Sudden Sea (3 page)
Napatree felt like a private place they had wandered into. It was exclusively a summer colony, and half the houses were shuttered for the season. The rest would be closing in the next week or so. By October, an off-season melancholy would settle over the place. This morning, though, the water was warm, the combers long and smooth. Clothes snapped on a line behind one house. A solitary beach umbrella stuck up from the sand in front of another. A pair of small boats scooted down the bay. The shouts of the boys in the second boat carried on the wind.
Geoffrey Moore Jr. flew along Little Narragansett Bay, whooping and laughing, oars high in the air. Except for an occasional thump, the rowboat skimmed the surface, barely touching the water. A sailboat zipped along just ahead, pushed by a quickening southeast wind. He leaned out of the rowboat, brandishing an oar, and tried to snag it. The sailboat — which belonged to his sister Anne — had broken loose from its mooring behind the house. Geoffrey saw it go. He had been talking to Andy Pupillo, a Westerly boy who worked for the Moores, and the two raced down to the dock, jumped in the rowboat, and gave chase.
Geoffrey’s hair, tousled and sun-streaked, snapped in his eyes. He pushed it back and made another stab at the sailboat. The wind was carrying them so fast he didn’t have to row, but the sailboat, usually cumbersome and slow, was empty and moving faster, just out of reach. Andy hollered that Geoffrey would capsize them if he wasn’t careful. The boy laughed and lunged again. He was thirteen years old, small for his age but fast and agile, and in that place on that day, he seemed the quintessential golden boy — blue eyes, face lightly freckled, smooth bare chest tanned a deep brown, a strong swimmer and skilled sailor as easy on the water as he was on land, a natural athlete, eldest child and only son.
On that Wednesday his future seemed certain. He would return to the Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, at the end of the week to start the second form. A half-packed steamer trunk sat in the corner of his room at Napatree, filled with the requirements of prep school: one dozen white button-down oxford-cloth shirts, one navy blazer, three pairs of dark flannel trousers, six neckties, etc. From prep school, he would go on to college, then join the family business like his father, his uncles, and his grandfather. George C. Moore Co., manufacturer of elastic webbing for everything from ladies’ underwear to golf balls and gas masks, was located in Westerly, Rhode Island.
Just six miles apart geographically, Westerly and Napatree– Watch Hill were poles apart in every other way. Named because of its location at the state’s western border, Westerly is a small city with a romantic history and a couple of natural assets.
The town’s first settlers — John Babcock and Mary Lawton, his boss’s daughter — are Westerly’s own Romeo and Juliet. Forbidden to marry by Mary’s father, the young lovers eloped from Newport and made the risky ocean sail around Narragansett in an open boat. They arrived on the east bank of the Pawcatuck River in 1643. Their son James was the first white baby born in Westerly, and more than four hundred years later, it is still Babcock country. Westerly has the Babcock House, Babcock School, Babcock Cemetery, and the ballad of John and Mary’s romantic flight, attributed to the most famous of all poets after Shakespeare — Anonymous:
The bark rode on the ocean lone
And precious was the freight,
Two loving souls transfused in one
With bounding hope elate.
Two hundred years have sped apace
And wrought in man’s behoof;
And thousands now their lineage trace
To John and Mary’s roofe.
The first of Westerly’s natural assets is bluish granite, considered by many to have the finest texture in the world. In the nineteenth century when the Smith Granite Company, Westerly’s first and largest quarry, was buzzing, skilled stonecutters from northern Italy were imported to carve Civil War monuments and gravestones. Eighty percent of the memorials for both Yankee and Confederate soldiers are built of Westerly blue granite, and the masons who carved them established the roots of an Italian community that remains strong to this day. Westerly’s other natural asset is the Pawcatuck River, which allowed mills to flourish.
George C. Moore, Geoffrey’s grandfather, arrived in town at the start of the century. He was an Englishman who had deserted his horse artillery regiment and fled to America. Oversize in all things except height, Moore was a man of quick wits (he filed almost as many patents as Thomas Edison) and quick fists. Being packed into steerage with hundreds of other fugitives and optimists did nothing to curb his temper, and before he reached the end of the gangplank, he was brawling with a fellow passenger twice his size. An English gentleman, embarking from a first-class cabin, witnessed the fisticuffs and hired Moore as a bodyguard. The two toured the Wild West together.
