Let Me Finish

by Roger Angell

  There's much more—events unfold at breakneck speed—but what holds a reader is the story's unique style and spirit. It's depressing but also funny and surprising. You learn hopeless and frightening things about the narrator and his plight, and you sense that he is both desperate and exhilarated. There is something stylish about him, almost jaunty. It's a hell of a story—one that stays with you.

  We decided to buy this, of course, and to work with the writer on some necessary editing—it needed cuts and clarifications all the way along—but when I called the agent with the news, she seemed startled. "You're taking something by Jake Murray?" she said. I made a date for Murray to come in to the office and see me. When the moment arrived, I went out to the twentieth-floor reception room and found a tall, thin, shabby man with some missing teeth and a huge bandage over one side of his forehead. He was wearing an ancient orange parka, with rust-colored bloodstains all over it. "I'm Jake," he said, watching my expression. "It's all true."

  What was also true was that Jake was an ideal writer to work with. We talked over the manuscript in some detail, and he agreed to take it back and work on some sections and passages, and bring it back in a week or two. When it came back, very quickly, he not only had fixed the rough places but had taken a few suggestions of mine and turned them into something much better. The story had taken on fresh life. He was excited and pleased, and so was I. The process had worked. The story went into galleys, and he took these back, after we'd met again, and made the same kind of sharpenings and smoothing he'd done before. The man was a pro.

  I had learned a little more about him. John F. Murray belonged to a large and distinguished Catholic family from the South Shore of Long Island. They were society people, and there was plenty of money there. Sometimes the Murrays had been compared with the Kennedys. Jake Murray was one of seven children. He had gone to Yale and served overseas in the Second World War. He had written a novel, The Devil Walks on Water, I now remembered—it's about the monster New England hurricane of 1938—which received enthusiastic reviews. He had also been a successful copywriter and executive with some top-level advertising companies, and he'd been married three times. He had three children.

  When I got to meet him Murray was down on his luck, and almost down and out. I'm not sure I ever passed an hour with him when he wasn't drunk or getting over being drunk. Early on, he asked for an advance on our payment for the story, and I was able to get him a check for two hundred dollars. When he came back the next morning, it was gone—he told me he had been robbed. But I'd been warned that this would happen. I'd had a call from a brother of his, Tom Murray, a stockbroker, who asked if we would please not give Jake any more cash; just send the rest of the money to the agent. In the story, O'Phelan's broker brother is called "the hateful Martin," but Tom Murray, I found, was the opposite. He was a sweet man. He seemed to know where Jake was every day, and he had set up a network of friends and cops and bartenders who kept an eye out for him. There was a powerful strain of attachment among the Murrays, I began to realize after a conversation about Jake I had with his sister Jeanne (an old acquaintance of mine), who told me that late one Christmas Eve she'd had to call the Southampton Police Department to come over and get her brother, who was carrying on noisily under her windows. The next morning, Christmas, she turned up early at the jail and bailed him out. She told this with laughter, and Jake laughed, too, when I mentioned it to him. "Just like her," he said. But no one was happier about the story the magazine had bought than Tom, or more proud of what his troubled brother had managed to do.

  The story ran that spring, and was much admired and talked about. There was a flurry of mail from readers, and inquiries from publishers. Everyone at the magazine was delighted, Shawn above all. I'd brought Jake in to meet him, and they talked about more stories up ahead. We'd found a new writer, and there was no telling what would happen next.

