about 2 hours
drive from Manhattan. Actually it’s 2 hours when you leave at 2 in the morning. Any
other time there will be so much traffic on the LIE (that’s the Long Island
Expressway, also known as the largest parking lot in the world) it really takes like FOUR
hours. And don’t even TRY to get there if you leave Manhattan on a Friday afternoon
in the summer unless you have a helicopter. So why is everyone in the WORLD (that is the New York world) trying to get to Southampton? Because it is THE place in the summer. Actually, the whole HAMPTON thing is pretty much THE PLACE. That includes Westhampton, East Hampton, Bridgehampton, and Hampton Bays (You really have to stretch it to include Hampton Bays, but, then, I’m a snob.). Still, Southampton is THE HAMPTON-est of the HAMPTONS. Totally OLD GUARD. All the houses are HUGE and EXPENSIVE especially the ones that are right on the water. They are usually surrounded by tall (I mean 10-feet tall) privet hedges, and there are a lot of big estates with private drives so you can’t see anybody’s house from the road. We lived on a big estate, but I’ll get to that later.
So then there’s the whole New-York-Country-House-Thing. New Yorkers mostly live in apartments. Sometimes the apartments are pretty nice, but a lot of people have a country house, too. Country houses, I guess, can be anywhere, but people usually have them in Westchester County, Connecticut, New Jersey and Long Island. The north shore of Long Island, Connecticut and Westchester are really nice if you like the country/horse thing. New Jersey and Long Island have real beaches on the ocean. (You mostly summer in New Jersey because you HAVE to, not because you want to; but, as I have said, I’m a snob.)
We were lucky because my grandparents, who are now dead, had a house on an estate in Southampton. It was RIGHT on the water. My grandmother left my father the house because Dad wanted that and left my Uncle Jim a bunch of money because he wanted THAT. I think we got the better end of the deal. The house had twenty rooms, a guest house and a quarter mile of private beach front. It was really cool. It had dumbwaiters, and secret doors in the paneling, and an upper garden and a lower garden. And my Mom had JUST finished redecorating. Every year we left in the fall I would go around saying goodbye to the house and hoping it wouldn’t be lonely. And every year when we came back, I went from room to room saying hello again.