by Roger Angell
As I've written, my father, Ernest Angell, lost his father at the age of nine, in a marine disaster, the 1898 sinking of the French liner La Bourgogne, in a night collision near Sable Island. He and my mother married young, had two children, and were divorced in 1929, when I was eight. One explanation for the divorce was that my father, who went to France in 1917 with the A.E.F. as a counter-intelligence officer—he spoke French and some German—adopted a Gallic view of marriage and was repeatedly unfaithful to my mother after he came home. Another was that my mother had fallen in love with E. B. White, a colleague of hers at The New Yorker, where she was an editor. She always insisted that there was no connection between her divorce and their marriage, which came three months after her return from Reno. Whatever. What can be said for sure is that each of my parents grew up with a critically missing parent—she a mother, he a father—and pretty much had to fake it in these roles with their own kids. They worked at this all their lives, though it sometimes pissed you off or broke your heart (choose one) to watch them.
The day my mother told me about the divorce, she took me for a walk to the waterfall at Snedens Landing, where we went in the summer. The waterfall is still there—a brook splashing down over steep-sided ledges and into a dark pool a few yards west of the gliding Hudson. I loved the narrow woodland path down to the pool—I'd learned how to swim there—and it was a kick to have my mother to myself on that day. On our way back, she summoned her courage and sat us down on the steps of an empty Victorian house, the Lawrence place, to deliver her news. I remember the look of the overgrown lawn and our knees oddly in a row, there on the porch steps. I did pretty well until she told me that Nancy and I would still be living at our house on Ninety-third Street with our father, but she wouldn't. She'd still see us a lot, practically all the time, on weekends and vacations. "No, no, I want to stay with you!" I said indignantly. "I'll come, too. Nancy can stay with Father—I don't mind."
Memory is fiction—an anecdotal version of some scene or past event we need to store away for present or future use. John McCrone, a British science correspondent, writing in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement, calls memories "cognitive reconstructions," and goes on to say that our brains, though not well evolved for retrospection or contemplation, never give up a reshuffling process in their effort to extract what is general and what is particular about each passing moment of life. Garry Wills, in his book Saint Augustine's Memory, writes, "The past ... is not an inert structure in which we can deposit a remembered item to remain unchanged until called up again....In fact, what is being recalled is the experience that a person underwent in acquiring anything to be remembered." But when do we get to throw away the piercing announcement, the over-contemplated morsel of bad news? A few weeks after my parents split up, I was with my mother on the echoing main concourse of Grand Central when Father appeared, rushing up to us with a newspaper under his arm and sliding like a boy across the last few feet of the shiny floor. "Sorry I'm late," he said. He was soon grave again, and I went off with him, as arranged. My sister, Nancy, would not have approved of this playful moment, which I had seized upon as a sign that our parents still liked each other after all. She was less forgiving about what had befallen us, and after she got married and had kids of her own she became a serious Episcopalian, of all things. My father never got over Mother going off the way she did, and still woke up brooding about it through his sixties and seventies and eighties, despite his long second marriage and full-house second family. The divorce never grew stale to him.
While I was in my thirties and still in my first marriage, another memory of me with my mother came back repeatedly. In this dream or scene, I am a small child who has awakened in the night with an upset stomach—this is in our first Snedens house—and when Mother appears in response to my cries she snatches me up and carries me to the tiny bathroom under the stairs, to throw up. This came back again and again, haunting me, until a reliable shrink asked, "And how often did your mother hold you in her arms back then?" Then it stopped. Nobody in our family was much of a hugger, to tell the truth, Mother least of all. Instead, she worried about us, and about everything. She became a world-class worrier in the end, and probably even worried about her low hugging marks, along the way.
Loss is the common currency of family tales—who doesn't have a sad ancestor or a stopped child to tell about?—but it isn't talked about much, out of respect for others, whose news, come to think of it, is probably worse than our own. "Get over it!" is the cry I hear lately in conversations about some mopey pal or once happy couple, by which we mean shut up about it, give us a break. My grandfather Charles Sergeant, a stooped, sweetly polite man, painted oil landscapes in his old age, standing before his easel in tweeds, with an incessant ash hovering on the tip of his Chesterfield. He could not have forgotten his early orphaning or the sudden loss of his young wife, but he never got around to such matters at the dinner table. I am his age now, and find myself wondering what he thought about late at night in his bedroom, or in the unexpected moment when his gaze lifted from the sunlit cove or difficult oak he wished to capture on his little canvas. I could also jump back a good deal farther here and speculate in similar fashion about Captain John Sheple (as the name was then spelled), the murdered James Shepley's great-great-great-grandfather, who at seventeen was captured by the Abenaki Indians on July 27, 1694, in a raid on Groton, Massachusetts. He was one survivor of a massacre—it was an early skirmish in the French and Indian Wars—that took twenty-two lives, including those of his parents and his two siblings. After a captivity of more than three years, he returned to his native town, where he married, produced five children, and, in the words of a local historian, "held many offices of trust and responsibility, both civil and ecclesiastical." His memories are not mentioned, and no wonder.
