Let Me Finish (30 page)

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.

O
NE
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—garroted 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.

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":