Let Me Finish (6 page)

"I've been thinking that, too," he said, with a little gleam of pleasure.

"Just remember the script," I said. "If you die now, I'll never forgive you."

"O.K.," he said, "I won't die." And he didn't—not for a long time.

I have passed over most of the second half of my father's life, which brought him a happy second marriage, financial and social comfort, a twin son and daughter, and some honors at the end. (He was, among other things, an almost perpetual chairman of the board of the A.C.L.U., and served as well at International Commission of Jurists meetings in Athens and New Delhi.) None of Father's other children share the view of him that I have offered. Nancy found it harder to forgive the harsh terms of that long-ago divorce and the worrying sort of love that came from our guilt-worn mother. The twins, Abby and Christopher, recall a father who was too old for the job—he was fifty-five when they were born—and too willing to hand
the work over to others. Quite by chance, I had the best of him, and it was by luck that I had final word of him in the early '90s, almost a quarter century after his death, when a woman I didn't know sent me a clipping from the August, 1903, issue of
St. Nicholas
magazine. Both of my parents had grown up reading this famous children's monthly, and both of them had been contributors to the "St. Nicholas League," a popular feature that ran poems and stories and drawings and photographs by young subscribers. The clip that was marked for me—I have no idea how my correspondent knew the connection—was called "Polly's Fourth (A True Story)," with the byline "by Ernest Angell (Age 13)." It begins briskly: "One 29th of June found Polly Stewart and her parents in the city of Montreal. Late that evening they took a steamer en route for England, sailing early the next morning." The story goes on, in unadorned prose, to describe the wonders of the "ever-widening St. Lawrence" and the option that liners had in summertime of steaming north of Newfoundland, instead of taking the longer southern route. Polly's vessel goes north, and passes the Strait of Belle Isle. But "when Polly awoke the next morning the engines were still and silence reigned....The steamer was inclosed by ice stretching as far as the eye could reach, tumbled, irregular, of a pale green color!" The vessel lies motionless in this dangerous situation, "save when the ice parted a little around the boat, showing the black water....Of course the weather was bitterly cold." The next day, the ship moves more freely, drawing clear of the floes, although it is learned that during the night it grazed a large iceberg. "The rest of the voyage was uneventful, and the
Stewarts arrived in due time at Liverpool. But that Fourth in the ice Polly will never forget."

Neither had my father forgotten, for the journey he writes, with its proper date, takes his father's boat north of Newfoundland, rather than on the fatal course to the south, and he steers its passengers and crew safely home at last. I can't get this brusque tale out of my mind, or account for the audacity of its author. He has rewritten the worst moments of his life, and, at whatever price, put them behind him. At thirteen, he is on his own, and ready for all of us who await him eagerly up the line.

T
HE
black dog of Christmas jumps in the window, right on schedule, around eleven in the morning, or maybe sneaks in the front door you've just opened to admit the granddaughter who's here on time, after all—her cheek cold from outdoors—before the serious present-opening. It's still skulking around a little later when you make a tour of the room to pick up the ribbons and bright ripped-off wrappings and the cards (well, save the cards) and walk back to stuff them deep into the big kitchen wastebasket. Come on, this is Christmas, so brighten up, can't you? Listen to them, out there. Smile. Back before this one—on Christmas Day, 1931, let's say—the day began for my sister Nancy and me and our father with the stockings. Our narrow brownstonehouse living room had a mantelpiece made of some dark oaky wood, with carved wreaths on the flankings, on either side of the fireplace: exactly the right thing, I noticed again, for this one day of the year. Then the tree, then the presents, then the lonely aunt and weird old cousins arriving to be cheered up on this special day. The goose, well carved by Father. The plum pudding, with bits of burnt matches floating in the brandy that at last takes light. The hard sauce. Now Nancy and I exchange a glance and get up and leave the others; upstairs we take our stuffed shopping bags and tiptoe back down and grab our coats. Goodbye, goodbye. Merry Christmas, everybody.

Out on the empty, sunlit street, there's a stripy blue taxi just coming by. We jump in and fly downtown. There's no Christmas tree at Rockefeller Plaza, because there's no Rockefeller Plaza yet—no Radio City at all. Maybe there's a tree at the far end of Madison Square, but it's not lit up or anything. Never mind. I look at Nancy—she's just turned fifteen—whose brown eyes are glittering, the way they do when she's excited. Yay, Christmas!

