Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (13 page)

Brooks Baekeland

In the Bakelite Corporation, the Roll descendants—my Aunt Nina and her four children—held common stock, and the Baekeland descendants—my father and his three children—held, but in considerably less amount, preferred stock, all this in trusts mostly. The Roll children would inherit automatically at twenty-one but the Baekeland children would not inherit automatically but at the discretion of my father and only on his death. Great trust was put in “George’s judgment,” that he would do the right thing. This extra liberty of action had been his reward for having given up his career as an exploring petroleum engineer to enter and become the vice-president of the Bakelite Corporation, as LHB began to feel himself getting old. And though my grandfather could hardly have had many illusions about the suitability of what he was doing—for any fool could have seen that my father had no business talent—it was in the old European tradition of family.

I doubt that LHB really considered any other alternative. He knew that time was running out for him. He wanted to retire and to prepare the way—and it
had
to be his son. For him, Bakelite—and all of its ramifications both backwards and forwards in time—was a family business, to stay in the family and be of the family. It is as banal as “Emil Duval et Fils” written over the entrance to a small electrolytic zinc plating establishment in Auteuil.

My father did everything he could all his life to disassociate himself from that, from “Duval et Fils.” And thus, as soon as LHB began to become senile—it took twelve years, and in those years Zeus gradually became Pan—and could no longer oversee the Bakelite Corporation, my father sold the whole thing. Disastrously, as it turned out, for the whole family but particularly for his own children. He destroyed the Baekeland fortune. He destroyed the Baekeland family.

He then began to lead that life of a country squire—expensive cars, expensive tailors, elegant yachts, shooting in Scotland, playing bridge with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in Nassau, and all the rest—that showed him not the son of an American immigrant but an English duke without a title.

That day I climbed up to the tower of Snug Rock, I brought back a lot of early photographs of my grandfather, my grandmother, my father as a boy, and his little sister, Nina.

Well, one day he came to visit Barbara and me in New York—he had occasional generous impulses; there was a wanting-to-love man buried there under all that neurotic scar tissue. Barbara was out. I was on the fourth floor—as far as I could get away from my social wife’s life—studying, no doubt, when I heard the doorbell ring.

I went down. It was my father. The Grand Duke. A rare and fluttery event. What to do with him? A glass of port? One always had to entertain him—like royalty. He had no conversation. One ended up chattering, feeling a perfect fool. That is perhaps the principal reason royalty has been almost universally suppressed: it is utterly useless and makes intelligent people feel stupid.

And then I had an inspiration—nothing else had worked. I took him up to my study to show him the wonderful photos I had brought back from Snug Rock. I was also hybridizing orchids up there, under all sorts of artificially simulated climatic conditions. The orchids did not interest him in the least, not even the fact that I had some growing in conditions approximating fourteen thousand feet in Peru and Chile and, in a glass case right next to them, some growing at sea level in Sumatra—different pressures, sunrise and sunset times, temperatures, humidities, and seasons. I began to take out all those photos showing him as a small boy on the knee of Zeus, etc.

And he would not, he could not, it almost seemed as though he
dared
not, look at a single photo of his father!

That was when I first grew up, so to speak, insofar as understanding my lifelong problem with Father was concerned. After that day I no longer feared him. I pitied him. I understood his tragedy and it horrified me.

He was first and always the beloved apple of his mother’s eye. My grandmother was so besotted she told my mother when she married my father that “George is a combination of Leonardo da Vinci and Jesus Christ.” I concluded that he was protected early from Zeus and that he was not intimate with his father, that eccentric tyrant figure, whose lava outpourings of speech and learning and whose intolerance of folly must have made him a dreadful person in the house, an awesome parent. A man who could not stand noise, save it issued from his own mouth. Zeus, the terrible.

Judging from the fact that my father always hated and distrusted “intellectuals” and read with the slowness and concentrated effort of a peasant, and from the fact that the interests and style he soon developed were totally opposite to his father’s—that is, all things physical and sporting—and that he spent enormous sums of money all his life on things elegant and beautiful, and became what I call a high-class redneck, to the right of Right—from all this, I take it that he had made, and perhaps with his mother’s connivance, a classic revolt against his father.

But—and this is what interests me—my father apparently never actually defied my grandfather. In fact, he obeyed to the point of wrecking his own happiness. You might interpret his obedience to what he feared and loathed as showing a lack of courage, but I think there was a still stronger influence that made defiance unthinkable. Despite his efforts to separate himself from everything that had a foreign accent, so to speak, to be a real—but tip-top-class—American, or even better yet, a noble Englishman, Snug Rock was a thoroughgoing piece of bourgeois Europe, and in Europe, Victorian Europe, filial obedience was total. The only alternative was to “run away to sea”—leave home forever. With his mother’s devoted protection, that would never have been necessary. All he had to do was to see as little of his father as possible, and that was easy, for LHB was always working or away.

And then, in the few years before he joined what was then I think the Signal Corps and went to Italy as an aviator, he met and fell in love with the most beautiful girl in the Hudson River Valley—my mother, Cornelia Fitch Middlebrook, a thirteenth-generation American, descended from founding fathers and from governors of New York State, etc., etc. They were engaged shortly before he went off to war. He was the happiest man in the world.

