Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (17 page)

One of the things that most put me off about the beautiful ex–Barbara Daly was her convertible Chrysler and her mink coat and her empress’s airs, which did not go at all with my disguise as a minor Prince Incognito, Air-craftsman 2nd Class, and “one of the mob” fighting Hitler. I was all for Democracy. She was soon ordering around my commanding officers. She already knew “how the world works.” I did not want to know. I hated the very fact that that
was
how it worked. I loathed her for her political acumen. You can imagine my embarrassment when I came home once, after two weeks, to my humble hovel, wherever it may have been at the time, to discover Barbara giving a cocktail party—the first person I saw on opening the door was the man before whom I cringed and whom I saluted every other day of my life, my C.O., suddenly converted into a genial and subservient “friend” calling me “Brooks” instead of “Baekeland, AC
₂
”—a man whose social inferiorities would have embarrassed a Gila monster. I wished that my new wife might just vanish back into the meretricious world she had come from.

Anyway, there were always those two weeks before we were able to couple on bumpy mattresses and cow the local population with her airs of Catherine de’ Medici. And it was horribly boring for her—I mean all those blotchy, overworked, overbabied, gingham-dressed other officers’ wives at tea in the intervening fourteen days.

Since I soon saw that the poetry was not going to work, I began to try to teach her how to draw and do watercolors. As a teacher I took my job seriously and, standing behind her—as I did through the rest of her whole artistic career—I gave her the ideas, the suggestions about form, theme, color, etc. She did have talent and ambition, but she had no imagination. What she had—and what may be more valuable to an artist—was passion. But she had never had a Conté crayon or a brush of any kind in her hand before. You can see in Nina Daly’s apartment in New York that what Barbara did with that ignorance and passion was not so bad at all. The romantic spirit.

And in the long summer evenings in that north country, after a crummy but lovely dinner in some awful village greasy spoon, we would go walking for miles out into the Canadian countryside—wilderness, or semiwilderness in those days, with me trying to walk on the rails of some abandoned railroad line and reciting “Gerontian”—I was mad about T.S. Eliot then, think him an old fart now—and, above us, in the satined evening sky, the Nighthawks sliding straight down with that amazing BOOOOOM to impress their girlfriends. I trust they were!
I
was.

What tied me to Barbara for all those years? Pity. I still feel sorry for her. I still feel guilty. I still feel protective.

Official Visitors File, Broadmoor Special Hospital, September 18, 1975

Colm Byrne

When I knew Tony, he was in Gloucester House. I couldn’t say I knew him that well—Gloucester House when I was there had ninety-six patients.

The patients at Cornwall House, where he had come from, were, let’s say, much more disturbed. Cornwall House was commonly referred to as “the monkey house.” That was because largely the patients in there were diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, whereas the patients in Gloucester House tended to be fairly controlled for a long period of time, more stable—there wasn’t a great deal of what we call psychotic behavior in Gloucester House in comparison with Cornwall House. Cornwall House was much bigger as well. Gloucester House was referred to really as a semi-parole block because it was much more easygoing.

Official Visitors File, Broadmoor Special Hospital, November 27, 1975

Brooks Baekeland

Nina Daly is a Fraser—no nuttiness there that I ever discovered. I had a very close, often Rabelaisian relationship with her. She was the best part of my marriage. She had an enormous sense of humor, no education, silly values, and indomitable loyalty.

Helen Delaney

Nina Daly is a harmless enough creature. Her values came from Cholly Knickerbocker and the Catholic Church—mostly from Cholly Knickerbocker. But on her husband’s side of the family there was real mayhem. It’s what you might call a frail line.

Brooks Baekeland

The fact is, the turning, bending, hinging energy in the stories of human lives is given off by very intense and often very queer people who are no longer alive to play mischief, though the mischief still breeds. There are two kinds of mischief in this regard. There is the mischief in the blood—when it is there, as it was certainly in Barbara’s father Frank Daly’s family. Frank Daly’s own father, Barbara’s grandfather, was a violent and aberrant man, and so had been
his
father, Barbara’s great-grandfather, by all report. And Barbara’s paternal grandmother was a “case” who mooned at the piano all day and never did any housework or house management—a kind of Zasu Pitts creation.

