by Roger Angell
The strain between my mother and Elsie was more than an everyday family tangle. Elsie, lit'ry and sociable, always looked down on Mother's successful career and busy life at The New Yorker—"that vulgar magazine," she'd once let slip—and perhaps her marriages as well, but she could never forget that it was the magazine's success and Mother's hard work that kept her afloat with privately arranged allowances and a nice extra check at Christmas. Mother was loyal to Elsie all her life but could not bring herself to say warm things about her writing. She never mentioned her sister's financial dependency or the emotional strain it exacted on both sides, but worried about Elsie's health and living arrangements, even while she was being driven wild by her vagueness and intellectual hauteur. Andy White believed that Mother was secretly afraid of her, for reasons that went back to their childhood, but it may also be that Bryn Mawr was in play between them all along. Elsie had graduated in 1900, eight years before my mother entered the demanding and exalting Bryn Mawr of President M. Carey Thomas's time. The high shrine required four languages, prodigious reading, and a permanent engagement with the classics and a life of the mind. My mother did well there—she graduated fourth in her class—but two decades later, when she'd become the most significant woman editor in New York, was editing Mary McCarthy and Vladimir Nabokov and John O'Hara and Elizabeth Bishop, and week by week having a hand in every aspect of the New Yorker, she may have also crazily believed that she'd abandoned the groves of Spenser and Goethe and Kant, where Elsie strolled every day. The two met now and then, but were not capable of the offhand joke or passing embrace that would have blown all this away. My mother found a life-saving lightness in Andy White, but Elsie had no such resource—which inexorably caused my mother further guilt, and added that fresh twinge to the others.
Elsie never wavered. Toward the end of her life, she went resolutely back each summer to MacDowell, the writers' colony in New Hampshire, even in seasons when she'd not been invited to return, again occupying one of the cottages where lunch was left silently at the door in a little basket, and then joining the other artists and poets for jolly dinners and interesting conversations each evening. I happily remember her in her seventies, when she was a neighbor of mine in Rockland County, upriver from New York. She had a tiny house tucked behind a stone wall in the village of Piermont, a cottage so bijou that you had to grab a banister rope while ascending the steep circular staircase to the second floor. Here on a summer Sunday, Elsie would have me and my family to tea on her terrace, a bare few yards from the pallid Hudson. Appearing with her thick braid coiled on her head and wearing amber or ivory beads, a Navajo bracelet, and a white lawn dress that dated back to 1908 or 1910, she would pour tea into thin family China cups, and have me pass round the slivers of cinnamon toast while she talked affectionately with my wife, Evelyn, and our daughters. Roaring outboards sometimes made for a pause in our conversation, and my daughter Alice would slip away from the table to keep watch on the saucer of milk that Elsie had put down for the garter snake said to live in the wall. Elsie, resuming, would mention her neighbor Horace Gregory, the poet, her archaeologist friend Hetty Goldman, and her good friend Thornton Wilder, the playwright. "You've read The Bridge of San Luis Rey?" she asked Callie, who was then about ten. "No? Well, one day soon, I'm sure." A little before this time, when my brother Joe White and Allene Messer were getting married and preparing to get into the boat-building line of work, Elsie picked out a nice book for their wedding present: The Life of Nietzsche.
Ill and old, she ended up in a retirement home in Westchester County, with her books and a few sticks of her own furniture. Visiting New York one day, at eighty-three, she died at the Cosmopolitan Club, with a check from her publisher in her pocket-book—an advance, issued that day, against her next book. Way to go out, Elsie!
