Let Me Finish (5 page)

There is a misapprehension here, a dark crosscurrent, that still startles me. I wasn't a bad kid—I missed my mother, and I had guessed that somehow he was to blame for that, and I was lazy and careless and sometimes silly in return—but the struggle that he couldn't win or shake free of was his failed marriage, not his children. The divorce was off limits for us all, and his expression grew taut and wary
if Nancy or I went on about our weekends or vacations with Mother and Andy. My mother, for her part, waited some years and then told us that it was our father's love affairs that had destroyed the marriage. He had been an intelligence officer in France in the war, and had come back after three years abroad with different ideas about sex and marriage. He had even encouraged her to try an affair of her own: they would be a modern couple. This was what had done them in, but my mother could never bring herself to say that she had left us kids behind, along with the marriage, in order to join Andy White. Her tale stopped at that point, for all her life. Family memoirists, caught somewhere between feelings of disloyalty and the chic contemporary mode that demands that we tell all and affix damages, don't take this stuff lightly. Neither could the principals. Why else do I remember a day in the 1960s when I was having lunch with my mother at the Algonquin and she introduced me to Groucho Marx, who had stopped by our table to say hello? "A son named
Angell
?" Groucho said at once. "How did that happen?"

"Well," my mother began, "it's a long story—"

"And a sordid one, I'll wager," Groucho said. Waggling his eyebrows, he departed.

What a marriage that must have been—hers and my father's, I mean—stuffed with sex and brilliance and psychic murder, and imparting a lasting unease. Get hold of Groucho again: it's time to sweep up these bodies. Tales like this were not uncommon for people of my generation, to be sure, and have grown into cliché; what perhaps makes
mine different is that the central figure, the king, for all his destructiveness and ferocity and self-doubt, turned out to be an exceptional father, with heroic energies. "Parenting" in its contemporary sense was not a concept most fathers would have understood back then, but if it was pride that first made him fight to keep his children, he then plunged right ahead with fatherhood, striding up its trail at full charge. I can scarcely remember a weekend when he and I were not off tobogganing, or taking the ferry to Staten Island, or hurrying to see the latest Diego Rivera murals, or climbing in Inwood Park, or working on my new curveball (I blew out my arm early), or stitching costumes for a marionette show I was preparing to put on, or catching the new Ed Wynn show at a matinée, or, one late-November Saturday, getting up early to drive to the Yale Bowl for a famous Barry Wood–Albie Booth Harvard-Yale game. (On the way, with other friends aboard, he stopped the car unexpectedly in the middle of a covered bridge in Connecticut—there were no parkways then—forcing us all to expel the hold-your-breath wishes we were making about the game's outcome. Red-faced, we at last let go and glared at him. He laughed, but when he started up again he said, "To hell with Yale!" and then we all shouted it together.)

Summers were no different, and in his half of our vacations—we went to Maine and the Whites in August—he took Nancy and me to a ranch in Montana; to the oil fields and semi-jungles around Tampico, Mexico; to Nantucket and Chocorua; to New Mexico and the Painted Desert of Arizona; to a cattle farm in Missouri. These were
inventive, unpackaged vacations, more adventurous than anything my school friends seemed to be doing in their summers, and he was our driver and guide and keeper.

In Montana one day—it was the summer I was ten—he and Nancy and I tied up our horses when the canyon trail we were descending grew too steep for them to carry us closer to the stream at the bottom we wanted to fish. Fly rods held high, we went the rest of the way on foot or sliding on the seat of our jeans. We ran down the steep last yards laughing, with dirt and stones pattering around us, and when we landed on the flat bank at the bottom, with the sunlight from the water in our eyes, we were abruptly surrounded with an electric sound that came from no one place yet was urgently close at hand.

"Stand exactly where you are!" Father said in a voice I'd not heard before. "No talking."

He took a slow backward step, then another; he looked like a player in Still Pond, No More Moving. "I think—" he said, and, bending low, nudged a frond of bush aside with the tip of his rod. There, staid in the shadows, awaited the thrilling celebrity profile—the yellow eye, the thick, poised head retracted above the topmost bend of heavy coils, with dust blurring the curves and patterns below. Not our first Diamondback of that month but easily the biggest and nearest. "See him watching us?" Father whispered. "He'll be moving along any minute now." And the great snake, as if listening, went silent and unhurriedly but all at once slid away.

