The first thing to say about this August Diary is that it will run right through half of September.

When I came out to fix a spot of breakfast this morning, Megan came to tell me that we had run out of milk after all. So I gobbled my egg and toast and headed off for Whitney’s Pantry, where I saw to the day’s marketing than anticipated. The food has been put away, the dishwasher has been emptied, and I’m doing a small load of laundry. A morning routine seems to have taken shape.

The freight boat, carrying two boxes for me and a bicycle for Will, pulls in at 12:30, more or less. I’ll be there. I can’t wait to unpack the rest of my stuff, including tea and a teapot. Whether we’ll have lunch in town has yet to be decided. At four, I’ll take an hourlong walk along the beach. By then, I hope to have really begun to calm down.

***

Moving from the South Sea Bubble to the Great Crash of 1929, I’ve put down Malcolm Balen and picked up John Kenneth Galbraith. In the Foreword to the 1975 edition of the book, Galbraith sets forth what I consider the most basic law of men, money, and markets:

As a protection against financial illusion or insanity, memory is far better than law. When the memory of the 1929 disaster failed, law and regulation no longer sufficed. For protecting peole from the cupidity of others and their own, history is highly utilitarian. It sustains memory and memory serves the same purpose as the SEC and, on the record, is far more effective.

(Which is not to say that the re-enactment of Glass-Steagall wouldn’t be a great idea.) Tony Judt made much the same point in Postwar; sacrifices and safety-nets that seemed to do no more than meet the minimal requirements of a humane civilization became, for later generations that didn’t remember the carnage, merely expensive.

Why do most people seem to find history boring? I’ve never understood that. I’ve certainly read history books that might have been livelier, but on the whole I would nominate history as the field in which the best nonfiction writing is done. As a rule, the more serious the historian, the better the writing.

The hard work of learning history is done at the beginning — perhaps that’s the problem. When, as a child, you are required to wake up to the distances of historical time — thousands of years, crowded with events — the desire to remain asleep is intense, and most people succeed. Facts and dates are memorized for examination purposes and then forgotten. Unfortunately, a society is only as strong as its sense of history, and it is for that reason that I am pessimistic about the United States. Too many people have an unnecessary ideological resistance to the very idea of “collective memory,” which is what history in everyday life amounts to. (Worse, there is a great deal of lying about the past, indulged by the more reactionary Supreme Court justices and others who ought to know better.) At a minimum, we need leaders who, no matter what they say, really do know what has happened in the past, and not just at election time. We need an élite.

The old aristocratic order in Europe, however glittering it was two or three hundred years ago, had its origins in protection rackets that no one would have described as, literally, aristocratic. The terms were self-servingly applied to the inheritors of feudal power nearly a thousand years afterward. I often wish that we could give the concept another go, without reference to the counts and dukes of yore. But I wouldn’t know where to begin.   

Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony.

We’re here, and, amazingly, at 10:15, we’re all still awake. There has been a diaper emergency. Ryan has sped off to the town to see what can be bought. Meanwhile, Will is, incredibly, operational. And so am I, even more incredibly, given the little list of Things That I Forgot, the only significant lapse being the cable that connects the camera to the computer — a lapse that Ryan redressed with magic from his own backpack.

Kathleen is reading Green Eggs and Ham to Will while Megan has a moment of regroupment. We are all incredibly content. Ryan agreed with me: it’s as though the time between now and our last time here had been shoved into a closet. Not forgotten, but so not real.

There’s a loft, over the bedroom where Megan and Ryan will stay (a bed with a tester!). Will has decided that the loft is “his house.” His parents are wonderfully game.

***

I did have an amazing day: everything went as it ought. Once we were established in the house, I set out for food and booze, and decided to separate the missions. So I went out for booze, and then I went out for food. My head was an airport. It will take a day or two to settle down into the mode of being still, not traveling.  

Meanwhile, Will, who will be here for a week, is having the highest of holidays. All of us are convinced that he is the one important person in the room.

***

If Saturday was the day of arrival, Sunday has been the day of settling in — cooking, dishwashing, and laundry. All pursued with such enthusiasm that my cell phone got laundered along with the towels. My fault exlusively. I realized what I’d done shortly after the point of no return. I’ve resolved myself to a few days without a phone. I haven’t had a fit. But I’m shaken and disturbed.

The governing idea of a month by the sea — and, by the way, we have yet to walk down the lane to the ocean — is simplicity, the toughest of all standards for anyone not obliged by need and lack of options to observe it. If deprivation is a human condition characterized by preoccupation with the things that are lacked, where does simplicity shift from boon to burden? 

My brain is still an airport, and at the same time a plane seeking to land. s

***

This morning (Sunday), I finished a dandy little book by Malcolm Balen, A Very English Deceit. It’s a brisk account of the South Sea Bubble that exploded in England in 1720, later in the same year that a similar plutomania blew up in France. (Confusingly, the Banque de France and the Mississippi Company, headquartered in Paris’s rue Quincampoix, were the brainchildren of Scotsman John Law, a fugitive from English justice after the death of a romantic rival in an impetuous duel. Law did not return to England until the 1740s, after the fall of Walpole, when he was able to purchase a pardon for £10,000. Just to keep one’s head spinning, Law is buried at San Moisè, in Venice.) The episode takes its name from the South Sea Company, set up in 1711, by Tory leader Robert Harley, as a trading operation that would challenge the domination of existing Whig institutions, the Bank of England and the East India Company. Nine years later, and now just as Whig as they, the South Sea Company stepped forward with an ingenious scheme for eliminating the staggering national debt. Balen explains this scheme lucidly, and he also explains how something so hare-brained ever attained Parliamentary imprimatur. In other words, he tells a tale for our times, of corrrupt government toleration, and even encouragement, of fraudulent finance.

Edward Pearce’s book about the Walpole ministry made me realize that I had to find a book that focused on the South Sea Bubble itself, in order to organize the litter of information deposited by histories to which the catastrophe was incidental. (Charles Mackay’s well-known 1841 retelling is long on drama but short on mechanics.) Subtitled “The South Sea Bubble and the World’s First Great Financial Scandal,” Balen’s book was occasioned, as it were, by the dotcom bust of 2001. The author, a journalist with sometime berths at ITV and the BBC, acknowledges his debt to John Carswell’s 1993 study of the Bubble, which he clearly has no intention of superseding. A Very English Deceit is not really history; it’s reportage of the highest Vanity Fair quality. Which is precisely what one wants in a case like this. As an accounting of the actions and intentions of individual men — real history — Balen’s book is arguably second-rate. Having read a number of books, just in the past year, about English politics in the first half of the Eighteenth Century, I must say that I find Balen’s characterizations of the leading players, from George I to Robert Knight (and, when you know who Robert Knight was, you know what the scandal was all about), are either crude or cursory. Balen’s ball, however, is not the individual players but the game itself, and Balen shines as a financial sportscaster. The following passage, depicting the very crest-into-crash of the wave, gives a good idea of Balen’s comfortably engaging style.