And then there is the other kind of mischief—the mischief that produces more mischief by cause and effect, action and reaction.

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

Barbara’s father committed suicide—I don’t know why, I don’t even know
how
, unfortunately. And her brother committed suicide. I remember Fred Baekeland saying, “Isn’t it extraordinary that the whole family has committed suicide.”

Helen Delaney

The suicide of Frank Daly, Sr., was observed by Frank Jr. through the window of the locked garage. Frank Sr., who had lost what money he had in the Crash, was gassing himself with carbon monoxide while pretending to be working on his car—it was a Pierce Arrow, as I recall, and he was underneath it and the engine was running. Frank Jr., walking back and forth before the garage window, watched his father die. The insurance company was suspicious but could never prove fraud. Frank Jr., Barbara, and Nina Daly each got about sixty thousand dollars from the insurance company. This was in 1932, mind you. That would be at least six hundred thousand each in today’s currency.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

The son Frank later died in a car accident, supposedly on purpose—I don’t know. How does one decide that somebody has gone into a tree on purpose?

Helen Delaney

One day Frank Jr. whipped around a curve in Cohasset, Mass., I think, and just drove at high speed into an elm tree. The official story was that the steering mechanism had malfunctioned. I know he had been drinking for some time.

He was a front-and-center-look-at-
me
kind of guy—just like his sister. He loved to raise Cain in public. I forget what he actually did for a living but I do remember that he was trying to crack the detective-magazine market. I don’t think he had much luck. His wife was the quiet-little-woman type, so there was friction there as well. They had two nice little boys.

Brooks Baekeland

Barbara and I inherited that fatherless family. She performed all the brave and wonderful human prophylaxes. I begged for money from my family. I resented bitterly having to ask my fascistic father for anything, but I did not mind being in debt to my marvelous grandmother—I could even glory in that, because our spirits, hers and mine, were always in tune. The problem, the Socratic problem, of value—how can it be established? proved?—controlled her life as much as it did mine. Both Barbara and Tony were wrecked on those stony shores. They became raiders—or rather,
she
was to begin with. They were arrogant. They were destroyed. These are not merely abstract questions. Those who have seen Nemesis in their stories were right indeed. It works in all our lives. It worked with a terrible obviousness in theirs. A swift, destroying sword.

If one seeks to pin down the source of Tony’s violent instability, one mustn’t entirely blame the Dalys. I think there was mischief in the blood on both sides—the Baekelands as well. I have in my notebooks a quotation that I copied down from Robert Gittings’s life of Keats—I was in India at the time: “Suffering had laid cruelly bare his abnormally passionate nature, unbalanced since his boyhood, always in extremes.”

Was I thinking of Tony when I copied this? Certainly not. I was thinking of me!

Someone, I now forget who, told me years later that when Foster Kennedy heard that I had married Barbara Daly, he said: “God forfend that they have a child!”

AS GRADUALLY TONY BAEKELAND
became a member of society at Broadmoor, he could choose from among the several occupational therapies available to patients: toy-making, pottery, carpentry, metalwork, printing, radio-making, basket-making…He preferred drawing and painting. “He gave me one or two things—paintings of flowers and things like that,” Dr. Maguire recalls. “We have to be very careful about paint because in some cases it’s very toxic and patients can harm themselves.”

Tony Baekeland soon improved to the point where he was reading university-level books—among them, a volume on abstract mathematics. He wrote to his father that he was happy, had “a home and new friends.”

Old friends—and friends of friends—began to visit him. There was as well a community group called the Broadmoor League of Friends, two of whose members—a retired army doctor and his wife—took a particular interest in Tony.