In Tampico, we took a trip down the brackish Laguna de Tamiahua, south of the port, hooking passage on an ancient, lifeboat-size ferry that was towed all through the memorable
second night behind a larger vessel loaded with pigs. Another day, Father and I got aboard a narrow-gauge, gasoline-powered train that putted us twenty-five miles inland to Pánuco, an oil town that dated back to Cortés's time. A couple of armed soldiers lounged on the platform of our crowded car, protecting us against bandits; it was the rainy season, and for most of the distance we swished our way through a lake of drowned trees, leaving a widening wake astern. That night, I saw a corpse being carried along on a shutter, just across the street, and went to my first prizefight, up onstage at the local theatre. When "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" came along, seventeen years later, I knew they'd got the local stuff right.

Every book I read back then, and every sudden passion I developed, elicited Father's curiosity and support. After I determined that I would become a naturalist when I grew up, our house filled up with fish tanks and snakes and horned toads, mice (to feed the snakes), a coatimundi that we picked up on the trip to Mexico, and then a fiercely biting macaque given to me by my mother's friend Emily Hahn. "Interesting. Let's see," my father said of each proposed further addition, and that night or the next he would sit down with me as I pored over the catalogue from the Ross Allen Reptile Institute, in Silver Springs, Florida, while, counting up my allowance, I selected the next specimen. Then he would go downstairs to prepare Joseph and Edmonde for another creature under our roof.

 

What lightened us up for good was that sudden notion of Father's, in the autumn of 1931, of finding a young Columbia student to come by late in the afternoons to provide
me with some company until he got home from the office. (At eleven, I had outlasted the final governess.) As I've mentioned before, Arthur (Tex) Goldschmidt turned up for the job—a slight, smiling political-economy major from San Antonio, with a slant of blond hair across his forehead, and fingers stained yellow by his incessant Chesterfields, and after Father caught my eye he asked him to stay on for dinner. This was a good thing, Tex confessed later, because he was flat broke. Soon Tex's hours had expanded to four nights a week; and within weeks he moved in with us for good. Tex taught me a rackety, blindfolded, down-on-your-knees game called Calf Rope, in which you bashed your opponents with a rolled-up newspaper. He asked me about my school girlfriends and named one of them Betty Boop. He got me reading
The New Republic
and
New Masses,
and took me to see grainy Sergei Eisenstein films, on Fourteenth Street. Observing the pantings and fartings of our old Boston terrier Tunney one day, he proposed that the federal government should fund a plan like the Passamaquoddy Bay project that would put all this energy to some use. When word came back from Lincoln that I was being viewed as the worst head of student government in the history of the elementary school (the job was handed out by rote, not merit), Tex said, "Wow, and you weren't even trying!"

Tex saved my life, and perhaps he did more than that for Father. The product of a family of idealistic German intellectuals, Tex fired up my father's rather distant liberalism, brought professors and journalists he knew to dinner, and got us talking about Tammany Hall and the Reichstag fire,
the Scottsboro boys and subsistence gardens for the unemployed. Tex was a leader of a Columbia student strike over the university's expulsion of the editor of the
Spectator,
and the next day at breakfast we excitedly passed around the
Herald Tribune,
with a heroic photograph of him addressing a crowd from the base of the Alma Mater statue while being pelted with eggs. He insisted that I take part in all this fervor and discussion, and within weeks had converted me into the junior op-ed voice at the dinner table, and a major pain in the neck. When Tex came back from a week's visit to the bloody mine strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, my father gave him a watch and a dinner party. He and my father shaved together each morning, after I'd gone to school, and talked politics and ideas and books, which is to say that Father had stopped talking to himself, except on weekends. He trusted Tex in everything, and let him take me along in our old Franklin sedan for local and longdistance trips. When Tex and I went to Detroit by bus in March of 1933 to pick up that new Hudson Terraplane that Father had wangled at a very low price from an advertising friend, we found that all the banks had closed down and the city was running on scrip, not U.S. currency. The New Deal was at hand.

