Let Me Finish
Page 25
I had a visit from Walker Field while I was writing this piece, when he turned up in a dream, nicely dressed and with his freshly combed hair still dark from his shower. He gave me a friendly look, through his horn-rims, and proceeded past, perhaps headed for a party. It was one of those dreams you recognize as dreams while they're happening, and make you a witness and a participant at the same time. And along about then or a little earlier I remembered a photograph of him in another cheerful setting. I couldn't find it in any of my old albums, but then my daughter Callie told me that she still had a print of it. Looking at it, I can name the day and time of day when it was snapped: late afternoon on May 8, 1956. It's our back garden, on Evelyn's thirty-fifth birthday, and here she is, lean and glamorous, with her hair combed back and her favorite party earrings gleaming.
That winter, we'd lost an ancient apple tree that stood in the middle of the scruffy lawn behind the house; we'd hung a swing for our girls from one of the low branches. There was an ice storm, and when I looked down there the next morning the ancient centerpiece was slightly askew, still standing but snapped off clean at its base. Now the group in the family picture is surrounding its replacement, a nymph-thin apple sapling that's just been planted a few yards from where the old one stood. The tree is a surprise present from the Fields, who have brought it up the hill in a truck, with kids and neighbors and shovels and tootings, before the party they've arranged for Ev, at our place. The photograph has the perfection of the moment; Giotto couldn't make it better. Unwrapped and debagged, the tree is already in the ground. One of my neighbors, the pathologist Lewis Thomas, is letting fall a last shovelful of loam, and my old car-pool pal Dick Salmon, a cigarette in his mouth, is kneeling at the right, hand-raking dressing he's taken from a white paper bag labelled "Sheep Manure." The men are in jackets and neckties. Beyond and to the left, my young daughters are side by side, five-year-old Alice in her bathrobe—it's almost her bedtime—and Callie inside an old field jacket of mine, with the sleeves pushed back. Maybe it's been raining. The girls wear an expression of delight—Alice's mouth has fallen open—as they look up at Walker Field, just beyond the slim tree to the right, who seems to be laughing, too, even with his lips pressed to the mouthpiece of his trombone. He is lean and young. The forefinger of his left hand is hooked over the shaft of the trombone, and its long descending slide becomes another elegant angle in the composition. Evelyn is leaning over our girls as she explains that the tune that Walker is playing is the old Joyce Kilmer thing "Trees."
I was not there—maybe this is why the picture means so much now. I was off in London on assignment for Holiday magazine, where I worked—I hated being away for this notable birthday—but within a few minutes the phone in our kitchen would ring with my surprise call, and Evelyn would let me know what I'd just missed. She sounded young and lit up with happiness—just the way everyone in the photograph looks now. Across our patchy little property and up the steep hill beyond, our neighbors Rita and Bob Norris have just stepped out onto their terrace—they're coming to the party, too—and they burst out laughing when the faint, globelike notes of the corny old song come floating past them, glowing like summer lanterns.
I am grateful for friends and colleagues at The New Yorker, where some of these chapters first appeared, and in particular for my editors: William Maxwell, Gardner Botsford, Charles McGrath, Ann Goldstein, William Shawn, and David Remnick.
—R.A.