  Nothing happened until the following January, when another manuscript came in from Jake. It was called O'Phelan Drinking, and turned out to be a direct continuation of the first one. I was disheartened—how could he expect to do this all over again—but when I'd reread it I saw that it was written with more confidence than the first one and that there was more to it. Picking up the first story, it takes our man to "St. Justin's Hospital" in the Village, for alcoholic rehab—to St. Vincent's, that is—where once again O'Phelan knows the ropes and remembers the doctors. The patients and their dilemmas are done with greater skill this time—it's riveting but appalling to meet them. Again, the tone is strong and certain, but there is much more feeling. There's a sustained flashback in which O'Phelan picks up his young children at their mother's house in Connecticut—the family has busted up—and takes them on a vacation to Nantucket. He holds things together, just barely, and delivers them home again. Every moment for him has become risky and terrifying. O'Phelan wakes up in the hospital again, and later that day, when he slips out of an A.A. meeting in the Village and buys a pint of 100 proof Smirnoff, you want to cry out "Stop—my God, don't do that!" But you also understand the calm that O'Phelan finds in the booze, and the sense of order it restores.

  When Jake Murray came into the office this time, he looked worse than before, and there were fewer traces of his old élan. He was looking forward to our sitting down again and going through the editing process, so he was disappointed when I told him that this would have to be put off for a couple of weeks. We were in a busy time of year, and I was swamped with other stories and writers. I'd call him in a couple of weeks, the first chance I got. But Jake didn't want this pause. Some days when I came to work or back from lunch, he'd be sitting there in the reception room, waiting for me. Other times he turned up late in the afternoon. One morning when I came in early, around seven-thirty, I found him there, asleep, with his old work boots sitting side by side on the next chair. Wait a couple of weeks, I begged him when he woke up. But he was back that same afternoon, and in bad shape. Shawn and I conferred, and agreed to do nothing. It was January, full winter, and we didn't know if Jake had anyplace to go. Tom Murray said that he'd take him off our hands, but he was back again in a day or two, and noisy. Shawn called me in and said he was sorry, but this had to stop. The receptionists were getting upset, and there were other visitors to think about.

  When I went out and gave Jake this news, he grew stubborn. "I'm a staff member and I demand to see Mr. Shawn," he said.

  "You're not a staff member, Jake," I said. "You're a trusted contributor, and you can't see him right now. Come back when I'm done with my other stuff, and we'll do the story together."

  "I just want a place to hunker down," he said.

  "You can't hunker here," I said.

  He stood up and looked at me. "This is it?" he said.

  "This is it, Jake," I said. "See you soon."

  He shook my hand and gave me one of his extraordinary smiles. "Roger, goodbye," he said.

  As far as I know, I was the last person who knew him to see him alive. Some time that day or the next day, he went into the river. Tom called me later in the week and told me how worried he was. "He always lets me know where he is," he said. But no word came, and when it became clear what had happened Tom came to see me, and told me, at length, not to blame myself. "This was inevitable," he said. "It's been coming for a long, long time."

  John Murray's body reappeared in the spring, and a few days later there was a service for him at St. Thomas More, that trim little church on East 89th Street. Tom spoke and told us how much he'd admired and loved Jake all these years—the older brother who was always smarter in school and a better athlete, and better with girls. He also mentioned the magazine, and said that Jake's experience with The New Yorker had been the best news for him in many years. It was springtime and the service was crowded, and there was a sense of joy to it.

  A few weeks later, I consulted with Tom Murray, and met with Jake's children, Matt and Jeff, who were still in their teens, and consulted their older sister, Melinda, by telephone, and togethe
r we talked about O'Phelan Drinking and how he might have made the fixes that the story needed. It came out in October—another smash hit—with no mention of what had happened to the author. This good-sized excerpt arrives about halfway through the story—the flashback of O'Phelan's, mentioned above, which comes to him at a time when he's in residence in the awful rehab center. The children's names, it will be noticed, were not fictionalized.

  That night, in my room, I must have dreamed about Nantucket, because I woke up while it was still dark and found that I was thinking about 'Sconset. Years ago, when I was in the advertising business, I lived in a house in Darien, with my first wife and my three children. But my wife divorced me and took the house and got my insurance policies and whatever alimony payments I managed to keep up with. She did not, however, take my children; my children could see me freely, and I could take them on vacations. One summer, I rented a house on Nantucket for two weeks, and I was determined that the children and I would go there and have a good time. I was anxious to be with them, because I had been in a big hospital up in Westchester, from which I escaped and to which I had been returned, and I hadn't seen them in months.