Despite the gullibility of the investors and the apparent success of the share launch, however, Blunt was facing a severe cash-flow problem. Without an even faster inflow of money, there simply wasn’t enough cash … to support the share price, and if the share price could not be supported then the illusion he had created for the last six months would be shattered. Accordingly, he found a way of demonstrating his supposed confidence in the Company’s future. On 30 August he persuaded the Court of Directors to vote for an absurdly generous Christmas dividend of 30 per cent, accompanied by the astonishing promise that the annual dividend for a decade would be 50 per cent. The offer of such an extraordinary dividend was an attempt, though far too late in the day, to persuade investors to keep their money in the Comapny for the long term, rather than indulging in the short-termism that had marked the attitude of shareholders in the other bubbles. But to be in a position to pay such amounts, its shareholders could calculate, the Company would have to make at least a £15 million profit each year.

The effect was not as Blunt had intended. It was as if someone had thrown a bucketful of cold water over the investors, who had so blindly followed his charismatic financial leadership. They stood blinking and disbelieving at what they saw before them: a company whose trading prospects had been nonexistent in the past, and would be nonexistent in the future; a company whose proposed dividend implied such extraordinary annual profits that anyone with any sense could now see that it simply could not trade on the multimillion-pound scale which the offer to shareholders suggested; a commpany which was, quite nakedly, a machine for making a profit out of debt reclamation, and not a trading company at all; a company which still had a third of the national debt to sell, and whose chances of doing so were receding by the hour. “Sir,” wrote a sceptical correspondent to one newspaper, “South Sea is very sick, a premium of 50 per cent has been applied as a cordial for revival, but it won’t do; the old woman droops still.”

More intriguing, for me, than the familiar ride of boom and bust is the wonder of Walpole’s cunning transmutation of national disaster into the longest, as well as the first, premiership in British history. Walpole stage-managed the short-term resolution of the shock in such a way that the power structure that he intended to control was not itself damaged; this meant shielding a number of Very Important People, not exluding His Britannic Majesty. It meant making sure that the British government’s official call for the extradition of Robert Knight was diplomatically flouted by officials of the Holy Roman Empire; as keeper of the “little green book,” Knight was like the accountant who exposed Al Capone as a tax cheat, only, in this case, with the government in the gangster’s seat. Walpole decided which malefactors got to walk and which were pilloried and subjected to clawback. (One South Sea functionary was left with only £31, which seems a bit heartless.) And the irony of it was that Walpole’s position as Mr Clean owed entirely to his personal banker’s sensible refusal to follow Walpole’s instructions to pour money into South Sea at the peak. It is difficult to think of other opportunists on the scale of Sir Robert Walpole. Even Balen, who regards almost everyone in his book as some kind of knave (Earl Stanhope excepted), cannot avoid sounding impressed. “Walpole had protected King and country, preserved the Whig hegemony, and had made himself the indissoluble element that bound all three together.” You can’t think of studying politics without him.  

Separation anxiety: this morning, Ray Soleil and I carried the four dining chairs downstairs and out the service entrance onto 87th Street. The upholsterer’s van appeared presently, and the chairs were carried away. Although the material in which the seats are covered is in fine shape, the underlying upholstery has given way, so that you fear that you are going to fall right through the frame when you sit down. While I’m out on Fire Island, the chairs will be repaired and returned — it makes great sense. But the combination of losing the chairs while preparing to go away for an entire month left me feeling somewhat stateless.

***

Among the many books that I ordered a while back, a few have begun to stream in, and one of the first is singularly interesting just as a book, for it is the first that I have ever held, much less owned, that was published in India (Aleph Books, New Delhi 2012). It is a novel, Em and the Big Hoom, by Jerry Pinto, and I’ve read more than half of it already. It tells the story, played for rueful comedy, of an Anglophone family of Goans living in Mumbai. At the heart of the tale is the mother’s very serious bipolar disorder, which defies medication. But what fascinates me is the language, which is fluent but slightly foreign. Without ever being lost, I’m aware of missing nuances here and there, usages that have sprung up in a community that’s physically remote from other English-speaking groups, and therefore as distinctive as Cockney or country. And the pages are edged in black.

***

In the early afternoon, Megan and Will came uptown, and we met at Carl Schurz Park. It was interesting to watch Will’s interactions with the other children, who were, of course, complete strangers. There were occasional difficulties, but no violence and no tears. I was entertained by a ballet of sorts involving a little girl, her mother, and Will’s collection of small cars. While Will was playing with two of his cars, the girl approached and expressed an  interest in sharing one of them. Will did not reciprocate, but moved to bar from his little parking lot: “My cars.” When Megan suggested that Will be nicer, he reached for a third car and offered it to the girl, but it was too little, too late, and the girl walked away brusquely. This earned her a gentle reprimand from her mother, who now entered the scene and, not knowing the circumstances, thanked Will for being so generous. It was all so unfair!

For the record, I ought to note that I had my first complete telephone conversation with Will yesterday. He said hello and told me that he was at his house. I said that I was at my house, and, having just heard what he’d been up to earlier this week, asked him if he’d see the sea lions (no, the seals), the penguins (no response), and the dinosaurs (yes!). At this point, Will decided that he’d had enough, and he said “bye.” I said that I loved him, and he said that he loved me, and we both said “bye.” Then his mother came back on the line. It was all quite competent.

Having solved the shipping problem that has been eating away at my vitals for three weeks, I feel well enough to write a proper entry, complete with picture, but I think I’ll just keep my head down in case the well-being goes gossamer. What shipping problem, you ask? See how nice I am, that I don’t bore you with all my troubles? This one was particularly odious, in that I brought my full reserves of obstinacy to not dealing with it. I have only myself to spank.

(However, nota bene: I have solved the shipping problem prospectively only. No further boxes will languish at the Bay Shore branch of the Post Office in the wake of the one that I sent to an address where, it turns out, boxes from the Post Office are not accepted! (Fire Island Ferries deals only with UPS and FedEx.) As for the one that, I hope, will be returned in due course to us here in New York, it was a test, containing nothing very valuable.

