Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [52]
“Call her Mrs. Onassis. Call her Mrs. Onassis unless she says otherwise.”
We were supposed to be met at the dock by Vassili, a short, wiry Greek from Levkás. He’d worked for years on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht and was now in John’s mother’s employ. Instead, there was a rounded man in a striped shirt with a most engaging smile.
“Maurice, what are you doing here!” John looked pleased.
“I’m surprising you,” the man said brightly. I liked him immediately. Maurice Tempelsman was a financier, a diamond trader, and Mrs. Onassis’s last love. Rob, John’s friend since college and current roommate, knew him, but for the rest of us, there were introductions all around. He had come by boat, he said, and thought it would be fun if, instead of driving the thirty minutes to Gay Head, we continued on by water, anchoring at Menemsha Pond, a stone’s throw from Red Gate Farm.
After lunch at the Black Dog, we piled into the open Seacraft. As the waves kicked up, Maurice pointed out the landmarks. When he saw me shivering in a jean jacket, he gave me his windbreaker and had me sit in the captain’s seat behind him. I caught sight of John. He was perched up front as far as he could go—his face leaning hard into the wind.
Red Gate Farm was off an unmarked dirt and gravel road. If you continued on the main route as it swung north, you would come to the end of the island—the cliffs, the redbrick lighthouse, a small cluster of shops—and when the road wrapped back inland amid fieldstone fences and stunted sea-bent shrubs, there was a small library, a firehouse, and a town hall. But if you turned before the road curved and entered a weathered wooden gate that in those days was rarely locked, you would have found it. The land, a vast parcel of the old Hornblower estate, was wild with scrub oak, native grape, poison ivy, and deer ticks. It bordered Squibnocket Pond and a spectacular swath of private beach. Mrs. Onassis had bought the property in 1978, and the traditional cedar-shingled house—a series, really, of adjoining saltboxes with clean white trim—had been finished in 1981. There was a garage, a vegetable garden, the caretaker’s lodgings, and tennis courts hidden by hedges. A short distance from the main house, there was a guest cottage, known as the Barn. Next to this, designed with John in mind, was an attached faux silo with a bedroom at the top that we called the Tower.
Wherever you looked you sensed proportion—a symmetry between what she had built and what had always been. It was there in the way the lawn ended and the wild grasses began, in the slant and angles of the saltbox roofs, in the cut trails that wound their way through dense brush to the beach, and in the pensive space between the fruit trees in the orchard. It was there in the wildness she left, there in the stillness. She had built her house in agreement with the land, and the Tower, where we stayed, stood sentry.
The years that I visited, she remained on the island for most of the summer, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, returning for meetings in the city only when she had to. With her were Efigenio Pinheiro, her elegant, earringed Portuguese butler, and Marta Sgubin, who had begun as a governess to John and Caroline and was now cook, confidante, and cherished part of the family.
On moonless nights, the sky there was so black, even with a riot of stars arched above. In August, when the grass was parched and the sea untroubled like green glass, we often went up with friends, staying in the Barn and cranking the stereo. But when we were there alone, it was quiet in the Tower—the wind, crickets, a bird’s call, and the oblivious blanketing beat of the waves. At sunset, there was a ruffle of scarlet in the west before the shadows came.
Being there felt like you were in someone else’s dream—one created for pleasure, not to impress. Everything was pleasing to the eye. Things