Let Me Finish (10 page)

The keeper I asked for, I believe, was Ditmars' first assistant, John Toomey, whom I actually had engaged in a few Sunday afternoon conversations as he stood with folded arms beside the door to his sanctum. But no, Mr. Toomey wasn't in today, Kim and I were told. We must have looked stricken because the man at the door, a youngish fellow with an Irish air to him, now opened the door wider and waved us in. "What've you got in the blanket?" he asked. Within minutes, Humphrey was stretched out on a white-topped metal table and the young keeper, bending close,
had plucked off the offending eye-scale with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into my palm. "There you go," he said. "Good idea you came." He asked about Humphrey's age and feeding habits, and made sure that there was always a water dish in his cage. "Excellent specimen," he said, and with our permission eased Humphrey into a snowy white cotton collecting bag and knotted the neck. "Come again" he said, shaking our hands.

Outside, Kim and I reverted in three seconds from boy scientists to boys, shrieking and cavorting down the paths, dancing past the camels and cassowaries, and whirling Humphrey (in his bag) in circles around our heads. This continued through our homeward bound trip on the subway, where we told the story of our scientific errand again and again to ourselves, laughing in the half-empty train. We were so full of it all that we almost missed our stop at Ninety-sixth Street and only at the last second remembered—somebody yelled after us as the doors were beginning to close—oops, to nip back and grab Humphrey and the family steamer rug, side by side on our seat in the car.

 

Kim and Roger stop short here in memory, as such unbidden tales often do. With a bit of effort I can look back on these eager, irony-deprived boys—my bygone self and my long-ago school friend—without an attached moral, but still sometimes wonder how these afternoons would play out in a modern production. Quickly it can be seen that any plan for a present day Kim 'n' Rog series—on daytime HBO, say—would run into script difficulties. The Adventure of the Purloined Diaphragm goes into turnaround when Research reminds us that today's boys would have zero interest in Mrs. Atwood's medicine cabinet, having learned all that stuff in a Third Grade Responsible Reproduction Class, with an accompanying instructive video. The ailing snake still holds promise, but the IRT subway scenes are gone, made superfluous by the Net. The two smart kids talk to each other as much as ever but it's by Live Chat or Instant Messaging. They Google up the passing pit viper or anaconda in full color on
whozoo.org
, with accompanying lengthy texts (perhaps even including passages from Dr. Raymond L. Ditmars), and when Roger, still at home, reports that Humphrey has eye issues, Kim is back in three minutes with the email address of a herpetologist hotline in California, plus another site offering harm-free, environmentally O.K. plans and dimensions for the caging of unthreatened native constrictor species. The story's the same but where's the action?

"W
E
are fam-ilee," the great old Sister Sledge single went, and then the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates swiped it and made it their own, riding that beat all the way into the World Series and winning with it, of course. Anyone who was there still can see the Pirate player wives, in their full-length October furs and coats, kicking and boogeying together to the song, arm-in-arm on the home-team dugout roof. Who doesn't want to be fam-ilee? Let's start counting, just for fun. There is mine and yours and also the Kennedys and the Cosbys, the Cabots, the Bushes, the bin Ladens, the Roosevelts, the Alous, the Osbournes, the Barrymores, the Brontës, the Marx Brothers, the Jameses (William and Henry), and the Jameses (Jesse and Frank). Also the Gambinos, the Medicis, the Adamses, and the Addamses. The Guermantes. The Bachs, the Windsors, the Wallendas. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and Jr.; Sherlock and Mycroft
Holmes. Saltonstalls and Pallisers, Fondas and Stuarts. The Bobbseys, the Romanoffs, and die Strausses Johann the Elder, Johann the Younger, Richard, and Levi. The Capets and the Capulets and, yes, the Carters. Jimmy and Rosalynn and Amy and Billy Carter; A. P., June, Maybelle, Helen, and Anita Carter; Gary Carter. Andrew Jackson. Michael, Jermaine, Jackie, Marlon, Tito, La Toya, and Janet Jackson. Stonewall Jackson. Reggie Jackson. Donald Duck; Huey, Dewey & Louie Duck. The Sopranos.

