This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  —

  WHEN I GOT HOME that evening, I looked through my little stack of Steig books, and noticed once again how many different dedicatees there were. Jeanne was there, and so was Michael di Capua, and so, of course, were Steig’s children and his two granddaughters, but the list seemed to grow from year to year and from book to book. “To Maggie, Melinda, Francesca, and Nika” was the dedication in “The Amazing Bone.” The next book is “To Delia, Nika, Abigail, and Francesca,” and the one after that “To Delia, Sidonie, Nika, Sylvain, and Estelle.”

  Jeanne had told me that she was part of a large, Chicago-based family that included a son and daughter of hers from an earlier marriage, four grandchildren, and also nieces and nephews and cousins in profusion, and she said that a number of these kids had been cited by Bill in his later books. The son of a woman who’d worked in a grocery store in Kent was in one of the books, and so was Chuck Close’s daughter Maggie. Jeanne thinks that getting their names into Bill’s books is almost a new fad or craze for kids. Bill, smiling, said that he’d begun to impose a visa system: three or four repeats and then you couldn’t expect to find yourself in there anymore. But now, looking over the thin, different-shaped volumes, and the gatherings of names up at the front, I got the feeling that the message here was more complicated: real children climbing their way into books where they had so clearly and so often been made to feel interesting and important. “To Delia, Sidonie, Sylvain, Estelle, Kyle, Molly, Reid, Tina, Serena, Zachary and Zoe,” and “To Alicia, Charlotte, Curran, Evan, Geneva, Georgia, Kate, Maggie and William.” And others waiting.

  (Credit 30.4)

  Onward and Upward with the Arts, February, 1995

  FOUR FAREWELLS

  EARL WEAVER

  Earl Weaver, the banty, umpire-contentious, Hall of Fame manager of the Orioles, who died Friday, was the best naked talker I ever heard. Deadline-aware writers, seeking him out in his office shortly after another last out, would often find him behind his desk gnawing on a chicken wing, sans uniform and undies: a five-foot-seven, birthday-suited unsentimentalist still alight with the complexities and hovering alternate possibilities of the trifling game we’d all just attended. His seventeen-year—1968–86—run at the helm in Baltimore (he retired at the end of the 1982 season, then thought better of it a couple of years later) produced teams that won ninety or more games in twelve seasons, along with four American League pennants, and one World Championship: the second-best managerial record of the century. He will remain most famous for his red-faced, hoarsely screaming set-tos with the umps, which produced hilarious photos, thanks to the size differential, but even here he was an intellectual at heart, having discovered that tipping the bill of his cap to one side would allow him to get an inch or two closer to the arbiter’s jaw, without incurring the automatic ejection of the tiniest physical contact.

  What Earl wanted, what he battled for and talked about and thought about endlessly, was that edge, the single pitch or particular play or minuscule advantage that could turn an inning or a day or a season his way. Long before Billy Ball, he had his coaches keep multicolored pitching and batting charts that told him which of his batters did well or poorly against each righty or lefty flinger in the league, and where on the field well-hit enemy line drives against one of his starters’ or relievers’ sliders or fastballs would probably land.

  He relished eminent, top-performance players—Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, Mark Belanger, Ken Singleton—played them every day, and barely spoke to them for games and seasons on end. Perhaps he was secretly even happier about his left-field platoon of the right-handed-batting Gary Roenicke and left-batting John Lowenstein, since they presented an irritating little difficulty for the other manager when making out his starting lineup. Most of all, I think, Earl loved his perpetually available left-handed pinch-hitter Terry Crowley, the primo late-inning, other-manager’s dilemma of that era.

  “Oh, I love this stuff,” Earl would exclaim, perhaps only talking about the trifling game when he’d tried an outfielder, John Shelby, at second base for a few innings, in place of the slumping Rich Dauer: “Shelby at second gives us an extra move, and I’ll go with it…. If you’re losing, go for offense. Look for that move.”

  Talent mattered, too. In 1982, raving about his rookie infielder Cal Ripken, whom he had lately shifted from third base to shortstop, he said, “Wherever he plays, you can write him in for the next fifteen years, because that’s how good he is.” Yep—and thanks, Earl.