***

Now, back to F L Lucas’s Style: On the Art of Writing Well, originally published in 1955. A formidable book! I wish I could remember how I heard of it. (That I hadn’t heard of it until just this summer is what’s really remarkable.) Never having spent much time with Strunk & White, I can’t say how very different Lucas is, but he’s certainly more comprehensive (longer and deeper)  than they are, and he values what used to be called Continental literature at a level wildly beyond the stretch of American popularity. Lucas extols the classical virtues of clarity and brevity and variety, but it was only for the second edition of Style that this Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, could be persuaded to footnote his copious extracts from foreign letters, chiefly French, with translations. The first edition, cannot have struck any reader as clear, brief, or varied (the examples being incomprehensible to the monophone).  

In the new Harriman House reprint of Style, a somewhat rebarbative studio photograph of the author serves as the frontispiece; you can see it here. Looking at it makes me feel that I have just spent hours in a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and I cannot quite reconcile it with Lucas’s chapter on “Good Humour and Gaiety.” And yet…

The practical conclusion? That must remain, I think, a question of temperament and of tact. There are some people with as little gift for gaiety as Milton’s elephant trying to amuse Adam and Eve by twisting its “lithe proboscis” — or as Milton himself. Heaven forbid that I should tempt any such into the quicksands of facetiousness. Better I should be taken by the neck and cast into the Cam.

It’s the right time for me to be reading this book, though. Writing intelligibly has never been more important to me. I fear that I don’t. I’m afraid that I chatter in a donnish patois all my own, composed like a bird’s nest of the most miscellaneous straws. As a sort of compensation, I have come to share Lucas’s dislike of everyday contractions, especially ‘s, which can stand for either is or has, an ambiguity that poses no difficulty to the native speaker but that may well, given the other demands of my way of writing, add an unnecessary burden to friends from other tongues. At the same time, I can’t quite bring myself to say “I am afraid” instead.

And then there is the future to consider. How much of today’s writing will be comprehensible a century from now? I should prefer most of mine to be. I am particularly worried by the sporting verbs that permeate vernacular English today, almost everywhere it is spoken. How long will “step up to the plate” mean anything? Sometimes I find myself using terms that I don’t really understand myself, such as “full court press.” I have looked into this phrase several times, but I rest assured that its meaning is a sealed book to anyone lacking an interest in basketball.

Finally, there is Lucas’s concern for “the purity of English.” It sounds awful to talk about the purity of anything, but there’s no other way to describe a problem that presses ever more heavily on my mind. It would be better to talk of the strength of the language, perhaps, because that’s what’s lost when standards are lowered in order to make an enormous intake of new speakers feel comfortable. This is no merely contemporary matter; what I have in mind is the vast immigration that made Germans the most numerous ancestors of today’s white population. Its impact remains undigested. Also: the thorough dissemination of Yiddish throughout American humor. To the extent that these influences add to the language’s flexibility and expressiveness, they are most welcome. To the extent that they replace its native structures (“graduate college”; “shop Bloomingdale’s”), they are even more noxious than the affectations of French and Latin that have troubled the English now and then in the past, worse for seizing the minds of the uneducated. We have always counted on the uneducated to remind us of our roots; it is in counterpoise to the oaken tenacity of unlettered speech that English has incorporated ways of thinking and of speaking from almost every culture with which it has come into contact. Ironically, the pigheaded Midcountry ban on bilingualism threatens the degradation of English as much as any other factor. We would all speak better English if we had to speak a little Spanish.  

The humidity is flattening. Aside from my trip to the hospital for a Remicade infusion, I spent yesterday in bed. A good deal of reading got done, and even some thinking. But I am not really here. I have checked out.

Takeaway from a front-page article in yesterday’s Times:

In fact, the Germany economy sometimes resembles one big Mittelstand company: it is built for stability more than growth. Debt is bad, prudence a higher virtue than profit.

What a concept! In today’s paper, Maureen Dowd reminds us that, according to the author herself, “Ayn” rhymes with “swine.” I wish that Ayn Rand were here, to repudiate the new veep candidate and champion crockmeister.

What, no picture?

It’s not just the crazy week that I’ve got ahead of me, but, even more, the distraction of having hit upon the appropriate structure for a long-term project that I’ve been doodling about for the past year: I’m going to ease up on contributions here. Once I get out to Fire Island, with plenty of new things to photograph,  I’ll resume normal posting.

Right now, though, I’ve got to read Ryan Lizza’s piece about Paul Ryan in a recent issue of The New Yorker. I saw in the Times today that Ryan is, or was, an avid Ayn Rand fan. As far as I’m concerned,  this makes him the equivalent of a Scientologist.

And then I’ve got to shop for dinner — for eight!

Although far from pleasant — perhaps because it was so far from pleasant — yesterday’s horrible weather offered the most gracious way of ending a summer vacation. Gedouddaheah!

Did we mention the Vital Transportation driver who sped us from the Bay Shore ferry terminal to our own front door in one hour and ten minutes? Terrifying as it was, that early-August drive came fondly to mind yesterday as we occasionally inched our way along the Southern State Parkway. Conditions on the Cross Island were smoother, and traffic on the Grand Central Parkway was surprisingly fleet, given the tropical-storm grade downpour. Miraculously, the FDR wasn’t flooded. But it was a terrible day to be on the road, even if we weren’t doing the driving. 

The first thing I did when we got home was to make a pot of tea. The second thing was to order Chinese. Perfect weather for steaming bowls of pork lo mein.

We camped out in the living room. The dining table has been serving as a distribution hub all summer, piled high will all manner of printed and stamped information, but, thanks to the agreeable balcony setup, we haven’t been inconvenienced. No sitting on the balcony last night, though! I read Anthony Flint’s Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City. That would be a better title, I think, if it wound up with “…and Put an End to Urban Renewal.” Fifty years later, American cities remain largely untransformed (if you ask me), and that has made it possible for some of them to become charming. “Urban renewal,” in any case, was a euphemism to rank right up there with “ethnic cleansing,” which it substantially resembled. Flint’s second chapter, “The Master Builder,” necessarily retraces ground so ardently mapped by Robert Caro, in The Power Broker, and I haven’t seen anything that I didn’t encounter in the bigger book, echoes of which still haunt me weeks after I read it. But Flint is certainly more temperate about Robert Moses — so far, at least. In case you just tuned in, let me remind you that the three parkways that I mentioned earlier were all early works of the “commissioner for life,” as Moses came to be known. 

At some point before eleven, I decided to turn in. I took my pill and climbed into bed with my book, put on my reading glasses, and got comfortable. Then, without reading a word, I took off my reading glasses, put the book down, and turned out the light. That was it for me.

