Let Me Finish (12 page)

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 idly 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.

L
ATELY
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.

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."