“IT’S THE USUAL STORY,” the man at the tiller reflected, regarding the beautiful derelict on the hill. “At the end of old money there is real estate.”
There were three of them in the boat that Saturday in June. They had set out from Rockland, Maine, on a day’s sail into the bay, and tacking into a cove of one of the many granite islands eight or nine miles offshore had come face-to-face with the great white house before them, some sea captain’s pride, sitting squarely on top of a long lawn leading down to a boathouse and dock.
The house needed paint. The lawn needed cutting. The boathouse roofline sagged and the shingles slipped. Empty of boats, the dock in front of them had been patched and patched again.
It was magnificent.
“I’m waiting for it to go up for sale,” the host of the weekend went on. “Low-hanging fruit.”
“Whose is it?” the man sitting beside him asked.
“One of those families who used to run the world.” The host stretched his legs, pressing his bare feet against the boat’s hull. “WASPs.”
“WASPs?” The other chuckled. “Do they even exist anymore except in their own heads?”
The host smiled. He had just made a fortune in health care.
“What happened?” the man beside him asked.
“The usual, I’d suspect. Drinking, apathy, dullards in the gene pool.”
“What’s their name?”
“Don’t know.” He jimmied the boom. “Milton? The Miltons?”
“Milton?” The third man, the man in the bow, who had been staring up at the house all this while, turned around. “As in Milton Higginson, the bankers?”
“Sounds right,” answered the host, pulling the mainsail in so the wind caught, sending them on an angle out of the cove and back into the channel, running with the wind along the coastline of the island. The sailors fell into a companionable silence, punctuated by the host’s “Ready about” and “Hard to lee,” calling them to shift their weight from one side of the Herreshoff to the other, leaving room for the boom to sail unchecked over their heads.
“It’s one of those tragic families,” he said as they reached the end of the island’s granite spine. “They say somebody drowned there.”
“Where?”
“Just there, off those rocks.” He pointed to a mound of white granite boulders humped high above the waterline, backed by a ridge of spruce rising into the sky.
There was nothing to see.
“Ready about,” the man at the tiller said. And they tacked away.
