R. A. Scotti - Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938  

Copyright 2003 by Chapter & Verse, Ink.

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First eBook Edition: December 2008

We Have Seen the Wind, from Collected Poems 19301993 by May Sarton. Copyright 1993, 1988, 1984, 1980, 1974 by May Sarton.

Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

ISBN: 978-0-316-05478-2

also by R. A. Scotti

The Kiss of Judas

The Devils Own

The Hammers Eye

Cradle Song

For Love of Sarah (as Angelica Scott)

Lal,
to your bright eyes

The noontide sun, calld forth the mutinous winds, And twixt the green sea and the azurd vault Set roaring war.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Gone with the Wind

J uly 14, 1938, was a scorcher 90 in the shade, air like pond scum. At New Yorks Floyd Bennett Airfield, men in shirtsleeves and loosened ties, jackets slung over their shoulders, fanned themselves with their straw hats. Women pinned up their hair to get it off their necks and shimmied their skirts to stir up a breeze. Anticipation was so keen that in the midst of the Great Depression, thousands had spent precious fuel to drive to Queens. When the sun dipped over Jamaica Bay, they still held their places, pressed against the wire fences along the runway. Maybe there was nothing else to hold on to, no work, no prospects, and nothing better to do that day. Maybe they wanted to say they were part of history. Or maybe theyd given up on their own dream and were grabbing on to the kite tail of somebody elses. New York bookies were giving even odds this one would come true, and even money is better than no chance at all.

At eighteen minutes after seven, a lanky young man shambled onto the runway, stride unhurried, shoulders hunched, eyes on his scuffed shoes, his lucky hat a battered brown felt fedora set a little rakishly. The way he walked to his plane, he could have been going to the corner for a two-cent newspaper instead of embarking on an aerial argosy to challenge Charles Lindberghs transatlantic record. From Paris, he planned to keep on flying, around the top of the world, faster than anyone had ever flown. The silver wing of the Lockheed was burnished gold in the setting sun. He climbed into the cockpit, slid open the window, and waved, one quick awkward motion.

The big monoplane sixty-five feet from wingtip to wingtip lumbered down the runway, its huge aluminum belly filled with 1,500 tons of flammable fuel. Any glitch and it could explode as the Hindenburg did the month before in New Jersey. Lifting over Long Island, he turned the plane and followed the Sound. In his breast pocket was a note from his girl, promising an answer when he returned.

From the pier in Fenwick, an exclusive seaside enclave that curls around Old Saybrook, Connecticut, a slender redhead watched the darkening sky. Over the sound of the sea came a distant purr that deepened into a roar. A silver bullet shot out of the west. Katharine Hepburn began waving both arms over her head. The Lockheed streaked along the Connecticut shore, dipped a wing over the Fenwick pier, then headed out across the Atlantic. She waved until the sky was empty.

Hepburns affair with the dashing young pilot Howard Hughes was as romantic as a Hollywood movie. Hughes wanted to marry her and he was flying around the world, 14,716 miles over some of the roughest, most remote terrain, waiting for her answer. Actress and aviator were two of a kind handsome, high-spirited, and iron-willed. He called her the most totally magnetic woman in the entire world. She said their affair was sheer heaven! I was madly in love with him, and he about me.

In the summer of 38, Hughes was the more famous of the two. At thirty-three, he was one of the richest, most glamorous bachelors in America. Hepburns career was in free-fall. Declared box office poison by the press after seven straight flops, she had bought out her studio contract and moved home to her familys summer retreat on the Connecticut shore.

If Hepburn was daunted, she didnt let on. The movie version of Gone With the Wind was going into production, and she had set her sights on playing Scarlett OHara. The quintessential Connecticut Yankee playing the ultimate Confederate belle might seem incongruous, but Hepburn identified with Scarlett. The Fenwick house was her Tara.

Hepburn was author Margaret Mitchells first choice for the role, and director George Cukor was squarely in Kates corner. But producer David O. Selznick wanted a Scarlett with sex appeal, and he didnt think Hepburn, all angles and arrogance, had any. Frankly, my dear, he would tell her, I cant see Rhett Butler chasing you for twelve years.

By the time Hepburn received his ultimate rejection, it was the end of September and Fenwick, like Tara, was gone with the wind.

A Perfect Day

A t the tail end of the bleakest summer in memory, weeks as gray as weathered shingles and drenching downpours, September 21 arrived in southern New England like a gift from the gods. The surf was spectacular, the best of the season long breakers rolling in, crescendos of sparkling foam, the water temperature surprisingly warm, and no pesky seagulls to swoop off with lunch. Silky cirrus threaded across a pastel sky, and the tang of salt was on the hot air, the air itself motionless, as if time had paused to savor the moment. For vacationers lingering after Labor Day, this was the reprise they had hoped for a last perfect beach day.

The morning began softly on Narragansett Bay just the flat, steady slap of the sea against the wooden hulls of the fishing boats easing out of the harbors of Rhode Island at first light. Through a thin morning fog, the sun was a silver-white dollar, promising a bright day. The beam from the Beavertail lighthouse at the southern tip of Jamestown Island guided the boats out. The gooselike honk of the lighthouse horn and the random shout of one fisherman to another carried across the water. Otherwise, the bay was strangely silent. No gulls trailed the wakes, calling to one another and diving for breakfast. There was no birdsong at all.

Carl Chellis, the lightkeeper, was up with the dawn, watching the boats glide out. There were swordfish boats, forty- or fifty-footers with long pulpits and high lookouts so they could sneak up on their catch, and big trawlers, holds packed with ice, crews curled up in the cabins or sprawled on deck sleeping off the night before. Striped bass and blues, the catch of weekend fishermen, were running off Block Island, so plentiful you could almost lean over the side of the boats and scoop them up. But the big trawlers were in the hard, dirty business of commercial fishing. They bottom fished, dragging for halibut, skate, cod, haddock, flounder, the white fish served at the meatless Friday supper tables of Catholic families throughout the Northeast. The old-guard Yankees were becoming a minority in southern New England. Irish, Italian, and Portuguese immigrants were changing the demographics and politics of the larger cities.