It's my guess that we cling to the harsher bits of the past not just as a warning system to remind us that the next Indian raid or suddenly veering, tower-bound 757 is always waiting but as a passport to connect us to the rest of the world, whose horrors are available each morning and evening on television or in the Times. And the cold moment that returns to mind and sticks there, unbidden, may be preferable to the alternative and much longer blank spaces, whole months and years wiped clear of color or conversation. Like it or not, we geezers are not the curators of this unstable repository of trifling or tragic days but only the screenwriters and directors of the latest revival.
Two years ago, I had a telephone call from a woman in her fifties named Cally Field, whose voice I hadn't heard for thirty years. "Sorry to bother you like this, Roger," she said, "but I've forgotten so much about my father. Is there anything that comes to mind?" I said yes, sure, and mentioned his socks—cheap, pinkish-brown athletic socks from Sears, Roebuck that he commonly wore at home in the evening—or at dinner at my house—tucked into a pair of ancient and badly cracked patent-leather dance pumps. Nobody else did this: only Walker Field, my neighbor, my college classmate, my old reliable. I filled in a little more for Cally, who was his oldest child, mentioning his narrow wrists and alert gaze and long fingers, and perhaps the absorbed, delighted way he watched his hands that were tipped down, oddly vertical above the piano keys, as he played: as they played—it was all from within—"Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes," say, or "Memories of You," or "Do Nothin' Till You Hear from Me," or flashes of Ravel and Schubert. If there was a party and some singing along, he knew the best word or words in a great lyric—giving an enunciating clarity to, say, the "cling" in the bridge of "Makin' Whoopee":
Picture a little love nest, down where the
roses cling;
Picture that same sweet love nest: see what
a year can bring.
The socks, I explained to Cally, were affectation carried to the upper levels of cool. Walker was the most stylish gent I knew, with the possible exception of his older brother, James Field, a celebrated professor of American history at Swarthmore, who was even leaner and longer than he, with a n
arrow nose that came to a point. Jim—to continue this digression—while on a visit to Walker and his wife, Nancy, in the mid-nineteen-fifties, drew himself a bath, and lying at ease in the tub received an unexpected visit from Cally's two younger brothers. After an extended silent inspection, Sam Field, then perhaps five, said, "Uncle Jim, are all men like you?" Jim was so pleased with his response that he passed it along to me that evening. He said, "Very few."
I spared Cally this riposte, but offered instead a moment from 1941 or thereabouts. Walker, who had an ongoing pair of subscription tickets to the Boston Symphony, took me along one spring Friday afternoon. We had lunch somewhere off Beacon Street and were back in the sunshine in plenty of time before the overture, when Walker said, "Let's run." And away we went, a couple of twenty-year-old Harvard juniors in jackets and ties and narrow summer pants, leaping like deer across the Commonwealth Avenue traffic, hurdling hydrants, dodging in front of dowagers and startled pedestrians, our feet spattering down the red brick Boston sidewalks, our heads straining like Olympic sprinters. Laughter got the better of us at last and stopped us, wheezing and sweaty, with our hands on our knees, a block or so short of Symphony Hall. There was no point to this, I told Cally: we were young, was all. Talking with her, I suddenly recalled what Walker and I watched for that day, once we got inside and found our seats. Serge Koussevitzky, the Symphony's revered long-term conductor, always halted infinitesimally when he walked out onstage from the right and then made a smart, almost military pivot toward the podium. It was Walker who first spotted the mannerism and named it "Koussey's Pause." Here again, we nudged each other and smiled in the dark when the maestro delivered as promised, then strode across the illuminated and waiting stage.
