This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  When the conductor came through, a little later, my friend asked why there’d been a second halt, and the conductor said that by state (or maybe it was county) law they were required to inform the local game warden about the dead moose, and that the engineer had waited until he spotted the lights of the first nearby farmhouse before he stopped once again. He, the conductor, had then walked across the field, knocked on the door, and conveyed the news by phone. My friend asked why he couldn’t have done this at the end of the line, and the conductor smiled and told the rest of the story.

  Another state or county law specified that any fresh meat taken from animals accidentally offed on the right of way went first of all to residents of the nearest state poor farm, but after that it was first come, first served. The warden he’d reached said that the institution in question had only two residents at present, and that their teeth were not in great shape. They’d get some bits of tenderloin, all right, but the rest of the moose would now be divided up between the train crew, the farmer with the telephone, perhaps the warden, and also the nearest butcher, who was probably already headed for the scene.

  “We’ll be picking up our shares, cut and wrapped, on this same run, come Friday,” the conductor said. “Don’t happen often, but it’s always nice when things work out.”

  Happy Thanksgiving!

  Post, November, 2010

  FAMILY LINES

  When my mother, Katharine White, in her sixties, had to spend a Christmas Day confined in the Harkness Pavilion of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, I tried to cheer her up with a fresh version of the hoary Clement Moore jingle. She enjoyed it, even while exclaiming, “But they told me to avoid any laughing!”

  THE NIGHT AFTER CHRISTMAS

  T’was the night after Christmas in the Pavilion called Harkness:

  The patients were lying in pain and in darkness;

  The interns were nestled all snug in their beds

  While visions of catheters danced through their heads;

  And Mama in her traction and I with my piles

  Had just settled our heads for a night of brave smiles,

  When down through the airshaft there came such a whining

  From an ungrateful patient they were trephining,

  Away to the window I flew like a gull—

  Tripped over the bedpan and fractured my skull!

  And what should appear in response to my curses

  But a miniature quack and six surly nurses—

  Miss Frowner, Miss Jouncy, Miss Middle-Aged Pixie,

  Miss Coldhands, Miss Sphincter, Miss You-all from Dixie.

  Their smiles were so starchy, so plain their frigidity

  That I almost smiled back, despite my rigidity.

  They said not a word but went straight to the task,

  Took sputum and fluids and blood in a flask;

  “Any record of madness, TB, croup, or others?

  Give names and birthdates of both your grandmothers.”

  The doc checked my Blue Cross, the girls checked reflexes

  By chanting a mantra to my solar plexus.

  More happy surprises! More cries a cappella

  When they tapped out some sambas upside my patella.

  The doctor then sighed and gave his diagnosis:

  “This poor fellow’s suffering mild acidosis

  I foresee some CCs of antibiotic—

  Let’s try this free sample, it looks quite exotic.”

  He bade me farewell as he smoothed my pajamas:

  “They’ll fax me your look-see in the Bahamas.”

  And ignoring the clots on the back of my head

  The Nightingales bundled me back into bed.

  They turned out the light with a cheery last warning:

  “Be ready for bed-baths at five in the morning!”

  My lawyer father, Ernest Angell, was chairman of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1950 to 1969. When he stepped down from the august post the A.C.L.U. gave him a festive dinner. One of the entertainments was my rewrite of W. S. Gilbert’s “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” from “The Pirates of Penzance,” bravely performed by a chorus of staffers, law professors, and judges.

  I AM THE VERY MODEL OF A CIVIL LIBERTARIAN

  I am the very model of a civil libertarian,

  I favor equal rights for Capricorn and Sagittarian.

  I am a big defender of each gender in the picket lines,

  I like to see some G.O.P. in dirty-movie ticket lines.

  I’ll fence the board that’s evidenced creationist proclivities;

  I’m wise to guys with cries of un-American activities

  I tout the outed Seminole or fallen seminarian,

  For I’m the very model of a civil libertarian.

  I am a bold upholder of American amenities,

  I cede the budding playwright’s need to write in pure obscenities.

