THREE

SAG HARBOR

July 2014

Some doctors see Alzheimer’s as a disease of seven stages. Others see it as a three-stage disease. It’s the same disease either way: it doesn’t progress any slower if you measure it in seven stages rather than three. Whichever model you use, B. has the mildest stage. That’s what her doctors told her last autumn when she was diagnosed. Her short-term memory is diminished, but her long-term memory, so far, is fine. She needs my help in an ongoing way—so far, I’m her one and only caregiver—but she still gets around on her own, at least from our house into town. She drives to the market, picks up the mail—all the daily errands that anyone in a small town does on her own.

I know that at some point, she won’t be able to drive anymore, and I know she won’t be the one to decide that. I will. I also know that she’ll be angry—really angry—when I cut her off and start keeping the keys in some secret place. I can live with that, and the anger, after all, will pass. It always does, along with the hurt. What bothers me is: How will I know when that time has come? When she gets lost coming home? When she gets into an accident? When either she, or someone else, is hurt? I know the right thing would be to take the keys from her now. But I also know how that would depress her, robbing her of her independence and making her feel worse than she does. I try to keep B. as happy as I can, while also trying to keep her safe.

Almost every afternoon, B. takes Bishop, our Italian mastiff, for a walk on the beach. Those are some of her happiest times. Bishop came into our lives after B. was diagnosed: he belonged to our twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Dana, who moved from Washington, D.C., to help, and brought Bishop with her. He’s a big and powerful creature who would chomp your arm off if you made a lunge for any one of us. If you’d asked B. or me two years ago what kind of dog we might like, Italian mastiff wouldn’t have been on the list. It would now. Bishop is smart; we really communicate. More important, I know that B. will be safe whenever he’s with her. I’m not sure B. can sense danger anymore—not from someone who might at first be friendly. But Bishop can.

We live in a neighborhood of Sag Harbor called Sag Harbor Hills—one of three beachfront black communities, side by side. Back in the 1940s, black doctors and lawyers brought their families to this all-but-deserted bayside stretch of scrub pines and sand on the outskirts of what was then a scruffy blue-collar town. The roads were dirt, and pitch dark at night: no streetlights till the 1980s. There these mostly upper-middle-class families summered with their own, rarely renovating or expanding their beachy bungalows. Living below their means was the whole idea, like summer camp. Once in the 1980s, feminist Betty Friedan, novelist E. L. Doctorow, and others tried to bridge the gap between black and white with what they called the Sag Harbor Initiative. It was well intended, but went nowhere; neither side had much interest in socializing with the other. Those three little enclaves—Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest, and Ninevah—are still a draw for prosperous blacks, like Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, and you’re as likely to see Ivy League sweatshirts there as you do in the nearly all-white historic district of Sag Harbor itself. Now, though, the real estate market is bringing integration after all, as black owners die off and white buyers move in, eager to get a waterfront house at a fraction of what it would cost anywhere else in Sag Harbor. A lot of our neighbors resent the changes. Not B. or me. We’ve always been comfortable in either camp—which is, to be honest, one reason we’ve done as well as we have. B. just radiates warmth and elegance and grace in a way that transcends race altogether. It’s an amazing thing to see—even now.

From our house, B. takes Bishop up the beach toward town, throwing a tennis ball into the surf again and again, and laughing as Bishop swims out to retrieve it. From our front deck, I watch her playing with him, as if nothing were wrong and this day was a day like all the others we’ve had. Then slowly, steadily, she diminishes, until she’s a distant dot.

If she keeps on into town, B. will reach the wharf, and the restaurant that was, until last year, B. Smith’s, with its waterfront tables overlooking the marina. For sixteen years we made it a go-to place for whites and blacks. To find another such place, where both worlds overlapped, you’d have to go all the way to Manhattan—to the B. Smith’s on West Forty-Sixth Street. The B. Smith’s in Sag Harbor was also the only black-owned business greater than family-sized in the Hamptons, clear up to Montauk.

B. knows better than to pass the restaurant directly on her walks. She knows that seeing it as someone else’s place will make her sad. I think she knows, too, that it would still be hers if not for Alzheimer’s. Instead, she turns up Main Street, with Bishop pulling at his leash, and takes in Sag Harbor’s simple delights, chatting with other strollers, and perhaps picking up a head of lettuce at the IGA before heading back home—the home that so far she knows how to find.