Let Me Finish

by Roger Angell

  Here we are, instead, on a frigid December day in 1929, walking up a steep stretch of Pinckney Street, on Beacon Hill, in Boston. The narrow brick sidewalk is snowy in places, and the going is harder for Andy than it is for me, because he's wearing ice skates. He's been complaining—who can blame him—and finally he sits down on somebody's front stoop to pull off the skates, and goes on, snow or no snow, in his socks. We've been here on a family visit from New York to the Newberrys' house at 87 Myrtle Street—my Aunt Rosie and Uncle John's place—and Andy and I brought our skates along, just in case. Christmas is two or three days away, and on a clear and cold afternoon he and I head down to Charles Street and then over to the frozen lake in the Public Garden. There may be a red-ball sign standing out on the ice, telling us it's safe to skate, but there's no place you can go to buy a ticket, and no shack with a stove inside, where you could keep warm while you lace up your skates. We find a park bench instead. Andy hides our shoes under a bush and we step down an embankment and sail away. Other skaters are here already—some of the men are in overcoats, along with kids in striped scarves and big mittens—but it's as if we had the place to ourselves. There are wintry trees and park lampposts with a different shape than the ones in Central Park, and though the sense of Boston is close at hand, we could almost be in the country. Wind has cleared patches and paths through snow for us to skate on. The ice is rough, with frozen ripples here and there to trip you up, but Andy and I are good skaters, and we laugh when we come to a curved bridge and, bending low, shoot under and out the other side. It's a great afternoon—right up to the moment when we come back to our bush and see that Andy's shoes are gone. I don't recall that we made a fuss or much of a search; this was hard times, the onset of the Depression, and even a poorly fitting pair of shoes was better than a handout or a hot meal for a lot of men just then.

  Andy was shy and self-conscious—he was a slight man, never one to bluster his way through things—and I could see him turn his head away in embarrassment as people coming toward us down Beacon Street began to smile when they saw him tiptoeing along on his hockey skates. Sometimes after they'd gone by he stopped and bent halfdouble, laughing at himself. "'The Skater,'" he said, shaking his head. It was a relief for me to laugh, too. What came to me later—I was nine but prone to thought—was that this adventure would not have happened with my father. I'd done more skating with him, on rivers and ponds everywhere—he'd started me when I was small—but he'd have taken us home when we found there was no place to check our shoes. Or if he had lost his shoes somehow he'd have found a cab or made a phone call before ever walking a dozen blocks in his skates. Andy was ten years his junior, and younger than my mother, too. He was a grownup, but there was a readiness for play in him that lasted all his life. Luckily, I didn't need another father and that freed us up.

  Andy makes light of the lost shoes in a tiny Notes and Comment piece he wrote for The New Yorker afterward, and I've remembered the day for boyish reasons—it was an adventure and it put me alone with someone I loved but didn't see all that much. Actually, the story is right up his alley. In One Man's Meat, the celebrated collection of his essays published in 1942, he recalls his dreamy seventeen-year-old self at home in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1917, just before he entered Cornell as a freshman. He was thinking of a girl he had skated with the winter before, when "the air grew still and the pond cracked and creaked under our skates," and "the trails of ice led off into the woods, and the little fires burned along the shore. It was enough, that spring, to remember what a girl's hand felt like, suddenly ungloved in winter." The shift from the winter general to the sudden particular of the girl's hand is a White special, as is the self-deprecation. And pegging along on a sidewalk in skates was an embarrassment that he would have made more of in a piece later on and played out with relish, as he did so often in his writings, turning the awkward moment into a charming and then telling paragraph, even as he dwells on his fears. He was the most charming man I've known, and he got that side of himself into his writing, like everything else, without effort.

  Another winter scene is coming—this one a half century later—but first it should be explained that E. B. White was a lifelong hypochondriac, perhaps world class, but not a solemn one. Munching a canapé on my porch in Maine one evening, he clapped one hand to his face in horror. We paused, drinks in midair. "Got anything for cheese in the eye?" he cried indignantly. The crisis passed and the moment was affectionately filed away, joining the deadly ant bite at the beach picnic, the bone in his upper spine that was almost surely pushing its way through his windpipe, the passing ulcer or descending thrombus, and the thousand-odd spoonfuls of soup or compote, or forkfuls of salad or soufflé that were suddenly halted and inspected midway to his mouth, with the same "Any clams in this?" A clam had poisoned him once—though I don't think I ever heard the meal or the mollusk named—and the cooks and hostesses of the world, including my mother, were out to lay him low again by the same means. No discussion followed a fresh alert. "Nope, no clams, Andy," someone would murmur, and the meal resumed. If your eye fell on him later, you might notice that he was chewing, as always, with his mouth a quarter or an eighth open, ready to discharge any skulking bivalve that had slipped through the lines. Another quirk of his, almost as familiar as his gray mustache or his easeful walk, was a persistent leftward twist of his head, a little adjustment of neck and spine repeated every minute or so, retesting a structure on the verge of collapse.