  The day came, and I drove to Darien, to my old house, where my kids were waiting for me. Melinda was sixteen then, and Jeff was fourteen, and Matt was nine. Matt was very excited about our vacation. We packed the kids' things into the Volkswagen, and I distributed them inside, and we made for the ferry at Woods Hole. Halfway up the Connecticut Turnpike, I slowed the car and pulled over to the shoulder of the road. Jeff was sick. I let him out, and a state trooper pulled up behind us. I almost started up the car again, because I had been hiding from the police when I escaped from the mental hospital. But the trooper said, Do you need any help, and I said no, just a small emergency, thank you very much. He tipped his hat and drove on. Jeff got back in the car and we drove to Woods Hole in time to pick up our reservation for the afternoon boat to Nantucket.

  It was a pleasant trip. We sat in deck chairs on the foredeck listening to a conversation at the rail between two lawyers, one young and one old, who were discussing some mutual friends who had spent part of the summer at Westhampton Beach. The young lawyer was saying that he did not like people who went to Westhampton Beach, and he wondered why his friends had gone there. The old lawyer simply shrugged, but Melinda and I decided that although he probably felt the same way as the young lawyer did about Westhampton, he did not think it was something you went around saying.

  We arrived in Nantucket as the sun was going down, and drove to 'Sconset, across the island. Our house looked like a boat and lay very near the beach, and when we had unpacked we went outside and played with a Frisbee. We had eaten on the boat and we weren't very hungry for dinner, so we came back inside and I broke open a deck of cards, and I taught my children the game of crazy eights, which I had learned at the hospital in Westchester. They loved it. We played for a long time. Then they got sleepy and went to their rooms.

  When I had kissed them good night and closed their doors, I went to the kitchen and suddenly felt very lonely. I missed my girlfriend—my girlfriend then—whose name was Lucinda, and I missed a girl at the hospital named Peggy, and I even missed my first wife, who had come with us on those jaunts in the past. I did not really need a drink, but I made one anyway. I made a rum and Coke. It tasted good but made me nervous, drinking it so soon after the hospital and daily doses of Thorazine. I poured the rest of it down the sink and then I went to bed.

  The next day, the kids rode their bikes and swam, and on the following days we visited various beaches, went on picnics, and had a good time. Hummock Pond was our favorite place. Sometimes we cooked out in the evenings and watched the Northeast Airlines Yellowbirds out over the ocean as they made the turn toward the Nantucket airport. One afternoon, Jeff tried out the Volkswagen and knocked down part of the fence beside the driveway because he got mixed up about the brake and the clutch. I was mad and yelled at all three of the kids, but then we got over it and it was all right again. In the second week, I took out some oil colors and started a painting of our house. Twice, I went to general delivery at the post office to look for mail from Lucinda, but there was none.

  One gray afternoon, some people from across the boardwalk dropped in. I knew them all from Connecticut, especially a striking blonde called Isabel Channey—a nice enough woman, I had always thought. Well, there was some sand in my bedroom and in the kids' rooms, and sand in my bed, and all the beds were unmade, and the house had a very casual look about it, and Isabel Channey chewed me out loudly. She told me I was no good and a terrible father. My kids heard her. I took it all, feeling very helpless and ashamed. I had been drunk and crazy, had blown my marriage, and now this. I decided I would not let it ruin the rest of the vacation, but it gnawed at me. When the people finally left, I went in and made myself another rum and Coke and drank all of it, right in front of the kids, and when I was finished I said to them, Don't sweep up and don't make your beds. Then we sat down and played crazy eights.

