I would like to say a word about my former landlady, Barbara Johnson, without whom I would not have been able to stay in East Hampton.
In brief, she saved me — and I her, she said, at a party once held for her on North Haven — though my debt to Barbara was far greater. I still remember that day, on the eve of Thanksgiving 1978, when, adrift, having reluctantly left two young children behind in Springs, she took me in.
Thanks to her generous spirit and to her wry good humor, I was quickly made to feel at home. Being a fellow Aquarian sealed the deal, but she embraced everyone within her purview — all children, whether hers or someone else’s, highbrows, lowbrows . . . everyone. Her house, the Riding Club, where Jackie Kennedy had once changed into and out of riding outfits — in the north bedroom allotted to me, I think, and for a pittance throughout my stay — was a lively place, much as the big verandaed house on Pudding Hill Lane, where I’d spent a few weeks one summer while our house in Springs was being rented, had been. She would have liked to have remained in that big house her mother owned on the way to Main Beach forever, but it was not to be.
While far smaller than Pudding Hill — though just as cold in the winter — the Riding Club, where you risked incineration should you inch back too far into its walk-in fireplace — did not diminish her spirit, however, one in which arch humor and reverence were about equally mixed, explaining perhaps her love for the theater and for the Episcopal Church. Because of her wide acquaintance — in her ambit were the Maidstone Club’s Old Guard, theater people, and Bonackers — she knew East Hampton well, perhaps better than anyone I’ve known, and loved it unflaggingly.
We always put our best feet forward when together, in good times and bad, knitting up the raveled sleave of care as best we could — often with the aid of that Gallo Hearty Burgundy she liked. During my five-year interregnum there were deaths, in her family and mine, not to mention our broken marriages, yet we survived.
Which reminds me of the Gloria Gaynor song that I’m pretty sure I brought with me to the Riding Club, and to which we all danced and sang along: “Oh no, not I, I will survive / Oh, as long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive. . . . I will survive, I will survive. . . .”
And I did, because of her.