'On the rocks? With water?'
'Neat.'
She allowed herself a little smile. 'Just like your dad,' she said.
She motioned for me to sit in an oversized armchair. It was upholstered in a dark tan linen fabric. The same fabric covered a large sofa. There was a Swedish modern coffee table, on top of which were neat stacks of art books and high-end periodicals (The New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, New York Review of Books). The living room was small, but immaculate. Bleached wood floors, white walls, more shelves filled with books, a substantial collection of classical CDs, a large window with southerly exposure, overlooking a small back patio. Directly off this room was an alcove which had been cleverly fitted out as a small home office, with a stripped pine table on which sat a computer, a fax machine and a pile of papers. Opposite this alcove was a bedroom with a queen-sized bed (bleached headboard, a quilted old Americana bedspread), and a Shaker-style dresser. Like everything else in the apartment, the bedroom exuded style and subdued good taste. You could tell immediately that Sara Smythe was refusing to embrace the muted dilapidation of senior citizenship – and live out the final part of her life in an apartment that was, stylistically speaking, two decades out of date, and reeking of shabby gentility. Her home hinted at a quiet, but ferocious sense of pride.
Sara emerged from the kitchen, carrying a tray. On it was a bottle of Hiram Walker bourbon, a bottle of Bristol Cream, a sherry glass, a whiskey glass. She set it down on the coffee table, then poured us each a drink.
'Hiram Walker was your father's favorite bourbon,' she said. 'Personally I could never stand the stuff. Scotch was my drink – until I turned seventy, and my body decided otherwise. Now I have to make do with something dull-and-feminine like sherry. Cheers.'
She raised her sherry glass. I didn't respond to her toast. I simply threw back my whiskey in one gulp. It burned my throat, but eased some of the serious distress I was feeling. Another small smile crossed Sara Smythe's lips.
'Your dad used to drink that way – when he was feeling tense.'
'Like father, like daughter,' I said, pointing to the bottle.
'Please help yourself,' she said. I poured myself another slug of bourbon, but this time restricted myself to a small sip. Sara Smythe settled herself into the sofa, then touched the top of my hand.
'I do want to apologize for the extreme methods I used to get you over here. I know I must have seemed like an old nuisance, but . . .'
I quickly withdrew my hand.
'I just want to know one thing, Ms Smythe . . .'
'Sara, please.'
'No. No first names. We are not friends. We are not even acquaintances . . .'
'Kate, I've known you all your life.'
'How? How have you known me? And why the hell did you start bothering me after my mom died?'
I tossed the photo album on to the coffee table, and opened it to the back page.
'I'd also like to know how you got this?' I said, pointing to the clipping of Ethan in the Allan-Stevenson school newspaper.
'I have a subscription to the school's newspaper.'
'You what?'
'Just like I had a subscription to the Smith College paper when you were there.'
'You're insane . . .'
'Can I explain . . .'
'Why should we be of interest to you? I mean, if your photo album is anything to go by, this hasn't been a recent fixation. You've been tracking us for years. And what's with all the old pictures of my dad?'
She looked at me straight on. And said, 'Your father was the love of my life.'
Part Two
Sara
One
WHAT'S MY FIRST memory of him? A glance. A sudden over-the-shoulder glance across a packed, smoky room. He was leaning against a wall, a glass of something in one hand, a cigarette between his teeth. He later told me that he felt out of place in that room, and was looking across it in search of the fellow who had dragged him there. As his eyes scanned the guests, they suddenly happened upon me. I met his gaze. Only for a second. Or maybe two. He looked at me. I looked at him. He smiled. I smiled back. He turned away, still seeking out his friend. And that was it. Just a simple glance.
Fifty-five years on, I can still replay that moment – nanosecond by nanosecond. I can see his eyes – light blue, clear, a little weary. His sandy hair, buzz-cut down to short-back-and-sides. His narrow face with sharply etched cheekbones. The dark khaki Army uniform which seemed to hang so perfectly off his lanky frame. The way he looked so young (well, he was only in his early twenties at the time). So innocent. So quietly preoccupied. So handsome. So damn Irish.
A glance is such a momentary, fleeting thing, isn't it? As human gestures go, it means nothing. It's perishable. That's what still amazes me – the way your life can be fundamentally altered by something so ephemeral, so transitory. Every day, we lock eyes with people – on the subway or the bus, in the supermarket, crossing the street. It's such a simple impulse, looking at others. You notice someone walking towards you, your eyes meet for an instant, you pass each other by. End of story. So why . . . why? . . . should that one glance have mattered? No reason. None at all. Except that it did. And it changed everything. Irrevocably. Though, of course, neither of us knew that at the time.
Because, after all, it was just a glance.
