Jewels (19 page)

“You don’t really want to go out there in this awful weather, dear,” her mother replied. But the truth was, she really didn’t mind. She liked the beach in the rain. There was always something peaceful and soothing about it. But she knew her mother worried about her driving in bad weather, so she stayed home to help her mother in town. Her father had already called the man who owned the farm she had put the deposit on, and had explained to him that his daughter was getting married and moving to England instead. He had been extremely nice, and given Sarah her money back, although her father had still scolded her for doing something so foolish, and he assured her that he would never have let her live alone in a fallen-down farmhouse on Long Island She had taken the money back from him apologetically, and put it in the bank. It was the thousand dollars she had gotten for selling the wedding ring she had gotten from Freddie, a useless item she had never missed.

But she wasn’t thinking of the farm, or even the wedding, that afternoon, as the rain grew worse in New York. She was thinking about Prague and the terrifying situation there, when she suddenly heard a ferocious rattling of her bedroom windows. It was two o’clock by then, and when she looked at the window it was so dark it almost looked like midnight. The trees outside her parents’ apartment were bent low in the wind, and she thought she’d never seen such a fierce storm in New York, and at that exact moment her father came home early.

“Is something wrong?” Victoria asked him worriedly.

“Have you seen that storm?” he asked her. “I could barely make it out of the car and into the building. I had to hold on to the awning poles and two men on the street had to help me.” He turned to his daughter then with a worried frown. “Have you been listening to the news?” He knew how well-informed she was, and that she often listened to the news bulletins in the afternoon, if she was at home with her mother.

“Only about Czechoslovakia.” She told him the latest about that then, and he shook his head.

“This is no ordinary storm,” he said ominously, and went to his bedroom to change. He came back out in rough gear five minutes later.

“What are you doing?” Victoria asked nervously. He had a habit of doing things beyond his skills or his years, as though to prove that he could still do them, even if he never had before. He was a strong, able man, but he was clearly no longer as young as he had been.

“I want to drive out to Southampton and make sure everything’s all right there. I called Charles an hour ago, and the phone didn’t answer.” Sarah looked at her father’s eyes only for an instant, and then spoke firmly.

“I’ll come with you.”

“No, you won’t,” he argued with her, and Victoria began to look really angry at both of them. “You’re both ridiculous. It’s just a storm, and if something is wrong out there, there’s nothing either of you can do about it.” An old man and a young girl were not going to be able to fight the forces of nature. But neither of them shared that opinion with her. As her father put his overcoat on, Sarah emerged from her room in some of the old clothes she had worn during her year of solitude on Long Island. She had on heavy rubber boots, khaki pants, a fisherman’s sweater, and a slicker.

“I’m coming with you,” she announced again, and he hesitated, and then shrugged. He was too worried to argue.

“All right. Let’s go. Victoria, don’t worry, we’ll call you.” She was still furious with both of them when they left. She put the radio on as they went downstairs, got in the car, and set off toward the Sunrise Highway en route to Southampton. Sarah had offered to drive, but her father had laughed at her.

“I may be old and feeble in your eyes, but I’m not crazy.” She laughed and reminded him that she was a very competent driver. But they said little to each other after that. The force of the winds made it almost impossible for him to keep the car on the road and more than once, the wind pushed the heavy Buick a dozen feet sideways.

“Are you all right?” she asked him once or twice, and he only nodded grimly, his lips a tight line across his face, his eyes narrowed to see through the driving rain.

They were still driving along the Sunrise Highway when they both saw a strange, high bank of fog roll across the sea and settle itself against the coastline. And it was only shortly after that they realized that what they were seeing was not fog, but a giant wave. A forty-foot wall of water was pounding relentlessly against the eastern seaboard, and as they watched in horror, houses disappeared in its jaws, and two feet of water eddied and swirled across the highway around their car.

It was another four hours of relentlessly driving through the pounding rain before they reached Southampton. And as they approached the estate they loved so dearly, they both were silent, and then Sarah realized that the landscape had brutally changed. Houses that she had known all her life had disappeared, entire estates, most of Westhampton seemed to have vanished. And some of the houses there had been enormous They only learned later that Edward’s lifelong friend, J. P. Morgan, had lost his entire estate in Glen Cove. But for the moment, all they could see was the endless desolation around them. Trees uprooted everywhere, houses reduced to kindling if they were there at all. In some cases, an entire segment of land, and dozens of houses built on it for hundreds of years, had vanished. There were cars overturned everywhere, and Sarah suddenly realized the extraordinary skill her father had used to get them there. In fact, as they looked around them as they continued driving, Westhampton seemed literally to have disappeared from the face of the Long Island coast. They learned later that a hundred and fifty-three of the hundred and seventy-nine houses there had vanished entirely, and the land they sat on was gone too. And of those that were left, they were too battered to rebuild or live in.

Sarah felt her heart sink as they drove slowly toward Southampton, and when they reached their own house, their gates were gone. They had been picked up out of the ground and uprooted, along with the stone posts that held them, and all of it had been turned to rubble and tossed hundreds of yards away. It looked like a child’s model railroad, but the tragedy was that the damage was real, the losses too great to fathom.

All of their beautiful old trees were down, but the house still stood in the distance. From where they were, it looked as though it had been untouched. But as they drove past the caretaker’s cottage, they saw that it literally stood on end, and all of its contents had been spilled across the ground like so much garbage.

