Ghost of a Storm

By Chris Genute

Ghost of a Storm is a gothic love story that spans almost a century. The story revolves around a magnificent Stanford White mansion that stands over the cliffs in Montauk, NY. On September 21, 1938, Montauk was devastated by a nor’easter. The Stanford White Mansions in Montauk, as well as the Manor, were among the few structures that remained standing after the storm. Lynn has been invited to house sit for a mansion in Montauk. The fact that she is beautiful, talented, and smart is unfortunate for her because she is the exact prototype that her anti-hero, Sonya, has been waiting to end for a long time. Lynn will need to evolve emotionally and spiritually before she can meet the powerful challenges that are coming her way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662919022

Book preview

Chapter 1

It was circa 1969 and all was still good in the world or at least here in the ol’ USA. The post-war prosperity blossomed into a very consumer-oriented society. Honesty and trust in one’s fellow man was still a standard by which most people still lived by. Nader was making sure that no monopolies were hoodwinking anyone. In addition, you could flip the news channels on the TV and pretty much get the same spin on what was going on in the world and awards were given for the most objective reporting. If there was good and evil in the world, Americans certainly thought they were the good guys.

It was at this time that Lynn was driving out to Montauk, for a much-needed vacation. Lynn was a young and idealistic artist, who lived in the Soho area of NYC in a loft on Prince Street where there were many galleries. She was in a good place in her life and felt that the world was a place that she could handle on her own. She had worked very hard to get to where she was in life, and she was following her own goals.

Lynn was surprised that she was not tired at all when she finally entered the small dirt road at the end of Ditch Plains in Montauk and continued as the directions described. She had started out fairly early, but the ride still took about four and a half hours with all the traffic from Manhattan. It was Friday night at about ten p.m. on July 22. The road meandered left and right and cut through high scrub bushes that lined either side of the path, until it reached the top of a hill where the Stanford White House seemed to tower above the landscape. The house overlooked a cliff with an ocean view below it. The famous architect had been commissioned at the end of the 1800s to build three summer cottages looking over the cliffs and bluffs. They were called the Montauk Point Association. She could not believe her eyes when she saw how big the house actually was. They considered this a cottage?

Montauk was the so-called the end of the road. It lay at the very east tip of Long Island. It had been formed by gigantic glaciers at the end of the last ice age that deposited a peninsular of rich topsoil at the foot of its trail. As a result, grazing and farming had always been viable and productive industries for this area. Lynn had passed many corn and potato farms lining both sides of Route 27 almost as soon as she exited from the Long Island Expressway.

She approached Montauk by a long stretch of a heavily wooded, two-lane highway. That’s if you took the high road. The landscape looked very much like a cross between a Grant Wood painting with lollipop trees and a lonely stretch of trees by Edward Hopper with no sign of civilization for miles. Then there was the low road which was the beautiful Old Montauk Highway which hugged the beach all the way from Bridge Hampton. Many mansions were passed along the way, with white swans gliding along pristine ponds.

After reaching the main part of town in Montauk, it took all of ten minutes for Lynn to reach the other end. Then, the road climbed again to higher ground where Lake Montauk formed a protective environment for both private and commercial seacraft, with the mouth of the lake fed by the ocean like a womb. Further on lay Oyster Pond to the north and the cliffs above the beach on the southern part of the island. The state park reserve and some old and abandoned army lookout bases (complete with old canons) continued after the Association houses. The state park land stretched out to the point where the lighthouse stood. Young people often walked the long stretch of beach or followed the cliffs above for about a half mile to a cove. This was a surfer haven where the waves broke high and was far enough away from civilization for nude bathing.

The house belonged to the Donahues, or Ds, as everyone called Donna and David. They had been suddenly called off to Europe. In the past five years, the Ds were Lynn’s biggest clients and bought many of her paintings. Over time, they had become great friends. Incredibly, they had recently asked her to do them a favor by house-sitting for the summer. They assured her that the gardens and upkeep were already arranged for, and they merely wanted a warm body of someone they trusted to be seen coming and going in order to show it was occupied. She knew they had an alarm system, and she was convinced this was their way of giving her a much-needed break from the city that they knew she’d never take on her own. They had cleared a back-room library of all its furniture so that she had an adequate space in which to paint. Friends like this you don’t find every day.

Lynn left her bags in the car and took her only significant other, Smokey, out of the back seat. Smokey was a gray, stray male cat that had followed her home one night in SoHo. As she held him, she walked up the front steps to a wonderful white columned porch that decorated the front of the house with very large potted, red geraniums placed on either side of the columns. The geraniums looked black in the moonlit night.

As she entered the large receiving room, there was a walk-in fireplace to the left of the room and an archway to the right. Through the archway one entered a dining room with a twelve-foot long, mahogany table that looked capable of feeding a small banquet of at least twenty people. The light entered the room from four casement windows that stood tall from floor to ceiling. What struck her was how amazing it must have been to view the exceptionally large fireplace through the archway from the dining room. Stanford White, she was sure, had planned it that way.

To the left of the fireplace was a solid oak door that entered a high-walled library that also had a fireplace and was surrounded by large, high windows that went from the floor to a foot or so from the trimmed ceiling.

On the right side of the large fireplace in the back was another living room with another fireplace and windows all around. She saw that most of the furniture had been cleared in this second library. The rugs were rolled up and a large tarp covered the inlaid wood floor, so she had a place to paint indoors. The light would be just wonderful during the day in there, she could tell. Well, yes! she thought to herself. She found this to be quite an adventure. The Ds had thought of everything for her.

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Chapter 2

Lynn had lived in NYC these past ten years. After graduating from Pratt Institute, she became one of the thousands of starry-eyed artists who came to NYC to carve their name in the Big Apple. Lynn knew she was talented and smart. She had a dancer’s figure and with her clear, fine complexion and dark, lustrous hair, she could be very attractive. She had faith in herself and always knew she wanted to be a painter. She was drawn to traditional and romantic styles of painting, but could not relate to the avant-garde and commercial derivatives of Andy Warhol, the coldness of cubism and over-simplification of Paul Klee or Mondrian. She could understand the intellectual progression of it all but then she didn’t have to live with them on her walls. She was tired of professionals and pseudo-experts dictating what the latest flavor in fine art should be.

After a number of years at odd jobs and hitting what seemed to be a few zillion galleries with slides of her work, she had finally found a few of good caliber, that wanted to sponsor her paintings. Most established galleries at that time preferred to take male artists into their stables. It was feared that a woman would eventually marry and have children and therefore interfere with the dedication of the artist.

Lynn had started with some co-op galleries run by artists but found that the shows were never given serious coverage by the art magazines. Once she was accepted by those few galleries that catered to the traditional and figurative styles, she was also able to find an agent as her work began to sell. But this took time, because it was not an easy task to find a topnotch gallery or an