  But let me tack on one more exchange, just before his retirement, which I initiated with the suggestion that he’d surely be back in baseball again before long, perhaps as a coach with a college or even a high-school team somewhere.

  “I hate kids and I hate fucking kid baseball,” he barked, startling us both to laughter. All he wanted was the real thing, the edge and nothing less.

  Post, January, 2013

  GARDNER BOTSFORD

  Memorial at the Century Association

  We’ve come to the end of the line, and my only duty is not to say anything that would appear to sum up our old friend. As an editor, he didn’t trust heavyweight last paragraphs and liked to make them shorter or drop them altogether. What he’d say right here is enough already—let’s stop the speeches and have a drink. Pieces of him are still turning up—flashes and bits of talk that come unexpectedly into my mind: his way of plumping his hands onto the dinner table, palms down, before the soup arrived—a gesture of satisfaction about where he was and what was to come. A noontime swimming party at the pond at Four Fields, before the pool was built, with several of us treading water or standing in the ooze, up to our chins in the dark, cool water. Arms and shoulders are barely visible and the impression is of a collection of floating white balloons—one of them, at the center, still wearing his eyeglasses—all talking and spouting, and stopping only now and then when a young frog comes breast-stroking by. And a moment of Gardner at the wheel of our Italian Rent-a-Car, twelve years ago, when we were driving home from Assisi, and the others of us babbling along the Lower Basilica and Cimabue and Giotto and Santa Chiara. We’re working hard on our accents—“Chi-mah-BOO-aye”…“Ghi-YAH-to”—and there’s almost an air of conversion hovering about, and then Gardner saying, “Oh, well, yes, but it’s all just Disneyland.”

  After he’d left The New Yorker we’d see each other a couple of times a week—mostly at the Coffee House, where we bored the pants off the younger members with our talk about old New York late-night radio stations and Edith Oliver and FDR and Charlie Addams and Margaret Sullavan and Fiorello La Guardia and Carmin Peppe, and a number of breathtaking young women we’d both known and danced with sixty years before—Gardner knew them better than I did and was a better dancer. When we talked about the magazine he was sometimes unhappy about how it had changed, but he was never one of the mooners about The New Yorker’s past grandeur. He was alert and generous about what was new in the magazine—a terrific piece this week from some writer he’d not heard about before. And if I mentioned an exceptional story or a lively department column or Comment piece that he’d missed he’d write himself a note and look it up later. His name still came up at the office, and after he died Rick Hertzberg wrote me a note saying how much he’d loved Gardner’s book. “To read it,” he said, “is to see what was right about certain sons of the American ruling class of the early twentieth century—the modesty, the confidence, the straightforwardness. I felt real affection for him.”

  Gardner’s gift to us was to keep himself elegant. He was aware of the dark side but preferred lightness and emotional economy. He knew all about the collapse of our cities and our politics, and the glazing-over of American good will, but assumed that we did, too. Because he was knowing and grown-up and good-looking it was easy for us to accept the invitation and try to be suave and optimistic when in his company—the way we used to feel when we came out of a Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers movie, each of us quicker on our feet now and looking around for the next party,
just down the street.

  One morning a few weeks after he’d retired from The New Yorker in 1982, I had a phone call from him, and he said, “I can see you! You’re sitting at your desk. In a blue shirt—right?” He’d just rented a one-room Midtown office for himself, over on Madison Avenue, near Forty-second Street, and when he’d looked out the window he was startled to find that he could see our old digs on the nineteenth and twentieth floors, away across Fifth and halfway up the next block on Forty-third Street. He told me to look out my window, but I couldn’t find him. “Hold on,” he said, and then, “Now look.” I stared across the great chasms and palisades of stone and glass, and then, sure enough, there was Gardner: a tiny figure flapping a dust-rag or maybe his raincoat from a side window, with the phone in his other hand. “Wow!” I said. “I can’t believe this!” he said, and we laughed and, I think, agreed to meet for lunch. Another little piece of Gardner—farther away now but still waving hello.