Two more glimpses of Aunt Elsie have surfaced, arriving within three weeks of each other last spring. Dr. Marilyn Norcini, a cultural anthropologist whom I encountered by chance while on a visit to the University of Pennsylvania, turned out to be a wellspring of knowledge about Elsie's days in New Mexico in the 1920s and '30s. She mailed me a packet of my aunt's writings and records, which center on her efforts to appreciate and preserve the expiring culture of the Pueblo lands and people, and to fight for them a little on the political front. In 1935 she appears to have been instrumental in the adoption of a constitution by the Santa Clara Pueblo, which brought claims by various tribal groups into accord. It was signed on one of those iron-cold January mornings in the Southwest: a photograph shows Elsie standing in the snow amid several bundled-up sachems and elders, one whom is wearing an eagle-feather bonnet. There is also further documentation of her studies with Jung, and, most touching to me, a bibliography which lists eighty-three articles she wrote for national periodicals between 1910 and 1963—the steadiest flow is in the teens and twenties—for magazines like The Nation, The Saturday Review, Dial, and The Atlantic. It begins with "Toilers of the Tenements," for McClure's in July 1910, and includes "Must Great Women Be Ruthless?" in the Ladies Home Journal for February, 1928, and "New Deal for the Indian" in the June 15, 1939, New Republic. A nice body of work, if never quite a livelihood.
And then, right after the Elsie trove, here came a little packet of letters written by my mother in the 1950s and '60s to a garden or garden-and-literature correspondent of hers in New York named Ambrose Flack. These had lately been unearthed in the attic of a cottage on Fire Island by a renter who didn't know Flack or Katharine S. White but somehow remembered my name and connection, and sent them along. Most of these are about generiads and slipper gloxinias, and the like. But in March 1965, my mother responds at length to an inquiry from Flack about Elsie's book, Willa Cather: A Memoir, beginning with the news that when she herself was in college Elsie had taken her on more than one occasion to visit the novelist at her New York apartment on Bank Street. Then, in May 1921, the three meet again at the Central Park Casino, "...where the hanging violet-blue wisteria clusters seemed part of the Victorian age." The lines are from Elsie's memoir, which goes on about her subject to say, "Her way of delivering herself completely to the situation of a little party she was giving and making a friend feel welcomed was most charming. The warm, assertive, direct outgoing side of her nature still came up from the depths of her distance to meet the occasion."
Here is my mother, on the same moment: "My report on the day when Miss Cather, my sister, and I met for tea under the wisteria vine in Central Park would have been very different from the one in my sister's book! It was a matter of two writers, each obsessed with their own books in process, and each hardly allowing the other to get a word in. Miss Cather won. My sister had been wounded and was just back from a long and dreadful experience (of which she wrote or was writing in Shadow Shapes, her wartime French diary) and she trustingly thought that Miss Cather was there as a friend to hear about her, Elizabeth's, ordeal. It soon became evident to me that Miss Cather was there for another reason—to get factual detail and background for her own novel in progress, since she had not been in France at all and was writing One of Ours. (It turned out to be her poorest novel.) I resented this at the time, though my sister did not, and I probably still do."
One more aunt. My father's sister, Hildegarde Angell, three years younger, had the same long face and grave look as he but much larger brown eyes; there was something exotic and thrilling about her, for me. When I was quite young she told me about a day the summer before when she'd taken her bathing suit off while at the beach in Provincetown, and, seeing no one else about, had gone for a walk along the shore without a towel. If another woman hove into view in the distance it wouldn't matter, she told herself, and if the figure turned out to be a man she would reverse course and stroll back to her towel and maillot. In time a tiny figure did appear up ahead, and by the time she could make out that it was a man she saw that he, too, was naked. She forged ahead, telling herself not to be the first to bail out. They approached each other, exchanged nods and friendly "Good afternoons
," and went on by. I made her tell this to me all over again.
