Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (10 page)

From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, April 20, 1907

Brooks Baekeland

From his most profound beliefs my grandfather despised publicity, money, fashion, sensation, exploitation, and all the people whose lives were dedicated to such. He was an idealist, a feudal-socialist, a radical theorist, an antimaterialist millionaire. All this was in the same curious spirit as his benefactions during the Depression, such as I got a hint of once when I was with him at the Chemists’ Club. He had gone somewhere—to pee? to buttonhole a colleague?—and a sandy-haired, middle-aged man came up to me and asked me who I was. When I told him, he said, “No one will ever know how many of us your grandfather brought through the Depression or what would have happened to us without him.” He said this to me very emotionally. I had never heard of this. I asked my grandmother later. She had never known, either. And this was the man in sneakers and one suit who was known as a miser!

He was a benefactor by impulse: utterly without cynicism, without regard to self. Victorians—especially Victorians of his class, the academics—believed in Man and Family. They never doubted Life’s purposes.

My real education began at the example and from the words of my Belgian grandparents, who were not unsusceptible to Honor but tended to deride it in its social, self-lauding, self-loving forms—the forms
we
all in fact love so much. Because we love ourselves?

My grandfather, in particular, held all that mutual backslapping in ridicule—despite his own multiple honors, at the reception of each of which he always let the side down by saying it was all due to “luck” and his “marvelous wife.” How could he say: “due to my genius and your ridiculous system of self-congratulation”?

The academic class in Europe that my Baekeland grandparents came from put very high value on nonmaterialistic achievements. It despised show. It despised the accumulation of money and power. In the nineteenth century the European university world considered itself—and was considered—an aristocracy. In its heart it put itself above royalty, and did so without any hesitation whatever! It was guilty of an almost monastic pride, and its scientific members put Truth,
the
Truth, above Man—or any man.

So, from those two immigrants—totally out of phase with a society given over
entirely
to show, power, and gain, all of which they soon had, too, almost automatically, due to “luck” and LHB’s “marvelous wife,” of course—I learned everything, early.

Their only son, my father—George Washington Baekeland—was entirely the opposite. As was my first, ambitious, beautiful, backgroundless wife, Barbara.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

Brooks admired the way his grandfather and grandmother had led sort of separate lives—but in harmony, because they had similar values. Perhaps this was something he missed, because certainly he couldn’t have done that with Barbara, ever.

Letter from Leo Hendrik Baekeland to Professor Camiel De Bruyne, University of Ghent, Belgium, August 27, 1931

From the “Very Truly Yours” Column, Helen Muir,
Miami Herald,
January 18, 1940

Brooks Baekeland

LHB died in 1944. He had been greatly gaga for several years—senile dementia, taking sometimes violent forms as the oxygen and glycogen were gradually starved from that massive brain. In his middle or late seventies he no longer always liked it when I asked him specific questions. He would reply testily, “It is not polite to ask me such questions as the name of some exotic hybrid now. Old men’s memories fail.” Or he would upbraid me for standing in front of him with my legs apart—done, though he did not realize it, to shorten my six feet four to a more agreeable height, he being just under six feet—by saying, “You don’t have to emphasize your height like that!” His temper worsened, and I think his loneliness—of which state I was already a precocious sufferer myself—was almost intolerable for the simple reason that not even delivery boys and Pullman Car porters would listen to him anymore. Shall I talk of loneliness? Of the loneliness of
that
kind of greatness? In the end he became a pathetic, a tragic figure, and had to be sent away from home to be “taken care of.” He was violent long before he died, of the final massive cerebral hemorrhage.

In 1941, when he was very old and already quite dotty, I called Snug Rock to ask my grandmother if I could come and crouch there. My grandfather answered and said that my grandmother was in the Adirondacks but that I must come anyway, he needed my help. It was an order: I was to come at the swiftest.

Now, I loved my grandmother more than anyone I had ever loved, but this time my motive for wanting to come to Yonkers involved a girl with a divine body, long red hair, green eyes, a taste for Richard Strauss, and whose father was a football coach—this was just before I met Barbara Daly. So I said, “Yes, Grandpapa.” I knew Dick the chauffeur’s number, called him, and had him pick me up at the station.

My grandfather immediately made me privy to his problem. In fact, he had two problems. The first he did not know but I recognized immediately—he had gone over the edge since I had last seen him—and I wondered: “Who is taking care of him? This is dangerous.” The second problem was the following: He had just arrived from Florida, he had four heavy suitcases with him, and they were all locked and he had no key.

What he had done is lock the first case, put the key in the second, lock the second, put the key in the third, lock the third—and so on. You see, in that way, you did not have
four
bulky keys in your pocket but only
one.
But he had lost that one! He was in despair.