  A few days later, we packed up and left. We felt good. We stopped outside Nantucket town for blueberry pancakes. This had been a farewell breakfast for us for years. The trip back to Darien was easy. I dropped the kids at the house and they helped me unload the stuff. I hugged them goodbye. Then I was off into the night. As I drove down the Hutchinson River Parkway, I had a sudden urge to turn off at the Harrison exit and drive over to the Playland amusement park, where I would buy a bottle of rum and demolish it aboard the roller coaster, screaming wildly and happily with every swoop and turn, and staying aboard until it closed down for the night. But I resisted that temptation and drove on to the city. The next day, I went back to work at the advertising agency, safe and sound.

  I think what Jake wanted so badly in those last weeks and days wasn't just publication but the continued risk and adventure of writing, and the orderliness of the editing process. Our brief meetings have stayed firm in my memory, of course, appearing there at times with something like the washed clarity that descends before a sunset. I hope I haven't patronized him by overpraising his work. These are not the best stories ever written. They deal with contemporary forms of suffering—stuff that we all know almost by heart now—but without inflating them to tragedy or explaining them away as case history. The writing has a Hemingway brusqueness, but isn't confessional or self-pitying. Nor is it particularly intellectual. These are good stories, first-class, and the best that Jake Murray could have done when he wrote them. I have come to the conclusion that he understood this and that he paid us at the magazine a grand compliment by entrusting the rough second manuscript to us, when he saw that it was time at last for him to be moving along.

  Hard Lines

  ONE of my great-grandfathers, James Shepley, was born in Saco, Maine, in 1826, went to Bowdoin College, graduating in the class of 1846, and set up a law practice in the frontier town of Red Cloud, Minnesota, where he had a hand in the writing of the state constitution. In a small photograph, taken in 1862, he stands with his right foot slightly forward and holds a long horseman's coat in one hand. He has a scruffy beard and is wearing two pistols, military gauntlets, and a dusty tunic and pants perhaps made of canvas. Next to the photograph in its family album, one of my great aunts has written "Father as he appeared in St. Paul after riding two hundred miles through the Indian country to get relief for Fort Abercrombie on the Red River to the North." A bit later, while he was still in his mid-thirties, Shepley won a Civil War commission as an aide to a cousin of his, General George Shepley, but he contracted malaria and was confined for months to a hospital in New Orleans. Back home at last and eager to recover his health, he became a farm manager in Naples, Maine. He and his wife had three children by now, and in 1873, hoping to improve the Shepley fortunes, he bought into a sheep ranch near Fresno, California, and went west with a friend. He planned to bring his family out to join him, once he got settled. One spring night in 1874, while sleeping at a camp at Little Dry Creek, he was murdered—garrot
ed with a piece of wire. Two Portuguese sheepherders were tried for the crime but acquitted; there was no evidence of a robbery or suggestion of some other motive, and the case was dropped. The mystery was never cleared up.

  His widow, Mary Barrows Shepley, now abruptly deprived of income, moved to a house in Boston with her children and began taking in boarders. An impoverished gentility was preserved, though just barely, and rescue arrived at last as if from the pages of Jane Austen. One of the boarders, a young businessman named Charles Sergeant, fell in love with the youngest Shepley child—Elizabeth, known as Bessie—and in the spring of 1880, when she turned twenty-three, the two were married. Both of Sergeant's parents had died by the time he was seventeen, and he found himself the sole support for five sisters and a younger brother. A classic self-made man, rising from accountant to a district manager with the Eastern Railroad, he became a vice-president of the West End Street Railway Co.: the Boston El. As the new family prospered, they moved from Winchester, Massachusetts, to suburban Brookline, with their three daughters, the youngest of whom, Katharine, was my mother. All went well until the spring of 1899, when, on a visit to New York, Bessie Sergeant died of a burst appendix. My mother was six years old when this blow fell, but I never heard her speak of it. Not once. There is a family story, though, that her oldest sister, my Aunt Elsie, who was seventeen at the time, was not permitted to cry at their mother's funeral. Elsie went on to graduate from Bryn Mawr, and to become a bluestocking and a respected author, but nothing came easily for her. In her twenties, she was confined for a time in a mental hospital in Paris, and then in an asylum in Zurich, where she was treated by Carl Jung.