At some demented moment yesterday morning, I ventured to suggest to Kathleen that we didn’t need to ship any boxes of stuff home; there wasn’t so much that we couldn’t ferry it across the Great South Bay and into the trunk of a commodious Town Car. Happily, she paid no attention to this — pretended that she hadn’t heard it. We packed our four boxes of stuff and mailed them off and we still had four groaning tote bags — the ones that are so big that Kathleen has to put them on her shoulder, because otherwise she can’t lift them off the ground — and Will’s Maclaren (taking which out to Fire Island was the dumbest thing I did all summer, by far) to haul. As I lugged these through sodden lanes and sandy stretches toward our final ferry ride, I could only bless Kathleen’s providence.

Like Klingsor’s flower garden at the end of Parsifal‘s second act, Ocean Beach and environs were drained of all summery pleasures in an instant. For me, the instant fell when Will and his parents left, yesterday; what had been an iffy but not unpleasant day became a maelstrom of loss. This morning, something like an actual maelstrom showed up, sending curtains flying and drumming rooftop rain. A more miserable hour for lugging boxes to the post office — we sent four, stuffed with clothes and books and whatnot — cannot have been imagined, without making the weather actually exciting.

I am eager to leave; I’m dying for a cup of tea. The propane ran out (again!) on Saturday, and a boatload of food went to waste because we couldn’t cook it. It seems that the propane tank was unmoored somewhat by the storm surge; by the time it was reattached, it had leaked considerably. (It had been a fresh tank as of the previous Friday, as I should know only too well.) Saturday was the first day of the holiday weekend, of course, and although I was assured that someone would stop by (I knew whom to call), no one ever showed up, and no one has even yet.

I did read Emma, all in a great gulp; never have I gone through one of Jane Austen’s novels so briskly. I was right to think that speed would cause changes in tone to register more clearly, and the novel presented a four-part structure as if in a satellite photograph. More about that when I can enjoy a cup of tea! Now it’s time to put the computer away, along with everything else that we are carrying back to the city, and prepare to vamoose.

For some time, I’ve been hankering to re-read a favorite classic, and I suppose that my simply putting it that way assured that Emma would be my choice. I love no book more. And, familiar as it is, the novel still bristles with complicating mysteries. It seems to be more shapeless than Austen’s other novels, but the appearance must be deceptive, because comedy of such civilized intensity cannot possibly emerge from haphazard construction. Rather, it is my taste that is at fault, too gross to discern the pattern. On this reading, my seventh or eighth, I sense Austen’s slyness. She begins with an ending, the end of Emma’s happy enjoyment of Miss Taylor’s company. The entire first chapter is a novel in its own right. Where can the story go from there? The novel gets going in earnest — not that you’d sense this if you hadn’t read the novel several times — at the end of the third chapter, with the introduction of Harriet Smith. Chapter 5 shifts the point of view away from Emma, as Mr Knightley tells Mrs Weston (as Miss Taylor has become) that he doesn’t think that Emma’s association with Harriet will do either girl any good. For the first time, Emma’s defects are stated rather than implied. “I am much mistaken if Emma’s doctrines give any strength of mind, or tend at all to make a girl adapt herself rationally to the varieties of her situation in life. They only give a little polish.” This is not a declaration of war — that comes three chapters later, with Mr Knightley’s thundering tirade, “‘Not Harriet’s equal!'” — but it more than hints at hostilities to come. Knowing that the enemies (the heroine and her brother-in-law) will ultimately negotiate a peace that flourishes in true love only (and oddly) increases the suspense.

Was it the second or the third time that I read Emma that left me feeling slightly scorched?

She had always wanted to do everything, and had made more progress, both in drawing and music, than many might have done with so little labour as she would ever submit to. She played and sang, and drew in almost every style; but steadiness had always been wanting; and in nothing had she approached the degree of excellence which she would have been glad to command, and ought not to have failed of. She was not much deceived as to her own skill, either as an artist or a musician; but she was not unwilling to have others deceived, or sorry to know her reputation for accomplishment often higher than it deserved.

Ouch. This passage used to make me feel found out, as it would Emma itself. Now it just makes me sad, because, like Emma, I got used to doing things too surprisingly well without much effort to strive to do anything really well. My piano teacher warned me again and again not to play “by ear,” but it was so much easier for me to do so  than actually to learn to read music that I can follow a score only when I’m listening to the music. In a similar way, I dodged every occasion on which I might have been obliged to study Latin; victorious over Caesar, I never captured Horace. Above all — and out of vanity exactly like Emma’s — the thing that I worked hardest at was avoiding the appearance of working hard.

When did I read Emma for the first time? I don’t recall. The copy of the novel that I have with me, a leatherette-bound Collins edition of 1953 that was part of a boxed set, has a note on the endpapers indicating that I read the novel for the third time in 1970. That seems a little precocious — but I loved Emma from the start. And yet, like any true classic, it is always a different novel. This go-round, what I’m noticing is that Mr Knightley is indeed a bit rough, “knightly” or not depending on your ideas of men in medieval armor. He is no prince. He makes me just as uncomfortable as he does Emma; almost every complaint that he has against her, adjusting for gender, was made to me, many times, by teachers and other grown-ups; like Emma, I wouldn’t listen. It was only Jane Austen herself, the second or third time that I read her masterpiece, who could get my attention. By then, I had gotten in more scrapes and created more havoc than Emma ever dreamed of, but I was not beyond repair. Whatever else might have been better in my life, my marriage to Kathleen cannot have been improved; almost always a source of happiness, it has, as it approaches its thirtieth anniversary, become something more than that, something that I can’t quite (or daren’t quite) name. I can’t think of anyone who deserves more credit for my side of the business than Jane Austen.

The morning is sunny and calm. Raindrops caught in the porch screens tell of a shower in the night, but the sky is clearer at the moment than it was yesterday. (We have had some very bright days since Irene. On Monday, it was as though the sun had just been invented and was being shown off to an admiring public.) Evidence of the storm is not striking, not at first. At first, you’re surprised and relieved that the houses, and the trees around them, look pretty much as they did before. For the most part, they look exactly the same. But when your eye drops to the ground, and you notice that you’re walking in sand, sand which has drifted everywhere, quite as if it were a new kind of snow, you notice the splintered bulkheads and fallen fences. You see that the slabs of pavement at the beach end of Sextant Walk have been heaved from the ground. And when you get to the beach, well, the beach is not the same. High tide reaches much further than it did before. That’s because the storm surge swept away the crest of sand that builds up at the shore in normal conditions. It swept the sand inland, onto the pavement and into drifts that are every bit as annoying as their wintry counterparts.

So now I have proof that the peace and quiet are deceptive. Of course I knew that peace and quiet don’t last forever, but now that I can see it, I’m strangely reassured. I don’t feel any better about getting old and infirm — where was the wave that could knock me down when I was twelve! — and I don’t feel any less anxious about the political and environmental future that threatens my grandson’s future. But I don’t feel like somebody who’s having a bad time at the beach. I’m having the right kind of time.