I was not his grandson for nothing. “Are there any other keys in the house?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

So we went looking, and of course we finally found a huge ball of keys all snarled together, for every good old house has one—keys that no one knows the origin or the function of anymore but that no one dares throw away.

Do not forget that he was talking the whole time, perhaps telling me how he had just escaped with his life from the head-hunting Dayaks in the Sunda Straits in 1913 or about the famous oral exam that he and some colleagues had trained one of their dear but, alas, nitwit friends to pass, and how the friend, asked to explain the polarization of light—a question they had not trained him for, deeming it too abstract for his limited brains—had cleared his throat and said, “Messieurs, in order to explain to you how light is polarized, I must first describe to you the principle of the suction pump”—a question they
had
trained him for. And with that bunch of keys, as I was saying, I began to try, Edison-like, the six thousand possibilities. Of course, I soon got all the suitcases open, to my grandfather’s
fervent
joy.

And what was in those four suitcases? Books, papers, diaries, notebooks, checkbooks, manuscripts. He had forgotten to pack
clothes!

Now, to me this was not just a sign of senility, but an indication of his lifelong priorities. And you may imagine what a great woman it took to wife a man like that and keep her good humor.

I was overwhelmed with pity and so I started unpacking for him, hoping to find at least a pair of pajamas and a toothbrush somewhere in all that incunabula. Nothing. Not a handkerchief.

What I found that startled me was literally dozens of pocket checkbooks from different banks all over America. Ten would not have attracted my attention. There must have been fifty or more, maybe a hundred. As I remember, one suitcase was full of nothing else.

“What are
these,
Grandpapa?”

He chuckled. “Banks,” he explained, “are insolvent.”

When he saw my puzzled expression, he went on. “They lend money they have not got—that is, they give credit without backing. In fact, they are all bankrupt.”

I was still looking puzzled.

“The backing is the depositors’ money, but the loans they make are many times, often ten times that. It’s a fraud. As long as the depositors don’t know and as long as the debtors pay their debts, the banks make money—other people’s money, of course—and the banks are called ‘solvent.’ It should not be allowed. It is highly dangerous. In fact, there is not a solvent bank in the United States.”

Poor old man, I was thinking.

“So,” he went on, “I play the numbers.” He giggled. “I spread the risk. I keep money in banks all over the United States instead of in just one or two where a run of a few days during a panic could wipe me out.”

Senile. I offered him the loan of my pajamas. “Healthier,” he said, “to sleep naked.” He always had. Goodnight. He had some reading to do.
I
had a long, cool, green-eyed girl to see, but of course it would not have done to tell him. He was, as I said, one of the last great Victorians.

But the memory I treasure is this. When I got back, at three a.m. to Snug Rock, afoot—it was not far—I found the house hermetically sealed. I had forgotten my dear grandfather’s growing paranoia. I tried every door, every window, every crack—it might have been Bodiam Castle. I was humiliated to think I could not scheme
some
way into that ancestral home. My mind set to working. I would not admit defeat; it was not theoretically possible—whatever I, Brooks Baekeland, wanted, I, Brooks Baekeland, could and would discover a way to get. It was an almost Mosaic law.

But in fact, there was no way short of storming that would let me in. So, just as the first birds were all singing grand opera, making promises too grand to keep, I lay me down on a wicker sofa on the porch facing the Hudson River and the majestic Palisades on the other side—it was a warm July night—and, with a perfectly bad—that is, good—conscience, I fell asleep.

The next thing I knew, the door from the dining room opened and there was Grandpapa looking at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, as I got up and brushed back my hair. “I got back late and didn’t want to disturb you.”

I had not a clue as to how he might react to this development. What he did was to give me a discourse on the climbing vine called wisteria, genus Wisteria, named after Caspar Wistar, an American anatomist who had died in 1818, and which had been developed into I forget how many hybrids by the Dutchman Claus something-or-other into however many varieties, of which this one on our porch was…“Would you like to take a bath?” he finally asked. “We will be served breakfast in half an hour.” “Thank you, sir,” I said.

That was the last time I saw my grandfather alive.

I do not mean that it was on the porch at Snug Rock that I last saw him alive. I was with him all that day and the next, alone—mostly in his laboratory, where he talked to me about his student years and gave me a sample of a “synthetic” beer he had made—it was not bad—or in his wine cellar, where he gave me samples of the very strong Sauternes he also made. He spoke to me about my grandmother as the very model of virtue, as someone we—the grandchildren—should forever appreciate and honor. I was deeply touched by this, since they had never been able to live together for more than a few days at a time, so that we had only seen them together at Christmas or Easter.