Back to our own tree, earlier that day. My father had kept the Victorian ornaments of his childhood—the fragile and now tarnished brownish-crimson or dark-green balls, the glass icicles, a bent-velvet Santa with an ancient bit of rippled peppermint candy undetachably stuck inside his pack. Also the snap-on candleholders, which we fitted with fresh little candles and affixed carefully to the outer balsam branches, pinching the springy snap until the thing stood upright on the swaying branch, with nothing above it to catch fire and bring on disaster and the Fire Department. Three or four of the candles had interesting counterweights below and could be hooked over the smaller branches, where they balanced magically upright, staunch against the swayings of your touch. Father had filled a white enamel
kitchen pail with water and put it down, with the invariable short-handled dish mop beside it, next to the tree. Then we lit the candles, one by one. We started opening presents, but soon my father broke off to pick up the little mop and begin putting out the candles, one by one, as they burned low. Already, I thought—I
think
I thought—he looked grave at what was to come.

Downtown, a left onto Eighth Street and ring the bell. Christmas is starting all over again—my mother and stepfather's Christmas, in their little apartment looking down (from the back) onto Washington Mews. There are more presents here than uptown, and they're better wrapped. This tree has lights, not candles. Everything is new and young, even the Christmas-tree balls: I can't get over that. There's the Scottie named Daisy. A one-year-old brother, Joe, just up from his nap. The rubber plant named Hattie. My stepfather, Andy, mixing a Manhattan and offering one to Joe's slim young nurse, Eleanor McCluskey, who laughs and blushes at the idea. Happy Christmas, everyone. Shall we start the presents?

When it was over, after our second Christmas and second Christmas dinner, Nancy and I drove back uptown to Ninety-third Street in mid-evening—this was the plan: it was all written into the divorce agreement—in another cab, with our different presents in other shopping bags propped on the seat beside us, and by the time we hit Park Avenue, with only the low ranks of green and red traffic lights up ahead for decoration, we'd fallen silent at the thought of Father again, and the quiet house waiting, and the put-aside stories about our Eighth Street Christmas,
which we'd learned not to talk about, ever. Nancy had Father's long face, with a natural shadowing under her brown eyes, and at times like this, I later came to realize, she bore the look of a chorus member from a Greek play; because she was older I studied her expression with care and wondered if my own face would some day carry this important seriousness.

This, in one form or another, is a particularly American sort of Christmas for perhaps millions of us—right up there with Clement C. Moore and "It's a Wonderful Life." Even then, well before I'd grown up, I swore to myself that such a thing would never be done to my own kids, when they came along. Only it was.

 

Is it this cut-rate Dickens tale that makes me glum in the middle of Christmas every year? No, not really. Is it the Christmas deodorant and electric-razor commercials, or the eighteen-hundred-dollar Christmas scarves, or the "God Rest Ye"s coming at us from Vienna and La Jolla and Baghdad and Nazareth, PA? No. Is it because I don't wake up that morning anymore and think, Christmas! No, but we're getting close: it's because I do still think that, at least for the first second or two. Just about the way I used to when I was eleven, except that back on that 1931 morning I still thought you could grab onto Christmas as it began to happen and more or less throw it to the floor. Was that the sound of an odd, early holiday train slithering along half empty toward Grand Central on the tracks under Park Avenue? Was there somebody walking by, across the street? There they went, and goodbye to this day, too, already a
goner by the time Father rattled a box of matches and tossed it invitingly over to me, then fished for his cigarette lighter in the lower-right pocket of his vest as he stepped up to the tree. Shading the white triangle of flame behind his hand, he brought it up to the first candle, on its bending branch, and said, "Well, here we go. Christmas again."

I
WAS
born in 1920, and became an addicted reader at a precocious age. Peeling back the leaves of memory, I discover a peculiar mulch of names. Steerforth, Tuan Jim, Moon Mullins, Colonel Sebastian Moran. Sunny Jim Bottomley, Dazzy Vance, Goose Goslin. Bob La Follette, Carter Glass, Rexford Guy Tugwell. Robert Benchley, A. E. Housman, Erich Maria Remarque. Hack Wilson, Riggs Stephenson. Senator Pat Harrison and Representative Sol Bloom. Pie Traynor and Harry Hopkins. Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Benjamin Cardozo. Pepper Martin. George F. Babbitt. The Scottsboro Boys. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Babe Ruth. In my early teens, I knew the Detroit Tigers' batting order and F.D.R.'s first Cabinet, both by heart. Mel Ott's swing, Jimmy Foxx's upper arms, and Senator Borah's eyebrows were clear in my mind's eye. Baseball, which was late in its first golden age, meant a lot to me, but it didn't come first, because I seem to have been a fan of everything at that
age—a born pain in the neck. A city kid, I read John Kieran, Walter Lippmann, Richards Vidmer, Heywood Broun, and Dan Daniel just about every day, and what I read stuck. By the time I'd turned twelve, my favorite authors included Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Will James on cowboys, Joseph A. Altsheler on Indians, and Dr. Raymond L. Ditmars on reptiles. Another batting order I could have run off for you would have presented some prime species among the Elapidae—a family that includes cobras, coral snakes, kraits, and mambas, and is cousin to the deadly sea snakes of the China Sea.