In my early teens, I was startled to learn that a new friend of mine, Fred Parson, had five brothers, and that his father, Ken, whom I also knew, had also grown up as one of six brothers. Now there's a
family,
I thought. I had started with zero brothers and one lone sister. My divorced parents weren't much better off, with my mother being the youngest of three sisters, and my father having had to make do with one younger sister. Thin pickings. True, my mother and stepfather had a son now, Joel, who was still too young to be much fun but would perhaps become a brother down the line. I was dying for relations. For me, aunts and uncles were like the secondary characters you looked for in a good book or a movie: you wanted plenty of them, for color and action and to represent the full spectrum of oddity. A woman I know has told me that a departed great aunt of hers on East Sixty-second Street had been the long-term mistress of the celebrated Metropolitan Opera tenor Giovanni Martinelli—exactly the kind of news my family lacked. With the self-pity of the young, I had observed the slim branches on my tree and seen a
poplar. But I was wrong. I hadn't appreciated the relatives I'd been given, and I was not yet aware of the generative powers of American divorce.

Looking at my family now, I note that there have been eleven (or sixteen, counting another way) divorces, spread across three generations—more than enough for a soap, and not what its members would have invented for themselves as children. But we cannot now unimagine the new fathers and step-aunts and half-brothers or sisters and half-grandnieces that sit around the family tables on a Thanksgiving, or wish a life for ourselves that did not include unexpected attachments. In this story, a man is approached by a man he has known for forty years, who says, "Guess what. We have the same father—I'm your brother. No wonder I could always beat you at singles." On another day, a new baby, a wonderful son, is baptized simultaneously in ten or eleven different rites, including the Yoruba. Four years later, the friend who thought of this caper, a minister, and pulled it off is killed in a homophobic murder. Years after this, a blond granddaughter acquires a coffee-colored sister, from Colombia. Much later, a niece writes a daring master's thesis about recent research into the terrible disease ALS, and its inexorable progress in one particular victim, her mother. Long before this, in the fall of 1944, a stepfather sits down in his West Eleventh Street apartment and resumes the abandoned draft of his first children's book, tentatively called
Stuart Little.
Back still farther, in 1918, a bluestocking aunt, now long gone, is wounded on the Western Front, where she'd ventured as a correspondent for
The New Republic.
More recently, a pair
of middle-aged half-brothers—this is me and Joel: "Joe," to me—smile as they agree that they have never found a way to express the love they have for each other; now the survivor, sailing over the bit of Jericho Bay where his brother's ashes were gently sunk, feels that they did close the gap after all.

I also count in Aunt Olive—my father's second wife's aunt, Olive Higgins Prouty, the wife of a staid Massachusetts businessman and the redoubtable author of
Stella Dallas, Now Voyager,
and eight other weepy best-selling novels. One day around 1950, she approached me for professional help. "Now, Roger, you know New York," she began. She went on to explain that in the novel she was then writing—it was called
Fabia
—her heroine had moved out on her husband in Boston and come to New York to live with an artist. She had them sharing a little apartment on the West Side, maybe in West Seventy-seventh Street. It was early in the 1920s. Would that be right?

"That sounds exactly right, Aunt Olive," I said. Needless to say, I waited impatiently for the book's arrival, and when I read it there they were, almost in sin in the West Seventies. He never laid a hand on her.

This is my own family. Amazingly, I am its patriarch—though only one of us, a nephew, seems to see me that way, thank God. My attachments and affections within it run every which way, leaping from my children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews to my twin half-brother and half-sister to my divorced and deceased first wife's nearest sister, whom I've known for sixty-seven years ("Of course I live in denial," she says. "It's the perfect place for me"); to
a different ex-sister-in-law, who's a judge in California; to a niece, the single mother of two grown sons, who's an intensive-care nurse in Vermont and trains enormous jumping horses in her off time; and to all and each (well, just about) in between.

