Let Me Finish (2 page)

The first day of that 1933 school trip to the Chicago World's Fair went on forever, and it was after dark when we topped a hillside in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, slowed at the vision of Pittsburgh alight in the distance, and felt a little lurch and jolt as the right rear wheel fell off the Buick and rolled gently on ahead for a few yards by itself. I can't remember dinner, but it was past midnight when, rewheeled, we pulled up at the McKeesport YMCA and settled for two double rooms, plus cots. Jerry Tallmer, a surviving member of the party, tells me that a fellow traveler, less suave than the rest of us, confessed to him later that until this moment he'd held a childhood notion that if you weren't in bed by midnight you died. Out in Chicago, we took in the House of Tomorrow and Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Car; ogled Sally Rand's "Streets of Paris" but didn't attend; went to the Museum of Natural History; laughed at Chicago's dinky elevated cars; and in our little notebooks wrote down that Depression soup kitchen lines in Chicago looked exactly like the ones in depressed New York. We were smart and serious, and would be expected to report on this trip in Social Studies, come fall. The Century of Progress, we concluded, was mostly about
advertising.
One afternoon, the temperature went down twenty-nine degrees in an hour and a half as a black storm blew in from over Lake Michigan; the next morning we read that the sightseeing plane whose ticket window we'd seen at the Fair had crashed, killing all aboard. Three days later, wheeling south from Niagara Falls, my companions (including the heroic Burkhill or Burchell, who did all the driving) offered to pay me two dollars apiece if I'd just shut up for a change, and not speak another word for the rest of the trip. Unaffronted and short of cash, I agreed, and collected my princely ten bucks while we were passing under the new George Washington Bridge, just about home.

 

Breakdowns happened all the time. A year earlier, headed for Missouri with my pal Tex Goldschmidt, our car, another family Franklin, quit cold on a hillside in Liberty, New York. Towed to a garage, we learned that the replacement part we needed would arrive by mail in two days. We put up in an adjacent boarding house, where the large brown cookies permanently in place in the center of the dining-room table were just possibly varnished. Sitting on porch rockers that evening, with our feet up on the railing, we were terrified by a Catskill lightning bolt that flew along a grounding wire from the rooftop rod and down a viney column a yard or two from our toes. We sat on, listening to the thrash of night trees and the gurgle of water through the gutter downspouts, when—
bam!
—it happened again: an explosion and a blaze of white down the same path, and the smell of immeasurable voltage in the air around us.
"Well, so much for
that
adage," Tex said, rising. "I'm going to bed."

Arthur Goldschmidt came from San Antonio, and was knowledgeable about cars and roadside stuff. He'd been hired by my father, with whom I lived on weekdays, to come down from Columbia a couple of afternoons a week and spend some time with me when I got home from school, but he was so smart and engaging that he became a fixture. Here, a few months later, he'd been given the family car and the family wise guy to take out West; my father would come along by train a little later, while Tex continued south to see his folks. Driving, Tex smoked Chesterfields and talked about the Scottsboro boys, asked if I thought Babe Ruth wore a girdle, and wondered how much I knew about the corrupt but colorful governor of Texas, Ma Ferguson. We had no radio but stayed alert anyway. Tex was the one to spot the first buzzard aloft and the rare passing North Dakota license plate, and to pick up on roadside or billboard names. ("Sweet Orr Pants," he said, musingly. "Coward Shoes?") He challenged me to recite all the Burma-Shave jingles we'd encountered ("The bearded lady / tried a jar / she's now / a famous movie star / Burma-Shave"; "Rip a fender / off your car / mail it in for / a half-pound jar / Burma-Shave") and make up some of our own. He made me rate the girls in my class for looks and then for character, and said, "If our left front tire is six feet around, how many revolutions will it make by the time we reach Cleveland?" Late in our trip, wheeling down an unpopulated gravel highway west of Edina, Missouri, Tex slowed as we came up to three black sedans, oddly parked crossways on the road at a little distance from each other. As we passed the first one, to our left, the second moved forward from the right to block our path, but Tex spun us hard right, spewing gravel, passed behind him, and floored it up the road and away. Prohibition revenue inspectors, he thought, or maybe a highway stickup. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were around here somewhere, making do in hard times.

