Chapter Four #2
Eight years ago, Anna had sat in the ornate dining room of the Demarests’ house in Newport, keenly feeling the loss of the lakeside cottage that Clarissa had tolerated (barely) for one summer before insisting Father sell it.
They had just been served their soup when Jerome mentioned that he was considering building a house in Ambrose Lawrence’s new summer colony in Maine.
Lillian looked frantic. “Why would you go up to that wilderness?” she sputtered. “What is wrong with Newport?”
“What’s wrong with Newport?” Jerome scoffed. “Have you not noticed the crowds? Nouveau strivers coming in the windows. You can’t even get a tennis court!”
Oblivious as always to the effect he had on his mother, Jerome looked up thoughtfully, spoon suspended between bowl and lips. “I think Ambrose is going about it the right way. No hotel means no riffraff. From the start, it will be populated with the right sort.”
Earlier that summer, George Graham, a friend of Jerome and Ambrose’s from Harvard, had invited a group of college friends and their wives to Maine.
It was meant to be a swan song of sorts.
For more than a century, the Graham family had owned Haven Point, a peninsula on Maine’s Casco Bay.
After countless offers from speculators interested in purchasing the land for a hotel, they had finally decided to sell.
As it happened, Ambrose, also tired of the crowds in Newport, had been touring other spots in New England in search of an alternative, but nothing had appealed to him.
“Too much new money,” he said. According to his diagnosis, the problem was that the genesis of most summer colonies was a hotel.
(“And anyone can go to a hotel!”) The cottage lots and communities were an afterthought.
Ambrose had hit upon the idea of building a community from scratch and had just begun searching for land when they all descended on Haven Point.
He took one look and made the Grahams an offer on the spot.
George and his family would keep their house and a large piece of land around it.
Ambrose hired a surveyor to carve up the other plots, as well as a lawyer to handle the legal niceties, and became Haven Point’s unofficial mayor and pitchman.
Jerome, ignoring his mother’s almost histrionic reaction, had been one of the first to purchase a lot. He hired an architect and builder, and two summers later, Anna paid her first visit.
“I think you will like it, Anna,” Elizabeth had said. “It might even remind you of the lake.”
Anna was skeptical. Ambrose Lawrence was awfully starchy, and his rationale for the project suggested Haven Point would be another Newport, only smaller and gossipier. Her first impression when she arrived at the steamship landing was not favorable.
She had looked up at the enormous houses glaring down at her, listened to the screech of seagulls and almost violent sound of the waves hurling themselves against the granite cliff, and wondered how Elizabeth ever thought this place was anything like the lake.
There, nature had whispered and crept. Here, it roared and rampaged.
On a map, Haven Point looked as if it had tried to tear itself from the north shore of Casco Bay but was held fast by a spit of land on the northern part of the peninsula. From this tenuous connection, it gradually sloped upward until it reached the high cliffs on the southern edge.
Fourwinds, Elizabeth and Jerome’s house, stood on an irregular outcropping on the southwestern part of the peninsula, affording views east into the Atlantic, and south and west into the island-studded bay.
Though it was hard to get past Fourwinds’s sheer scale, Anna did soften a bit upon seeing the shingle-sheathed house with its quirky rooflines and windows, a sign that Elizabeth and Jerome had at least departed from the extravagant architecture of Newport houses.
Inside, the first floor was dominated by one large room that stretched almost the entire length of the house, with a wall of windows facing the ocean.
Large stone fireplaces and comfortable seating anchored the ends, and a long dining table was in the middle.
Anna was also touched that Elizabeth had used much of the furniture from their lake house. Her favorite old hickory rocker was on the south porch, and she spotted other pieces throughout—drop-leaf tables, several of Mother’s paintings, and a brass bed frame.
Houses that blended into the landscape were very much in fashion, though, so it did not necessarily say anything about the broader community. It was that evening when Anna truly began to feel that they had gotten lucky.
As it was a weeknight, Jerome and the other Boston husbands were away.
George Graham, however, was an attorney in Portland, and he and Nora had invited them for dinner.