 

What comes back to me these days often begins with an insistent detail, a sunken branch sticking up from a stream which has snagged a mat of memory. When I was a kid I loved our once- or twice-a-year visits to my Aunt Rosie and Uncle John Newberry's house on steep, red-bricked Beacon Hill in Boston. The place had a living-room oddly stuffed down into the basement—you could peek in there through little sidewalk-level windows beside the front steps—and featured a waist-high Stromberg-Carlson phonograph that amazingly played both sides of a regular ten- or twelve-inch 78 rpm record in succession. When your Brunswick or Victor Red Label selection was done a shiny metal apparatus moved magisterially into place, gently plucked up the record, rotated it in midair, and lowered it back into place; almost bowing, it withdrew as the record spun round again and the arm lowered itself toward the new tune. (This was ten or fifteen years before jukeboxes developed the same capability, dealing more briskly with the biscuit-like 45s of the day.) None of my school friends in New York had anything as fancy, but what kept me riveted next to the Newberrys' machine wasn't just "Rosalie" coming after "Valencia," or the "Moonlight Sonata" in two full parts but the machine's delicious fallibility. Now and then—you'd have to wait while twenty or thirty faultless flips and plays went by—the
shiny armature would produce a tremble or speed up in mid-transfer and then silently and insanely smash its precious load to bits. "It did it again!" my cousin Jack and I would yell excitedly, and Uncle John, muttering, would tromp down the red-carpeted stairs to inspect the wreckage.

The Newberrys had money—he'd inherited a cement manufacturing business in Ohio, though I don't remember that he ever worked at it or went there—and because Uncle John was a mild eccentric, I conjoined big bucks and weirdness in my young mind. One day when I was about six he parked the Newberry car, a snappy beige Marmon, on the steep little road outside our rented summer house in Snedens Landing, but forgot to engage the hand brake. We were eating lunch when a cry from out there brought us to the windows just in time to see the Marmon slip into the adjacent Hudson River, where it came to a halt with its nose and front wheels buried in the muddy flow. "Oh, dear," said my uncle.

Uncle John, who was silent by nature, had pink cheeks and brown hair that stuck up in spikes behind, and arrives in memory accompanied by a nagging, minatory call from his wife: "
John."..."John?
" In later summers, the Newberrys put up at Breezemere Farm, a rustic main house with adjacent cabins in South Brooksville, Maine, about twenty miles away from my mother and stepfather's place in North Brooklin. There were picnics or lunches, back and forth, a couple of them every summer, and whenever there was going to be some swimming I looked forward to watching Uncle John's getaway. Strong and broad-chested above his dark bathing trunks, he stepped his way gingerly down the
stony beach, lowered himself into the icy Penobscot waters, and swam away. His progress, in a churning late-Victorian breast-stroke, was slow but cumulatively awesome; ten minutes later, then twenty, you'd see his dark head still bobbing up and away, first the size of an apple, then a distant dot. "John!" Aunt Rose called after him. "
John!
" It was even better when this happened at the Newberrys' picnic place at the western end of Eggemoggin Reach, because Uncle John's swim soon took him out of sight, beyond the point that separated us from Buck Harbor, though even this did not silence her cries. Sometimes he stayed out so long that I too began to imagine that a cramp or a passing Chris Craft had taken him down at last, but then the dot would reappear and surge slowly back to us. "Oh, John," Aunt Rosie said reproachfully as he emerged, with his body scarlet and drops spangling the hair on his chest. He'd wait until he'd found his towel before making his declaration, "Nine hundred and twenty-three!"—the strokes of today's swim. The number varied but never the glow.

Some years later, Uncle John broke his silence with another announcement, the appearance of a book,
The Rainbow Bridge,
a scholarly study of the Sanskrit Antakaranha, a journey to higher awareness and the sources of creation, which he'd been writing and thinking about all along, it turned out. Somewhere I have a snapshot of him and Aunt Rosie standing on the beach with me at Sarasota, where I am visiting in the mid-1950s. They are old now, but Uncle John's hair still sticks up behind. Aunt Rosie is talking, one hand in the air, but Uncle John, who is leaning slightly forward, can't get away this time. One hand is tucked into the
pocket of his summer jacket and the other, his right, is oddly angled across his waist: Parkinson's.

 

My mother's oldest sister, Aunt Elsie, administered one of the shocks of my young life when, on a spring Saturday in 1930, she invited me to pay a call at her apartment near Gramercy Square, where an Indian friend of hers was visiting. An American Indian, she said: the real thing. I grabbed a downtown bus—I was nine—rang the bell and looked eagerly about.

"Mr. Luhan will be right out," Aunt Elsie said. "He's washing his hair."