MY FATHER USED to say of Mount Desert Island, which is just off the Maine coast and contains the once very fashionable summer resort of Bar Harbor, that it was so beautifully unreal that one could hardly read the New York newspapers there, with all their threats of doom. This made it, of course, an ideal vacation spot, and we used to rent for midsummer a commodious stone and wood villa on a peninsula called Schooner Head that had the sea on both sides. Our landlord, who laid fishnets along the rocky coast around the peninsula, hauled in a blue shark one morning and laid it out on the small beach at which our housemaids sometimes dared to take an icy dip. There was no other place for them to do that, but needless to say, after the sight of the shark none of them ever put even a toe in the water again.
Of course, we as a family had the elegant swimming club where the water was let in at first from the ocean to a large enclosure and warmed before being piped up to the members' pool. We had also a golf club and marinas for those who sailed or enjoyed deep-sea fishing. The sumptuous shingle villas along the seashore blended handsomely with the gray of the rocks and the deep green of the surrounding hills, which we called mountains. It was indeed a paradise for the rich.
Both my parents were old Bar Harborites—my paternal grandparents still in my boyhood occupied their big house on Clefstone Road—but it was the natural beauty of the place rather than its social activity that attracted them to it. Father, who was something of a jock, adored the golf and tennis, and Mother's particular joy was in climbing the mountains and planning picnics. Of course, they had plenty of old friends on the island, and dined out on occasion, but they always insisted that that was not the "point" of the summer, which was essentially a family occasion. They avoided the spectacular new rich like the plague, and even the old if they were too involved in the social game.
This meant that we children were not invited to children's parties given by parents on whom ours had not chosen to call, and these, of course, tended to be the most lavish and desirable of all. My older brother and sister didn't care, but I resented it bitterly. I tried to make out just what Mother's standards were and listened carefully when she talked to her friends without knowing, so to speak, that she was on the air. Here is the explanation that one of her intimates gave to her question as to how she could bring herself to dine with a particularly vulgar tycoon:
"But I love it, my dear. You start with strong, well-mixed cocktails followed by a cordon bleu dinner at which you needn't talk to the ape on either side of you as you are expected to listen to a fine organ expertly played. And after dinner there's a brand-new and exciting movie in a comfortable auditorium. Oh, I can't wait to be asked again!"
But that was not at all Mother's idea of a good time. She deplored the deep impression made on me, her third child, by the very people she sought to avoid. There were, however, people on the island at whose great houses she had to go because of family connections. One of these belonged to Mrs. Duer Blake, the former Mrs. Clarence Mackey, who gave large parties for the children of her second marriage (including my friend Billy Blake), where the winners of games received little cups of real silver that I craved but never won. I thought Mrs. Blake, tall, thin, and aristocratic-looking, the epitome of style, and it further fascinated me that one of her eyes was of glass. We were always told not to stare at her in the effort to find out which one.
One day Mother had come to pick me up after a Blake party. As she was taking leave of our hostess, I was startled to hear Mrs. Blake say of the next meeting of this children's group (which was scheduled to be at my grandmother's house): "I'll send the children, of course, but you know I can't go there."
"Why can't Mrs. Blake go to Grandmother's?" I wanted to know as we drove home.
"Because your grandmother is very old-fashioned," Mother replied in a rather tart tone. "She won't receive women who've been divorced and remarried."
I was appalled. Dowdy old Grandmother wouldn't receive glamorous Mrs. Blake! I had evidently a great deal to learn about society, which was a tangle of rules that made no logical sense.
I was much helped in my quest by my friends Edith and Jimmy Clark, with whom I sometimes stayed for a week after my family had returned to New York. Their parents had each been married four times, and they lived for long stretches with their maternal grandmother, Edith Fabbri, the divorced Vanderbilt wife of Ernesto Fabbri. He was one of three Fabbri brothers whose father had been an Italian partner in Morgan & Co. The other two were bachelors: Egisto, a man of fabulous good taste who designed for his sister-in-law Buonriposo, the Palladian villa in Bar Harbor where I stayed, and Alessandro, famed radio expert and inventor who became Edith's lover and is buried beside her in the Vanderbilt cemetery in Staten Island. Visitors assume the tomb is her husband's. The Fabbris were rich, but Edith was richer and considered the essence of respectability on Mount Desert Island, though everyone knew everything about her. I was learning.
Her past did not keep Mrs. Fabbri from disapproving of most of her grandchildren's friends, whose parents she considered of too recent origin to be invited to Buonriposo, but this did not keep Jimmy and Edith from going. Bar Harbor, like many social summer resorts, offered the new rich a chance to break into a society that barred them at home. Let us suppose, for example, that you have made a fortune from some unattractive aspect of plumbing in Philadelphia and are not received by the better families. Invest your money in Mount Desert Island, where your yacht, your glittering, foreign cars, your fabulous parties will be the envy of the younger generation, who have not yet developed their parents' snobbishness. The latter will not object to their young going to your parties, for they do not imagine a summer friendship commits anyone to much. But they may find, on returning to Philadelphia, that their children will have formed deeper friendships than they have expected—even love affairs—and it will be hard to ignore their parents.
I learned in Bar Harbor that sex is as interesting to people I once regarded as too old for it as it is to the young. The mother of my friends, Teresa, was the most beautiful woman on the island, and on her rare visits to her mother when she was between marriages, and sometimes not, the telephone at Buonriposo rang constantly for her. There was an extension in my bedroom, and I had the impudence to listen in. Was that really Father's friend Tom Cook, whose amorous tone I heard? It was. Yet he was married to a friend of Mother's and had six children, some of whom were older than I. Even so.
The young were less social snobs than the old, but they had equally rigid standards where personalities were involved. They could be hard as nails on an unattractive girl, which my late friend Mariska de Hedry, for all her sterling qualities, unhappily was in youth. She was the only child of a former Hungarian diplomat, married to an American heiress who crossed the Atlantic every summer to visit her sister, Miss Coleman, in her big house on the Shore Path. The family was hopelessly conservative and old-fashioned, and Mariska's dismal plainness was not alleviated by her dowdy if expensive clothes. The jeunesse dorée of Bar Harbor wouldn't give the poor girl the time of day, but I appreciated her character and saw her from time to time. One day she asked me to take her to the Saturday night dance at the swimming club, which she ordinarily never went to, adding, as if to explain: "The emperor is staying with us, and Mummie thinks he would like the dance."
It was a command performance from her father's former boss, the Austro-Hungarian emperor pretender Otto, and of course we three went. Word of whom we had brought spread like fire around the dance floor, and Mariska found herself the belle of the ball. For fifteen minutes. By then the beauties of the summer colony had entirely preempted the imperial pretender, who was only too willing to be preempted, and I was left with Mariska, who soon enough told me that she was ready to go home and leave Otto to his new friends.
Bar Harbor was not the place for her. It was not the place for saints, one of whom, as a nun, she almost became.