When he came back East, Moore worked in various New England towns as a weaver, finally settling in Westerly about 1912. He was in his early thirties by then, a widower with five children and enough capital saved up to invest in a small mill. He also invested in a horse and buggy and set about to win the affections of Elizabeth Fahey, an Irish bricklayer’s daughter. Elizabeth was just as feisty as George and several inches taller. To offset her natural advantage, Moore wore high-heeled shoes. In their later years, after her husband had made a fortune, Elizabeth liked to keep him in check by saying that she married him because he was the only young man with his own buggy, and since her other serious suitor was a man with one leg, George seemed a catch by comparison.
Elizabeth and George had four sons: Thomas, Harold, Geoffrey, and Cyril. Their father put them to work in the mill as soon as they were big enough to operate the equipment. Elastic webbing was in demand as a substitute for whalebones in ladies’ corsets, and George C. Moore Co. prospered. The First World War brought a further business boom, because the same elastic webbing that gave a woman an hourglass figure made gas masks a snug fit. By 1938, the Moores were the wealthiest family in Westerly. They lived in splendor in Elmore, a mansion built by Stanford White on a private street named Moore Lane. Two of George’s sons, Jeff and Cy, built summer homes on nearby Napatree.
A summer idyll on the very edge of the ocean, Napatree was “sunshine, surf, and salt air blown over a thousand miles of open sea.” Those who lived there called it heaven on earth. They came back summer after summer, the well-to-do with live-in help, and their children grew up, married, and returned with their children. They surf-cast for flatfish from the rocks at the point, raced one another in their sailboats on Little Narragansett Bay, and occasionally lamented the fact that in all the years they’d been coming to Napatree, they’d never weathered a real lollapalooza of a storm.
Hurricane
was a foreign word in New England. People didn’t know how to pronounce it. They didn’t know what it meant, and whatever it meant, they were sure it couldn’t happen to them, until September 21, 1938. On that last perfect beach day, a maverick storm sprinted a mile a minute up the Atlantic seaboard. Like a giant Cyclops, the storm had a single, intense, sky blue eye, and it was fixed on New England.
An extreme hurricane is both the most spectacular show on earth and the deadliest. By comparison, the atom bomb is a firecracker on the Fourth of July. Scientists estimate its force variously as the equivalent of an H-bomb going off every sixty seconds or three ten-megaton bombs exploding every hour. The Great Hurricane of 1938 was just such an extreme storm. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it was one of the ten “storms of the century” and the most violent and destructive natural disaster in New England history.
Most hurricanes attack with three weapons: swirling winds so strong that chickens are plucked clean of their feathers, rain so heavy that it turns tributaries into rampaging Mississippis, and waves so high that at first glance they may look like a fogbank rolling in. The Great Hurricane of 1938 had a fourth weapon: surprise.
On that capricious Wednesday at the ragtag end of summer, a strange yellow light came off the ocean and an eerie siren filled the air like a wordless chantey. In the next instant, serene bays became swirling cauldrons, and everything moored and un-moored was picked up and whipped in — fishing tackle, teapots, corsets, porch gliders, picnic baskets, bathing caps, clamming rakes, washboards, front doors, barn doors, car doors, sand pails and shovels, sandpipers, sea horses, girls in summer dresses, men in flannel trousers, lovers on an empty beach, children in their innocence. Joseph Matoes and his three sisters on the Jamestown school bus, Geoffrey Moore and his three sisters in their Napatree beach house were scooped up and tossed into the maelstrom.
Although the sea had been running high and small-craft warnings were in effect, as late as midafternoon there would be no alert that a killer storm was prowling the coast. Rampaging through seven states in seven hours, it would rip up the famous boardwalk in Atlantic City, flood the Connecticut River Valley, and turn downtown Providence into a seventeen-foot lake.