***

I chose the photograph above from the ones that I took this morning not because it was the nicest to look at but, on the contrary, because it accorded with the mood that reading Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme put me in. When the book was published in Britain in 1994, Dyer was all but unknown in the United States (although, as he points out, he was living in New Orleans during the Gulf War), and his meditation on the Great War and its R(r)emembrance would have been a hard sell. Now that Dyer is as fashionable as good writers ever get, it’s another story. Here’s a nugget from the closing pages:

There had been military disasters before the Battle of the Somme, but these — the Charge of the Light Brigade, for example — seerved only as indictments of individual strategy, not of the larger purpose of which they were a part. For the first time in history the Great War resulted in a sense of the utter waste and futility of war. If the twentieth century has drifted slowly toward an acute sense of waste as a moral and political issue, then the origins of the ecology of compassion (represented by the peace movement, most obviously) are to be found in the once-devastated landscape of the Somme.

Earlier, Dyer writes about searching, when reading about the War, “for what is not there, for what is missing.” Missing from The Missing of the Somme is an assessment of the purposeless of the Great War. This is taken for granted rather than explained. I found myself thinking about it on every page. How did something as hugely pointless — and as huge — as the Great War ever get going? As Dyer shows, commemoration of the “fallen” began almost at once, while men in all the belligerent countries were still enlisting with enthusiasm. We can explain the “origins” of the Great War in the usual geopolitical terms — the indisuputable first cause is the vacuum created by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire’s dominion of the Balkans — but doing so overlooks what was new about this War: the popular enthusiasm. Far from the “scum of the earth” conscripts that had made up so many armies in the past, it was enfranchised citizens, aflame with nationalist pride, who went to war in 1914. You couldn’t stop them from signing up, donning uniforms and heading for the front lines! Their enthusiasm ought to have given the monarchs pause; if it was jollier than the bloody-minded zeal of the French armies of the 1790s, it was not a whit less populist.

As Chou En-lai said of the French Revolution, it’s still too early to tell what the Great War was all about, but it seems clear that the political objectives that pushed the European powers to war were among the first casualties; that is why the War stopped making sense by the time the trenches were being dug. Had it not been for popular enthusiasm, kings and prime ministers could have called for retreat, but the genie was out of the bottle. The citizens who had gone off to war to crush the enemy for the sake of national honor became what the War was about. N

Typical. You pray for normal, so that you can back to all the things that you want to do, but when normal comes, you just goof off. “Want to do” is  a spongy phrase. There are things that I want to do, but not right now.

So, instead of goofing off, I went to the movies this morning. Our Idiot Brother is a quirky, sometimes goofy movie with a warm caramel center, so I’m not recommending it to anyone, but I liked it a lot. A lot more than anyone else in the theatre, if laughter means anything. The cast was terrrific. Elizabeth Banks, Emily Mortimer, and Zooey Deschanel play three sisters who think they’re so smart when in fact their almost as idiotic as their brother, Ned — who is not so idiotic, really, although he is excessively trusting. You’re led to expect a comic variation on King Lear, in which the girls have to take turns looking after their brother, but instead he straightens out their confused lives. Elizabeth Banks, whom I’ve adored ever since Seabiscuit, is Rachel McAdams on a less blazing scale, and she suits the cut of Bob Rafelson’s film-making down to the ground. And that’s just the core. I’ll be here all day if I start running through the excellent supporting roles, but Rashida Jones simply must be mentioned for her ultra-convincing portrayal of a butch corporate lawyer.

It seems that I’ll be going out to Fire Island tomorrow; Kathleen heard from the owner of the house that all is well out there. One or two screens needed to be replaced, and that was all. So it looks as though Kathleen will have the long weekend on the beach that she’s been looking forward to all summer after all. She had certainly given up on it a few days ago, when Irene was threatening widespread devastation. Actually, Irene delivered on the widespread davastation, jsut not in the places that concerned us. 

After I’d finished putting everything back out where it belonged on the balcony — for good measure, I washed the mud-spattered bedroom windows — I sat for a while beneath what I realized was the last of Irene, a counter-clockwise roil of lowering clouds from which rain did not fall. Then I got dressed and persuaded Kathleen to take a short walk up and down our block, just to see what was what. And what we saw was that most of the restaurants were open. Gristede’s was open. It was comforting to note that the new storefront medical center across the street was also open. We decided to go to a restaurant that we haven’t been to in a while, but it was too early in the day for that, so we went back upstairs, amused at the gusting raindrops that had come out of nowhere, as if to remind us that we’d just dodged a hurricane.

Later, just before bed, I brought my nightcap out to the bench and sat down again. Splotchy grey had given way to velvety midnight blue. Beneath the transcendently clear sky, thousands of lights gleamed from thousands of apartment windows, here and in Queens. The red light atop the New York State Pavilion was blinking nicely (it lies beneath the approach to LaGuardia). All was in order, or appeared to be, and I felt enormous gratitude.

(I’m not one of those people who has to know to whom or what gratitude is owing in order to feel grateful. A small portion of my gratitude is, however, earmarked for Mayor Bloomberg, who’s a firm but well-intentioned grown-up if there ever was one.)

Walking on the beach at Fire Island, two weeks ago, I thought about being tumbled by the surf and the inherent dangerousness of what we call Nature. I lost the taste for natural wonders very early, if, indeed, I ever had it; the only bit of scenery that has ever impressed me deeply is the view from the hotel at Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rockies, because there, for once, Nature got it right, and arranged the mountains and the glacier and the lake and even the sky just as a gifted landscaper would, given the power to do so. For the most part, Nature’s effects — canyons, waterfalls, Matterhorns — strike me as the products of a very troubled adolescent, a kid who needs help. This is a minority view nowadays, but, prior to the Nineteenth Century, it was an almost universally shared understanding. Nobody, except perhaps for philosophers, ever used to walk on the beach, not back then.

By the time Irene reached Manhattan, it was just another summer storm, as incapable as they all are of dinging our town. And, just like every other summer storm, it wreaked havoc in the suburbs. Being a very big summer storm in terms of expanse, it wreaked havoc in all the suburbs, and cleaning up after Irene is going to take a long time and cost millions if not billions. How long will it take for people to grasp that the suburban way of life is not sustainable?

Ultimately, Nature prevails. If nothing else, tectonic plates will eventually drag New York City into the ocean, or push it underneath New Jersey. But there is something meaningless about that destiny, because it will take so long to happen that no one human being, nor even a human civilization, will see it happen. People will come and go too quickly to notice. On the storm-tossed time scale that does register with me, I’m not cocky about Irene’s failure to make Manhattan life miserable. I’m just grateful that it didn’t, grateful that it did no harm to my family. For a few moments last night, looking out at the world I love, I was touched by serenity. I won’t forget it.