“Colonel Verbi was at one time in the English army,” Dr. Maguire explains. “He was a wonderful friend to Tony. He and his wife had the time to visit. Tony was so fond of them he gave them a number of gifts—I remember particularly a figure of an elephant. When Mrs. Verbi died some years ago and I went around to their house to call, Colonel Verbi gave me—to give back to Tony—the things that Tony had given to his wife. And, when Colonel Verbi died, he left Tony a silver ashtray in his will.”

Toward the end of his third summer in Broadmoor, Tony received word from his father and Sylvie in France of the birth of a half brother.

Letter from Antony Baekeland to Sam Green, August 29, 1975

Brooks Baekeland

God, not I, is an ironist. Barbara became pregnant only twice in her life—not counting an “occult” insemination in Mallorca by Sam Green, between two chairs across a room, with the aid, I suspect, of mucho hash—and for both she had to have an operation to untip her tipped uterus. The first one—I was flying then in Germany in early 1945 or late 1944—was miscarried. The second, in the autumn of 1946, was Tony.

H.R.H. Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia

She told me that she was one of those rare cases of women who can only conceive a child during their period. I mean, it’s not biologically possible, is it? And she wound up conceiving her own killer.

Marjorie Fraser Snow

I believe when her brother was killed she was carrying Tony and they were afraid she might lose the baby she was in such a state.

Notes from a Psychiatric Consultation on Antony Baekeland, New York, March 12, 1971

Brooks Baekeland

When Tony was born, I was living at 1220 Park Avenue, in a three-room apartment with Barbara and her mama and, in insidious progression as the next years passed, her widowed sister-in-law, Edna, and her two sons. Little did I realize that I would be supporting the Dalys for years and Nina Daly for the rest of her life. We also had an incontinent, decerebrate toy poodle which had come with Barbara and her mother from Delmonico’s. It peed everywhere and was called Negus. Finally we moved to 136 East Seventy-first Street, the large house that my grandmother had bought for me.

I was a graduate student in mathematics and physics at Columbia. I was the original student who did not go to lectures but discovered the texts from which those supposed gods, our professors, were themselves simply copying out sections on the blackboard, which my helpless fellow students scribbled down as fast as they could. I bought all the books and I worked out every single problem in every single book.

Peter Gimbel

I’m awed by intellectual prowess, especially in the physical sciences, and on
that
score Brooks always awed me. He had the highest academic record of any predoctoral student who ever went through Pupin—that’s the physics building at Columbia—up until whatever time that was, late forties or whatever.

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

Brooks was within one week of getting his Ph.D. and he just
left.
He left, he said, because he was sitting in class and he had taken all day to do the answer to one problem and this guy came in and did it in fifteen minutes—unless he could be the best he didn’t want to do it at all.

Elizabeth Blow

I know there was opposition in the family to Brooks’s quitting Columbia, and I think I heard that they even reduced his income because of it. But meanwhile he had decided to become a writer.

From the Diaries of John Philip Cohane, Unpublished

Brooks Baekeland

I enrolled in a short-story-writing class at Columbia to titrate—loosely: offset, neutralize—my studies in mathematical physics. I used to get off the Fifth Avenue bus at Seventieth Street each day when returning from my classes and sit for an hour or more in front of the fountain in the Frick Museum to wash all the chemistry and physics off me.

Alastair Reid

I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence when Brooks’s short story—I think it’s the only story he’s ever had published—appeared in the college literary magazine,
Inscape.
The faculty adviser to the magazine was Brooks’s old classmate at boarding school, Ambrose Gordon. In fact, it was at Ambrose Gordon’s house near Bronxville that I met Brooks and Barbara for the first time. She was raw-faced, large-boned, but I found her very attractive in conversation, in her enthusiasms and her suddennesses. She was much looser than Brooks. He was terribly aloof, very conscious of his own elegance—he dressed with almost finicky attention. What would be that thin elegant look that we have now—it was his. He exaggerated his own thinness. He was balding and he looked as though he polished his head. I mean, he had an incredible arrogance, a kind of personal arrogance.

