![]() ![]() ![]() I loved it as a child and love it more now. And yet, amidst all the clamor, the Vineyard house is a small marvel. There were even condominiums, of all things, especially near Edgartown, which he could not understand, because the southern part of the Island is what he always called Kennedy country, the land where rich white vacationers and their bratty children congregate, and a part-angry, part-jealous article of my father’s faith held that white people allow the members of what he liked to call the darker nation to swarm and crowd while keeping the open spaces for themselves. There were too many new houses going up, he would moan, many of them despoiling the roads and woods near the best beaches. Lately, in my father’s oft-repeated view, the Vineyard had tumbled downhill, for it was crowded and noisy and, besides, they let everyone in now, by which he meant black people less well off than we. My parents liked to tell how they bought the house for a song back in the sixties, when Martha’s Vineyard, and the black middle-class colony that summers there, were still smart and secret. ![]() I was glad to have the Vineyard house, a tidy little Victorian on Ocean Park in the town of Oak Bluffs, with lots of frilly carpenter’s Gothic along the sagging porch and a lovely morning view of the white band shell set amidst a vast sea of smooth green grass and outlined against a vaster sea of bright blue water. Addison is a gem, if you don’t mind the religious nonsense, but Mariah and I have not been close in the years since I joined the enemy, as she puts it, which is why my father bequeathed us houses four hundred miles apart. The football tickets, of course, were the most valuable item in the estate, but then Addison was always the biggest favorite and the biggest fan, the only one of the children who came close to sharing my father’s obsession, as well as the only one of us actually on speaking terms with my father the last time he drew his will. THE VINEYARD HOUSE WHEN MY FATHER finally died, he left the Redskins tickets to my brother, the house on Shepard Street to my sister, and the house on the Vineyard to me. For Mom, who loved a mystery, and for Dad, who is not in this one: I love you both, alwaysĭeux fous gagnent toujours, mais trois fous, non! (Loosely: Two fools always win, but three fools, never!) -Siegbert Tarrasch (Note: The chess piece Americans call the bishop, the French call le fou.) ![]()
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