  I know the lowly portion of the Mexican agrarian;

  I share your rage at wages of the sexagen librarian.

  I’ll read you your Miranda in a minute, but, more latterly,

  I gotta spring this Dalton kid caught reading “Lady Chatterley.”

  I’ll fix your nanny’s visa in a style egalitarian,

  For I’m the very model of a civil libertarian.

  There were two or three more stanzas, but this brief is running long.

  LONG GONE

  WHO WAS THAT?

  As I went into our local Korean fruit store on a recent evening, the man just coming out—gray, trim, shockingly handsome—was Paul Newman. My gaze crossed his, the city moment passed. When I got home with my bananas and seltzer water, I told my wife, Carol, about it. “How’d he look?” she said. “Great,” I said. That was about it, except that my mind, repeatedly and oddly returning to this non-event, has been telling me that celebrity-spotting, like other New York amenities, has actually been in a long decline. That seemed a curious development in our phone-in, paparazzified time of megacelebrity, but the old New York street-meet always had its own protocol of strict privacy: one looked and then looked again at the passing diva or statesman but did not speak. One smiled in recognition, and sometimes got back a tiny gleam or nod of acknowledgment. It was enough. We told our friends about the moment, and they said “No!” or “Wow!” in the manner of an exchange between dedicated bird-watchers, and then we tucked the specimen and the circumstances away in some mental life list. Now we want more—an autograph, a handshake, a posed digital snap, perhaps even a conversation designed to close the six (or sixty) degrees of separation between us and them. What we get, unsurprisingly, is a glimpse of a famous ankle disappearing into a black-glass limo, and miles of crowded avenues and side streets almost devoid of the sudden exciting face. Our loss.

  I’ve lived in New York all my life, and a quick refresher rundown of my own sidewalk sightings yields up Walter Cronkite, Babe Ruth, Vladimir Horowitz, Greta Garbo, Eleanor Roosevelt (gray chiffon wing bars), Fay Wray (Fay Wray!), Harry Truman, Uma Thurman, Yves Montand, James Mason, Jacqueline Onassis, Rex Harrison, Richard Nixon (yeeks!), Ezio Pinza, Alexander Calder, Ethel Merman, Sigourney Weaver, Benny Goodman, and more. Some of these were glimpsed more than once. Horowitz, who lived right across the street from our old walkup on Ninety-fourth, took regular afternoon strolls in the neighborhood. Beaky and elegant, he sometimes gave the impression that he was checking me out to make sure he’d been noticed; some days, helping out, he wore a silk bow tie with a piano-keys motif. Then there was the afternoon when Callie, a grownup daughter of mine, took her five-year-old brother, John Henry, out for a spin on his bike in Central Park; a very recent soloist, John Henry waveringly preceded her up the sidewalk toward Fifth, on a path that relentlessly converged with that of a frail, black-swathed woman coming from the other direction, who paused, made a small dodge, and then caught boy and bike in both hands. My daughter hurried up, appalled, and the woman said, “Dangerous, aren’t they?” Garbo.

  The Truman-mee
t began after lunch one day in the middle fifties, when he emerged from the front door of the Times, on West Forty-third Street, as I was walking by, and took up an eastbound path just to my left. I figured he’d been lunching with his son-in-law, Clifton Daniel. He was several years out of office, but had the same dapper, energetic look. No Secret Service men were in view; he appeared to be wholly unaccompanied.

  “Say something, dummy,” I muttered to myself. Breaking the rule, I managed a little sidewise bow and said, “We miss you, sir.” He responded graciously and, a good politician, quickly asked my name and found out where I worked. He asked if I knew John Hersey (who had written a Profile of him for The New Yorker), and I said yes—a little. “My wife gets The New Yorker every week and reads it,” he said. “I read it, too, when she’s done.” We walked together, crossing Broadway—“Hey, it’s Harry!” yelled a cabdriver, and the President smiled and waved—and continued another full block together while we chatted about the burdens of the Presidency (“It’s a job nobody can do entirely right”) and the burdens of the Mayor of New York (“Nothing in the world could persuade me for that job!”) and more. Midway, a man I knew named Harding Bancroft—a Times executive, in fact—spotted me and my companion as we came toward him, and performed a double take worthy of the late Oliver Hardy. I cut him dead.