When I told Kathleen that I was going to right the table, she sighed, “Well, if you’re sure that we’re not going to have any more high winds…” I groaned. “Whatever winds we’re going to have, my dear, they’re not going to be hurricane winds.” Irene had long since been downgraded to tropical storm status. What was puzzling was its complete dissipation. As the eye crossed over Brooklyn, our local weather became understandably calm. But that never really changed afterward. What happened to the rest of that huge mass of wind and rain?

The balcony floor is drying up rapidly. As soon as I get the hutch back up on the dresser, all the extra glass- and china-ware that I store in it (all of it having been run through the dishwasher yesterday) can take leave of the dining table, which will be convenient. I’ve already started taking the potted plants back out to the étagères, which I weighted down with bricks. Soon, everything will be back and in place, and I will have only one little problem: water, water everywhere.

There are the bottles of Deer Park and Poland Spring meant for drinking, and the gallons of some cheaper stuff that I kept in my bathroom. There are various household vessels, ranging from a humongous lobster pot to a wine carafe, filled nearly to the brim with water. There’s even a stovetop teakettle ready to go. Because we’re by no means through the hurricane season yet, I’m going to find a place for the store-bought water. As to the rest — my hope is to conserve it for watering plants. Given the reduced number of plants (I threw away anything the least bit scraggly), we’ll see how long that lasts.

Power was cut to Fire Island at 6 PM yesterday. That means that I’m in for a treat when I get out to the (presumably undamaged) house in the next few days. The prospect of cleaning out the refrigerator tempers, if only slightly, my rejoicing at seeing the last of Irene.

I took great comfort throughout the ordeal from Andrew Thompson’s history of the reign of George II. I wouldn’t want to have to live in the 1740s, but I never tire of dreaming about them.

Back in town, waiting for the hurricane to show us what it can do, I’m haunted by the image of the crepuscular party boat that I captured the other night at dinner, out on Fire Island.  Was it a party boat? It seemed to be a ferry boat that had been fitted out with an upper-deck awning and a few colored lights. It drifted by in no particular hurry and seemed to be heading nowhere, although it could easily have pulled up to a dock at Ocean Beach, behind me. It passed in silence, either too far away or too subdued to pour forth noise. Perhaps it was on its way to pick up more partiers! Perhaps I have an over-active imagination.

When my imagination steps in for information that I don’t have, the result is usually uncomfortable. I’m very familiar with the twists and kinks of my imagination, but that doesn’t weaken its grip.It doesn’t stop, for example, the flood of pseudo-foreshadowing irony. Below almost any peaceful, everyday scene, it can paste the caption, “This is what it looked like before the unforeseen disaster struck. Stay tuned.” Little does this old fellow over here in the corner, reading the Times as he sips his morning tea, know that he is about to be gobbled up by Godzilla — or, in this case, Irene. Strike that. The old fellow knows that he is being stalked by Irene. But what does that mean? Cue my imagination.

I’m hoping that, by now, Megan, Ryan, Will and Astor are tootling along in their Zip Car to Pennsylvania, where they’re going to weather out the storm with Ryan’s family. Aside from normal worries about highway driving, I’m glad that they’re not stuck in their flat in flood-zoned Alphabet City. (Nor will they be marooned uptown with us, where there are no extra beds of any kind, in case the power goes out — up eighteen flights of stairs and with no running water.) Once I hear that they’ve arrived in Easton, I’ll stop worrying about them. Meanwhile, there is plenty to do here, including the evacuation of the balcony. I’m saving that exercise for the later part of the afternoon. This morning, I’m going to do a few things in the kitchen that will probably be helpful later, and then I’m going to straighten up the bedroom and the blue room, which have gone untended for nearly a month.

Are we prepared? Prepared for what? Who knows. The MTA shutdown means that everyday commerce is going to be severely constrained until the storm has passed through and the grosser damage has been sorted out. Maybe, here in Yorkville, the hurricane will amount to nothing worse than high winds and pouring rain, but most parts of the metropolitan area are going to be far more sorely tested — I think. (Maybe the winds will blow our apartment building down. That would confirm the opinion that long-time tenants hold of its construction.) When will life “get back to normal”? I put it in quotes because we seem to be living in a time when normality is elusive. (When the chairman of the Federal Reserve calls the nation’s policy-making system “broken,” things are not normal.) And, beyond the storm and its aftermath, what will remain of Kathleen’s dearly longed-for Labor Day break on Fire Island? What will remain of Fire Island?

Maybe what draws me to the photograph is that it’s a bit out of focus.

 

23 August

One of the things that I have to do today is find one of those three-prong plug adapters for the beach house, so that I can keep the laptop powered while I’m sitting at the dining table. I may have one here in the apartment, but I’m not going to look very hard; it’s easier to go the hardware store and pick one up. Already taken care of: meds refills; clogged bathtub drain.

After lunch with Ray Soleil yesterday, I asked if he’d mind crossing the street to go to Williams-Sonoma. “I’ve got a craving to go to a store selling things that I might actually want to buy.” Really glam items: hot pads and an apron in the latest W-S stripe. Vac-U-Vin’s pineapple gizmo, for extracting a spiral of the best fruit without attacking the skin. (Good heavens, it has its own Wikipedia entry!) Stuff like that. Then we progressed to Crawford-Doyle. There were two books in the window that I had to have. That’s a figurative “two,” because, while Andrew Thompson’s George II consists of a single volume, the Dumbarton Oaks edition of the Douay-Rheims bible consists of three, with more to come.

A book about George II! As Andrew Thompson points out at the beginning, “He figures not at all in Sellars and Yeatman’s immortal guide to British history, 1066 and All That.” A no-kind of king! Even worse: “Unfortunately, there is no evidence to support the story often associated with George that he began the tradition of standing for the Hallelujah Chorus during performances of the Messiah.” Hell, there’s no evidence that he ever even heard the Hallelujah Chorus! Very exciting stuff. Principle understatement so far: “The circumstances of Ernst August’s marriage were unusual, even by seventeenth-century standards.” I had to restrain myself from calling up Ray with the story.

24 August

In the end, I’m left with the impression that if only Maria Callas had had a little more Tyne Daly in her makeup, her life would not have been quite so sad. This is not to fault Ms Daly’s triumphant performance. Master Class is a parlando opera about the sunset recollections of a highly gifted, highly temperamental diva. The life of Maria Callas provides Terrence McNally with such rich dramatic material that the point of the show is very much not to bring Callas to life, as it were. We can leave that to the female impersonators. 