Back then, baseball and politics were not the strange mix that they would appear to be today, because they were both plainly where the action lay. I grew up in New York and attended Lincoln School of Teachers College (old Lincoln, in Manhattan parlance), a font of progressive education where we were encouraged to follow our interests with avidity; no Lincoln parent was ever known to have said, "Shut up, kid." In classic pattern, it was my father who started me in baseball. He had grown up in Cleveland in the Nap Lajoie–Addie Joss era, but he was too smart to try to interpose his passion for the Indians on his son's idolatrous attachment to the Yankees and the Giants, any more than he would have allowed himself to smile at the four or five Roosevelt-Garner buttons I kept affixed to my wind-breaker (above my knickers) in the weeks before Election Day in 1932.

The early- to mid-1930s were tough times in the United States, but palmy days for a boy-Democrat baseball fan in New York. Carl Hubbell, gravely bowing twice from the
waist
before each delivery, was throwing his magical screwball for the Giants, and Joe DiMaggio, arriving from San Francisco in '36 amid vast heraldings, took up his spread-legged stance at the Stadium, and batted .323 and .346 in his first two years in the Bronx. He was the first celebrated rookie to come up to either team after I had attained full baseball awareness: my Joe DiMaggio. My other team, the New Deal, also kept winning. Every week in 1933, it seemed, the White House gave birth to another progressive, society-shaking national agency (the A.A.A., the N.R.A., the C.C.C., the T.V.A.), which Congress would enact into law by a huge majority. In my city, Fiorello LaGuardia led the Fusion Party, routed the forces of Tammany Hall, and, as mayor, cleared slums, wrote a new city charter, and turned up at five alarmers wearing a fire chief's helmet. (I interviewed the Little Flower for my high-school paper later in the decade, after sitting for seven hours in his waiting room. I can't remember anything he said, but I can still see his feet, under the mayoral swivel chair, not quite touching the floor.) Terrible things were going on in Ethiopia and Spain and Germany, to be sure, but at home almost everything I wanted to happen seemed to come to pass within a few weeks or months—most of all in baseball. The Yankees and the Giants between them captured eight pennants in the thirties, and even played against each other in a subway series in 1936 (hello, ambivalence) and again in 1937. The Yankees won both times; indeed, they captured all five of their World Series engagements in the decade, losing only three games in the process. Their 12-1 October won-lost totals against the Giants, Cubs, and Reds in '37, '38, and '39
made me sense at last that winning wasn't everything it was cracked up to be; my later defection to the Red Sox, and toward the pain-pleasure principle had begun.

 

There are more holes than fabric in my earliest baseball recollections. My father began taking me and my four-years-older sister to games at some point in the latter twenties, but no first-ever view of Babe Ruth or of the green barn of the Polo Grounds remains in mind. We must have attended with some regularity, because I'm sure I saw the Babe and Lou Gehrig hit back-to-back home runs on more than one occasion. Mel Ott's stumpy, cow-tail swing is still before me, and so are Gehrig's thick calves and Ruth's debutante ankles. Baseball caps were different back then: smaller and flatter than today's constructions—more like the workmen's caps that one saw on every street. Some of the visiting players—the Cardinals, for instance—wore their caps cheerfully askew or tipped back on their heads, but never the Yankees. Gloves were much smaller, too, and the outfielders left theirs on the grass, in the shallow parts of the field, when their side came in to bat; I wondered why a batted ball wouldn't strike them on the fly or on the bounce someday, but it never happened. John McGraw, for one, wouldn't have permitted such a thing. He was managing the Giants, with his arms folded across his vest (he wore a suit some days and a uniform on others), and kept his tough, thick chin aimed at the umpires. I would look for him—along with Ott and Bill Terry and Travis Jackson—the minute we arrived at our seats in the Polo Grounds.