The sky was smudged. The sun tried to set behind lavender and orange dust as our ferry plummeted through the Sound, and everything that had happened in every person’s life skidded behind me as the wind blew off my hat.
It toppled and came to rest against the liver spots of a varicose-veined shin. An ancient hag grasped its brim between gnarled fingers adorned with heavy rings. She managed some kind of a flourish, my hat pummeling in the salty breeze.
“To where are you destined,” she croaked.
“The Hamptons,” I answered.
“It’s far less gauche to call it Long Island. Or even better, out east.”
“But we’re… Traveling south.”
“Don’t get fresh,” the woman snapped.
She handed me my hat, looking away into the opaque wall of murk.
“You wouldn’t know it, but I’m one of the world’s leading experts on the Protestant establishment.”
“You don’t say,” I said.
“Oh yes. And I knew Tru. I was there when they strewed his ashes in Crooked Pond. Dunphy got all the ashes, you know.”
I didn’t.
It was the middle of my thirty-third year, and would be some time before I learned she was referring to the pond that separated Sag Harbor from Bridgehampton. Only a few miles south, Truman Capote and his partner Jack Dunphy had shared a beachfront property in Sagaponack, where they’d resided in separate houses for years.
In the seventies, the iconic author of New Journalism and contemporary gothic, still just middle-aged, began to rapidly deteriorate. He underwent a number of rehab, plastic surgery, and hair transplant stints. Weight fluctuated, and he continued to relapse. In 1980, his license was revoked for reckless driving in Suffolk County, and in the wake of frequent hallucinations, brain scans revealed a loss of brain mass. He died in 1984 from liver disease and intoxication.
Johnny Carson’s wife received half of Tru’s cremains, though Dunphy disputed the claim, and joined his lover in eternal rest eight years later. At this glacial remnant of the Long Pond Greenbelt, a stone marks the sight of their joint remains-scattering.
The crone took out a handkerchief like she was inspecting it for flaws.
“The natives called it Paumanok. The island that pays tribute. But it’s not the island that pays, now is it?”
I hesitated.
“I don’t know.”
-David Fishkind