  Nixon encounters were almost commonplace for anyone covering baseball in New York in the early 1980s, after the post-resignation Prez had become a fellow Gothamite. He would turn up unexpectedly at mid-season games at Yankee Stadium, where he would visit the clubhouses and offer strategy to the manager and coaches. This was at the old Stadium, where the only passageway between the press dining room and the Yankee clubhouse was a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, with a couple of bends in it. Here, in mid-turn, I would sometimes come face-to-face with President Nixon, five or six feet away and scary smile attached. “Yow!” I cried, each time, to which he nodded in friendly fashion as he passed by, with a murmured “How are you?” The experience was the same as the moment I remembered from boyhood visits to Coney Island fun houses, where you rode through inky passages in your bumpy little car and a suddenly illuminated ghost or skeleton would drop before your face.

  These tales, like my life list, have an old-time flavor, I know, and though I stay alert as I walk New York nowadays, I no longer expect such moments. Celebrities are only a click away all day long now, on my phone or home TV, accompanied by their posses, and the rest dead or in the Hamptons. But we, too, are missing—we, the other street-strollers, the other half of the compact, deep into our Facebook and Pulse and Twitter and Instagram, scarcely on the same city block with anybody. What I miss isn’t just that flash of face and name but the accompanying terrific compliment I once sensed in these innocent encounters: if I was walking on the exact same stretch of sidewalk as some worthy or glittering personage, then it was plain that each of us had chosen absolutely the right time and place in which to live. What a city!

  Paul Newman, to be fair, was seen quite often in my neighborhood over the years, often with his wife, Joanne Woodward, and a couple of small dogs. Even now, he turns up again in urban legends, including the Paul Newman ice-cream-cone story. Lady stops at a roadside ice-cream stand in Greenwich, and after ordering her single-scoop sugar-cone chocolate ripple notices that the midsized customer standing next to her is Newman’s own self. Now just be cool, the woman reminds herself. She pays for her cone, takes a fast, delicious gander, and walks away. Back in the car, still not staring, she reaches for the ignition but then realizes that she has no ice-cream cone. What? She climbs out again, looks under the seat, looks under the car—nothing. She goes back to the counterman for help: Uh, I was here just a minute ago, chocolate ripple—I paid, etc., etc., and realizes that Paul Newman is watching her. “I believe it’s in your pocketbook,” he murmurs.

  I’ve actually been introduced to a few celebrities, down the years, and interrupt our street-meet theme to trot out Judge Learned Hand, the bygone jurist of the Federal Court of Appeals, who was a friend of my father’s. Judges are meant to be elderly and distinguished in appearance, and Hand, who was born in upstate New York in 1872, filled the bill in every particular, with alert blue eyes, a shock of thick white hair, and a permanent aura of curiosity. Best of all was that name: Learned Hand—a creation worthy of Trollope or a Hollywood publicist. An older cousin of his, Augustus Hand, became a celebrated federal district judge in his own right, thus creating a little buzz or chord in the better circles whenever the anatomical handle came up. Also if you go to Saratoga for the races in August you can order a Hand melon for breakfast: a delicious regional cantaloupe developed by an agrarian in the same family, and said to be too juicy to survive export to the downstate markets.

  Hand was a celebrity of a special order—a hero not known to great numbers of his countrymen but almost fiercely treasured by those who came within his presence or his legal arena, or who had read his 1944 book, “The Spirit of Liberty,” with its disarming and oft memorized central lines “…the spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the mind which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.” He appeared to represent us at some higher level, I mean, making you feel that moments of clear thinking might always be within your reach.

  At my father and stepmother’s dinner parties, there was always a little scuffling among the ladies for a seat next to Judge Hand in the living room, and at dinner he actually listened, even to me as a burning young opinionist in my teens or early twenties. “Interesting, Roger,” he would murmur to some political or literary blathering of mine. “And particularly that you would think so.”

