The Lucky Ones by Anna Godbersen

Author:Anna Godbersen [Godbersen, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061962707
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

14

THE STORM MADE LANDFALL AFTER MIDNIGHT, although by then most people were indoors. On the east end of the island, windows had been boarded up and the electricity shut down. The old two-lane road that ran back toward the city was impassable, and many of the houses that had been built close to the shore or in low-lying areas were flooded. Trees had been ripped out and tossed around and woke up in new positions with their roots exposed. Very little business was done in the places that made a nightly mint selling illegal liquor, although there were a few, in Manhattan, where people were forced to stay all night and the reserve stocks were completely wiped out, and everyone present left with shameful smiles and forever after asked new acquaintances where they’d been during the hurricane of ’29.

The famous pilot Max Darby and the bootlegger’s daughter Cordelia Gray watched the storm come and go from the mostly empty ballroom of the Grand Marina Lodge out at Montauk, whose seaplane Max had borrowed to scoop her up. He had done aerial exhibitions for them when they first opened, he explained, and the manager had remained a friend, even after Max’s patron dropped him. That, plus the fact that they still owed him for the last time he had scrawled a marriage proposal for one of their important visitors in the sky, had gotten him the use of the plane—plus a dinner of fried clams, which they’d eaten off red-and-white paper plates on the beach before the real rain arrived. Most of the guests got out in time, before the electricity was shut off and the last ice shipment started to melt. The staff were forced to eat the oysters, which otherwise would have gone bad; they did it with a cheerful sense of duty and brought out old stores of white wine to wash them down.

The band had stayed, and their playing got louder as night gave in to morning and the chambermaids started dancing with napkins on their heads. They could see the waves beating against the rocky shore, and the dark clouds charging toward them from the south, but to Max and Cordelia none of it seemed to hold any real threat. They sat side by side in low-slung canvas chairs that usually lived on the deck, and they held hands through the storm and drank cola. Later, the staff of the lodge grew sentimental and began telling each other sweet lies. The band played slow, and Cordelia convinced Max to stand up with her.

“I can’t dance at all,” he told her four or five times, before she put his hands in place and rested her head against his shoulder. He couldn’t, that much was true, but she didn’t mind. She liked just moving vaguely to the music in his arms.

By dawn the storm had passed. The shore was strewn with wreckage, but the sky was a delicate pink where the sun nudged against the pale gray. The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.