 

I keep forgetting how hot it was, driving. Two summers along, in late August of 1934, my father replanned the second part of our trip by leaving my uncle's place in Green Castle, Missouri (the same haven Tex and I had been heading for), around noon and driving non-stop to Santa Fe. We'd do Kansas by night and stay cool. Our party—Father, my eighteen-year-old sister Nancy, her Concord Academy classmate Barbara Kidder (the two had just graduated), and I—were experienced car people by now. We hated motels, carried water in our two big thermoses (later, in New Mexico, we bought a waterskin and slung it on a front fender), and favored gas stations with the old-style pumps that were cranked by hand like an ice cream freezer while you watched your Sunoco or Gulf slosh into a glass ten-gallon container up on top, then empty into your tank. We knew how to open a Coke by sticking a silver dollar under the cap and banging the bottle with your fist, and we'd learned to stop wincing or weaving when another languid or headlight-entranced rabbit in the road—ba-bump—went to the great cabbage patch in the sky. The floor in the back of the car filled up with crumpled sections of the Kansas
City
Star
or the St. Joseph
News-Press
that we'd picked up at the last diner.

Nancy was driving by now, and could spell my father for two-hour stretches. She was a better driver than he was. Her hair was tied up with a string of red yarn, keeping it off her ears; at the wheel, she'd fire up a cigarette with the dashboard lighter, then hold it in the air in her long fingers, a ring of scarlet lipstick around the nearer end. Too classy for Bryn Mawr, I thought. I liked Barbara Kidder, who wore a blue neck bandanna and shorts, and had a nice store of rattlesnake and Gila-monster stories; her parents were archeologists—she was joining them later at a dig in Nevada. My father overcorrected while driving and favored long silences, but he was a soldier, a
commandante,
at the wheel, good for a five-hour bore through the blazing Indiana afternoon while we dozed and told dumb jokes. He didn't go in for jokes, but laughed out loud when we imitated him trying to order his breakfast café au lait from a waitress at our creaky small-hotel dining room. This always started our day. "I want a glass of milk," he began, speaking loudly and fashioning the shape of a glass in the air. "
Cold
milk, in a glass. Then, and in addition, I'd like a cup of coffee"—his hands moved to one side, forming an invisible cup with a saucer underneath—"and with it a pitcher of
hot
milk, to put into the coffee. Now, again: cold milk, please, in a glass"—he poured it and pushed it carefully to the side—"coffee, hot coffee"—he made a happy sniffing sound, at the Maxwell Houseness of it—"and over here our hot milk"—little finger waves to show heat rising—"to put into the hot coffee. Is that clear?" But of course it wasn't.
The waitress, bewildered by this mixture of mime and command and terrified by the lawyerly glare in his dark eyes, had long since paused with her pencil. What Father got was generally coffee with cold milk in the pitcher, or coffee and boiling water, or, at least once, iced coffee. It never came out right. We shook our heads helplessly, knowing that he wasn't cruel or unfeeling: he just liked things nice.

That night, in Kansas, Father held to course, upright at the wheel through the eight- or ten-mile straightaways, with the bright headlights forming—for me, in back—an outlined silhouette of his ears and bald head and strong forearms. I would fall asleep, and when I woke again it would be Nancy driving and smoking, with Father asleep on the right-hand seat and Barbara asleep beside me in back. The night air rushed in about us through the tilted wind portals at the front of the front windows and the smaller ones in back (we were in the zippy Terraplane that Tex and I had brought from Detroit), and with it the hot, flat scent of tall corn; a sudden tang of skunk come and gone; the smell of tar when the dirt roads stopped, fainter now with the hot sun gone; and, over a rare pond or creek as the tire noise went deeper, something rich and dank, with cowflop and dead fish mixing with the sweet-water weeds. I had a Texaco road map with me in back, and when we came through a little town or stopped at a ringing railroad crossing I got out my flashlight and tried to follow the thin blue line of our passage: Chapman and WaKeeney, Winona, and now—we must have turned south a bit—Sharon Springs. I fell asleep again. Sometime in the night, my hand found Barbara's hand and held on. When I awoke
with the first sun behind us, we'd climbed out of the heat, and the field dirt around us had a redder hue. "Colorado," Father said softly. I lay back in my nest and Barbara's hand came out from under her thin Mexican blanket and took mine once again. That morning, we went through La Junta and Trinidad and over the Raton Pass into New Mexico. (We'd stopped earlier at a lookout where four different states were visible, surely, in the haze to the east and south.) The Sangre de Cristos came into view and the first soft-cornered adobe houses, and that night we ate at La Fonda with my Aunt Elsie, who worked for the Indian Bureau, and had Hopi snake dances and San Ildefonso pottery-makers and Mabel Dodge Luhan in store for us in the coming weeks. Almost the best part was still ahead.

