Beach Wedding(25)

34

“I hate to bother you, Oscar,” I said the next morning to the old man bent at the locked door beside us.

“Oh, no, Mr. Rourke. Please, it’s no bother,” Sandhill Point’s longtime head groundskeeper, Oscar Womack, said, continuing to go through his huge key ring.

As we returned from the Montauk fireworks the night before, the house manager, Robin, greeted us with some nightcaps. When I asked her about the coffee table book, she had explained that Sandhill Point’s original groundskeeper, Oscar’s grandfather, had actually written it.

So I woke up early and tracked down Oscar to get the deluxe Sandhill Point historical tour.

We started out in the garden. After we went through the maze, he showed me where Eisenhower had beaten MacArthur at a game of horseshoes and the hidden gazebo where all the summering debutantes used to neck with their beaux. After that, we went into the kitchen, where he pointed out the antique silver safe, along with the old call bell box that Margreth and Arthur Mackenzie had used to summon the servants.

Now at the end of the tour, we were at the pool house, where Oscar said he was going to show me something I was really going to like.

I expected there to be a guest suite or something. That’s why my jaw immediately dropped as I saw there was a pool inside of the pool house instead. It was some imperial ancient Roman bath-looking thing the size of a basketball court beside several hot tubs and a glassed-in sauna.

Even the men’s changing room we were now standing in was a jaw-dropper, like it could accommodate a state university instead of a private residence.

“Honestly, Oscar,” I said. “If you can’t find it, we can try again tomorrow. You’ve already been so nice.”

“No, please,” he said, smiling. “If you’ll humor me, I’ll find it, Mr. Rourke. I like playing tour guide whenever I get the chance. Would you be surprised to hear most people who come here couldn’t give one whit about this wonderful old place?”

He tried another key.

“No. Most guests just want to take pictures of themselves in front of their fancy cars in the drive. And the amount of times we’ve heard threats of it being sold to contractors to raze it and rebuild! Rebuild? I say. It would be like painting over the Mona Lisa to use the canvas.”

He pointed up at the vaulted blue-and-gold mosaic-tiled ceiling as the lock finally clacked.

“How could anyone improve on this?” Oscar said as he opened the door.

There was a blast of dry heat and the faint sweet smell of water rot and chlorine as Oscar led me down a narrow staircase. At its bottom along the yellowish paint-cracked wall of a corridor he led me down, I suddenly noticed the gallery of pictures.

They were old black-and-white photographs of Gilded Age rich people. Women in wedding dresses. A debonair-looking fellow playing a piano in front of an enormous Christmas tree. My favorite was an elegant silver-haired gent in a topcoat and tails with a silk hat, cigar in his mouth, holding a puppy.

“Those are the old Mackenzie family photos,” Oscar told me as we walked along. “Grandpa really loved them. And they loved Grandpa back, especially old Mrs. Mackenzie. She gave him a precious silver picture frame from Tiffany’s as a gift every time Grandma had a new baby. They really treated him like one of the family. Imagine? Who would do that? They were a real class act, I’ll tell you. When he retired, they threw him a party at the Rainbow Room in New York City. First time in my life I ever tasted real French champagne.”

Oscar led me past a humming, low-ceilinged room filled with gauges and dials and a stainless-steel electronic board.

“All this stuff is new for running the pools,” he said. “They had a team from Germany come in to install everything. It’ll tell you the pH level in the pool and automatically adjust the chlorine. Top-notch stuff.”

After the pump room, we began to walk past several open doors in the right-hand wall.

“What’s in there?” I said, peering into one room with dusty tarps everywhere.

“Those are the last of the old Mackenzie family belongings and furniture. The remaining heirs keep claiming they’re going to have an antique appraiser come to take a look, but it never happens. Just a lot of hot air. No one seems to care about any of it.”

I nodded. I knew from Tom that the estate had been sold five years ago to the hotel company that was now renting it out during the summers as a private resort.

When we reached the last door at the end of the corridor, Oscar opened it and clicked on a light. Inside was a small concrete room ceilinged with dusty overhead pipes. Beneath them were piles of ancient clutter. There were old wood paint-splattered ladders and rolled-up rugs. On top of the deck of an ancient 1980s treadmill against the right-hand wall were a bunch of sea green copper sconces piled into milk crates. The sour antique-store smell of rot and dust was cloying.

“And here she is,” Oscar said.



35

“Here what is?” I said, glancing at the junk.

Oscar suddenly pointed to a card table and folding chair on the left-hand wall.

“I present Sandhill Point’s pièce de résistance,” he said.

“Um. That’s real nice, Oscar, real nice,” I said, looking around the jail cell–like concrete room, trying to figure out the joke. I was having trouble.

“You said you liked Xavier Kelsey, the writer, right? Well, this was where he did it. At least in the summer. This was his writing studio and that there was his desk.”