We were at a party. It was the night before Thanksgiving. The year was 1945. Roosevelt had died in April. The German High Command had surrendered in May. Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima in August. Eight days later, the Japanese capitulated. Quite a year. If you were young and American – and hadn't lost anybody you loved in the war – you couldn't help but feel the heady pleasures of victory.
So here we all were – twenty of us, in a cramped third-floor walk-up apartment on Sullivan Street – celebrating the first Thanksgiving of peace by drinking too much and dancing too raucously. The average age in the room was around twenty-eight . . . which made me the kid of the group at twenty-three (though the fellow in the Army uniform looked even younger). And the big talk in the room was of that romantic notion called the Limitless Future. Because winning the war also meant that we'd finally defeated that economic enemy called The Depression. The Peace Dividend was coming. Good times were ahead. We thought we had a divine right to good times. We were Americans, after all. This was our century.
Even my brother Eric believed in the realm of American possibility . . . and he was what our father called 'a Red'. I always told Father that he was judging his son far too harshly – because Eric was really more of an old fashioned Progressive. Being Eric, he was also a complete romantic – someone who idolized Eugene Debs, subscribed to The Nation when he was sixteen, and dreamed about being the next Clifford Odets. That's right – Eric was a playwright. After he graduated from Columbia in '37, he found work as an assistant stage manager with Orson Welles' Mercury Theater, and had a couple of plays produced by assorted Federal Theater Workshops around New York. This was the time when Roosevelt's New Deal actually subsidized non-profit drama in America – so there was plenty of employment opportunities for 'theater workers' (as Eric liked to call himself), not to mention lots of small theater companies willing to take a chance on young dramatists like my brother. None of the plays he had performed ever hit the big time. But he wasn't ever aiming for Broadway. He always said that his work was 'geared for the needs and the aspirations of the working man' (like I said, he really was a romantic). And I'll be honest with you – as much as I loved, adored, my older brother, his three-hour epic drama about a 1902 union dispute on the Erie-Lakawana Railroad wasn't exactly a toe-tapper.
Still, as a playwright, he did think big. Sadly, his kind of drama (that whole Waiting for Lefty sort of thing) was dead by the start of the forties. Orson Welles went to Hollywood. So too did Clifford Odets. The Federal Theater Project was accused of being Communist by a handful of dreadful small-minded congressmen, and was finally closed down in '39. Which meant that, in 1945, Eric was paying the rent as a radio writer. At fir
st he scripted a couple of episodes of Boston Blackie. But the producer fired him off the show after he wrote an installment where the hero investigated the death of a labor organizer. He'd been murdered on the orders of some big-deal industrialist – who, as it turned out, bore more than a passing resemblance to the owner of the radio network on which Boston Blackie was broadcast. I tell you, Eric couldn't resist mischief . . . even if it did hurt his career. And he did have a terrific sense of humor. Which is how he was able to pick up his newest job: as one of the gag writers on Stop or Go: The Quiz Bang Show, hosted every Sunday night at eight thirty by Joe E. Brown. I'd wager anything that nobody under the age of seventy-five now remembers Joe E. Brown. And with good reason. He made Jerry Lewis appear subtle.
Anyway, the party was in Eric's place on Sullivan Street: a narrow one-bedroom railroad apartment which, like Eric himself, always struck me as the height of bohemian chic. The bathtub was in the kitchen. There were lamps made from Chianti bottles. Ratty old floor cushions were scattered around the living room. Hundreds of books were stacked everywhere. Remember: this was the forties . . . still way before the beatnik era in the Village. So Eric was something of a man ahead of his time – especially when it came to wearing black turtlenecks, and hanging out with Delmore Schwartz and the Partisan Review crowd, and smoking Gitanes, and dragging his kid sister to hear this new-fangled thing called Bebop at some club on 52nd Street. In fact, just a couple of weeks before his Thanksgiving party, we were actually present in some Broadway dive when a sax player named Charles Parker took the stage with four other musicians.
When they finished their first set, Eric turned to me and said, 'S, you're going to eventually brag about being at this gig. Because we have just witnessed ourselves a true revolution. After tonight, rhythm is never going to be the same again.'
S. That was his name for me. S for Sara or Sis. From the time Eric turned fourteen, he called me that – and though my parents both hated the nickname, I cherished it. Because my big brother had bestowed it on me. And because, in my eyes, my big brother was the most interesting and original man on the planet . . . not to mention my protector and defender, especially when it came to our deeply traditional parents.
We were born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. As Eric was fond of pointing out, only two interesting people ever spent time in Hartford: Mark Twain (who lost a lot of money in a publishing house that went bust there), and Wallace Stevens, who coped with the tedium of being an insurance executive by writing some of the most experimental poetry imaginable.
'Outside of Twain and Stevens,' Eric told me when I was twelve, 'nobody of note ever lived in this city. Until we came along.'