 

I learned how to drive early, and in June of 1936 sent five dollars to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Augusta, Maine, along with a note saying, "I am fifteen. Please send my license in enclosed envelope." That was all it took. I appropriated the Whites' yellowy old Plymouth roadster, with its splayed fenders, wooden-spoke wheels, cracked leather front seat, and leaky ragtop roof. (I carried a thick roll of Johnson & Johnson adhesive tape under the seat, for rainy-day patch-ups.) There was a little hole in the floorboards, near the brake pedal, and if you glanced down there on a daytime errand you could see the grainy macadam streaming by under your foot. Soon I was taking girls to the movies on Tuesday or Saturday nights, upstairs at the Town Hall in Blue Hill, or to the Grand, in Ellsworth. I kept my headlights on low beam on foggy nights, suavely navigating
through sudden thick blankets of damp, and found quiet places to park in East Blue Hill or out on Naskeag Point. I had become Andy Hardy. Making out in parked cars puts me into the movies or into a thousand cartoons, but what memory presents about these chilly long-gone summer evenings is the first five minutes under way, with my hands at ease on the nubbly wheel, and with the white highway ahead and the gleam from the looped roadside power wires giving back tanned knees, a sweet nose and strong chin, just there to my right. Intimacy.

Late on a Sunday afternoon in February, 1938, somebody called up the stairs of my boarding school dormitory, "Angell, there are three women from Smith down here to see you." We were in the hilly northeast corner of Connecticut, far into the dreary winter-term stretches of my senior year, with spring vacation still six weeks away. A gag of some sort. Muttering, I came down and found Cynthia Coggan's blue Ford phaeton waiting by the door, and her tickled smile behind the snap-on winter side window—a friend from Maine, with crinkly blond hair and her own low, late-model white-wall speedster, the snazziest wheels I knew. She was about my age, but a year and a light-year ahead. Now, with two classmates for company, she'd driven seventy or eighty miles from Northampton on impulse, to press a surprise Sunday call. I rushed upstairs for a coat and permission, and in another minute was turning around from the cozy front seat to meet the new ladies in back as we sped away, delightfully in motion. I only had an hour—time enough for tea and cake at an inn in the next village, it turned out—and they got me back barely before
compulsory evening Vespers. Walking into the chapel, I knew that every eye was on me and that my school clout had just taken a gigantic upward leap. I didn't have to tell anybody that Cynthia was a friend, not a girlfriend, or that the difference didn't matter to me. All I could think about was the ride and the compliment.

Driving nowadays is nothing like it was. Mostly, it's a time of day: where we are before the mall, or around nine and six and—thank you, God—not later. On longer reaches, noise and wind rustle have been abolished, trafficfree stretches appear only late at night or in the moments when a red light has swept the road clean, and our powerladen machines provide an airliner sort of lift that does away with inertia and topography. We move in ceaseless company, each of us wrapped in cold air and an expensive and imperturbable anonymity. Only now and then, easing at seventy-six miles per hour past the Audi going seventy-two, do we throw a glance at our neighbors three feet to the right and are startled—it nearly makes you jump—by pure genre: two or three young men gesturing and laughing at something in there, or an older woman holding up her book and reading out loud to her driver husband. Driving, for all its drags and trouble, puts us together—I'm amazed that its immense advertising never quite gets this right—and on some trips delivers a complicated fresh sense of ourselves. I think that pause with my mother on the Bronx River Parkway first stuck in my memory as an adventure but later on because she and I almost never had something happen just to the two of us. And if she thought back to that outing it could have been to see Andy
White—perhaps they were not quite lovers yet—finding a boyish and confident joy in the unexpected. My Lincoln school classmates didn't hate me for my non-stop blather in our crowded Buick; they craved a little quiet, and bet that perhaps I'd enjoy it, too, given a chance. It was a long shot, but maybe I'd find, along about Poughkeepsie, that I didn't have to be on all the time to stay alive. Tex Goldschmidt never looked at his watch in the day and a half we hung out together in Liberty, New York, waiting for that distributor part, while my father would have seen the mishap as a test of some kind, and gone all stern and strong in response. But Father trusted Tex because he'd seen what his jokes and sweet spirit did for us; there was something easy and silly there that he longed for. I don't know what Barbara Kidder made of our holding hands like that. She was almost a woman that night and I still almost a boy, and I can't say why I'm so sure she never mentioned it to anyone.