Let Me Finish (4 page)

Friends my age—I am past my seventies—tell me that they, too, often find themselves caught up in details of their childhood, but I wonder if they ever find, as I do, that they are reliving a parent's life as well as their own. My father, a New York lawyer, was lean and tall, with long fingers, brown eyes, and an air of energy about him. One of his great-grandmothers was a Seneca Indian—the Angell family had come from western New York State—and his high forehead, strong nose, and long upper lip affixed an Iroquois solemnity to his expression that he did not always feel. Handsome and dashing in the flattering, tightly cut suits and jackets of the 1930s (like Gary Cooper, he remained unstuffy in a vest), he strode swiftly, banged doors behind him, and swarmed up stairs, appearing always on the verge of some outdoor errand or expedition. Bravura came naturally to him. In Snedens Landing, a hillside enclave twenty miles upriver from New York where we sometimes passed our summers, there is a small waterfall made by a brook that splashes steeply down into a mossy and perpetually shadowed woodland pool. When I was a child, there were always large Sunday picnics there, in an adjoining pergola that looked out on the Hudson, and my father,
on the slightest urging and sometimes with no urging at all, would climb up to a scary, almost invisible niche in the cliff face, nearly thirty feet above the water. He would stand there interminably—a bald, narrow Tarzan in floppy bathing trunks—and then at last launch himself out over the boulders in an elegant swan dive into the exact center of the tiny pool. I can still see the waves sloshing over the spillway as he came up, spouting and triumphant. It was a parlor trick, of a kind, and, like all parlor tricks, perhaps insufferable—except to a small son of the diver.

We stopped going to Snedens when my parents were divorced, but I remember returning to the pool with Father once when I was in my teens. He climbed up the cliff again and poised and dived, but this time I tried to talk him out of it; I was embarrassed by the whole dangerous performance. The truth was, of course, that I didn't have the nerve to try it myself, and I lacked the spirit that made it all so important to him.

It was this spirit, brought to mountain climbing, to figure skating, to tap dancing, to tennis and trout fishing, to skiing and canoeing and gardening and so forth, that sometimes inspired us in the family to call him the King of the Forest. His tennis game was thunderous but erratic, and it took years for me to realize that his real physical grace was non-suburban. He could flick a Royal Coachman fly again and again into a backwater beneath an alder thicket twenty yards away; he knew how to carve an axe handle; and he swam, otterlike, with an oily smoothness that left no ripples. He was a terrible tap dancer, by contrast, but undauntable. Late one night in Paris (he was in his sixties),
while in company with his friends the British writer V. S. Pritchett and his wife, he broke into a creaky, Gene Kellyish spatter of kicks and taps across the sidewalk and up against the store shutters of a steep little side street in Montmartre. I was appalled when the Pritchetts told me about it later, but they didn't agree. "No, no," they said, laughing. "It was simply extraordinary."

Where this élan came from is a mystery, for he was not a trivial sort of person, not an entertainer. He didn't get it from his father, a slight, almost frail man, who had been crippled by childhood polio. My father didn't know him for long, in any case. Elgin Adelbert Angell was aboard the French liner
La Bourgogne
—one of the last North Atlantic blue-ribbon ships with masts as well as steam—which sank, en route to France, on July 4, 1898, off Sable Island, southeast of Newfoundland, after a dawn collision with a British merchant vessel,
Cromartyshire,
with the loss of five hundred and forty-nine lives. It was a famous marine disaster of its day. My grandfather, a Cleveland lawyer, had embarked the day before, and was looking forward to a reunion with his wife and daughter—my father's younger sister, Hildegarde—who had been in Europe for six months. The story behind this is that my grandmother had exhausted herself nursing my father through a long bout of typhoid, and had been sent abroad, on doctor's advice, to recover her health. My father, who had just turned nine, had been booked aboard
La Bourgogne
as well, but he came down with chicken pox and had to be left behind. Fortuitously, my grandmother's brother, Frederick Curtis, was the head of a small school for boys in Brookfield, Connecticut; my
father had been enrolled there during his mother's absence, and there the disappointed patient had to remain, while his father went on alone. My father never said much about this episode in his life, but he did once tell me that his Uncle Fred, who had a long beard, used to make the rounds in his nightshirt, carrying a candle, to kiss each of the boys good night. I don't know when my father got word about La Bourgogne or how many weeks or months went by before he was reunited with his mother and sister, but this Dickensian scene is what comes to mind when I try to imagine the moment: the wavering candle held by his approaching, sadly murmuring uncle, who wakes him up for the bad news.