Oh, he was so wonderfully arrogant. He'd say anything outrageous if it upset our father, Robert Biddeford Smythe III. He fit his portentous name perfectly. He was a very proper, very Episcopalian insurance executive; a man who always wore worsted three-piece suits, believed in the virtues of thrift, and abhorred flamboyance or mischief-making of any kind. Our mother, Ida, was cut from the same stern material: the daughter of a Boston Presbyterian minister, ruthlessly practical, a triumph of domestic efficiency. They were a formidable team, our parents. Cut-and-dried, no-nonsense, reluctantly tactile. Public displays of affection were rare events in the Smythe household. Because, at heart, Father and Mother were true New England Puritans, still rooted in the nineteenth century. They always seemed old to us. Old and forbidding. The antithesis of fun.
Of course we still loved them. Because, after all, they were our parents – and unless your parents were savage to you, you had to love them. It was part of the social contract – or at least it was when I was growing up. Just as you had to accept their manifold limitations. I've often thought that the only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else . . . and then acknowledge that, within their own boundaries, they did the best they could for you.
But loving your parents is far different from embracing their world-view. From the time Eric was in his teens he worked hard at infuriating Father (yes, he insisted we address him in that Victorian manner. Never Dad. Or Pop. Or anything hinting at easy conviviality. Always Father). Sometimes I think Eric's radical politics were less rooted in ideological conviction, and more to do with raising Father's blood pressure. The fights they used to have were legendary. Especially after Father discovered the copy of John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World under his son's bed. Or when Eric presented him with a Paul Robeson record on Father's Day.
My mother stayed out of all father/son arguments. To her, a woman had no business debating politics (one of the many reasons why she so hated Mrs Roosevelt, calling her 'a female Lenin'). She was always lecturing Eric about respecting Father. But, by the time he was ready to enter college, she realized that her stern words no longer carried any import; that she had lost him. Which saddened her greatly. And I sensed that she was always a bit baffled as to why her only son – whom she had raised so correctly – had turned into such a Jacobin. Especially as he was so astonishingly bright.
That was the only thing about Eric which pleased my parents – his exceptional intelligence. He devoured books. He was reading French by the age of fourteen, and had a working command of Italian by the time he entered Columbia. He could talk knowledgeably about such abstract, abtruse subjects as Cartesian philosophy or quantum mechanics. And he played a mean boogie-woogie piano. He was also one of those maddening whiz-kids who got straight As in school with minimal work. Harvard wanted him. Princeton wanted him. Brown wanted him. But he wanted Columbia. Because he wanted New York, and all its ancillary freedoms.
'I tell you, S, once I get to Manhattan, Hartford won't see me ever again.'
That wasn't exactly true – because, despite his rebelliousness, he still remained a reasonably dutiful son. He wrote home once a week, he made brief visits to Hartford at Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, he never shoved Mother and Father out of his life. He simply reinvented himself completely in New York. To begin with, he changed his name – from Theobold Ericson Smythe to plain old Eric Smythe. He got rid of all those Ivy League Rogers Peet clothes that my parents bought him, and started shopping at the local Army/Navy store. His skinny frame got skinnier. His black hair grew thick, bushy. He bought himself a pair of narrow rimless spectacles. He looked like Trotsky – especially as he took to wearing an Army greatcoat and a battered tweed jacket. On the rare times my parents saw him, they were horrified by his transformed appearance. But, once again, his grades silenced them. Straight As. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa at the end of his junior year. High honors in English. Had he wanted to go to law school, or get a doctorate, he could have waltzed into any graduate program in the country. But instead, he moved downtown to Sullivan Street, swept floors for Orson Welles for $20 a week, and dreamed big dreams about writing plays that mattered.
By 1945, those dreams were dying. No one would even look at his plays anymore – because they belonged to another era. But Eric was still determined to break through as a playwright . . . even if it meant writing hack jokes for Joe E. Brown to keep a roof over his head. Once or twice, I dropped hints about maybe finding a teaching job in a college – which struck me as more worthy of Eric's talents than churning out one-liners for a game show. But Eric refused to entertain such notions, saying things like, 'The moment a writer starts teaching his trade, he's finished. And the moment he enters academia, he slams the door on the real world . . . the place about which he's supposed to be writing.'
'But The Quiz Bang Show isn't the real world,' I countered.
'It's more rooted in reality than teaching English composition to a bunch of prim little women at Bryn Mawr.'
'Ouch!' I said, having graduated from Bryn Mawr two years earlier.
'You know what I'm saying here, S.'
'Yes – that I am a prim little woman who probably should be married to some dreary banker, and living in some prim little town on the Philadelphia Main Line . . .'
The Pursuit Of Happiness Page 10
