Night Mares in the Hamptons by Celia Jerome Page A

galleries and gourmet farmers’ markets and antique stores.
    Springs had no central business district, just a strip mall and a scattering of necessities, like a liquor store and a pizza parlor.
    Sag Harbor was almost a restoration village, with tiny shops and houses dating from its old whaling days.
    Of course those are all short subjective opinions, without going into the natural beauty of each place or its cultural offerings or its family neighborhoods. I had friends in all of them and appreciated what they had to offer. None of them looked or felt like home. New York City still had my heart—and my legal voting address, resident taxes, and rent-controlled apartment—but little Paumanok Harbor had grown on me. Like a jack-and-the-beanstalk vine, giants and all. Fee-fi-fo-fum.
    Paumanok Harbor wasn’t on the ocean, wasn’t on the tourist route, didn’t have a lot of motels or summer homes. Too much of the Harbor was unbuildable wetlands or town-owned preserves to be part of the Hamptons land rush and building boom of the last couple of decades. There were some new McMansions, but the monstrous eyesores were mostly scattered up wooded drives or on five-acre lots. The majority of houses and land and small farms like my grandmother’s were still in the hands of the descendants of the early English settlers. Witches and warlocks all, it was rumored, fleeing oppression everywhere else.
    They built up their new settlement like many New England towns, with a grassy commons in the middle, houses close together facing the center square, with a school at one end and a church at the other. Unlike other communities, the church was an afterthought, more for effect and public opinion than praying. These immigrants had way different beliefs, but they needed to conform to the neighboring towns.
    Now stores and offices had replaced many of the old houses facing the square, and a much larger school had been built two blocks north. The library was in the old school building, refurbished, of course, and the handsome new community center and art building extended the central business district by another block east past the commons. The town offices, firehouse, and police station were on the next street, between the school’s playing fields and the parking lots. The one gas station and the bowling alley popped up one block south of the village square.
    Restaurants and bars and bait shops were strewn here and there throughout the village borders, but most of the necessities were right here on Main Street. The bare necessities, that was, for mail, groceries, coffee, house paint and Band-Aids. Some were located in the front rooms or lower levels of private houses, like Janie’s Beauty Parlor and Martha’s real estate office. Others were in a hodgepodge of styles, old wood, brick, stone, shingles, modern glass. Town planning hadn’t been a big thing until it was too late, but at least the business area hadn’t sprouted golden arches or luxury latte shops. Not yet, anyway.
    Paumanok Harbor had incorporated decades ago, freeing it from East Hampton Township rules, but forcing it to keep its own police department and zoning board and bookkeepers. Taxes were high; independence was priceless, especially for the odd ducks in this particular pond.
    When I had to spend summers here with my family, I thought the place was a boring backwater blight with ingrown, insular, ill-adjusted residents. The Harbor seemed stuck in the past, with no interest in improving or attracting more business or entertaining the people it already had. After the city, where we really lived, it was deader than a graveyard.
    Now I appreciated how the pace wasn’t as fast and the faces in the shops were familiar and usually friendly. Paumanok Harbor had Character, as well as characters.
    I drove my mother’s Outback into the school parking lot. She’d left the car at the airport, but one of her friends drove it back for me.