Everyone in the cast was great, even the genuine tenor, Garrett Sorenson, but I found myself looking to see what Jeremy Cohen, playing Manny, the suppressed/repressed piano accompanist, was up to. There’s a moment when Callas puts her hand on Manny’s shoulder, during the tremolo run-up to Lady Macbeth’s first-act aria, and I thought that I was going to faint, because surely that’s what Manny was going to do, now that he had been touched by La Divina — and Mr Cohen did not disappoint. Manny did faint, you could see the shock flash across his face. But it was a very quick fit, and Manny’s hands were never tripped up on the keyboard.

I went to see Tyne Daly, but I came away hugely warmed by the playwright’s belief, which I share, in the absolute primacy, in opera, of following the score. “It’s all in the score,” Callas tells her audience. All the singer has to do is listen to the music. There is no need for directorial accretions. How much I’d like to see a Macbeth stripped of everything but what Verdi explicitly calls for.

***

Although I heartily recommend Jeff Madrick’s The Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present, I wish that it were a stronger book. Madrick and his editors appear to have felt obliged, unfortunately, to provide the general reader with a chronological narrative that is not as comprehensive as it ought to be — there are many rushed, and more than a few nearly incoherent, passages — but that is also fairly unnecessary. Instead of attempting to write a capsule history of the financialization of American business, Madrick ought to have concentrated his eloquence upon the object lessons that lie at heart of each chapter. In that way, his thesis would glow compellingly in a moral constellation instead of blinking unsteadily through a thicket of disttracting facts. That thesis is most clearly stated in a couple of sentences near the end:

The collapse was the product of decisions by individuals, set upon making fortunes and becoming kings of the mountain, not an inevitable failure of the system.

It was a handful of individual men making bad, self-serving decisions that placed the entire credit system at risk.

There was nothing wrong with “the system”; nor was the damage of this or that bubble unforeseeable. A few inordinately powerful men (Sandy Weill, Jeffrey Skilling, two name but two) screwed things up for everybody. They did so because they could, and they had the power because Washington and the press had both been drugged by the purest streams of snake oil. That anyone could listen to Alan Greenspan and continue to respect the quality of his thought is what still astonishes me. I doubt that Madrick could have the answer for that one. But if he had focused more rigorously on the abuse of permissions that would-be “kings of the mountain” wrought upon the nation’s economy, we might have a better idea of how to put an end to the cycle of euphoric greed and exorbitant bailouts that has plagued the United States since the waning of the Cold War.  

***

How about that earthquake! Never felt it. But when I took a taxi down to Kathleen’s office in midtown, the taxi driver said that she hadn’t felt it either. But she suggested that it had spooked the truck drivers. Since we were speeding down Park Avenue at the time, I couldn’t look around me for corroboration — trucks are by and large banned from Park — but I did notice that we were driving very fast. Considering that it was 5:30 on a weekday afternoon, Park Avenue was a speedway.

No, it’s Irene that’s on my mind. Current forecasts call for the hurricane to reach these parts, if it does bounce off of the Carolinas or even shift course entirely and aim for a more northeasterly landfall, no earlier than Sunday, which is when the weekenders (everybody but me) would be leaving anyway. But if the storm picks up speed as well as heft, it might be imprudent to bring a toddler into an evacuation zone. We shall see. I still intend to return to the beach house tomorrow. (I would have gone today, but I’m waiting for the replacement credit card, v infra.)

***

Later: Some day, get me to tell you the story of the replacement credit card, and how it arrived yesterday. Then again, don’t. The important thing is that I’ve got it. I’m whole again.

At Bayshore, this morning, my back pocket was picked, and a credit card was stolen from my wallet. I had no idea that I was missing the wallet until the boy who collected fares for the bus between the ferry and the train came up to me at the station and handed it to me. I’ve never lost a wallet from my back pocket in my life, and I was flabbergasted at the idea that it could have happened. On cursory inspection, it seemed intact, and I didn’t miss the credit card until I got into town. A quick call to the credit card company informed me that the card had been used at an ATM in Jamaica, Queens — a town that I had passed through on the train from Bayshore to Penn Station. I have my ideas about how it was done, but for the moment I’m shuddering in a strange relieved shock. I’m not wondering where I lost my wallet, and I’m not wondering where I left the missing credit card. I know almost everything about what happened, and, on Wednesday, when the replacement card arrives, I’ll be whole. But still shocked, I expect.

I’ve just returned from the beach, where I was tumbled by a wave in water too shallow for me to regain my footing. I scooted as best I could toward the sand, but Megan and a nice young father had to help me to my feet. Kathleen was terrified that I’d broken my neck, and Will, in his father’s arms, was just plain terrified.  What a dope I was! I was never in serious danger, not for a second, but I certainly appeared to be in distress, and now I’m exhausted. I ought to have been a better judge of the surf.

From The Power Broker, I’ve moved back to Jeff Madrick’s The Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present. It’s not quite as depressing as Robert Caro’s book, possibly because so much of the material is in the air, as it were — the public conversation about the “financialization” of American business would be hard to ignore, if I wanted to. But both books have set me to thinking even more arduously than I usually do about the problem of regulation — why it so often fails. It’s clear that a big part of the problem is the word itself, “regulation.” Like so many words in common parlance, it has taken on an insidious mechanical connotation. For example: “He couldn’t take the pressure anymore; no wonder he blew up!” We may no longer be conscious that this figure of speech derives from the behavior of faulty steam boilers two hundred years ago and more, but we persist in thinking of many human processes as if they were mechanical — dependably mindless. Another example: A Machine That Would Go of Itself, the title of Michael Kammen’s insightful 1986 book about the American Constitution. No constitution could be a machine (much less one that “would go of itself”), because the men and women whose actions realize its force in the real world would not be machines.

Machines invariably do the same thing with whatever power they’re given. Men and women invariably don’t. When we speak of “regulation,” we’re dreaming of “systems” that could be “put in place” to “maintain” public “order.” In Europe, where the Frankish passion for uniformity has been imprinted on the bureaucracy of the European Union, the size of almost everything has been prescribed down to the last millimeter by fiat. Americans like to think that we’re more flexible, but by giving our regulators greater discretion we also give them more power, and it is power, above all things, that needs to be regulated. Who regulates the regulators?

Across the table, our laptops back to back, Kathleen is working on a document. She worked all through yesterday afternoon as well. In a well-regulated working world, big deals would not simmer during August. Just the sun.   

Kathleen thought that she was going to miss the 8:10 ferry. The 6:27 out of Penn Station was detained at Jamaica because of  “signal problems,” which in the LIRR’s low Stalinist manner were persistently announced but never explained. I was all the more glad, then, that I’d decided not to wait dinner for her arrival. In fact, we were just finishing up when she called to say that she might have to take the 9:00.

