Here’s what I remember: I must have been nine or ten years old. The family, my mother and father, from Brookline, had spent some time on the Cape, in Falmouth Heights. My mother – her name was Zina – was a strict disciplinarian and humorless. My dad, Frank, was a darling man and I adored him.
Suddenly I found myself on a ferry. We had left Woods Hole. I was fascinated by the gulls that circled above. I remember coming into the Vineyard Haven harbor and the sound of clanging, the rattling of the gears as the gangplank was lowered.
When we finally got off we walked along Main Street in Vineyard Haven to the Rabbit House at the corner of Main Street and Tashmoo. Vineyard Haven looked almost exactly like it looks today. We had rented rooms on the second floor of the Rabbit House, and took our meals at Tashmoo Inn, which is right next door, where the Montessori School is now. When I take my grandchildren up Main Street today, I tell them, “This is where I first stayed.”
We used to go swimming down the road toward the Styrons’ house by the yacht club. I remember I had water wings. And I simply fell in love with it. We didn’t stay a long time, maybe a week or two. We couldn’t afford more. Was that long enough to make an impression? You’re damn right.
But then I started going to summer camps in New Hampshire and Maine – Boy Scout camps – for eight weeks each summer with my brother, Irving Wallace. So I didn’t go back to the Vineyard for a long time. Then, this must have been in 1940 or 1941 – a long time ago – I was with my daughter, Pauline, and my wife, whose name was Lorraine. We were going to the Cape, Provincetown, Truro, and it was my daughter who said, “Let’s go see Martha’s Vineyard. C’mon. Let’s do it.”
We knew friends there; I knew Artie Buchwald. I barely knew the Styrons, but I felt as though somehow it would be like coming home. I knew it was the right place for me to be. When we first came back to the Vineyard we stayed at the Harborside [Inn] in Edgartown. It was absolutely fascinating to me to live on the water. . . . We had those balconies and we’d look out at the boats coming in and out – oh, my!
Pauline was midway through high school and those were the days when you could walk around and explore. The Kafe was a restaurant on the left side going down toward the Edgartown Yacht Club; it doesn’t exist now, but that was where we’d always go.
After that, we rented homes in Edgartown for our vacations. We stayed on School Street for several years. Then it became apparent to me that I preferred Vineyard Haven because my pals, the people I cared about, were over there: Artie and Ann Buchwald – they rented for a long time and then finally bought a house – Bill and Rose, the Lucy and Sheldon Hackneys, and Beverly Sills. We rented all over the place.
That’s where Mary and I were married – in a rented house just outside town in Vineyard Haven. Mary and I had been old friends, like cousins. Her late husband Ted Yates and I had been partners. I remember going to the airport and met her coming off the plane when she first flew in from Naples, Florida. Two weeks into the visit, a little romance developed. Until then we’d been like cousins.
We were married under an apple tree. At the wedding were the Buchwalds – Artie’s late wife Ann, a darling, and Mary were friends – the Styrons, the Hackneys, Mary’s kids, Pauline and her husband. A small family wedding, June 1986.
During the summers Artie and I would take walks together. We used to walk a lot. And Bill Styron would walk with us too, because we were all simultaneously suffering from depression. We called ourselves the Blues Brothers. One day we were walking up toward West Chop and as we went past the cemetery, Artie said, “Listen. They’re selling cemetery plots here for $500 apiece. Perpetual care. I bought a couple of plots. And you love the Vineyard.”
I said, “You know something, Artie? I’m going to get some plots for the family.”
Then I said, “You know how I feel about the Vineyard. Let’s say I’m buried over here. What would be a proper epitaph for me?”
We were kidding.
And he said, “I’ve got it. ‘Here lies Mike Wallace. He was always a renter.’” Come on, to own a piece of property here....We bought a house in six months, Kingman Brewster’s house. It was kind of a tumbledown house. But the porch was there, the sailors’ bethel, the trees, the waterfront. The kitchen was from 1880 and hadn’t been touched. So we decided to tear all that down and put in a second story – two bedrooms and two baths. We spent a month there the first summer, the month of July. Back then, I was doing 60 Minutes, I would get about four weeks and when I wasn’t traveling, I would come up. Mary stayed all summer. And then came the children, the stepchildren, and the grandchildren. It became a big family event every summer.
Even as I talk I can see it and smell it and feel it. It’s a special, insular, quiet, healing, glorious place. And year after year after year, you not only see your kids and grandchildren grow, but you see everybody else’s kids, the same people, grow. There’s a strange continuity to life on the Vineyard.
And when the sun slants down from behind the house in the summer and you see the ferries coming by and the boats looking golden in the sunset, and you’re looking at the Sound – Mary and I sit there on the porch and how lucky could we be?
Just yesterday I was thinking, Gee, it’s January: January, February, March, April, May, the Vineyard.