Evenings at Ninety-third Street have kept their zing. The candles are lit, people are here for dinner, and Tex has once again brought along his friend and mentor Joseph D. McGoldrick—a rotund, pink-haired professor of government, with glasses slipping down his nose, who would soon become New York City Comptroller under Fiorello
LaGuardia. Joseph (the other Joseph) has given us crêpes Suzette for dessert, and after dinner, up in the library—where my four-and-a-half-foot king snake Humphrey, the very Mona Lisa of my collection, is oozing his way contentedly along behind the blue Conrad volumes—we'll play the new game that's all the rage with university faculties. Like everyone else just then, Tex and I have laid out our own board on easel paper, with ruled-in squares, made-up corporate names, and hand-scissored strips of money, and tonight, as before, Joe McGoldrick will be the first player in the room to go broke. Maybe this game, Monopoly, as yet unpatented, will catch on someday.

I'm not sure if Tex was at the house on a snowy night in the winter of 1933 when my father asked a few men friends in for drinks before a Roman Revel masquerade party at the Century Association. Observing that each of them had managed no more than the predictable bed-sheet toga and paper-laurel crown, I said to Father, "Why don't you dress up like Cleopatra and take Humphrey along with you?" The suggestion came halfway into the second round of martinis and was acted upon at once. Lady friends of my father were consulted by telephone, and quickly rallied round with filmy garments and makeup. I remember gilding the paternal toes with poster paint. In no time, the startling drag was complete, and Father, wrapping my long king snake around one arm, slipped into his overcoat and departed for Rome with his entourage. He had a thin time of it there, it turned out, discovering to his amazement that not many fellow-members among the distinguished group shared his interest in partying in first-class reptilian company. "'My God, it's alive!'" he said the next morning, imitating, for my delight, his clubmates' squeamish noises and unherpetological departing scuttle.

After Tex finished his graduate work at Columbia, and got married and went off to work for the New Deal—he became a noted Department of the Interior specialist in water development and environmental protection—he told friends of his that it was my father's trust and fairness of mind that had probably kept him from joining the Communist Party in those anxious times. And my father, in a letter to Tex's parents, said that he liked him better than any young person he knew and had come to think of him as a combination son and brother. Tex, laughing with me years later, said, "Of course, it was just like him not to tell
me
that he'd done such a thing."

 

This account, a boy's view, has not offered much about my father's other self—his politics, say, which he took seriously. He busied himself within the American Civil Liberties Union and the Foreign Policy Association, and sopped up all the weightier weekly and quarterly journals. (Well, almost all: unopened copies of the weekly
Manchester Guardian,
in their yellowish wrappers, tended to pile up under a table in the living room and would only later be taken out, ripped open, and absorbed over a giant weekend cram course.) Father voted for the Socialist Norman Thomas in 1932 as a protest against the hopeless Hoover and the lightweight Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then underwent something of a conversion to the New Deal. But F.D.R.'s maneuverings with the Constitution meant another crisis
of principles for my old man, and a second Norman Thomas gesture in 1936. His real affiliation was for fairness. As a member of the liberal Willard Straight Post, which unsurprisingly got itself thrown out of the American Legion after much public opposition to that staid body's patriotic and isolationist lobbyings, he happily led a legal battle that went to the New York State Supreme Court and brought vindication and reinstatement. I'm not sure he ever went to another meeting.

I have slighted my mother, whose professional and emotional attachment to
The New Yorker
drew me inexorably toward writing and editing and, in time, to the magazine itself. The choice was an easy one for me, because my father never murmured or hinted that I had let him down in some fashion by joining the Whites' family firm. It was quite the contrary. In 1950, I wrote a story called "Tennis," a work of fiction, thinly veiled, that drew heavily on the struggles I was still experiencing in beating Father at singles. In the story, the narrator, a man named Minot, is rebuked by his wife for pouting and carrying on when his more spectacular father takes him again, on his court in New Jersey. Later in the story, the senior player suffers a courtside heart attack but survives, leaving the two men to wonder what they've been doing to the game all this time. I ran this effort past my father, in manuscript, who saw the connection, of course, but insisted that it should be submitted unchanged. When it came out in
The New Yorker,
he called to tell me how proud he was, and added that a few friends of his had already been in touch with him to protest my perfidy. "I can't believe it," he said. "Can't they see it's a
story?
Can't they see how good it is?" Four or five years after this, almost inevitably, after my father and I had been playing Sunday doubles together at his friend Stuart Chase's court in Redding, he complained in the car of a heaviness and some twinges in his chest: a full-blown coronary, it turned out. When we got home to his weekend place in Newtown, I called his doctor, who said he'd send over a local man he knew and that he was ordering an ambulance from Danbury. My father waited calmly enough, lying out on an old Victorian sofa in his tennis whites, and at last I said, "This is weird, isn't it?"