Well, some of us were finishing up. Others hadn’t eaten — “others” being the parents of a little boy who has been having a lot of excellent fun out here on Fire Island, swimming, running, climbing onto chairs; checking out the screen doors to see if, maybe, for once, they’ll open to his touch; and religiously following his new diet of milk and french fries. More fun, alas, than his developing constitution can handle, given — I forgot to mention this — his disinclination, what with all the fun on offer, to take naps. The meltdown began while I was setting the table, and it had not entirely subsided when Kathleen called again, to say that she had indeed made the 8:10 — as happens on weekends, the boat had been held for the train — and I scooted off with the wagon to meet her.

It was very still, and slightly humid, not our best weather, when I walked to Ocean Beach.  Distant flashes of sheet lightning lit up the sky in the west, but the air barely moved. When I reached the dock, I spotted the tiny constellation of gliding lights that I knew to be the Fire Island Belle (or its sister, the Queen) and thought how good it was going to be to see Kathleen. Maybe she would want to have a quick bite in the town. I would give The bars were overflowing with young people, but Rachel’s was almost empty, and that’s where we went, straight from the ferry; Kathleen did indeed want a quick bite in town. The moment we took our seats, the hanging baskets of plants in the window begin to sway in a gusting wind that put me in mind, not entirely unhappily, of Twister. We were sure that we’d be soaked in the impending storm. But the storm impended elsewhere. The breeze kept up, but the rain never came. When Kathleen had finished her crab cakes, and the orders of buffalo wings that I’d ordered in lieu of dinner for me were packed up (we’ll find out tonight how well they kept), we headed home in the dark, we were surprised by the nightscape of the band of National Seashore that separates Robbins Rest from Ocean Beach: it looked like snow. The sand almost glowed white, and the tops of the reeds and the scrub seemed vaguely phosphorescent. We trudged along thinking that we were ridiculously underdressed; we ought to be wearing boots and parkas!

As we neared the house, we listened for Will but did not hear him. Coming up the ramp, we heard the amiable chatter of a group of adults, but no child, sobbing or otherwise. Will had finally gone to sleep, and his parents, grandparents, and great-uncle were gabbing in the living room. We were happy to join them. I would occasionally tell Kevin to keep his voice down, and Kathleen would tell me to keep my voice down. We didn’t stay up long. We had all shared Will’s busy day of doing nothing at the beach.

 

About two minutes before Megan’s father-in-law pulled up in front of the house, shortly ahead of the rest of the party, I closed The Power Broker. Everyone who had seen me plowing through the 1162-page text had been kidding me, “What are you going to do when you finish it?”, and now I felt the edge of the situation. What, indeed? Never mind what I’ll read next. What will I think, and how will I feed the thoughts aroused by Robert Caro’s ultimately baroque portrait of a man who was far more singular and even more powerful than I ever imagined. One of the pebbles in my ruminative shoe is the fact that Robert Moses was 39 years old when he attained his first salary-paying job; no wonder he held on to power in his eighties! Something else: Moses was still very much alive in 1975, when The Power Broker appeared. (He would live until 1981.) Having, by then, lost just about every shred of that power, he was now insulted (I use the word in its medical sense) by an impassioned compendium of his crimes against humanity, compiled with Dickensian outrage. I am not going to say that I feel sorry for the man. But his bewilderment — there must have been much of that, because, like anyone who becomes addicted to and intoxicated by arrogance, he seems always to have been convinced that he was doing the right thing — is sad and embarrassing. So is the humiliation. It was bad enough that influential people had stopped consulting him; now they were judging him.

But, as I say, I was not left with these thoughts for long. Mike was no sooner sipping a Corona and chatting with Kevin than Fran arrived with Megan and Will. I set out to buy a few boxes of wine, an errand that I’d deliberately postponed until after the O’Neills’ arrival in case there was something else that was needed from the town (there wasn’t). When I got back, I started cooking dinner. And so on and so forth. A storm approached as we sat at the table, and later, when the dishes were all washed and the men were enjoying a nightcap on the front portch, it put on quite a good show, with several flavors of lightning, plenty of thunder, and buckets of racketing rain. The new day has dawned mild and fair. And I can’t give Robert Moses much thought until I take care of the propane problem. It seems that we’ve run out.

“Dickensian” — not a word that I use often. I don’t like Dickens. He overdoes the scenery and underdoes the psychology. I have never found his fiction to be truly adult. But guess what — I’m reading Dickens next. I’m re-reading the first real novel that I ever read, A Tale of Two Cities. It came loaded on my new smartphone, and I thought, “Why not?” I plan to put all of Jane Austen and most of Henry James on the phone, so that I never have to carry just-in-case reading material again, but, just as Fire Island was the right place for reading about Robert Moses (he wanted to pave it with a highway), so a beach house in August is the right place for revisiting a novel that filled me with an abiding dread of civil war in general and of jacquerie in particular.

Everyone’s up, and we’re glad to have a toaster oven, a coffee-maker, and (for the time being, anyway) hot water. At eight we phone the landlord.  

Sunday may have been poundingly wet, Monday morning miserable and Tuesday morning grim, but Monday afternoon was sunny and fair, and Tuesday afternoon was nothing less than glorious. At about four, I walked toward the sun for twenty-five minutes, then I turned around, and it took half an hour to get back where I came from. The waves were breaking a little farther out than on Monday, and when one of them rumbled my footing a bit, I decided that I had better get out while I could. (I used to love being tossed in the surf, but now it’s quite terrifying.) Kevin and I went into town for an early dinner, and this was our view (above).

After dinner, I received a note from Ray Soleil describing some work that he had done for us at the apartment. He got through the worst of a big, messy project (repainting the balcony door, which had been so neglected over the years that paint was falling off in big chips that Will happened to find interesting), and I wrote back to congratulate him. Shortly thereafter, a tumbler fell. I remembered Kathleen’s telling me that she had left her cell phone at home (she was at the office at the time). So I couldn’t alert her, in the conventional way, to the possibility that Ray might have locked the apartment door a bit differently. (He hadn’t, of course, but I couldn’t confirm this.) My first thought was to have someone at the restaurant where I knew she was having dinner slip her a note, but this sounded fussy. After many other less satisfactory thoughts, however, that’s exactly what I did, only the headwaiter interrupted my tale and summoned Kathleen to the telephone. She was frightened, of course, to hear that her husband was calling — had something happened to her brother? — but when she found out the reason for my call, she was grateful as well as relieved. 

In the old days, of course, I’d have called the doormen at our apartment building, and one of them would have tipped her off when she came in; but, under new management, you can’t do that anymore. The headwaiter must have thought that we live in a tree.