  September, 2005

  JOE CARROLL

  When word came the other day that Joe Carroll had died, old New Yorker guys (or this old New Yorker guy) had a flash of taking a right off our nineteenth-floor office corridor and walking into Makeup, where everyone, it seemed, was cheerful and conversational, and worked standing up. Writers hid away in slot-like offices, hunched miserably over their typewriters; cartoonists came in on Tuesday mornings and went home again after lunch; and fiction folks did their thing upstairs; Makeup was a mostly Irish, mostly male enclave—John Murphy, Bill Fitzgerald, Bernie McAteer, John Broderick, Pat Keogh, et al.—that you hurried into to plead for another seven inches for your copy, which already lay pinned out on a corkboard delivery table, with beautiful runarounds enclosing blank spaces that would soon hold a cartoon or a spot drawing. Joe Carroll—leaning and smiling, with a dashing light beard—ran the place, and after he’d provided the blessed relief (“For you, of course!”) there would be time enough for him to pass on a joke that just had come in over the phone from the R. R. Donnelley printing plant in Chicago, where the magazine was printed. Everyone in Makeup looked young but had been there forever; there’s a 1982 photo of Joe and six of his boys—all in white shirts and dark or striped ties—who together represented a hundred and eighty-six years’ service, or nine thousand six hundred and seventy-two closings.

  Joe Carroll, who came to work at The New Yorker in 1936, and succeeded the fabled Carmine Peppe as top Makeup man in 1977, always seemed to have that extra beat of time that great athletes retain in mid-play; late on a Thursday night, when a piece or a Comment had fallen through, he was the quiet, smiling guy in the midst of curses and raised voices who somehow knew that we’d be O.K. again soon. He was a reader of the magazine as well as one of its makers, and along the way also found time to write a couple of Talk of the Town pieces, draw a cartoon that got published, and sire eleven children. He was ninety-one when he died last week in Virginia, and he still took pleasure in the ongoing newer and quicker, silently produced New Yorker. His magazine took form more slowly each week, after a process that required the skills of craftsmen or guild masters to put it together, and when the thing arrived at the office on Monday morning (with “ROUGH COPY” stamped on the cover) it promised pleasure and quality and a long future.

  Post, January, 2011

  ELWOOD CARTER

  Read by Alice Angell at Elwood Carter’s memorial, Brooklin, Maine

  I’m extremely disappointed that age and disability prevent me from joining Nota and Lisa and Troy and the rest of you here this afternoon to remember Elwood and celebrate his splendid life. He looked after our Wells Cove cottage for about thirty years, but I think it’s fair to say that we were friends all that time. We may have disagreed from time to time about what needed to be done to the shed roof or part of a seawall or a porch gutter, but we took our time about it, and it generally turned out that he had been right all along. His work for us was dedicated and professional, and much more. There’s scarcely a screen door or rusty lock or sickly spruce or stretch of shore or driveway on the place that we haven’t watched over and talked about together, and tried to fix. He cared about that point of land and the shore and that old house fully as much as we did. He loved it all and took pride in it, and our feelings about the place were touched and deepened by his pride in what he’d done.

  Elwood was also a caretaker of our town and land, and the people in it. I loved the way he talked about dogs and children and the weather—he was a great noticer—and I hope I learned from listening to him. He was modest or moderate in everything. Six or seven years ago, the ancient flagpole out by the point collapsed, after decades of patching and propping. I was a little shocked by the cost of a replacement, and we postponed a decision until spring. But when June came around Elwood let me know that he’d been working on a new flagpole through most of the winter while at home—a slender but shapely pine that he’d cut down, trimmed and sanded and painted for weeks on end, without a word to me. He was shy and nervous about it when I turned up—he called it “my starter flagpole”—but of course it was perfect, and all the better for a gentle bend at midpoint and the hint of a stem or nub of a branch here and there along the shaft. It’s been up and working for years now, and it will stay up forever.

