The Gold Coast Read Online Free PDF

Saturdays.

 
     
    Four
    The Lord rested on the seventh day, which has been interpreted to mean that His sixth-day creations should do the same.
    George and Ethel Allard take the Sabbath seriously, as do most working-class people from that generation who remember six-day workweeks of ten-hour days. I, on the other hand, have to take care of the Lord’s English ivy creeping over my windowpanes.
    I don’t actually do any business on Sunday, but I do think about what has to be done on Monday morning as I do my Sunday chores.
    Susan and I had cut ivy until about ten in the morning, then got cleaned up and dressed for church.
    Susan drove the Jag, and we stopped at the gatehouse to pick up George and Ethel, who were waiting at their front door, George in his good brown suit, Ethel in a shapeless flower-print dress that unfortunately seems to be making a comeback with women who want to look like 1940s wallpaper.
    The Allards have a car, William Stanhope’s old Lincoln that he left here when he and Charlotte Stanhope moved to Hilton Head, South Carolina, in ’79. George sometimes doubled as the Stanhopes’ chauffeur and is still a good driver despite his advancing years. But as there is now only one service at St. Mark’s, it would seem snooty for us not to offer to drive, and perhaps awkward for us to ask him to drive us. Maybe I’m being too sensitive, but I have to walk a thin line between playing lord of the manor and being George and Ethel’s assistant groundskeeper. We all have so many hang-ups from the old days. Anyway, George isn’t the problem; Ethel the Red is.
    The Allards climbed in, and we all agreed it was another beautiful day. Susan swung south onto Grace Lane and floored it. Many of the roads around here were originally horse-and-buggy paths, and they are still narrow, twist and turn a bit, are lined with beautiful trees, and are dangerous. A speeding car is never more than a second away from disaster.
    Grace Lane, which is about a mile long, has remained a private road. This means there is no legal speed limit, but there is a practical speed limit. Susan thinks it is seventy, I think it’s about forty. The residents along Grace Lane, mostly estate owners, are responsible for the upkeep of the road. Most of the other private roads of the Gold Coast have sensibly been deeded to the county, the local village, the State of New York, or to any other political entity that promises to keep them drained and paved at about a hundred thousand dollars a mile. But a few of the residents along Grace Lane, specifically those who are rich, proud, and stubborn (they go together), have blocked attempts to unload this Via Dolorosa on the unsuspecting taxpayers.
    Susan got up to her speed limit, and I could almost feel the blacktop fragmenting like peanut brittle.
    High speeds seem to keep older people quiet, and the Allards didn’t say much from the back, which was all right with me. George won’t discuss work on Sundays, and we had exhausted other subjects years ago. On the way back, we sometimes talk about the sermon. Ethel likes the Reverend James Hunnings because, like so many of my Episcopal brethren, the man is far to the left of Karl Marx.
    Each Sunday we are made to feel guilty about our relative wealth and asked to share some of the filthy stuff with about two billion less fortunate people.
    Ethel especially enjoys the sermons on social justice, equality, and so forth. And we all sit there, the old-line blue bloods, along with a few new black and Spanish Episcopalians, and the remaining working-class Anglos, listening to the Reverend Mr. Hunnings give us his view of America and the world, and there is no question-and-answer period afterward.
    In my father’s and grandfather’s day, of course, this same church was slightly to the right of the Republican Party, and the priests would direct their sermons more toward the servants and the working men and women in the pews, talking about obedience, hard work, and