Old Money: Cliff Walk, Rhode Island

Seeing as we’re all collectively watching the sun set on something (a dream, a delusion, a dirge), it seemed fitting to have the opportunity to visit the hollow white elephants that line Newport’s shore, tombstones to the dawn of America’s first Gilded Age, back when mansions had monikers: the Breakers, Marble House, Rosecliff, Kingscote. Names that feel soft and sensual on the tongue, like salt-water taffy.

As we strolled along manicured lawns, we smelled the fading hydrangeas and touched the cold marble, all while yachts yawned in the breeze.

The water was perturbingly placid. Sitting on the horizon, the collage of windswept triangles recalled the toy sailboats I used to play with in the bathtub, or was that someone else’s memory?

I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Evelyn Waugh, Edith Wharton, and TS Eliot—the great writers of glamour and decay.

But it was one wry line from Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady—which I first read with my friends Katherine and Liz—that managed to crack my increasingly dower mien: “Money is horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.”

I was surprised by how confusing, how affecting the experience was. As my mood soured, my eyes lit up. The familiar embrace of the noonday demon seized my heart, my mind came alive: furiously attempting to quantify, like a desperate accountant filing back taxes, the years of human effort that went into erecting these gilded halls, which suddenly looked like mirrors. Don’t we all want to live in Xanadu?

I was overwhelmed by the scale, the gargantuan undertaking required to build these modern mausoleums: the craftspeople employed, the shipping crates loaded, the designers commissioned.

“We don’t build things like this any more,” was all I could muster, wondering if that was something worth mourning.

I watched the waves break on the eastern shore, listening, looking for signs of Eliot’s manatees in the surf, as I allowed my favorite line of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to call me back to the sea:

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think they will sing to me.”