"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 right to do this, to get the juices going, but afterward, as you're both lying there, one partner is usually sullen and the other is sorry he or she was so graphic. Well, if you play with fire to get heat, you can also get burned. I asked, "What did you do today?"

"I planted those vegetables that what's-his-name gave us." She laughed.

"In the rain?"

"Don't they like the rain? I planted them in one of the old flower terraces in front of Stanhope Hall."

I thought old Cyrus Stanhope, as well as McKim, Mead, and White, must be spinning in their graves.

I turned into an unmarked road that I don't think I was ever on before. A good many of the roads on the North Shore are unmarked – some say on purpose – and they seem to go nowhere and often do.

A modern map of this area would not show you where the great estates are; there is no Gold Coast version of the Hollywood Star Map, but there did once exist privately circulated maps of this area that showed the location of the estates and their owners' names. These maps were for use by the gentry in the event your butler handed you an invitation reading something like, "Mr and Mrs William Holloway request the pleasure of your company for dinner at Foxland, the seventeenth of May at eight o'clock."