He was unlucky in being sent to Italy. The great Italian immigration to America had already begun, and to him, Italians were fellows in undershirts and paper-bag hats who dug ditches or labored in his parents’ gardens and greenhouses. He was sent to Foggia, where he flew Caproni bombers and where his commanding officer was Fiorello La Guardia, later mayor of New York, a small, talkative, emotional man whom he despised. I remember, as a boy, hearing him brag how he would shoulder “wops” off the sidewalks in Italy. Of the Renaissance, of ancient Rome, of Italian science, music, philosophy, mathematics, he knew nothing. “What did Italians ever do?” he would say, in later years. I would tell him. “Oh, artists!” he would say with contempt. I would then cite for him Italian figures in America who were distinguished scientists, politicians, bankers, industrialists, and even—best of all—multimillionaires. He would stare at me in disbelief, offended by such disgusting paradoxes. He felt the same about the Jews—or any immigrant people. When I was doing graduate work in physics he asked me once, in a lowered voice: “Einstein is a fake, isn’t he?” And these were all
idées reçus,
not gotten from his parents but from twentieth-century America as it was then.

My father hoped he was a total conformist. In fact, he was not only a right-wing radical but a misanthrope, who never had any friends, except those who could flatter him. Flattery was the only road to him, but his cruelty closed that road for me. He ended up sincerely preferring dogs to people.

But he was not quite the two-dimensional figure that I was then still persuaded he was. No one is. He was a man born out of his place, out of his time, and a man with superb—unused, curdling—gifts. He was, for instance, gifted with his hands—he loved cabinetwork—and he had a love of speed, was as quick and coordinated as a cat. He could be fun and even witty when he was happy, and he loved jokes—when they were on others. He was a man who on a camping trip would nail some friend’s shoes to the floor by his bed, his friend presumably drunk and deaf to the hammering, but would be red-faced mad if someone had done that to him. He was a wonderful practical joker and gave me some bad examples in that line, but he was never one to see himself in a funny light. I thought, even as a small child, that that was weird—mad, somehow. I could not understand it. I am not sure I do now.

He also had—but alas, it was superficial—dash, or what the French call
panache.
It was show. He was always, metaphorically speaking, standing at a mirror. He was totally conscious of his own style. But finally, his arrogance and his misanthropy were ego-saving rationalizations for a deep shyness and sense of his social incapacities. I know this because I am his son and have inherited many of the same disabilities.

My father roared out in the dark to keep the demons away. It was easy, being such a rich and protected man. As my grandmother used to say, “One of the uses of money is that it allows us not to live with the consequences of our mistakes.” He even fooled himself. I do not think he ever suspected that he had lived his whole life through at bay. Think of this. It is sad. After all, we do not have much time here, and to spend it
all
with our backs against the wall…But I suppose a large part of humanity does, and that is even sadder.

After my father and mother were married they went out to Golden, Colorado, then a village, where he entered the Colorado School of Mines. He had decided to be a geologist—geologists lived out of doors, hammered rocks, prospected for gold, built bridges over rushing torrents in darkest Africa and other romantic parts of the world. It was my father who gave me my romantic interest in faraway places—the Arctic, Africa, South America, the sounding seas—ships, adventure, the noble savage, etc.

In Golden, my mother bore him two children—first my sister and then, fifteen months later, myself. Upon graduation, with the aid of my grandfather, he was signed on to go down to Tunisia and Algeria and prospect for oil.

Engineering was the romantic thing in those days. It was the engineers, in their open-necked shirts, riding britches, boots, and pipe in hand or mouth, who were pushing civilization out into the “native” parts of the world. It was the tail end of Cecil Rhodes’s world, the do-gooding-but-ohso-much-money-making world of the British Empire. It was “a man’s life.” My father had made a choice that I could have certainly made myself—one part of me would have, for I have always had both sides in me, the active and the intellectual, and they have often been in conflict.

Eventually my grandparents decided that my father was to return at “a very good salary” and become vice-president of the Bakelite Corporation in New York, then headquarters for the German, English, American, and Japanese branches, and that “the young people” were to live in Yonkers, not far from Snug Rock, while my father made “a splendid career” in Bakelite. In the summers my mother and her two small children would move up to the Adirondacks.

My father ought to have pursued his open-air, adventurous, super-masculine life. But the promise of that “very good salary” and that “splendid career” and—what?—shame?—hope?—made him take a decision that embittered and diminished him for the rest of his life. In every blow that he beat his two young children there was the rage and bitterness of a man who hated himself—and so hated the world.

After his “very good salary” and other perks became so fabulous in the roaring twenties that he could move away from Yonkers, he bought a place surrounded by woods in Scarsdale where he built a swimming pool—a novelty in those days—and, on the same property, another house for himself, the Doggery, where he lived with his dogs and mounted heads, coming to “our” house only for meals. He did not stay with his wife after dinner but, always in dinner jacket, worked in his shop, making, for instance, sailing boats. He was an insomniac all his life, and, crazy with frustrated sexuality, would swim at night for hours up and down his pool to exhaust himself sufficiently to sleep.

We two—and later, three—children took it quite for granted that on our property there should be two separate establishments, one for my father and one for us and our mother. We always dreaded the black-cloud returns of “George” from his office on Park Avenue. Once, I saw with amazement a rat, not a squirrel, jump from the big sycamore near my bedroom window to the roof of the house. I could not wait to tell my father, for I had not known that rats could climb trees. I imagined it might please that man I so feared and whom, even then, I had to entertain and—I did not know it yet—be superior to. Not easy at five or six. Calling me a liar and saying he would teach me a lesson, he beat me with the back of a hairbrush. He could never keep his temper and knew no other recourse than the Gestapo ones—beatings, threats, reprisals. And we were all so weak, in our own ways—such sinful creatures, so culpably misguided, so unable to do right in my father’s eyes, so wanting to please, so terrified of doing wrong.

On the other hand, and sadly for my father, I was a person born with an inordinate and growing pride, and I began to stiffen and resist as time passed. As my darling Sylvie has pointed out to me, a child that knows it is loved will accept any punishment from the person who loves him, even when it is unjust, but no child will accept even just punishment from a person who dislikes him. And my father detested his children.