But this is too feeble. For though the Munns come through more vividly than anyone else in Upstate save Mary Pcolar, with a kind of unbecoming crotchetiness Wilson himself is not above recording foibles that make Wilson appear a lesser man than he was. Wilson continually extols the Munns’ virtues of industry, cleanliness, decency and family loyalty, and then abruptly he stuns the reader by deriding them for “no exercise of taste”—one wonders when Wilson expected Otis to cultivate that taste, at thirteen having set himself the task of sup porting his mother and saving the farm from the bankers— “hardly any pictures—two heads of deer in the dining room and the Doig portraits of trout caught by Thad, two small bookcases, piles of newspapers, and among them, when I first came in, Otis was asleep on a big red couch… . Otis asked me whether he was ‘stunk up’ from the cow barn— they got used to it and didn’t notice it.”
In June, 1959, Fern and Otis drove Wilson to the Mohawk Reservation at St. Regis for some research that would eventually be used in his Apologies to the Iroquois and Wilson records, with a good deal less sympathy than he gave to the mumbo-jumbo rituals of the Iroquois in his book, that on the way Otis stopped at a cheese factory and bought a paper bag of cheese curd which Otis and Fern ate like popcorn. “Fern said to Otis, ‘It squeaks good,’ and Otis said, ‘It squeaks good.’ They were talking about the sound you can feel it making when you bite it. This means that it is of the right consistency.” Certainly Wilson is here affecting an ivory-tower syndrome and might be a novice anthropologist who has just discovered a tribe of aborigines whose locomotion takes the form of “walking” about on the fingers of their right hands. Having grown up in Watertown, the largest city in the upstate region that holds interest for Wilson, I have as a “city boy” always been aware of the splendid small cheese factories in the area, have always known that many truck drivers and traveling salesmen carry on their dashboards bags of the curd they eat like peanuts, and that the test of the curd’s “body” is that “it squeaks good.”
On the publication of “Talcottville Diary” in The New Yorker Otis, a proud man, and rightfully so, protested this treatment in a long letter (September 15, 1971) to the weekly Boonville Herald (and Adirondack Tourist). Apparently Otis had hoped The New Yorker would publish it. Near the end of the letter he wrote, “I hope the New Yorker magazine will accept and publish my article because I strongly feel that I should be entitled to tell my side of ‘Talcottville Diary.’ “ But The New Yorker apparently declined —one prays they didn’t do so with one of their nastily arrogant and aloofly anonymous rejection slips—and Otis was forced to settle for the weekly where his “side” would at least reach his neighbors.
Otis begins by admitting that he and Fern are mentioned frequently in his cousin Edmund’s diary which appeared in two installments in The New Yorker and that they—realizing their limitations—are pleased to have a part in the life of a genius. Citing these “limitations,”‘ he ironically invokes his cousin Helen Augur to the effect that the Munns have lost their education and have bad grammar. He also says that of course both he and his father Thaddeus married “peasants.”
The letter here takes one of those nasty “family” turns by implying that at some past time Helen Augur had coerced their Uncle Tom, the stone house’s then owner, into leaving the property to Wilson’s mother (had Otis hoped for it?). Otis indicates that when his Uncle Tom was enfeebled, Helen Augur had the foresight to ask him to spend the winter with her in Milwaukee. Uncle Tom died shortly thereafter and the house went to Wilson’s mother. If this is the kind of advantage that accrues to the educated. Otis then rues not having gone on to school. For all Helen Augur’s “intellectuality,” Otis says, her gardening took the form of cutting down the currant and gooseberry bushes which had been thriving for twenty years and as a result Wilson had to go without his berries for a few years. He follows with an attempt at humor which, though funny, is awkwardly written and charged with the hurt Wilson’s references to him and his family must have prompted.
