Twenty-One, by Dan Marsh

When my aunt bought land in Springs in 1962, she put her own aunt’s name on the deed, “just in case.” The house she had built was about as basic as could have then been made: single-pane glass windows, uninsulated attic, water heater rusting in a crawl space.

God the family had fun there.

My aunt’s aunt, Tante Anna, taught us to play cards, a game called 21. This was what casinos call blackjack. Tante (she went by that name to us, as she was the only Tante who mattered to my brothers, sisters, and me) would sell pennies to us so we could play cards after supper at night. Five pennies a hand.

In those days in the Town of East Hampton, there was no cable television. If you had a TV, like us, with rabbit ears, there was only one station to pull in, WTNH from New Haven, Conn. (The reception didn’t come in that well despite aluminum foil decorating the antennas.) When I think about it, that was probably a favor. One late night I started to watch the movie “A Summer Place,” which has a memorable musical theme but may be the worst film ever made. The signal from WTNH got worse and worse as the clock ticked toward 1 a.m. I stuck it out to the end. I am sorry I did.

Card playing was better, though it seemed that Tante always won. I see her in my mind’s eye sweeping a pile of pennies into a beaded purse, many of the coins formerly mine. This hurt a little bit extra because she was at her age what I would have called old, but nonetheless had a dazzling smile as she did the deed.

Tante had taught us to play fairly. Draw on 16. Stick on 17, 18, 19. It just seemed that luck always went her way. Her old hand kept sweeping in the pennies. My brother and I speculated that she cheated. But we could never catch her at it. She taught me a German word. On the rare occasion that she had 16 and drew a king or queen she would bitterly say “futsch,” which means “busted,” “gone,” “vanished,” or “kaput.”

There were a lot of children at the table who learned to mutter “futsch.”

The Hamptons weren’t “The Hamptons” then. We were in the country. My father bought us used bicycles for $3 apiece. My brothers, sisters, and I rode to Daniel T. Miller’s store and split a Coke.

Tante is long gone now, but here’s one more bit.

Sometimes we would walk across the street to watch the sun set over Gardiner’s Bay. For a while a house was being built there. I guess now one would call it a McMansion. Once we were there and a man pulled up in a long white Cadillac. He looked like a bad writer’s version of a Hollywood director with a scarf tossed around his neck in the middle of summer and boots pulled over his pants. He came to where we were standing on the bluff and said, “May I ask who you are and what are you doing here?”

Tante had had polio as a child and one of her legs was a good eight inches shorter than the other. She walked with a cane. She picked up the cane and pointed it at the man’s chest. “We are watching the sun set,” she said. “We’ll leave if it does.”

I felt like I hit 21.

Dan Marsh writes from Garrett Park, Md.