 

Ernest Angell (school friends sometimes called him Sincere Cupid) grew up in Cleveland, did well at the private University School there, and was sent off to Paris and Munich for a year of studies before entering Harvard, in 1907. A photograph of him at the time shows the stiff collar, upright carriage, and chin-up, serious gaze that we have come to associate with the optimism of those times. He took six subjects in his freshman year, including physics, German 4 (a Goethe course), Latin composition, and Greek. Somewhere along the line, he had taught himself trigonometry. He took a cold shower at seven-thirty each morning, and resolved to "make a hard try for ØBK"—a successful one, it turned out—and strove even harder, I think, to find friends. He went out for and failed to make the
Crimson
and the freshman baseball team but got over it. He attended sermons and concerts and galleries and
operas (he heard Caruso in "Il Trovatore" at the Boston Theatre); performed in a German play with the Deutsche Verein; went to dinners and dances and football games; frequently called on a Cambridge girl named Evelyn Bolles and her family; and berated himself for a generally wasted year. "Outside of regular work I've done nothing that counts for anything," he writes in his diary on May 23, 1908. He passed his summers at Chocorua, in the midst of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, as he had since boyhood, and here, I think, his insatiable energy brought him more happiness. He became an accomplished woodsman, bushing out new trails along the Sandwich Range, camping for days at a time along the Albany Intervale, and canoeing and fishing with the other young summer people; there are snapshots of him there in winter as well, grinning in bearpaw snowshoes. It was in Chocorua that he met my mother, Katharine Sergeant, whom he married after he got out of Harvard Law School, in 1913. "Ernest was easily our leading spirit," a lifelong friend of his, Stuart Chase, said many years later. "Sometimes we called him 'the Great Man.'" One summer, there was a tragedy at Chocorua, when two young Irishwomen, immigrant domestics with one of the visiting families, got into a canoe on their day off and disappeared. When they were discovered in the lake, a day or two later, my father was the one who dived down and brought up the bodies; what he remembered about it, he told me once, was that the turtles had been at them.

On one or perhaps two of those college summers, he sailed north in a schooner from Boston with Sir Wilfred Grenfell's mission to the Eskimos and fishermen along the
outer Labrador coast: an odd journey, for him. I think he was impelled more by the adventure of it than by the good works. He took along a huge .45-90 rifle that I was sometimes allowed to heft when I was a kid; he'd wanted to bag a polar bear, he said, but never got off a shot. Only lately has it dawned on me that these summers may have had a purpose that he himself didn't wholly understand, and that the voyages out and back must have brought him close to the foggy cold waters where he had lost his father.

I want to bring back this sad, formidable man as he was in the early nineteen-thirties, when he and I and my older sister, Nancy, were living together in a narrow brownstone on East Ninety-third Street, with the steep front stoop of its time. We are comfortable enough there, God knows, with a succession of governesses to keep an eye on us kids, and a delightful French couple, Joseph and Edmonde Petrognani, living in the basement. Joseph does the cooking, while Edmonde, thin and beautiful, keeps house and waits on us at dinner. These are hard times, all the same. The Great Depression is deepening, and some of Father's friends who come for dinner have lost their jobs and are silent with anxiety; now and then we take in a frayed banker or architect friend for a week or two, a man who has lost his house or apartment and his savings as well, and has sent his family off somewhere while he stays in the city and looks for work. New York has taken on a shriveled appearance; nothing is painted or shined, and the people one passes on the sidewalk move slowly, with a stunned look on their face. Our house is mortgaged, and the time comes when Father tells Edmonde and Joseph that he's sorry, but he can no
longer keep them on. They have no place to go, though, and so they stay on and, for the time being, agree to work for nothing. ( Later on, he paid them back.) Our mother, Nancy's and mine, has been gone some years since. There has been a bitter divorce—in love with another man, the young writer E. B. White, she went off to Reno. My father's pride was injured, and he fought her hard, wore her down, until he won an agreement for joint custody of his children that would keep them under his roof, not hers; he swore that he would take her to court and shame her unless she agreed. A mistake all around: neither of them ever talks about this deadlock, and no wonder. Nancy and I don't talk about it, either. We go off to school together each morning on the double-decker No. 3 Fifth Avenue bus, to the lively, faintly cuckoo Lincoln School, up near Columbia; we can hardly wait for the weekends, when we visit our mother and Andy White in their happy, sunlit apartment down on Eighth Street. They have a Scottie named Daisy and a new baby, our brother Joel; there is a Ping-Pong table in one room, and the place is full of laughing, chain-smoking young writers and artists from
The New Yorker,
where they all work.