Another reason Aunt Hildegarde still holds a bit of glamour is that I don't know enough about her. She graduated from Wellesley but I don't remember what her work was after that. Now there's no one left for me to ask about this. She passed extended times in Mexico and South America, and in 1930 Norton published a serious, well-regarded biography of hers, Simon Bolivar. It's my belief, uncorroborated, that she went through an extended, never-resolved love affair with a married man. She was often around on weekends after my parents were divorced and came skating or hiking with us and friends of Father's, sitting out in the open with sandwiches and hard boiled eggs on their laps afterward, with everyone smoking and talking heatedly about books and plays and painters and politics. She joined Nancy and Father and me in the middle of a vacation at a small ranch in Montana in 1930, and on hot afternoons on the trails above the Little Big Horn would sometimes take off her shirt and ride along ahead of me in jeans and bra. One day, I rode up beside her while she was reading a letter that had just come in the mail, and announced what I saw at the top of the page "'Darling Hildegarde—'"
She screeched and slashed her hat at me, but the news held up. Later that year she married the letter-writer, Granville Smith—wonderful, delightful Granville, another man in the family at last and a pal for life. He must have been in his late forties then: a lively bow-legged man out of Kansas City and Yale. He was bald, with a round jaw, crinkly narrow eyes, and a Roman nose that shot down from his high forehead. He knew Mexico, too, and the very next summer Nancy and Father and I joined the brand-new Smiths in the Gulf Coast refinery town of Tampico, where we all lived in the mayor's house—actually, El Calde lived upstairs, so there was always a cop in a sombrero on guard or asleep at the foot of the steps. One day, at siesta time, there was a loud report outside our windows, where the guard of the moment had fired his rifle at a kid trying to steal my sister's bathing suit off the line, but missed. Each afternoon, Granville came home from his job at the oil camp covered with smudges of creosote—some of it came off on Hildegarde—which he wiped away with a cloth dipped in gasoline before heading off for his bath. He was an oil man but perhaps closer to roustabout than tycoon.
I hung about near Granville, who laughed at my jokes and kid ways. One day we all bundled aboard a narrow, outboard-powered local banana boat—though bigger, it had the same shape and configuration as the African Queen— and took that memorable day-and-night's run down the Laguna de Tamiahua, a brackish long lagoon paralleling the Gulf—in company with numerous locals and dogs and goats, and a raffish friend of Granville's named Boo-Hoo. There was no cabin or head, and when necessity called, Nancy and Aunt Hildegarde stepped decorously into a long rowboat astern, and took turns holding up a serape as a bathroom screen. That night, I was told, I almost rolled overboard in my sleep from our part of the rooftop deck, close to some stacked crab traps, but Granville stuck out an arm and grabbed me back. The next morning, we'd arrived at a banana plantation, where the light fell greenly through low leaves; just across the stream there were taller trees bunched into near-jungle, with iguanas and staring small monkeys everywhere. Boo-Hoo handed me a shovel and said "Dig anyplace," and in ten minutes I'd come up with some fragments of painted pots and a stone whistle stoppered with loam. This was old country.
Within a year, Hildegarde and Granville had gone into hock and bought a farm in northern Missouri—Spring Creek Ranch, in Green Castle—and were raising sheep and chickens and seventy-odd white-faced Herefords, of a prime strain they'd found through their rancher friends Ted and Haydee Yates, in Montana. Wild with impatience until vacation rolled around again, I joined Granville on horseback this time, and helped the hands drive the critters to water and back each day, or to a fresh pasture. I learned to ride with my stirrups long and my back straight above the supporting curve of the saddle, the way they did, and in time got the tilt of my hat exactly right. Riding alongside the plodding heifers, I touched up my horse toward the next fence, dismounted in a single motion, and coolly unhooked the barbed-wire gate loop with my shoulder and gloved hand. On drenching day, I wrestled heavy, terrified sheep off their feet and lay panting on top of them, while outsized metal syringes full of copper sulphate were stuffed down their throats; I was the smudge man, marking each woolly head with a chunk of blue chalk, to avoid a fatal repeat dose. Each night, there was shoptalk around the kitchen table about salt licks and brush-whacker tractors, the pick-up times at Milan for next week's cattle-trucks headed for Kirksville or Saint Joe, the damage done to a famous cottonwood that had just been whacked by lightning; and, again and again, the drought and the dropping water levels in the cattle cisterns. Hildegarde and Granville knew all the Herefords—which one had a damaged horn or a hind hoof that needed tarring and which calves would be best to cut out and saved for breeding. In the broiling afternoons, Granville let me steer his ancient Ford station wagon on the dusty dirt roads, and in time let me drive it, too, though I had to reach for the pedals with my toes. What was different about him was he had a terrible heart—he'd damaged it years earlier—and in the midst of these ranch exertions would sometimes gasp and throw his head back and struggle for breath, his body flung back against a railing or the hood of the Ford. Although his shirt went half unbuttoned most of the time he was never tan, and at times like this you could see his heart bumping and thrumming in his white chest. Then he'd draw a breath, smile wanly, and put his dinky straw Stetson back on and resume his tasks. Every day after lunch—or dinner, as it was called—he went to bed again, like clockwork, under the covers for an hour-and-a-quarter siesta.
