GLR July-August 2024

light was enough. In The Last Puritan , Santayana writes: “There was a subtle satisfaction in hiding in the open, and feeling what a deep secret might lie hidden in things perfectly innocent and published to the world. You might lead a double life without du plicity; indeed, you must, if you had any inner life at all; for about the important things you always had to be silent.” § S ANTAYANA ’ SNOVEL , in which hymns to the beauty of male bod ies are scattered among high-minded philosophical discussions, may be an apt corollary to summers on Tuckernuck. There, men of differing social backgrounds and from all gradations along the Kinsey scale found a place where they could stand naked be fore God and everybody, free to grin or to gawk or perhaps even to grope (if done discreetly, and always by mutual consent). Bigelow made sure there was a careful balance on Tuckernuck between hedonism and decorum, between refined taste and boy ish rough-housing, with each man allowed (within limits) to be have as his nature prompted him. The only inviolable rule on Tuckernuck was that one dressed in black tie at dinner. Charles Warren Stoddard wrote of an evening on Tuckernuck that in many ways encapsulates the spell that Sturgis Bigelow was able to cast, Prospero-like, on his enchanted isle. The host had retreated outside to meditate alone, as he did every evening after dinner, and his guests were lounging around the cottage in dinner jackets, reading or perhaps smoking pipes and sipping aged cognac—a scene that belongs in a Merchant-Ivory film. Suddenly Bigelow appeared in the doorway and called out: “Let us botanize!” In his hand he held an odd flowering tree branch, which he carried over to one of the tables and placed in a vase, bathed in a golden pool of lamplight. The gentlemen gathered around in wonder. “The petals were enormous and of unusual pattern,” Stoddard recalled, “the edges barbed and fringed, the centre embellished with arabesques. Sometimes they seemed to us like bits of rich brocade or tapestry, sometimes like panels of stained glass with the sunshine streaming through; again they were emblazoned with jewels; always more beautiful than pen can paint.” What was it, they wondered—a type of mimosa, per haps? And then one of the flowers began to move. And then an other. One by one the blossoms rose up from the branch and began to flutter around the room. “[T]he air was filled with but terflies balancing daintily upon the wing, lighting here and there for a moment and then flitting again. Finally, for their own sakes, we guided them to open doors and windows and they disap peared in the night. All that was left to us was the memory of something fairylike and hardly to be believed.” The gentlemen in their black ties and their starched shirt fronts, with their sore muscles and their sunburned noses, knew that they had shared a moment of pure magic. In August 1909, Henry and Bay Lodge were staying on Tuckernuck in Bigelow’s absence. Bay, though only 35 years old, had been experiencing heart arrhythmia for some time, and the family hoped a long rest on the island might cure him. But he suffered an acute case of ptomaine poisoning after eating a tainted clam, and the rigors of the attack proved too much for his weakened heart. He died in his father’s arms. With the death of the Golden Boy, the idyll of Tuckanuck came to an end. Bigelow closed down the house immediately and did not reopen it for the 1910 season. For years he had been

watching the sea slowly eat away at the property and had recorded the relentless disappearance of his safe haven. In 1904: “very heavy surf ... 6 to 10 feet cut off the bank.” Then: “The last of the road around Robert’s lot went, leaving about a foot to squeeze by on.” And finally, in 1909: “About 70 feet of bank cut off. Charley Brooks gives it eight years to the corner of the tennis court. I guess six.” When Bigelow died in 1926 he left the property to the La Farge family. The sea continued its relent less assault until, nearly two decades after acquiring Bigelow’s estate, the La Farge heirs relocated his library collection and parts of the house to another part of the island and demolished what remained. Today the whole of what was once Sturgis Bigelow’s private retreat is submerged beneath Nantucket Sound. On Tuckernuck, piping plovers and roseate terns still cry overhead, salt-spray roses still bloom among the seagrass, and waves still eat at the shoreline, changing its contours with every storm. Bright stars crowd the night sky as the wind rustles dead leaves along the deserted paths of the oak forest. Nothing hints that once there was a special island where, on a warm summer evening, gentle men in black tie chased butterflies by lamplight. R EFERENCES Reed, Christopher. Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and West ern Masculinities . Columbia University Press, 2017. Santayana, George. The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel . Scribner’s Sons, 1936. Shand-Tucci, Douglass. Boston Bohemia, 1881-1900 . University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.

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