Her father parked the old Buick as close to the main house as he could. Half a dozen huge trees lay across the road, barring him from going any farther. They left the car and walked through the driving rain, battered by the winds, with sharp needles of rain lashing at their faces. Sarah tried to turn her face away from the wind, but it was virtually useless, and as they walked around the house they saw that the entire eastern side, facing the beach, had been torn off and part of the roof with it. You could see some of the contents still within, her parents’ bed, her own, the piano in the parlor. But the entire face of the building had been ripped off by the relentless wall of water that had come and washed it away. It brought tears to her eyes, which mingled with the rain, but when she turned to her father, she could see that he was crying as hard as she was. He loved this place, and he had built it years before, carefully planning everything. Her mother had designed the house when they were small, and together they had chosen each tree, each beam, and everything that was in it. And the huge trees that had been there had been there for hundreds of years before they came, and now they were gone forever It all seemed impossible to believe or understand. This had been her joy through her childhood, arid her refuge for an entire year, and now it was so desperately damaged. And one look at her father’s face told her he feared worse.

“Oh, Papa …” Sarah moaned as she clung to him, the two of them tossed together intermittently by the wind as though they floated on waves. It was a sight that defied the imagination. He pulled her close to him and shouted above the shrieking of the wind that he wanted to go back to the gatehouse;

“I want to find Charles.” He was a kind man, and during the year she had hidden out there, Charles had taken care of her like a father.

But he was nowhere in the little house, and everywhere on the grass around them were his belongings, his clothes, his food, his furniture smashed to bits, even his radio lay yards from the house, but he was nowhere to be found, and Edward was seriously worried about him. They went back to the main house then, and when they did, Sarah realized that the little bathhouse was gone, as was the boathouse, and the trees around them. The trees stood on end, or lay broken on the narrow lip of beaten sand that had been a broad white beach only at noontime that day. And as she looked at the trees in dismay, suddenly she saw him There were ropes in his hands, as though he’d been trying to tie things down, and he was wearing his old yellow slicker. He had been pinned to the ground by a tree that had previously stood on the front lawn, and had flown at least two hundred yards to kill him. The sand might have cushioned his fall, but the tree was so enormous, it must have broken his neck or his back as it felled him. She mourned silently as she ran to him, and knelt beside him, brushing the sand from his bruised face as she touched him. Her father saw her then, and he cried pitifully as he worked to help her free him, and together they carried him to the shelter of the other side of the house and laid him gently down in what had been the kitchen. He had worked for Edward’s family for over forty years, and they had known and liked each other as young men. He was ten years older than Edward, and Edward couldn’t believe he was gone now. He was like a boyhood friend, faithful to the end, killed in the storm no one had warned them of, as all eyes turned to Prague and everyone forgot Long Island. It was the largest storm of its kind ever to hit the eastern seaboard. Entire towns were gone, and it lashed its way with equal force across Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire after that, taking seven hundred lives, injuring close to two thousand, and destroying everything it touched before it was finally gone.

The house in Southampton was not irreparably destroyed, but the death of Charles affected all the Thompsons. Peter and Jane and Victoria came out for the funeral, and for a week the elder Thompsons and Sarah stayed in the house to try to assess the damage and bring some kind of order back to the estate. Only two rooms were even usable, there was no heat, no electricity, and they used candles, and ate in the only restaurant still functioning in Southampton. It would take months to repair the house, years perhaps, and Sarah was sad to be leaving them when this had happened.

Sarah managed to get a call through to William from the little restaurant where they ate, fearing that he might have heard of the storm in the papers and been worried. Even in Europe the destruction of Long Island had caused quite a flutter.

“My God, are you all right?” William’s voice had crackled across the line.

“I’m fine,” she said, relieved to hear his calm, strong voice. “But we’ve pretty much lost our house. It’s going to take my parents forever to rebuild it, but we didn’t lose the land. Most people lost everything.” She told him about Charles losing his life, and he told her he was very sorry.

“I’ll be awfully happy when you’re back here. I almost died when I heard about this blasted storm. I somehow imagined you might have been out there for the weekend.”

“I almost was,” she admitted to him.

“Thank God, you weren’t. Please tell your parents how sorry I am, and I’ll be over as soon as I can, darling. I promise.”

“I love you!” she shouted across the crackling wires.

“I love you too! Try to stay out of trouble till I get there!”

They went back to the city shortly after that, and eight days after the storm, the Munich Pact was signed, giving everyone in Europe the delusion that any threat from Hitler was over. Neville Chamberlain called it “peace with honor” when he returned from Munich But William wrote and told her that he still didn’t trust the little bastard in Berlin.

William was planning to come in early November, and Sarah was busy with plans for the wedding, while her parents tried to organize both that and the extensive repairs to the house on Long Island.

William arrived on November fourth, on the
Aquitania
, with full fanfare. Sarah was waiting for him at the pier, with her parents, her sister, her brother-in-law, and their children. And the next day her parents gave a huge dinner party for him, and it seemed as though everyone she’d ever known in New York wanted to send them invitations to parties. It was a social whirl without end.

Six days later, they were having breakfast together in the dining room, as Sarah frowned and looked up at him from the morning paper

“What does all this mean?” She looked at him accusingly, it seemed, and he looked blank. He had only just arrived from his hotel and hadn’t yet read the paper.

“What does what mean?” He came to read the paper over her shoulder, and frowned as he read the accounts of
Kristallnacht
, while trying to assess the implications. “Sounds like an ugly business, that.”

“But why? Why would they do that?” The Nazis had smashed the windows of every Jewish shop and home, looted, killed, and destroyed synagogues, and generally terrorized people. And it said that some thirty thousand Jews had been taken off to labor camps. “My God, William, how can they do that?”

“The Nazis don’t like Jews. That’s no secret, Sarah.”

“But this? This?” There were tears in her eyes as she read it, and finally handed the paper to him so he could read it too. When Sarah’s father came in to breakfast, they told him everything and spent an hour discussing the continuing dangers in Europe, and then her father thought of something as he looked at them both. “I want you both to promise me, if war breaks out over there, that you’ll come back to the States until it’s over.”