I think Ambrose Gordon had invited me to dinner that night so I could say to Brooks Baekeland, “I read your story.” It’s been about thirty years since I read it, but I do remember that he was clearly into a certain kind of wordplay that was pretty fashionable. He talked about Queneau, whom I hadn’t read then but have since. Raymond Queneau, the French puzzle-maker—word games. Brooks invoked people like that and Karl Kraus, and I remember being annoyed because he was clearly bent on naming writers that other people hadn’t read. He gave the impression that he was a mysterious and secret writer—an impression which I may say he kept up as long as I knew him, into the sixties, because when I met him about ten years after this, he was still, you know, secretly and mysteriously writing something which—there was no question about it—was a masterpiece. He chose to arrive at the top in his own mind. I mean, his story in the Sarah Lawrence quarterly was clever, but that’s all. But then, I never thought of Brooks as a writer—ever.

Helen Delaney

As a work of fictional art, Brooks’s short story may leave something to be desired, but as naked fantasy it is simply astonishing—both as a psychological self-portrait and, amidst all the giddy hilarity, as a sinister foreshadowing of Brooks’s future behavior toward women.

“Milk,” Brooks Baekeland,
Inscape,
Sarah Lawrence Literary Review, Spring 1955

Freddy was small and blond and he bit his nails down to the quick. He had thinning hair (he was painting the scalp with iodine to “stimulate” new growth, and the iodine looked like a birthmark), and his eyes were like two pleasant, disqualified marbles. Freddy needed love—all the time. Those blue, vague, marble eyes of his showed it. They were like the eyes of a woman after childbirth. Of course he wore the fashionable black “loafers” with tassels (the smart, expensive ones), dark-gray flannel suits (Brooks Brothers) and gray socks with blue piping, and he never sat without crossing his legs gracefully and smiling: and he had the world’s most happy, charming smile. Freddy had no problems—if you except his flora—and he had oodles of money to play with. Only he hardly realized it himself. He just took it for granted, and he was terribly generous with it with all of his friends. His father, Argon Hoegfeldt Knipples, and his grandfather, Karl Peter Knipples, built up the Knipples family shipping business which had left him and his mother very well off when Argon died. And now there was only himself left, the last of the Knipples, going on thirty-six, adjusting nicely.

Of course, it can’t be denied that Freddy missed his mother frightfully, but that too was something he took for granted. When he talked about her—as he did constantly—it was with such a charming and loving naiveté that it hardly seemed like a mourning, but more like a tribute to her invisible concern and protection. Freddy was as gentle and as faithful as a girl. Many people never realized that his mother was dead. He still referred all his choices and delights to the invisible aegis of that gentle ghost whom he spoke of to everyone—even to chance acquaintances—as “Mother.” It was as though he took it for granted that everyone had met her or known her at one time, and all loved her as he did. Some people really felt they did, no doubt. And it was hard not to believe that she had been the most perfect of women, though probably unhappy with Argon H. Knipples, empire-builder, and to that small extent—because of her unhappiness—perhaps imperfect, as even towards the rude and bestial empire-builder a good woman has duties. But let us not look into this too closely, as it is likely to be unpleasant. That Freddy did not like his father, whom he referred to as “that brute,” we know, and that is enough—perhaps too much.

Naturally then, in the light of all this, Freddy must have asked himself what Mother would have thought of going on a diet of mushrooms and mother’s milk. He remembered that she had lived for several weeks once on nothing but tomato juice and yogurt—on his suggestion—he loved her when she was slim—and they had both been very excited by the results. Of course, human milk was a different matter. He loved milk, but he wondered if woman’s milk would be as delicious as a cow’s milk. After all it was pretty silly to nourish a prejudice in favor of a cow; rather perverted when you come to think of it—like that boy in
The Hamlet. That
was something to think about! He’d never thought of it that way, of course, and now that he did, he wondered why everyone didn’t drink mother’s milk instead of the milk of those great horny, bellowing animals that frightened him so. A mother’s milk must be delicious or it wouldn’t be human…. Was that right? He wasn’t exactly sure what he meant, but that was close to it….