  We bought a smaller, new flag, and I folded up the tattered old one and put it away in an old bureau in our little house, along with some others. I’m telling you this because it leads up to one of the rare moments when I took Elwood by surprise—a summer morning when I took him out to that same bureau, pulled out a drawer of folded old flags, and showed him what I’d just found: a red, white, and blue mouse nest.

  I wish Elwood were here this week to enjoy the Red Sox and maybe see them win the World Series. Not that he’d exactly enjoy it. I’m supposed to know a bit about sports and sports fans, but in all this time I could never cheer up Elwood about the Sox or the Patriots or the Bruins. If the Red Sox do beat the Cardinals, and I think they will, he’d say, “Well, all right, but next year don’t look too good, does it?”

  When I first got to Brooklin, more than eighty years ago, I noticed that men around here like to call their old friends “dear.” “Howard de-ah”…“Charlie, de-ah.” I feel the same way. Thank you, dear Elwood.

  October, 2013

  INNINGS

  BARRY AND THE DEATHLY NUMBERS

  Barry Bonds, the Lord Voldemort of baseball, has prevailed in the end, rapping the enchanted No. 756 and, for the moment, closing a complex tale that has held us too long and (here in Eastern Daylight Time, at least) way too late. The image may not hold up, since it casts baseball commissioner Bud Selig as Harry Potter, but for half a decade now a dank moral haze and a sense of unlikelihood have surrounded the Giant slugger Bonds as he pursued the famous seven-hundred-and-fourteen lifetime home-run mark established by Babe Ruth, and then Hank Dumbledore’s all-time seven hundred and fifty-five. An irritated non-reader (or non-fan) who happened in on this story three days earlier and saw Commissioner Selig standing up in his box in San Diego but not applauding Bonds as he circled the bases after his tying seven-hundred-and-fifty-fifth poke, against the Padres, would sense at the same moment that footnotes or a movie version would not begin to clear things up. You had to have read the books.

  Bonds’s record dinger, in the fifth inning of a night game against the Washington Nationals at Petco Park, in San Francisco, came in his third at-bat of the evening, succeeding a loud double and a single. One vacationing Maine-coast cottager with a dinky summertime TV set—this cottager—had recently fallen into the habit of going upstairs to brush his teeth and put on his pajamas after watching Bonds’s first at-bat, returning before the second one, and tottering back up to bed when it was over, never mind the rest of the game. This time, the vision of Barry’s locked-in, more characteristic swings kept him awake, and brought him back down again minutes before midnight: just in time for the blessed three-and-two solo blast, four hundred and thirty-five feet to right-center field, and the clenched fists to he
aven; the slow but not too slow base-circling; the extended-family hugs (including one with Willie Mays, who is Bonds’s godfather); a careful but placating prerecorded concession by the saintly and now deposed Hank Aaron, delivered on the Jumbotron (“I move over now and offer my best wishes to Barry and his family on this historical achievement”); and locally—on the stairs once again, with the set turned off at last—a “Yesss!” in the dark.

  © The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (Credit 32.1)

  The rejoicing here is not just over an expected natural decline in the booings and editorializings about Bonds’s inferred but unproved use of steroids during the 2000 to 2003 seasons, late in his career (he is forty-three), when his customary thirty-seven or thirty-eight homers per season jumped into the upper forties and, in 2001, produced the all-time single-season record of seventy-three. Another hope is for less piety, a shift in the altogether mystifying popular notion that the lifetime home-run mark is somehow sacrosanct—“baseball’s most hallowed record,” as the news reports called it the other day. Hallowed but hollow, perhaps, since home-run totals are determined not just by the batters but by different pitchers, in very different eras, and, most of all, by the outer dimensions of the major-league parks, which have always varied widely and have been deliberately reconfigured in the sixteen ballparks built since 1992, thus satisfying the owners’ financial interest in more and still more home runs. Bonds has been called a cheater, but the word should hardly come up in a sport whose proprietors, if they were in charge of the classic Olympic hundred-meter dash, would stage it variously at a hundred and six meters, ninety-four, a hundred and three, and so forth, and engrave the resulting times on a tablet.