  I never had the feeling that Andy worked on his worries. He wasn't exactly after attention, though that's what he got at the spectacular upper levels of his discomposure. In the winter of 1980, word came to my wife, Carol, and me in New York that a cherished Maine neighbor of ours, Catherine McCoy, had died. There would be a memorial in Blue Hill, early in January, and after discussion we agreed that Carol would fly up to Bangor while I stayed home with our ten-year-old son, John Henry. My mother had died three years earlier, and Andy was delighted by the unexpected visitor, though it was understood that he would not attend the ceremony. Public gatherings—and most private ones, as well—made him jumpy. For years he had passed up family weddings and graduations, town meetings, dedications and book awards, cocktail bashes and boat gams and garden parties. As his literary reputation widened when he was in his forties and fifties, he did make it to a few select universities to receive honorary degrees, but despite prearranged infusions of sherry or Scotch he found the ceremonials excruciating. "So the old emptiness and dizziness and vapors seized hold of me," he writes to my mother after his honoris causa Ph.D. appearance at Dartmouth in 1948. "Nobody who has never had my peculiar kind of disability can understand the sheer hell of such moments, but there they are." And when the time came for the encomiums and the enrobing, there in the sunshine at Hanover, he went on, his hood—"white, quite big, and shaped like a loose-fitting horse collar"—became entangled with the honoree in the next seat, Ben Ames Williams: Andy's worst dreams come true. "When I got seated the thing was up over my face, as in falconry," he continues. "A fully masked Doctor of Letters, a headless poet." After that, he stayed home, even passing up an invitation in 1963 to go to Washington and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson; the deed was consummated instead by a stand-in, Maine's Senator Edmund Muskie, in the office of the president of Colby College. Andy also skipped his wife's private burial in the Brooklin Cemetery, in July, 1977. None of us in the family expected otherwise or held this against him. And when his own memorial came, eight years later, I took the chance to remark, "If Andy White could be with us today he would not be with us today."

  There would be no question of his accompanying Carol to Catherine McCoy's farewell at the Blue Hill Congregational Church—except that a considerable snowstorm blew in overnight, converting the two-lane Route 175 to a slithery corridor the next morning. Carol said she'd drive herself over, but he wouldn't hear of it; he'd drive her—he knew these winter roads. And so she found herself and the writhing public E.B.W. seated
side by side near the front of the long church—the "Congo," in local parlance—while preliminary organ music fell about them and the rows filled up with stomping, de-muffling mourners. When the music subsided and the footfalls of the minister were heard, Andy leaned toward Carol and whispered, "I'm having a heart attack."

  "I'm not leaving," she whispered back, and kept her gaze straight ahead while he rose, excusing himself, and, half-bending but not unobserved, made his way out of the row and back up the aisle and, at last, through a door into the vestibule. The service and the tributes went on lengthily, at least for Carol. Had she done the right thing? She had no idea what she would find after the benediction and the recessional were over—certainly not the sight of Andy stretched on his back on one of the vestibule benches, a Saxon king atop his sarcophagus, as he responded to the anxious questions of each departing neighbor. "A heart attack," he explained. "I had a heart attack." In time, he arose, bundled up, and drove her safely back to North Brooklin for drinks and a nice dinner.

  My mother and Andy White got married in 1929, immediately after my parents' divorce, and though my sister and I were only weekend and summertime visitors with them after that, I soon felt as much at home at their place—on East Eighth Street and then East Forty-eighth Street, in New York, and then in Maine—as I was with my father the rest of the time. A fresh household sharpens attention, and one of the things I picked up was that sense of ease and play that Andy brought to his undertakings. Though subject to nerves, he possessed something like that invisible extra beat of time that great athletes show on the field. Dogs and children were easy for him because he approached them as a participant instead of a winner. In a family photograph, he is sitting astride a bench outside the garage door, in Maine, while he stirs up a dish of mash for his bantam hens. Blond John Henry, then about two years old, is standing close by, and they are looking into the dish with equal interest while Andy mixes and talks. When Andy, without his trying and almost without my noticing it, taught me how to sail or how to row or how to lure a flounder with a bit of periwinkle as bait and—in some part—how to write, ease seemed to be the whole trick. He let things emerge, like the time he unexpectedly put his nearly empty bottle of Pabst or Schlitz down on the carpet in front of his big dachshund, Fred, who sniffed about and soon found that by laying one paw on the neck he could tip the last of the beer toward the top of the bottle and lap it out. Then he ate the label.