In his diary, Otis says, Wilson spoke of Fern walking in her high heels about the farmyard and through the goose manure; but as the Munns raised only turkeys Otis has been meaning to write to Princeton—Wilson’s alma mater, of course!—and inquire by what miraculous chemical process turkey manure is transformed into goose manure. For all Wilson’s education, Otis points out that Wilson himself is helpless in many respects. Citing Wilson’s attempt to learn to drive years before, Otis claims Wilson got into a car and drove for miles “trying to probe the intricacies involved” in bringing it to a stop. As to Wilson’s much publicized battle with the IRS, Otis says Wilson didn’t file a return for years because Wilson assumed it was being taken care of by an attorney who had been dead for some time and that, in compliance with their demand for a yearly return, the IRS had received no monies from the hereafter. Being “un educated,” Otis says he has to fall back on his own resources and make out his own returns, as well as those for sixty or seventy of his neighbors.
Otis’s bitterness surfaces when he points out that superior education had not prevented his father from all but destroying the estate and with it the family. Attempting to establish his heritage in America as every bit as ancient as Wilson’s, he places the first known Munn in America as a soldier in the 1637 Pequot Wars in Connecticut. Otis concludes by saying that he is proud of owning a dairy farm he can leave to his children and implies that his life seems of more durable stuff than it would have been had he written a few lines of prose and poetry which is read and soon forgotten.
To Wilson, this latter must have been the unkindest cut of all, characterized as it is by that unfairness that only members of a family are capable of hurling at one another, for there was hardly a reference to Otis and Fern in Upstate in which Wilson’s affection and admiration for them didn’t come through.
And yet, when I read Otis’s letter in the newspaper Mary had sent to me, I was made terribly sad and found myself wishing that Wilson hadn’t published Upstate, wished he’d taken his cue from his own 1928 essay I’d read for the first time while waiting for Mary that Sunday morning, and instead of indulging his passion for reminiscence—what Cheever has so marvelously called the “lust of arteriosclerosis”—he’d passed his final days sitting in judgment of con temporary writers, a judgment they all but begged for. And now, and as I’d done that day in Mary’s air-conditioned Impala, I found myself saying, “Jesus, I’m really sorry about Otis.”
From Rosalind Baker Wilson I later learned that there was no need whatever to feel badly about Otis and her father. Had there ever been a break between the two men (and even in the face of the letter’s bitterness Rosalind Baker Wilson would deny that any hard feelings had ever existed; but then, I soon learned that Rosalind Baker Wilson has one of those likable and naive capacities to see things as they ought to be) it had ceased to exist at the time of her father’s death. On the Sunday night before Wilson died, Fern and Otis had in fact been Wilson’s last callers at the stone house. When Rosalind Baker Wilson helped him up from his chair by the window to take him into the living room to greet the Munns, Wilson said:
“Oh. that I should have come to this!”
After asking Fern and Otis to stay with her father until Mrs. Stabb arrived, Rosalind Baker Wilson said: “Goodbye. Father.”
11
Rosalind Baker Wilson, Wilson’s daughter and his eldest child by his first wife Mary Blair, is fiftyish. She has never married. Like her father she is short and fleshy, somewhat pugnacious of eye, formidably and imposingly eagle-like of brow, impatient and crotchety, and seems bent on conveying to people she isn’t much impressed by EW’s eminence— proudly: “I’ve only ever read two of his books. Night Thoughts and Upstate.” Too, she goes out of her way to make those people interested in her because of their interest in her father dislike her. From a man who knew her well I once heard, “It’s very simple—she hates her father.” As it happened this was patently untrue. Although she had me constantly dancing to her s
elections, although if I persisted in what she chose to believe was “prying” into areas where I shouldn’t pry—and in her scrupulous ferocious eyes these included almost any areas at all!—she was rude to the point where on two occasions I had to restrain myself from telling her to stuff it, although she refused to acknowledge my interest in her father as an interest worthy of me, I outlasted her and came finally, in one awful grief-wrought moment, to see how much Rosalind Baker Wilson’s life had been bound up with that of her father and saw with rueful clarity the reason she could not bring herself to talk about him.
At Wilson’s death I had written and sent to her at Wellfleet a note of condolence in which I said that I had been commissioned by the Atlantic to do a piece about her father, especially as to Wilson’s life and days at Talcottville. I also said that to make money from another’s bereavement seemed to me the action of a scoundrel, but that if she’d consent to see me and I published anything as a result I’d give the monies to the Red Cross (fat fucking chance!) or any charity she chose. I had not even really been “commissioned” by the Atlantic. That magazine’s editor Bob Manning had been kind enough to let me use his publication as a means of introduction to Wilson’s friends and neighbors in the hope that I might put down some words he could use, but I was so vague about my conception I don’t think Manning was much impressed or—perhaps knowing something of my reputation for procrastination—that he really believed he’d see any words.
