Islands in the dream

Since the early 19th century, well-off Americans have fled hot cities for cooler second homes, often passed on through generations of the same family. But it’s fair to say that no other “Summer Domiciles” -- as the Social Register once listed them -- confer anything like the status of places on the Northeast coast of the United States. Two seasonal memoirs pay homage to the particular mystique of Maine islands. Both are written by outsiders whose narratives end with their having achieved acceptance and a sense of belonging. Both authors are men who arrived at this estate by marrying women of inherited wealth and social position, and both are journalists.

In “Dark Harbor: Building House and Home on an Enchanted Island,” Ved Mehta, the former New Yorker staff writer, continues the autobiographical chronicle that began with his family’s flight from what is now Pakistan; his sufferings in a Little Rock, Ark., boarding school for the blind; the change of luck that led to Oxford and Harvard; and the career that launched him into the center of New York social and intellectual life. This latest chapter of his ongoing memoir sees the writer established, with a wife and family and a summer place in Maine. The “enchantment” in his title, however, has less to do with the natural beauty of Islesboro -- the island on which Dark Harbor is the one village -- than with its locus as a bastion of the very rich. “I had the fascination with money and moneyed people of someone who had been brought up in a poor country,” he tells us at the outset. Although Mehta acknowledges the costs of this fascination, the benefits clearly have outweighed the liabilities: “I enjoyed hobnobbing with the rich, as if association with them in itself could be nourishing and there were no price to pay for it, as if I could be wined and dined by them and still keep sacrosanct the plain-fare values of my vocation.”

During the late 1960s, through his friendship with Annette Engelhard Reed, daughter of the precious metals magnate, he begins spending weekends in Dark Harbor. Whisked by corporate jet, followed by small private plane, to the Reeds’ island estate, Mehta is hooked by the combination of unspoiled nature and social cachet. He determines to buy a parcel of waterfront land and wait until he can afford to build a simple cabin. During subsequent visits to the Reeds, he discovers the perfect plot. The only hitch is the price: $70,000 (Mehta is always refreshingly specific about what things cost), out of the question on his salary and small assets. Mrs. Reed comes to the rescue. Offering first to buy it jointly with Mehta, she then reveals that it was to be a gift all along. Alas, a parting one, as it turns out. Mehta feels patronized, insulted; he keeps the land but the friendship is over.

His benefactress gone, the writer is left with the far more costly problem of affordable housing. His romance of a primitive cabin turns out to be just that. Blind since early childhood, Mehta has requirements of access and interior plan that do not admit of a simple prefab solution. He decides to go for broke and solicit plans from the noted architect Edward Larrabee Barnes; drawings, site visits by contractors, a road builder and landscape architects follow. The bills are mounting before any contract is signed. The final estimate (less architects’ fees) is $200,000, with $20,000 to $30,000 payable monthly. Terrified, Mehta would have canceled but for a happy change in his life. Another heiress had materialized. This one became his wife.

There were obstacles. His bride, Linn Cooper Cary, if scarcely in the Engelhard bracket, had far grander family connections. Her mother disapproved: There was the difference in their backgrounds and ages -- he was 49, his wife-to-be 28 -- and, not least, his disability. About the last, Mehta is sympathetic: He wouldn’t want his own daughter to marry a blind man, he says. Finally, love conquers all, including the cost of a summer place. After conferring with Cary’s trust lawyers, Mehta agrees to deed half the land to her; in exchange, she will bear half the expenses of construction. Now begins the familiar saga of cost overruns and wrangles with contractors, architects and suppliers. Finally, the house is built, but not without strains on the marriage.

As the man of the family and the son of a patriarchal culture, Mehta assumed he was in charge of all decisions about the house: His wife’s contribution did not extend to inviting her views on the design. A silent presence in the early part of the house raising, she finally finds her voice, demanding a say in the choice of kitchen cabinet doors. Their first child arrives -- for whose needs neither the architect nor the new father appears to have made any accommodation. Then there is the delicate matter of social acceptance. The other summer people are chilly. Mehta admits to a “terrible gaffe”: When everything about the house seemed to have gone wrong, he distributed a form letter throughout the island. Addressed “Dear Neighbor,” it asked whether the recipient could refer prospective tenants to them. The neighbors included Douglas Dillon, former ambassador to France and former secretary of the Treasury, and the family of the late Nelson Aldrich, former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and uncle of David and Nelson Rockefeller. Never mind. Genes will out. Although she had always summered in the Berkshires and Cooperstown, N.Y., Linn Cary Mehta becomes a skilled sailor. She discovers family connections among other summer people. Relations thaw. In time, her husband has the pleasure of knowing that their young daughters are firmly in the social swim; he details their schedules of sailing, tennis and golf “clinics,” of sleepovers, camp-outs and dog shows. Now the Mehtas do the unthinkable: They build a heated infinity pool complete with pool house, guest quarters and sauna; the pool’s electronic cover alone costs $7,000. If there are rumbles from their fellow yacht club members, these are not recorded.

