Peggy Noonan Searches For Magic On Long Island, Finds Wine Instead

Peggy talks to fictional ghosts.

Ah, Long Island in the summer! A lovely place to pass the long, hot days. Oyster roasts on the beach at Montauk. Sniffing discourteously at middle-class tourists trying their darnedest to spot Ina Garten in the Hamptons. Pickin’ parties with the gays on Fire Island.

She loved it so, did Sister Peggy Noonan of the Order of the Amaretto Binge. The borough of Manhattan grew so stuffy and hot in the summer, the rats becoming bolder, the people surlier. Thanks to all the pot shops that had sprung up, every block now smelled like she lived inside a giant bong. And Peggy was not one for marijuana, at least not since that one curious night at the Sherry-Netherland with Robert Mitchum some decades ago.

What happened to the smells of the Manhattan she had long known? The hot pretzels, the peanut vendors, the horse shit in Central Park, the piles of garbage rotting in the gutters? The unwashed sidewalks! The unwashed vagrants! All the smells of lives being lived and dreams being dreamed in the great metropolis!

No, escape was needed, and where better to escape than what Fitzgerald had termed “that slender riotous island”? Generations of Manhattanites had fled there in summers gone, particularly the great families. The Roosevelts at Oyster Bay and the Vanderbilts at their treasured Eagle’s Nest and the Fricks in their magnificent property in Roslyn!

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And of course Great Neck, greatest of all the Necks, and Oheka Castle, the grandest of all castles. Built for the Jews originally, but now even such low a personage as Megyn Kelly could get married there. An imposing 127 rooms, acres of perfectly manicured gardens, and a lovely restaurant where one could look out at the grounds while lingering over the $27 shrimp burrito, a glass or three of white wine. A person could grow drowsy at the splendor of it all…

Once in Manhattan in the 1990s at a lunch to celebrate a friend I met the great philanthropist Brooke Astor. The conversation took a turn and she told us a story of when she was young, in her 20s, in the 1920s. It was a summer day on the north shore of Long Island and she was at a club or great mansion of some kind with a big broad lawn. 

“It is magnificent, isn’t it?” A stranger had sat down at her table, startling her out of her dreamy state. He was of medium build with short, dark hair and a tan that spoke to days spent engaging in the sorts of leisurely activities open to the idle rich. He wore a colorful blue dress shirt that looked as if it had just come out of its box that very morning and a light summer blazer, and he looked at her with eyes somehow both guileless and calculating at the same time.

“Magnificent!” he repeated. “It’s a place for tourists now so any old riff-raff can come here and trample the grass. But oh, the parties we had here when only a certain class had both the time to come here and automobiles that could handle the rough roads. Robert Moses, bless him, he understood who to steer to the Gold Coast and who would be more appropriate for Jones Beach.”

“And that lawn!” the stranger continued. “There was nothing finer than an intimate lunch for thirty people at long tables on that lawn, the kitchen staff bringing us plates of asparagus and trout freshly caught, straight from the Sound. And of course the drinks flowed liberally.” He winked at her. “Dry county my eye! We were as dry as a summer storm.”

“The name’s Gatsby, by the way.” The stranger held out an uncalloused hand soft as aloe butter. “Normally I don’t truck with journalists, they write such unflattering and lengthy profiles. But I’m finding myself somewhat melancholy this noon.”

It was an airplane, the first any of them had ever seen. It must have taken off not far away and had trouble, and now here it was, barreling down toward them to land on the lawn. Everyone said “Oh my gosh” and scrambled out of its path. The plane touched down and came to a halt. The pilot jumped out, did something to the engine, jumped back in, started the engine, used the lawn as a runway again and took off.

“Ah, I remember that, it was a sight indeed. Have you ever seen three dozen functioning alcoholics in summer finery suddenly spying an angry, spitting beast descending from the sky whence none had ever come before? It was like that Christian Bale movie with the dragons, only sunnier and no one got eaten. Say, let’s order another bottle of this wine, you seem to have polished this first one off by yourself. I like a woman who can hold her liquor.”

It’s come to mind after 10 summer days in Manhattan and on Long Island, of conversations with all manner of folk. I think I sense a general mood of carefulness about the future, a sobriety that isn’t down, precisely, but is, well, watchful.

“’Carefulness about the future?’ Is the Kaiser gathering his armies again? Those were bad times.” He shuddered and swallowed half a glass of wine at once.

They always claim they’re looking for better communication and greater joy between peoples when in the end it turns out they’re looking for money and power. And they only see the sunny side of their inventions because they were raised in a sunny age, and can’t imagine what darkness looks like, or that it comes.

“Yes, your science men do seem driven by an impregnable hubris. Computers writing movie pictures? Folly. Our age’s giants of industry built museums and concert halls and culture. Your age’s giants of industry want to buy Pacific islands full of savages and fornicate their way to building a race of genetic supermen. Can you imagine where that could lead?”

Time passes and doubts creep in. The loss in blood and treasure is high, the West is simultaneously proudly united and out on a limb, and Russia is in a way already defeated…

All who call for a battlefield victory as opposed to some sort of attempt at a negotiated settlement, unsatisfying as that would be, will probably eventually have to factor this in: that public sentiment means something, always, and it can change. Last week we hit 500 days since Mr. Putin invaded. People don’t like long wars.

“I must say, this is a strange way to view the current conflict. The only people actually fighting the tsar’s forces are the Ukrainians. What sacrifices are the American people making that they might grow weary of? Stomach upset when they read war stories in the paper?” The slightest slur had crept into Mr. Gatsby’s voice, as if the wine’s furthest tentacles were just starting to probe Broca’s area of his brain. “They should help the Ukrainians defeat the dark force from the East, then they can spend a decade in a state of unending debauch. Trust me, it can be done.”

I tried the patience of a foreign-policy specialist by saying that if China were thinking creatively it would stun the world by pushing itself forward as mediator and peacemaker… A foreign-affairs specialist said this was a romantic idea. True enough. But the problem with the world isn’t that there’s too much romance in it, is it?

“That tech baron who is running for president — Vivek Ramalamadingdong, or however he pronounces it — has been saying similar, and the shapers of foreign policy have been slapping their foreheads like flappers swooning in the heat. What a strange time this is, where Republicans demand we toss aside the stick and cower like the abominable Calvin Coolidge.”

Then the talk turned to magic. It was nice – all these smart and accomplished rational thinkers agreeing there’s a lot of mystery in life, things all around us that we don’t know, forces we can’t see and don’t credit, and that it’s all connected somehow to a magic within life. Hearing they thought this – it was sweet.

“Lord, what is this balderdash?” Gatsby pushed back from the table so hard that his chair fell over. He stood there, swaying like the great ape about to fall off the Empire State Buildng with Fay Wray clutched in his grasp. “Mystery? Magic? Did we have mystery in the trenches? Was the mustard gas magical? A mystery is when you don’t know if the love of your life ran over her husband’s mistress with his motor-car accidentally or on purpose.”

He closed his eyes. “Madam, this conversation has taken a strange turn, and frankly, the room is spinning too much for me to make sense of it. I must bid you good day, for right now I must retire. Perhaps a swim in my pool will restore my equilibrium.”

And with that he tottered off into the perfectly manicured garden. A swim would be nice, she thought. But there was no time. It had been an invigorating time on Long Island, but Manhattan and the penning of a column awaited her.

[WSJ]