On the way, Elizabeth pointed out cottages that had been built on the interior of the peninsula, and explained that George had persuaded Ambrose to carve out these smaller lots, promising that he knew plenty of wonderful families who would snatch them up.
This proved true. A dozen houses had already been built, and more lots had been sold.
“George Graham sounds like a good counterbalance to Ambrose,” Anna had commented.
“Indeed,” Elizabeth chuckled. “Ambrose wants to change the name from Haven Point. George agreed, but he wanted to have a say in the matter. Ambrose keeps proposing outlandishly pretentious names, and George counters with the most commonplace thing he can think of.”
Nora Graham greeted them at her door, and Anna liked her on sight. Everything about Nora, from appearance to personality, seemed wonderfully proportional. She was a little taller than Anna, sturdy but not stout, with thick brown hair and fine, even features.
There was nothing miserly or withholding in Nora’s interactions—she smiled when amused and unostentatiously attended to her guests’ needs.
In conversation, she directed her hazel eyes at whoever was speaking, responding with sympathy where appropriate.
She seemed sensible, steady, and immune to excess.
George Graham was the more expressive of the pair. He often poked fun at himself and good-naturedly teased his wife, whose eyes twinkled, even when she rolled them at his raillery.
The rest of the company, mostly George and Nora’s friends from Maine and New Hampshire, were intelligent and genial.
The women’s skirts and shirtwaists were well-made, but had minimal trimmings, and their hair was simply arranged.
When Anna asked what she should wear, Elizabeth had said the women agreed they deserved a break during the summer.
“Everyone loosens their corsets here.”
Like Elizabeth, Serena Lawrence was spending the summer on Haven Point, while Ambrose went back and forth. Serena, as always, was dressed to the nines, but she seemed comfortable with the other women, and they with her.
After dinner, the women moved to the living room, and the conversation naturally turned to children. Serena was a new and nervous mother, and Anna immediately saw how much she depended on the wisdom of Nora Graham, who had two children already.
“When Amory sleeps, he sometimes pulls his lower lip in,” Serena said, her brow wrinkled in worry. “I read babies do that when they are suffering from abdominal pain.”
“That might be. If it’s serious, though, I suspect he would also let you know when he’s awake.”
Anna thought it was kind of Nora to give the appearance of earnestly considering the theory (which she likely believed had no merit at all), and Serena seemed relieved by the indulgent response.
Later, at the request of one of their guests, George got his fiddle and played, while Nora sang “Annie Laurie” and “Comin’ thro’ the Rye.
” Anna was struck by Nora’s sweet, clear contralto, and by her and George’s modesty when everyone praised their performance.
They seemed to see their talents as something to be shared and enjoyed, but which they had not earned.
It was so unlike Jerome and his friends, who were determined to view their accomplishments as the result of ferocious effort.
Anna soon learned that this had been a typical evening event.
They had simple dinners, played cards or games, and sang songs.
Days were filled with lawn tennis, sailing, or gathering with their children on the beach.
She began to feel that Haven Point was a place where they might be able to heed their mother’s exhortation to keep the old traditions alive, and she was grateful that Jerome and Ambrose had broken with Newport and committed to this quieter, wilder landscape.
The financial panic had put a pause on development, though, and Ambrose had grown anxious about selling the remaining lots. His concern was not the financial investment—he had more money than he could spend in two lifetimes—but, rather, the massive investment of his ego.
Rhinelander could not have hit his mark better than by mentioning Leighton Penrose and Bud Williams. The two men, brothers-in-law, had to pull out while their houses were still under construction.
The unfinished homes were on the east side of the point, visible to all who sailed by on their way to the more established summer communities to the north.
Ambrose had been in a frenzy, courting wealthy friends and acquaintances, among them Rhinelander and Vesta, who were supposedly interested in building a house—in addition to their Newport cottage, of course.
After lunch, Vesta talked over the idea with Elizabeth, Serena, and Anna.
“I suppose it might be fun, rusticating. Far from the madding crowd and all that,” Vesta said, with a wave of her hand. “The land is so cheap. We could have a big house party, give our friends a taste of wilderness.”
She turned to Serena. “I wonder that you and Ambrose did not keep your Newport cottage. I would feel so bereft of society if I had to be here all summer.”