We went back to this entrancing place the next summer, and I returned alone two summers after that, when I was fifteen, and worked there through August until Father came out, near the end, for some vacation. One day I came down off a barn roof we were patching and stood uneasily by the storm cellar doors, along with everybody else, until a massive gray-green line storm changed its mind at the last moment and went moaning and crackling up the next valley. All was the same, except that this last year, 1936, Granville's wife wasn't Aunt Hildegarde anymore, but Hildegarde's best friend, Evelyn Dewey, the daughter of the educator John Dewey. Hildegarde had died after two or barely three years of her happy marriage—it was a breast cancer, and took her quickly—and Granville, unable to bear it, had found Evelyn. She missed Hildegarde almost as much as he did, and with the ranch and its urgent needs waiting, the two married within months of her death and went on without her, saving each other from too much grieving. Evelyn Dewey wore pince-nez and was not beautiful, but she had a serious laugh and didn't let me get away with anything. I got used to them, though it wasn't quite the same, but it took Father longer to get over this turn of events. Nancy and I were growing up and becoming ourselves, and he had not yet married again. Hildegarde was the companion of his bosom, and she'd become the part of the family where there was plenty of hope and laughter.
An earlier moment between me and Aunt Hildegarde remains, a happening so slight that its presence in memory is a puzzle. One afternoon in my boyhood—I was ten or eleven, I think—Hildegarde turned up at our house on Ninety-third Street in the afternoon, after I'd come home from school. I don't recall the occasion; maybe she was expected for dinner and thought she'd drop in on me beforehand. I was alone in the library when the front doorbell rang downstairs and when Joseph, our cook, opened the door I heard her voice and felt a start of pleasure at this surprise. She was halfway up the stairs when on sudden impulse I slipped behind one of the long curtains beside one of the windows looking out onto the street. Barely breathing, taking care not to stir the folds of heavy curtain, I peeked out and watched her come into the room. She made a little sound of disappointment, then looked about and sat down in the low armchair facing me. She found a magazine on the table before her and sat back and began to leaf through it, with her legs crossed. Savoring the surprise to come, I took in her stylish dress and saw her long, elegant face as she turned id
ly from page to page, and was struck, bang, by something previously unknown to me: an intimation or shift of view so strange that it made me jump out almost before I was ready, and run over to share her surprise and laughter and get a hug. Seeing Hildegarde unaware for an instant—alone, or so she thought—in a shadowed room was something I'd not experienced before with her or with any grown-up, and a powerful sense of loneliness and separation overtook me by surprise. She wasn't just Aunt Hildegarde but also simply someone alone in an empty room at that moment, and I was now the possessor of two thoughts, or two shots at the idea of this scene: what it was like to be Hildegarde, and what it was like to be me, watching her and knowing all this. The voyeur's sadness, which infects the watcher and the watched equally, was too much for me—it still is now—and I burst out: "Boo!" to make the day begin again and go on as before.
Andy
LATELY I have been missing my stepfather, Andy White, who keeps excusing himself while he steps out of the room to get something from his study or heads out the back kitchen door, on his way to the barn again. He'll be right back. I can hear the sound of that gray door—the steps there lead down into the fragrant connecting woodshed—as the lift-latch clicks shut. E. B. White died in 1985— twenty years ago, and more—and by "missing" I don't mean yearning for him so much as not being able to keep hold of him for a bit of conversation or even a tone of voice. In my mind, this is at his place in North Brooklin, Maine, and he's almost still around. I see his plaid button-down shirt and tweed jacket, and his good evening moccasins. One hand is holding a cigarette tentatively—he'll smoke it halfway down and then stub it out—and he turns in his chair to put his martini back on the Swedish side table to his right. It must be about dinnertime. What were we talking about, just now? We were close for almost sixty years, and you'd think that a little back-and-forth—something more than a joke or part of an anecdote—would survive, but no. What's impossible to write down, soon afterward, is a conversation that comes easily.