All my recollections of Walker are playful, which is surprising, because he was a serious man: a talented architect who built himself a brilliant Wright- or Mies-touched house on a steep hillside in Rockland County. He became engrossed in the larger forms of design and served as chairman of the regional planning board during the first explosion of postwar suburban growth. At Harvard, he'd been elected to the Signet, the honorary scholars' society. Reading his senior honors thesis—I'd asked to see it—I encountered the word "eclectic" for the first time: "When the flow of works from the boards of the Grand Eclectics first began to wane," or some such. He'd put me on to a favorite professor of his, Kenneth J. Conant (mentioned in a previous chapter), whose electrifying visits to Cluny and the Tugendhat House, delivered in lectures I took with him on medieval and modern architecture, almost brought about a late shift in my major. Walker had been in the Navy during our World War, but then suddenly we were neighbors, when, in 1950, my wife, Evelyn, and I bought a house in Snedens Landing, my old boyhood place on the Hudson, where Walker and Nancy Field's glass-and-fieldstone home had just risen above the road to the waterfall path. Here my two young daughters (by coincidence, the older one was named Callie) overlapped at school with Eliot and Sam Field. There were five young Fields in the end, and we Fields and Angells became part of the self-entranced Snedens car-pool and kids'-play-group and grownups'-party set, there in the fifties. Nobody said it, but Walker and the vibrant, dark-haired Nancy were easily our Dick and Nicole Diver, without the doom and boozing. Their parties lit up the best weekends, with Walker at the piano—at night in their cantilevered living room it seemed suspended amid the trees—or, later on, playing his trombone in soft accompaniment with Tricky Sam Nanton and Lawrence Brown on the 78 of "Never No Lament," while we danced. He had all the Ellingtons—a discology he'd begun to collect before his teens.
Walker's tennis game survives within this communal panorama. Each shot of his—his left-handed first serve to my backhand, his volley toward the deep right-hand corner, where there's always a slippery damp spot on the gray clay beyond the baseline to think about—still brings a hurrying response and counter-strategy to mind: slice him crosscourt up the line, or, no, better lob and get your ass back toward the middle. Mostly, he killed me. His first serve was a rocket, and the second—a spin so severe that it appeared to turn the midair ball into a fuzzy lozenge—sometimes jumped up into my face, reducing us both to laughter. And now here we are in September of 1958, playing each other once again in the semifinal singles of our unserious late-summer tournament, with the same audience of kids and dogs and waiting players arrayed on the weedy grass between the old court and the softly arriving cars on River Road. We are tied in the first set, but unexpectedly I break his serve and then hold my own, to win it. I take the second one as well, and more easily, and it's over. I'm elated but a little let down. Sitting next to Nancy, with a towel on one shoulder and his knees drawn up, Walker says, "It's so strange. I keep feeling we're about to start."
A few weeks later, the four of us are bound for a dinner party in Haverstraw when Walker, who is driving, misses a left bend in the road and instead shoots us straight ahead and halfway up a gravel driveway, where we come to a sudden stop. He sits behind the wheel, shaking his head, then murmurs, "Now, why did I do that?"
There have been some questions, as we know by now. Something's been happening to Walker—the doctors can't say what. More tests are coming up. He's going to be O.K., of course, but you have to be sure. There's a missing piece somewhere. Walker talks about it calmly, but soon only Nancy can remember what's been going on. We hear of some other slips and confusions, and now there's a chance of surgery, down the line. Nancy talks to us in private, and sometimes calls back again, late at night. Their kids are told. The operation, at Mount Sinai in March, goes well, but the news couldn't be worse. It's an infiltrating glioblastoma: a killer flower with its snaky tendrils all over the frontal lobes. Nancy makes a date for me, and when I call upon Walker one more time, early in the spring, he is sitting stiffly upright in a hospital chair, in clean green pajamas and white robe. A perky hat sits on his bald head, hiding the scar. He looks at me narrowly—he can't take his eyes off me—but I'm doing all the talking. He follows some of my chatter, but then his gaze fades or clicks off again. He has still said nothing. The nurse comes in, smiling, and says, "This is your friend Roger," and Walker is impatient with her. "We play tennis together," he manages. Then silence. When I get up to leave he's neither sad nor glad. He keeps looking at me, trying to figure it out. We shake hands.
Out on Fifth Avenue again, I am too shocked to cry. A wave of anger slams me and almost knocks me down. How could this have happened? How could Walker let it happen? Weeks or months later, it comes to me that death's dire nature, its publicized awfulness—the Man in the Bright Nightgown, the skeletal dancer with his scythe—has little to do with darkness or the shroud, but lurks within the unreturned gaze. My friend doesn't know me, and I am an infant again, flailing in the night and yelling to be picked up and held and whispered to.
