New York - The Novel

to the counting house,” he roared back. “Don’t wait up.”
    And moments later, he was striding out of Gramercy Park. Only when he was halfway down Irving Place did he slow his pace and allow himself half a smile.
    It had gone just as he planned.

    Mary gazed out at the ocean. The breeze made a faint, rasping whisper on the tufts of seagrass behind her, and played with her hair. The low rolls of surf broke with a light hiss, as they sent their spume to lick the sand.
    Miles away to the west, they could see the low rise of Staten Island’s southern shore. Ahead, between the two outer arms of the Lower Bay, lay the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.
    “Let’s go to the Point,” said Gretchen.
    It was Saturday morning. Most of the weekend visitors had yet to arrive, and there were only a few people on the long expanse of beach.Since the 1820s, when a shell road had been made across the creek between Coney Island and the mainland, people had been making Sunday excursions to its long dunes and ocean beaches. But it was still a peaceful place.
    In the middle of Coney Island, a hamlet of small clapboard hotels and inns catered to the respectable families who came to enjoy a week or two of ocean air and quiet. A few celebrities, like Herman Melville, Jenny Lind and Sam Houston, had come to visit, but otherwise the fashionable world had not taken it up and so the place retained its discreet charm. Once people did discover Coney Island, they usually returned. The half-dozen families staying in the inn that Gretchen and Mary occupied came there every year.
    They’d eaten a hearty breakfast of eggs, pancakes and sausages out on the broad porch that ran along the front of the inn, before they set out for a walk.
    The island’s western point was the only place on Coney Island where vulgarity raised its head. Some years back, a pair of sharp-eyed men had come out and decided to open a small pleasure pavilion there, so that when people came off the ferry, they could find refreshments and amusements. By midsummer, nowadays, a collection of card sharps, tricksters and other undesirables had made the place their own. The people at the hotel pretended it wasn’t there—and indeed, you could neither see nor hear it from the hamlet. But Gretchen and Mary were quite content to spend half an hour watching the men who sold candy or offered the three-card trick.
    Next, they walked round the landward side of the island until they came to the shell road.
    If you looked from Manhattan across the East River nowadays, you’d conclude that Brooklyn was a busy place. There were the shipyards on the waterfront, the warehouses and factories along the shore, and the residential city that had grown up on Brooklyn Heights. When the British redcoats had camped there in 1776, Brooklyn had less than two thousand inhabitants. Now there were more than a hundred thousand. Why, there was even talk of laying out a fine public space, to be called Prospect Park, up on the high ground. But once you got past the Heights, you came down to a great sweep of open countryside, extending half a dozen miles or more, and dotted with small towns and Dutch hamlets that had hardly changed since the eighteenth century.
    As she looked back along the shell road, therefore, across the open breezy tracts of sand dune, marsh and farmland toward the invisible city, Mary couldn’t help remarking, with a smile: “We might be in another world.”
    After that, they crossed again to the ocean side and walked eastward along the great stretches of Brighton Beach, drinking in the sea air, for upward of an hour. By the time they returned to the inn, it was past noon, and they were quite hungry.
    “Don’t eat too much now,” said Gretchen, “or you’ll fall asleep.”
    “I don’t care if I do,” said Mary. And she laughed, and helped herself to a second slice of apple pie, and made Gretchen take another slice too. There were cane chairs on the grass in front of the inn, so they sat in those for a while. The breeze had dropped, and they covered their faces with straw hats because of the hot sun.
    And some time passed before Gretchen said to Mary, “I have another surprise for you,” and Mary asked, “What’s that?” and Gretchen said, “Come upstairs, and I’ll show you.”
    Their bedroom was charming. It had two beds with pink covers, and a window that looked toward the sea. The walls were painted white, but there was a pretty picture of flowers hanging in a