Not that it mattered in Rosalind Baker Wilson’s case: she never answered me. When I told Mary this during my day with her, she suggested it might be because the note had gone to Wellfleet and might not have been forwarded to where Rosalind had been living for the last two years—three doors down the street from her father’s house in Talcottville. A few mornings after my ill-starred picnic I therefore telephoned her and was immediately struck with her volatile impatience. When I tried to explain I’d written her and the contents of my letter, she cut me dead by saying she was sure the letter would have been forwarded from Well-fleet. In any case it hadn’t made an impression and she couldn’t at the moment recall it. She would look for it. She then rang me off posthaste as she was in the process of cooking up “a good old-fashioned country breakfast” for some “good old friends” who had come to pay their respects. Two days later I received a curt and avuncular note reminiscent of her father’s chilling post cards, in which she told me that it would be her policy not to talk about her father with anyone. Following so close on her father’s death, the thought of further intruding myself upon her bereavement seemed to me distasteful in the extreme, but even as I came to that conclusion I couldn’t help thinking she’d never escape being Wilson’s eldest child and couldn’t help smiling wondering what her reaction would be when the academics and the “authorized” biographers, lustfully rubbing their hands, descended on her, the stone house, and the eighty-odd inhabitants of Talcottville. Then abruptly I got another letter from her.
Rosalind Baker Wilson was in a grandiose snit, one that would have become her father in his most polemical moods. She began by telling me that if I were going to do anything on her father not to give the money to the Red Cross, to get as much as I could and have a grand time with it. Then she got on to what was so distressing her. Rosalind said she hadn’t read anything on her father but the Watertown Times obituary. Now a friend had sent her Jason Epstein’s piece in The New York Review of Books; and though it would be the last thing she answered, she had to write Epstein. For my perusal she had enclosed a copy of a letter she’d sent to Jason Epstein in care of the New York Review. Of all the obituaries and tributes I’d read I’d liked Epstein’s best. I’d never heard of him—I heard later that he’d been (perhaps still was) a Random House editor—but there could have been little doubt from reading his eulogy that he and Wilson had been on easy terms. On reading Rosalind’s letter to him I had to go back to the New York Review to find the part that had so aroused her ire. Of the ceremony at Wellfleet Epstein had written:
There were moments of humor I had not anticipated: the young Orleans curate, like a scrubbed Beatle, shyly adjusting his lacy canonicals beside his blue Volkswagen in the Wilson driveway, as if he were hanging curtains; Edmund’s daughters, Rosalind and Helen, his son, Reuel, and Elena’s son, Henry, smiling as they took turns shoveling sand back into the grave where Edmund’s ashes had been placed, like children playing at the beach… .
—an “indiscretion” which had prompted Rosalind Baker Wilson to tell Epstein that she personally found the way he lounged over the grave repugnant; that he’d tried to play head mourner while Wilson’s insensitive children were caught up in gaiety. Again I read Epstein’s words, but for the life of me I could not see in them any conscious effort to inflict hurt or, for that matter, any effort to suggest that the ceremony had somehow been less grand than it ought to have been. Again I telephoned Rosalind Baker Wilson. That
she had even written and included me in what was obviously one of those family-friends’ contretemps common to almost everyone’s death seemed some reaching out to me, some un expressed hope that if I were going to do anything on her father I might at least get things “right.”
“I’m flexible as hell, Miss Wilson. I don’t really know what I want but whatever I do probably won’t be any more accurate if no one agrees to talk to me.” I then pointed out that if nothing else came from our talking she could tell any future pilgrims that she’d already talked with one “writer, Mr. Frederick Exley”—I liked that!—and intended to talk with no more.
