Rock-ribbed Maine Yankees, from an outsider’s viewpoint

Frankie’s Place

A Love Story

Jim Sterba

Grove Press: 274 pp., $23

*

For self-assurance, no people in modern America approach the descendants of the old Yankee families of New England. The origins of the trade and commerce fortunes that still support them have been worn away by time and by generations of the agreeable embrace of Harvard and Radcliffe. Intellect and plain living -- as they conceive of it -- produce a sense of entitlement as lasting as the pink granite of the mountains of Mount Desert Island in Maine, where many of them have spent their summers for 150 years.

Into this self-contained world 20 years ago stepped an outsider, a reporter for the New York Times and later for the Wall Street Journal, Jim Sterba, son of a Michigan family from Eastern Europe, who did not know his own father and whose early life was lonely and hard. He came to Mount Desert (pronounced “dessert”) not as a stranger but as the special friend of a woman who embodied in antecedent and attitude the essence of New England aristocracy, Frances “Frankie” FitzGerald.

FitzGerald, who became famous for her incandescent 1971 book on Vietnam, “Fire in the Lake,” was, as Sterba tells you in this memoir, the daughter of socialite Marietta Peabody Tree and Desmond FitzGerald, who rose in the CIA to become head of its clandestine operations. Her New England ancestors included Parkmans and Endicotts. Later, asking around the island for the name of the ultimate WASP in residence, Sterba was told, “You’re living with her.”

Visitors to her summer place were subjected to what Sterba calls the FitzGerald Survival School: Daily plunges into icy Somes Sound below the house, fast “walks” about the island, and frequent ascents of the Mount Desert mountains. Such strenuous activities should have come as no surprise, for one of her great-grandfathers was the Rev. Endicott Peabody, who founded and for 56 years ruled over Groton School, the famously austere Massachusetts boarding school for upper-class boys.

Sterba handles with sufficient aplomb the love story that is the subtitle of “Frankie’s Place.” It turns out that for all the security of her position, FitzGerald, no less then Sterba, longed for a home. As he had been farmed out to various relatives as a child, she had been consigned in the absence of her parents to the care of governesses. How the two, each burdened by loneliness and the self-absorbed demands of the writer’s trade, became friends, then lovers, then husband and wife, is the reason for the book.

The rest is the regular stuff of the summer season, that is, the time spent away from Manhattan. There are resident mice to be coped with. There is the 17-foot Boston Whaler to be attended to. There are mushrooms to be picked and cooked. There are the incursions of fog, which inspires Sterba to include a piece he wrote about artificial fog and fog machines for the Wall Street Journal. There are the weekend guests to be fed (some recipes included). There are the locals, who dispense cracker-barrel wisdom, drop their “r”s and say “ahyup” and other Maine expressions.

Then there is the house next door. It is introduced by the whine of chain saws and the grinding roar of assiduous bulldozers. Into this world of deliberate plain living in the woods, a very rich man from afar is building a very large house, with multiple bathrooms, much imposing granite, a multiple-car garage, and -- good Lord! -- a swimming pool!

People in Maine don’t have swimming pools!

But these people will. After the vast structure with all its accouterments is finished, its owners find they don’t really have all that much time to spend in it, so they dispose of it for a goodly sum.

This intrusive thing does not, though, seem to disturb the tranquillity of Frankie’s Place. By the end of the book, her family with which she shares the small cedar-sided house overlooking a fiord seems to have decided not to sell it after all. Sterba’s real father unexpectedly surfaces, and father and son reconcile, sort of. Autumn comes, and Sterba and FitzGerald leave for the New York writers’ life. You sense they will return next summer. Old New England, crotchets and all, will endure.