  I fell into silence—not from awe but because he had answered without irony. He had taken me seriously, a terrifying compliment.

  Because of his influence, Judge Hand was sometimes called the “tenth judge” on the Supreme Court that he never attained, but ponderousness was not in him. He was well along in his eighties when he and my father had dinner in Midtown New York one night—this was in the late 1950s—and afterward walked up Sixth Avenue together. It was a warm summer evening, my father told me later, and the street was full of young strolling couples. Here and there, lightly dressed lone females lurked in the shadows. “Ernest,” the judge said unexpectedly, “do you think there’s as much fucking going on as there was when we were younger?”

  My old man gave the matter his attention, as he did to all of Hand’s inquiries, and said, well, on the whole he thought probably there was. Yes.

  “So do I, so do I,” Hand replied. “Good.”

  And here come two last name-drops, each one a Nobelist, though met many decades apart. A woman at V. S. Pritchett’s house in London, in 1995, began talking about her old friend Bertrand Russell, who had lately celebrated his ninety-fifth birthday. She asked if I’d ever met him, and I said that as a matter of fact I’d been sent to interview him once in the fall of 1939, when I was a sophomore trying out for the Harvard Crimson. Russell was in Boston to deliver a lecture, and he and I had tea together at the Ritz, where he quickly must have realized that I knew nothing about him except that he proclaimed to have some unusual views about sex. Unoffended, he carried the conversation, saw to it that I got my interview, and—alone that night, for some reason—asked if I might also be free to stay on and join him for dinner as well. He was as easy to take as Judge Hand, it turned out, and perhaps surpassed him in the Great Hair department. Like the judge, he unsettled me in retrospect when I realized that he’d been more interested in the contents of my mind than I was.

  In London, the woman who knew Lord Russell—she was Constance Wells, then the wife of A. J. Ayer, the logical positivist Cambridge philosopher—told me that she’d helped get up the celebratory birthday lunch for the ancient philosopher, and then placed herself to his right in the table seating. Planning ahead, she had also come up with a question for the great man, which she put to him over the soup. She reminded him that he was not only
the world’s best-known atheist but now also perhaps the world’s oldest atheist. What would he say, she wanted to know, if, when the moment came, it turned out that he’d been wrong all this time and now found himself standing before the Pearly Gates? Russell’s eyes lit up, she told me, and he replied with eagerness. “Why, I should say,” he cried, in his high, thin voice. “I should say, ‘God, you gave us insufficient evidence!’ ”

  At home at our Brooklin, Maine, summer cottage in the mid-seventies, we received a late-morning visit from our friends Stephen Dixon and Anne Frydman, he a prolific fiction writer and a Johns Hopkins English prof and she a translator of Russian literature. They’d brought along a younger couple, out-of-town friends up here for a long weekend: the woman a striking blonde Italian lady who spoke only a few words of English (I’ve forgotten her name), and he a thin, intense, fortyish Russian, new to our country but now safely ensconced as a visiting poet at the University of Michigan: Joseph Brodsky. We invited them all out to our sunny porch, where Carol produced iced tea, and the conversation flowed along easily enough to turn the occasion into lunch, a little later. Brodsky, in a thin cotton summer suit, smoked incessantly and could not take his eyes away from his date. In time, though, he asked if he could walk around a little, and vanished in the direction of our adjacent granite point on Eggemoggin Reach, which offers panoramas of seaweedy shoreline and, across the waters, Deer Isle. He was away almost half an hour, and when he reappeared he was excited.

  “I have found moossels!” he cried. “Moossels everywhere!” And so he had: every pocket of his pants and his jacket now bulged with damp live mussels he had plucked from the crevices and crannies of barnacled ledges, now exposed at low tide. We often sat down to the same backyard provender, steamed and dripping with wine and butter, with friends at dinner, but Brodsky, an exile, understood things differently. This was his next meal, packed and ready to go.