  When the Whites moved to a year-round residency in Maine, in 1938, we kept in touch by letters, as everyone did in those days, but also, I began to realize, through his writings. He'd given up the Comment page he wrote each week for The New Yorker, and the eased deadlines and greater length of his monthly "One Man's Meat" column in Harper's suited the hours and bottomless concerns of a saltwater farmer with a hundred and fifty pullets, a dozen geese, twenty or thirty sheep, an editor wife (my mother had continued her work as a fiction and poetry editor with The New Yorker by long distance, with daily envelopes of manuscripts and proofs mailed back and forth between New York and Brooklin), a schoolboy son, Joel, and a full-time hired man. What he wrote about, along with the weather and the way to build a double-ended cedar scow for Joe and the way to keep a city rubber plant healthy with doses of "sheep-shit tea" (as it was known in the family, if not in print) and how to hook up a mooring with a chain so the tide will lift it free later in the morning, was himself. The arrangement left room for his thoughts about the movies, automobile design, the railroads, taxation, domesticity, poetry, Florida trailer parks, and freedom. In 1937, a year before he began writing One Man's Meat, Andy formally took a year off ("My Year" as he called it) to try—well, to try to become a serious writer. Nothing came of it, of course, but then the Harper's assignment came along and saved his life. He was self-conscious at first as a countryman—he is abashed as he catches himself crossing the barnyard with a paper napkin in his hand—but the demands of the work and his affinity for it soon dismissed such concerns and somehow put him in place as a writer. The Whites, with their well-staffed household and sophisticated occupations, would always be "from away," in Down East parlance, but no one in Brooklin who knew Andy ever took him for a gentleman farmer. When the war came, he even took on a cow—the first time he leads her out to the pasture, he writes, he feels "the way I did the first time I ever took a girl to the theatre"—and his production goals for 1942 were four thousand dozen eggs, ten pigs, and nine thousand pounds of milk.

  I was away much of the time at boarding school and then at Harvard, and then elsewhere as a soldier, but the sense of home and informal but intimate attachment I got from Andy's writings was even more powerful than it was for his other readers. Reading him brought him to me almost in person, as it still does in a 1955 passage about driving on U.S. 1, in Maine:

  Like highways everywhere it is a mixed dish: Gulf and Shell, bay and gull, neon and sunset, cold comfort and warm, the fussy façade of a motor court right next door to the pure geometry of an early-nineteenth-century clapboard house with barn attached. You can certainly learn to spell "moccasin" while driving into Maine, and there is often little else to do except steer and avoid death. Woods and fields occur everywhere, creeping to within a few feet of the neon and the court, and the experienced traveler into this land is always conscious that just behind the garish roadside stand, in its thicket of birch and spruce, stands the well-proportioned deer; just beyond the overnight cabin, in the pasture of granite and juniper, trots the perfectly designed fox....The Maine man does not have to penetrate in depth to be excited by his coastal run; its flavor steals into his consciousness with the first ragged glimpse of properly textured woodland, the first whiff of punctually drained cove.

  The moccasin joke survives—I think of it every year on the same stretch of highway, where the juniper and the foxes are scarcer now and the deer and the neon more prevalent. Reading the passage as a writer, I am struck by its simplicity and complexity, by that "punctually" and "barn attached" and the quick, sentence-closing "fox" and "cove." What I feel for its author comes not just from my knowledge of him at the table or twitchy behind the wheel but from a sense of trust. He has looked at the roadside grunge and granite with the same eyes I do, and he does not labor for reference or add a chunk of scholarship to give them meaning; he waits for the connection—that extra moment—and delivers it with grace. I am included: this must be my thought, too, elegant as it has become. His editor William Shawn, writing after Andy's death, called him the most companionable of writers, but added that "renowned as his writing was for its simplicity and its clarity, his mind constantly took surprising turns, and his peculiar mixture of seriousness and humor could not have failed to astonish even him."

  The other sentence-closer in the passage is "death," and Andy must have ceased in time to be astonished at how often the theme and thought recurred in his writing. It runs all through his sweetly comical piece "Death of a Pig," in which he tries ineffectually to deal with the crisis of a young pig of his who has stopped eating. Castor oil doesn't help, nor does his own sense of "personal deterioration," or the ministrations of Fred, who accompanies him on trips down the woodpath through the orchard to the pigyard, and also makes "many professional calls on his own." The pig dies, nothing can be done about it, and it is the profusion of detail—his feeling the ears of the ailing pig "as you might put your hand on the forehead of a child," and the "beautiful hole, five feet long, three feet wide, three feet deep" that is dug for the pig among alders and young hackmatacks, at the foot of an apple tree—that makes its death unsentimental and hard to bear.

  The "D-word" also ends two famous essays of his, "Once More to the Lake" and "Here Is New York," arriving without warning in the first one—a piece about taking his young son to a family summer camp where he himself often used to go as a kid. Everything there is the same, or almost—the middle lane, where the horse used to walk, has vanished from the road through the meadow—with the customarily spectacular afternoon thunderstorm thrown in. When it's over a
nd his boy is putting on his wet bathing suit for another dip, "I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death."

  I was a young man when I first read this, and remember finding the thought self-indulgent and exaggerated, almost a mistake, but this was before I'd begun to feel the brevity and sense of poignant loss that, from the first day, attend our meticulously renewed American vacations.

  "Here Is New York," written in 1948, was widely rediscovered in the weeks just after September 11th, because of its piercing vision. Reading the piece now—a revisiting of the pulsing and romantic city he knew and worked in during his late twenties and early thirties—you look for death at the end, since he has just mentioned that a small flight of planes could now bring down the great shining structure in a moment, but he almost appears to have given up on the idea. Has he forgotten the point? It arrives at the tail end of the last sentence, in the famously reversed final phrase: "this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death." Losing New York is possible, but not holding on to the thought of it—which is all we may have in the end—much worse.