“Frankie’s Place: A Love Story” is a tribute by Jim Sterba, a former New York Times and Wall Street Journal reporter, to his wife, Frances FitzGerald, and to her house near Northeast Harbor, on Mount Desert Island. Built by the two FitzGerald sisters and their brother, it’s a one-story shingle structure whose rugged site, in a forest overlooking a fiord, was the setting for their picnics as children, during vacations spent in the “big house,” owned by their mother’s family, closer to town.

To Sterba, his beloved’s cabin is an enchanted castle by the sea, and, like its fairy-tale prototype, Frankie’s place imposes mysterious laws and rituals, which the aspirant must master before he is deemed an acceptable consort. His prize is, indeed, a woman of daunting attributes: “She was blond, tall, beautiful, smart, famous, and scary. She was glamorous and glamour flummoxed me.” A contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, FitzGerald won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her book on Vietnam, “Fire in the Lake.” But for Sterba, the adopted son of a Detroit machinist turned failed farmer, it was FitzGerald’s family background -- combining intellectual distinction, social position and wealth -- that seemed most to disqualify him. Her childhood, Sterba tells us, was divided among stately houses in Barbados, Manhattan and Ditchley, England.

Sterba is middle-aged and worried about his waistline when he first visits Frankie’s place in 1983 and submits to the rigors of what he calls the “FitzGerald Survival School.” Their day begins with a freezing dip in the fiord, followed by “walks up and down mountains that would have been called forced marches in many of the world’s armies.” There are tennis and sailing, “which meant following orders, sorting out a tangle of ropes, being corrected for calling them ropes instead of lines and sheets ... then more mountains, more tennis, more ‘walking’ more ‘swimming.’ ” After these physical challenges, his reward lies in mental labor. His hostess sits at her typewriter and works for the better part of every day, seven days a week. Sterba has no choice but to follow suit. “I worked because Frankie worked,” he says.

Other rules of Frankie’s place target indulgence: Lobster may be eaten only in Maine, and even there only on special occasions, preferably ones that celebrate “big” achievements, Sterba notes mournfully. There are a very few “lobster loopholes,” and he hovers over these with the fierce gaze of a starving man. Over many summers, he survives his Outward Bound ordeal. Contributing male skills to the household, he improvises great meals (recipes provided), takes charge of restoring FitzGerald’s old car and oversees the purchase of a new motorboat. Most important, he wins her love.

Initially, Sterba’s voice is one of bemused innocence: Candide among the WASPs. So it’s sad to see him assume an ill-fitting snobbery. On the lot next to FitzGerald’s property, excavations have begun for “an ‘enormous’ house” and “ ‘big’ swimming pool.” “A swimming pool? In Maine? People in Maine don’t have swimming pools. People in Palm Beach have swimming pools,” Sterba sniffs. Their new neighbors (not the literary Mehtas) turn out to be a “self-made CEO and his girlfriend.” Ultimately the owners sell the compound, for a record price. They’re gone, their flotilla of boats and cars with them. But the barbarians have entered the gates.

Another story threads through Sterba’s memoir: the reappearance of his real father, now living in Florida, who disappeared from his life when the author was 2 years old. In the course of Sterba’s regular visits to Ocala, both men grope for common ground beyond golf. Inevitably, lost decades mute the drama of reconciliation. Sterba’s home is now his wife’s world: her family, friends and house. As his folksy title suggests, though, it’s still “Frankie’s place,” where, to this reader, Sterba will always remain a guest.

No one should make light of the snaky terrain braved by Mehta and Sterba in these memoirs. Respected professionals, they are both still “salarymen” in the Japanese term, married to women of inherited wealth and dynastic social connections. In America this is a mixed blessing. Unearned income defines how some families live. When “all the advantages” -- in the phrase of another era -- are the wife’s, issues of class and power, of masculinity and its corollary, misogyny, are never far from the surface. It takes a man of exceptional qualities -- honesty, a certain grace, self-knowledge above all -- to avoid the defensive extremes of presumption on the one hand and gratitude on the other. There are no free rides to enchanted islands. *