He didn't get better. He never quite knew us, and in time Nancy began to make shorter visits. He died four or five months later, in another hospital: a friendly pneumonia did the honors. He was thirty-eight. Before this, and because she didn't want the children to meet his empty stare, Nancy sometimes arranged for them to visit Mount Sinai but only to stand across the avenue and look up to where their father would be waiting at his window, looking down at this pretty woman and some blond kids waving their hands. The nurse would come by and say something, and he would raise his hand, too. What this was like or is still like for the kids is unimaginable: they're all still around, middle-aged now, with full lives and a cumulative nine children of their own, and so is Nancy. She got on with it, had a long and fulfilling second marriage, and, a widow once again, is now in Portland, Maine. Eliot Field, a lawyer, lives in a nearby town and keeps an office in Wiscasset. I have not asked any of them how much they remember about their father's or their husband's death. This is my version. Hard lines.
This was a phrase that Walker and I and some friends of ours said to each other in tough times, starting in college. "Hard lines!" we murmured if someone complained about an overdue history paper. "Hard lines!" to your undeserved
hangover or sudden cash shortage. It covered more serious stuff, too: hard lines about your alcoholic father and your departed terrific girlfriend. Hard lines about the war coming, and then about what the people in occupied Paris were suffering, with the Wehrmacht there now. I think the thing had begun with an older college friend of ours, John Brackett, who left law school after Pearl Harbor, and encountered hard lines indeed when the bomber he was piloting in an advanced Navy training exercise crashed one night and killed him. But Walker and I went on saying the same coolly comforting words after we'd become fathers and neighbors together. Hard lines about Levi, your dead bulldog. Hard lines about your mother: I'm so sorry.
Walker's long-widowed mother, Amy Field, a tall and elegant figure with an air of affectionate reserve, if that is possible, lived in the city but came out to Snedens Landing on birthdays and holidays. She always asked what I'd been reading. She grew troubled in her seventies and one day called on my father, a lawyer, whom she'd known years before, to tell him that she was being watched by agents of a foreign power. Her phones had been tapped, and lately secret messages for her were appearing on billboards and in the Times. Her sons put her into Roosevelt Hospital, where she had weekend outpatient privileges, and from which she soon took her leave, from a high balcony. In her lucid stretches she'd recognized the dementia that was overtaking her. After she died, Walker and Nancy and Jim and Lila Field realized that she had contrived to say goodbye, at some length, to each of them and to all eight of her grandchildren, before the end. "The last great act of a gallant lady" was the way Walker put it to me.
I've had a life sheltered by privilege and engrossing work, and shot through with good luck, but I don't believe that this accompanying trickle of rotten news is exactly rare. Stuff piles up, and people my age come to understand that what's been happening around them all this time is probably happening all over, in some version or other. It's comforting to conclude that everyday life in olden times was chancier than it is now, but I'm not even sure about this. Other stories creep back, catching us unaware. My young friend Eva coming home from school in Copenhagen one day to find her mother, Korin, a suicide. Jake, a sweet writer but tired of his demons, leaving my office on a January afternoon and, as related, putting himself into the Hudson. A little news item, down at the corner of a page, that caught my eye after the great ice storm that crippled upper New England and parts of Canada in January, 1998. It mentioned an isolated farm couple, both elderly, in East Sullivan, Maine, who'd gone without power for days, then roused themselves and drove down the rink-slippery driveway to collect the mail and newspapers from their roadside box. Coming back, their car slid into a frozen ditch not far from their garage. She fell on the ice, trying to make it home, and he could not get her back on her feet. Leaving her with his jacket folded under her head, he teetered toward the house when he, too, went down, quite close to her, and in turn could not get up. When they were found a day or so later the positions of their frozen bodies told the story, if not their last conversations. Oh, no, we exclaim when such news reaches us, but these tales are part of a classic repertory we recognize as our own. A woman I'd known for years surprised me when she said that her father had died in a fire when she was an infant; he'd saved her life but lost his. More recently, I asked a doctor friend if she'd ever known anyone who was murdered, as I have. She said no, but then called back a few days later and said, "You know, I was wrong. There've been three." What's strange and not so rare about this—it's not rare at all—is the way we press on. We get over it.