It doesn't occur to me to blame anybody for this setup, but it is plain that something has gone wrong. Nancy, graver now and more grown up, goes off to boarding school outside Boston. I am living on the top floor at Ninety-third Street, where the bathroom connects via an odd skylight airshaft to my father's bathroom, directly below, and sometimes in the morning I silently unlatch the little window there and listen to my father talking to himself while he
shaves. He mutters and exclaims under his breath.
What!
I hear, and
No, I won't!
There is a harsh, mumbled discourse—I can't make it out—and then a quieter trailing off: perhaps a more complicated thought about some law case of his. Things aren't going well down at his office, I know that much. Then I hear an
If she thinks
... that's almost shouted: he's back on my mother again. My name turns up, too, some days:
Rog-er,
with the syllables broken in half like a stick, or
Why can't he ever
... I close the window.

This stuff scared me, not just because of its severity and barely suppressed anger but because Father and I were in this together now, and he was suffering in spirit. I didn't put it to myself that way, but I sensed we were in danger. I knew I was letting him down in school, where I had stopped working. My notebooks were in a hopeless mess, and I was always in trouble, often being turned in to the principal's office. I broke windows and lab objects, slid off to afternoon movies, and skipped gym. One day, I dropped some pistol cartridges from a high window onto the sidewalk below, to see if they'd go off; a couple of other times I was found in the crawl space under the auditorium, where I had smoked vile messages on the ceiling with a candle. Father was angry when news of my school malfeasances came home; veins stood out on his forehead and he shouted. Bad manners also set him off. He never whacked me but sometimes I wished he would. Instead, he sat me down and flailed me with long, lawyerly arguments about my shortcomings. "Where is your sense of responsibility?" he said. "I see no signs of it, young man. There has been no progress whatsoever." On and on he went, for twenty minutes
at a stretch. He appeared barely able to contain his disappointment in me or his fears for my future. I sat in silence, waiting for it to be over, and secretly counted the detested "young man" appellations. At times these courtroom dramas took me to tears. One night, it became too much for me. "You make me want to be dead!" I burst out, and saw the shock of it turn him pale. He stopped at once, and then it was a long time before the next lecture.

He wasn't cruel: he was scared to death. Not much was going right with him, his money was running low, and he had to borrow from his sister, Hildegarde, to keep things going; my mother, who was doing well at
The New Yorker,
paid an increasing share of the school bills for Nancy and me—a bitter blow for him. He had taken on the burdens of being a single parent—both parents, actually—with little talent for the work and no firsthand example or memory to draw upon. He had no idea what kids were like. He was winging it there for a couple of years, and it amazes me sometimes that we came through at all.

He held on. He never gave in, never succumbed to languor or self-pity, never failed to go off to work, and, except for those morning groans and curses to himself, never said a word to anyone about his fears. He sustained a formidable social life, going to dinners or a dance two or three times each week, joining friends for weekend hikes or gallery visits, and entertaining at home, where he liked to serve the illicit, Prohibition-era wine he had fermented and aged in the cellar—Château Quatre-Vingts Treize. Father was good company and attracted lively friends—among them the playwright Sidney Howard, Walter Lippmann,
and the Sam Lewisohns, whose house on Fifth Avenue was stuffed with Seurats and Renoirs and Cézannes. In that smaller New York of the thirties, people saw each other often, with an intimacy not much distracted by celebrity or wealth; in the Depression particularly, they needed the comfort of talk and laughter. I couldn't take my eyes off the women, with their shining hair and glittering dresses. My father loved women, too, and sometimes one of his lady friends would still be there at the house in the morning, having coffee at the breakfast table with us before I went off to school. I wanted him to marry again; for a long time he was in love with a beautiful divorcée, with three terrific daughters, but she could never quite get over her failed marriage. Another one of his girls, Jean Simon, came up to my room with him one evening and kissed me good night after he did. He was lonely, but said so only to his sister Hildegarde—in some of those swiftly scrawled letters I saw him turn out—a writer who was living in Mexico. She was his confidante, and in those letters, which have somehow come down to me, he is less cheerful. "Lost my big case." "I'm tired as I can be—the difficulties with K, worry about finances, etc." I am in there, too: he is thinking of sending me to military school.