

The Gold Coast, you should understand, encompasses not only the northern coastline of Long Island's Nassau County, but by local definition includes these low hills that run five to ten miles inland toward the plains. These hills were left by the retreat of the last Ice Age glacier, some twenty thousand years ago, and are in fact the terminal moraine of that glacier. I will explain that to Mr Bellarosa one of these days. Anyway, when the Stone Age Indians returned, they found a nice piece of real estate, abundant with new plant life, game, waterfowl, and fabulous shellfish. Nearly all the Native Americans are gone now, their population probably equalling that of the remaining estate owners. Finally, curiosity got the best of Susan, and she asked, "What did he bring you this time? Goat cheese?"

"No. Actually, he wanted me to represent him on a real estate deal." "Really?" She seemed somewhat amused. "Did he make you an offer you couldn't refuse?"

I smiled, despite myself, and replied, "Sort of. But I did refuse."

"Was he annoyed?"

"I'm not sure." I added, "It sounded like a legitimate deal, but you never know with these people."

"I don't think he would come to you with anything illegal, John." "There is white and there is black, and there are a hundred shades of grey in between." I explained the deal briefly, then added, "Bellarosa said that he had made his best offer, and he had to show the owners that it was their best offer. That sounds a little like strong-arming to me."

"Perhaps you're overly sensitive to the situation."

"Well, the deal aside, then, I have to consider my reputation."

"That's true."

"My fee for the contract and closing would have been about sixty thousand dollars." I glanced at Susan.

"The money is irrelevant."

I suppose if your name happens to be Stanhope, that's true. And that perhaps is the one luxury of the rich that I envy: the luxury to say no to tainted money with no regrets. I, too, indulge myself in that luxury though I'm not rich. Maybe it helps to have a wife who is.

I considered telling Susan about my Easter morning at Alhambra, but in retrospect, the whole incident seemed a bit foolish. Especially growling at the woman. I did, however, want Susan to know about Mr Mancuso. I said, "The FBI is watching Alhambra."

"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.