At two o’clock the swath of coastline from Cape May to Maine was one of the wealthiest and most populous in the world. By evening, it would be desolate. The Great Hurricane of 1938 was more than a storm. It was the end of a world.
The Way It Was
W
illiam Stoughton, a judge at the Salem witch trials, once pronounced, “The Lord’s promise and expectation of great things have singled out New Englanders.” In 1938, even with the Depression dragging the region down like an undertow, few dyed-in-the-wool Yankees would have disputed the sentiment. Back then, New England was as much a cultural region as a geographic one. Independence and integrity were prized virtues, with modesty a close third. New Englanders rarely tooted their own horn. They felt no need to, because, to them, everyone else in the country was an upstart. They were confident in their superiority, certain that they had the highest principles, the richest culture, and the finest schools.
In New England, where both coast and character were rock-ribbed, history was alive and fiercely guarded. New England was the cradle of liberty, birthplace of the Puritan work ethic, home of the Republican cloth coat, and source of the original lobster salad roll (in a toasted hot-dog bun with no celery and just enough mayonnaise). Unlike the prairie states that seem to go on and on, or the big skies of the West, the region is physically compact. This gave it cohesion, or the illusion of cohesion. In the thirties, the farmer-poet Robert Frost, a Californian by birth, was making a literary business out of personifying the authentic Yankee. The reality was somewhat different from the poetry. The stereotypical New Englander, a person of few words and fewer emotions, was only one side of the regional character. New England had produced rabble-rousing Sam Adams, who goaded the somewhat complacent colonies into rebellion, as well as the Puritan fire-and-brimstone preachers Increase and Cotton Mather. The March sisters and Ethan Frome were fashioned from the same soil. The Yankee peddler, a master hoodwinker, and the upright Yank, straight-spoken and unflinching, were both home-grown. New England was gritty factory towns as well as manicured village commons, the “dark satanic mills” of William Blake as well as the
Saturday Evening Post
covers of Norman Rockwell, the pure lines of white clapboard churches set against maples and oaks in brilliant foliage.
The industrialization of the Northeast dated from 1793, when Samuel Slater opened the first successful cotton-spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Manufacturing soon joined fishing and shipbuilding as the area’s leading industries. By the 1930s, just about every American was dressed in cotton woven in New England towns and stepped out in shoes manufactured there. Most of the workers who labored in the textile and leather factories were immigrants straight off the boat.
Although such affluent enclaves as Napatree and Watch Hill went on much as they always had, by 1938 New England’s mills and quarries were staggering.
For the haves, the thirties were a time of afternoon tea dances, waiters in swallowtail coats, and gleaming soda fountains with mirrored walls and marble counters. For the have-nots, there were poor farms, orphan asylums, and unthinking prejudice. Blacks were called “inkspots,” and the upper balcony of movie theaters was referred to as “nigger heaven.” Telephones were mostly party lines, and although TWA’s
Sky Chief
was offering the first cross-continental flight from Los Angeles to New York, most people still thought flying was for the birds. If their destination was Europe, they traveled by transatlantic steamer, and it could take better than a week to make the crossing. There were almost no televisions then.
Newsboys hawked papers, shouting the day’s headlines from street corners. A paper cost two cents, and most cities of any size had two. New York City had more than half a dozen papers. There were no freeways, either, no frozen or fast foods, and no supermarkets. Butchers in straw boaters and bloody aprons, sawdust on their meat market floors, cut up sides of beef while the customer waited. Ballpoint pens, nylon stockings, and the forty-hour week were just coming in. Night ball games were a novelty, and airconditioning a rarity. In New England striped awnings kept out the summer heat and storm windows kept out the winter cold.
Banks were vaulting stone edifices, hushed sanctuaries for savings scrimped from a twenty-five-cents-an-hour minimum wage, if you were fortunate enough to be earning a paycheck. One in four workers was unemployed. But if you happened to have a quarter, you could buy four pounds of mackerel. For another nickel, you could pick up two packs of Lucky Strikes. In those days, lighting a woman’s cigarette was tantamount to an act of seduction. If she inhaled, you could book a room with a private bath and radio at the Hotel Taft in New York City for $2.50, or cruise the Caribbean for $10 a day.