With what seemed to me a somewhat hostile guardedness Rosalind Baker Wilson at last agreed that I might come on a certain early evening for drinks and a hamburger—not “hamburger steak.” If the weather were sunny—and the rains were continuing—Rosalind Baker Wilson suggested that I could take her to a “nice” restaurant on Bob Manning and the Atlantic. As I had no such expenses agreement with Manning, and as for months my wallet hadn’t been used for anything but a frayed and forlorn container for expired driver’s and current fishing licenses, I prayed the foul weather would hold. Fortunately it did.
I liked Rosalind Baker Wilson immediately. She wore a Mexican-style black cotton skirt, a white cotton blouse, she was barefooted and her sturdy legs were badly scratched as if she spent a lot of time going barelegged about the yards and fields of Talcottville or as if she were one of those odd blustering people who can’t avoid the piercing edges of kitchen cabinets. She shook my hand with warmth and firmness, and laughed with a kind of shakingly bouncy and unaffected joviality that suggested she was genuinely pleased to see me. She began by apologizing for the sparsity of the furniture, which she said she was in the process of rectifying by having on order “some things.” Almost instantly she ordered me to a typewriter at a card table in the front room and set me to copying for my “records” the brief eulogy Charles Mumford Walker had delivered at the gravesite at Wellfleet. Mr. Walker had been kind enough to send her a copy, and though it wasn’t at all the kind of thing I wanted, I dutifully copied it off, trying to act as solemnly earnest as a cub reporter “getting the facts.”
When I’d finished she gave me the rye and water I’d requested on her asking me what I’d have, I took a sip, made a face, and doing a Jackie Gleason said, “Boy, that’s goooood!” Rosalind Baker Wilson was not impressed by my fraudulent attempt at gentility, my trying to suggest the drink was a trifle strong for me. Because she, too, had never heard of me prior to my letter, she’d set herself to finding who and what I was—in her father’s lexicon what finally I was “up to”—and she’d been told by Dan Wakefield, a mutual acquaintance, that though I spilt more than most people drank I was “apparently” still functioning. She read Dan’s letter to me. I had no doubt Dan’s words had prompted Rosalind Baker Wilson to open her portals to me, and on that score was immensely grateful, but I didn’t much like the letter. My own “recommendations” are as simple as he’s okay, or he’s a prick, and Dan’s letter seemed to me somewhat patronizing in to
ne, self-protective (in case I got drunk and puked in Rosalind Baker Wilson’s lap she’d have been amply forewarned), and I made a mental note to thank Dan for the letter before I gave him a spanking.
When we were seating ourselves in more comfortable chairs, I brought the subject back to the Epstein piece.
“I didn’t even know we were supposed to fill in the grave till the last minute. If Jason saw anything humorous about it, what he took for us playing a bunch of prancing idiots was probably bewilderment on our part. Besides, who wants to bury their father with some joker hovering about taking notes.” She paused, those hawklike eyes narrowed ominously, she was preparing to strike. “Jason! You know what he is?”
“What?”
“A con man. You can quote me on that!”
She looked steadily at me, with no little defiance inviting me to write it down. Up to this point I hadn’t written anything down. With Mary Pcolar I’d filled up an entire legal-size pad, had spent two weeks studying the notes, and had determined that none of them had really contributed to catching the flavor of the afternoon, least of all the quotes. With Rosalind Baker Wilson I’d hoped to chat and after wards put down only what I could remember as having stood out, if I put down anything at all. Now she was giving me the eagle eye, and as I’d seen the results of Jason Epstein’s incurring her wrath, I removed my ball-point pen from my shirt pocket and with timid, rather quaking dutifulness and feeling downright cretinous wrote Jason Epstein— Con Man! Giving me an abrupt, affirmative so-there nod of the head, one of those I’ve-said-it-and-Fm-glad gestures, Rosalind Baker Wilson then digressed to substantiate her “charge,” looking pointedly at me to make sure I was getting it all down. And though I made my cute little ball-point go furiously on the page nothing but frantic curlicues was recorded. She said that when she was an editor with Houghton Mifflin Jason Epstein had tried to get her to release for a pittance—perhaps nothing—a bunch of her out-of-print titles for a Random House paperback line.
Pages from a Cold Island Page 18
