Memoir From Antproof Case (14 page)

I did. I looked at it sitting in the snow drift, and I thought to myself (or, rather, I felt) that it was time to father the child for whom such a thing might have value and to whom it could bring amusement. So I went back out, took it from the snow, and put it in my pocket. After I had taken off my coat and assumed a place at the table, I briefly experienced the beatific feeling, the contentment, and the love, that one feels when cradling an infant in one's arms.

Perhaps it showed on my face. Certainly, of the people who were in the room, all eager to promote their causes and show themselves off, I was the least competitive and the least in the mood for combat. At that moment I could think of nothing but babies, and a great wave of tenderness swept through me.

This was in the winter of 1947, and the conference on monetary policy was one of many that took place in the wake of Bretton Woods. The White Mountains were to economists then what Paris had once been to artists. And it didn't hurt that in the off hours you could ski.

I had had no desire to attend this meeting. I was neither an economist nor an academic, nor well acquainted with monetary theory. My job at Stillman and Chase was to assess the condition of a particular country and make predictions about its future, its political stability, military capacity, and social peace. With this, the financial gnomes would tailor their own recommendations, which would then be transmitted to me and to the other partners, and I would comment on them as far as I could in terms of my original judgments.

For example, if we wanted to finance a railroad somewhere, I might insist that it be routed away from a secessionist area with a history of disrupting lines of supply. Or I might say, don't advance a nickel to country C, because country B will swallow it within two years.

My sense of economics was derived from nothing more sophisticated than an understanding of ten or twenty basic economic relations and a thorough and intuitive sympathy with the Swiss. I measured a country's economic prospects against the Swiss model, mixing in decidedly noneconomic phenomena, but my appraisals never failed, if only because, finally, the study of economics is dependent upon an understanding of politics, character, and art.

Switzerland's economy can be understood in sixteen words: freedom, democracy, discipline, savings, investment, risk, responsibility, secrecy, pride, preparation, perfectionism, asceticism, peace, foresight, determination, and honor. The Swiss have a million excellent incentives to do well, but their original spur was that they had absolutely nothing and were too isolated on high to hope that anyone would listen to them complain.

I could fill this entire antproof case with an essay on Switzerland. I grew up there, and the foundation of my sympathy is that I spent years in the mountains. The mountains, shrouded in fog or shining in the sun, are the heart of the country, and perhaps the heart of the world.

The directors of Stillman and Chase wanted to expose me to monetary theory and get me out of the office. I never accommodated to the office. My forte was investigation. I would go to a country, put a knapsack on my back, and walk for weeks: talking to everyone I met; going into the factories, workshops, and stores; interviewing the editors of as many newspapers as I could in the medium-sized cities; studying all available statistics; poring over maps; and checking the workmanship and design of indigenous products. I would walk along the rail lines and see how well they were maintained, and at what speed the trains traveled and how full they were. In a few weeks, hardened, sunburned, with a portrait of the country's economy fully formed in my mind, I would visit the leaders of its government and business community, and listen to them skirt around the many flaws that might have been hidden from someone who had not covered five hundred miles on foot.

I was to Stillman and Chase what T. E. Lawrence had been to the English generals: they could not do without me, but they wished desperately that they could. I made or saved them immense amounts of money—in current dollars, literally billions.

Because of this, they tolerated my idiosyncrasies. In most investment banks, however, I wouldn't have lasted five seconds, but I started at Stillman and Chase in 1917 and was so senior at the firm that they tried to view my peculiarities as tradition.

To wit: I arise at five in the morning, a habit I learned during my first stint at Stillman and Chase, as I have mentioned. So I was always at my desk at 5:45. They loved this. To them, I was the ideal Protestant, except that ... I insist upon an afternoon nap. No matter where I am, I must sleep for an hour or two after lunch.

I have a favorite blanket, of Pendleton virgin wool, rust-colored on one side and gun-metal-colored on the reverse. If anyone other than me touches it, he's a dead man. When I roll up in my blanket on the floor, I'm asleep instantaneously. In '29, they thought I had committed suicide. No one could get in my office because I locked the door, and I used to take my telephone off the hook. It isn't my fault that the American business world considers taking a brief rest to be a form of vicious moral degeneracy. Why should they? In Europe, everyone takes naps.

And I must exercise, every day, for about three hours. I can't now, but I used to run five miles, cycle ten, row two, and devote a full hour to calisthenics, gymnastics, boxing, and weight lifting. This tended to make a rather large hole in my morning schedule, especially because, after exercising for three hours, my custom—indeed, my requirement—was to practice the piano for two hours. I can't play the piano well, but I struggle along even now on my antproof zinc-plated Brazilian Schrobenhausen, which sounds like forty crates of silverware falling down the stairwells of the Empire State Building. Two hours a day, every day, and you can stay limber enough to play all your favorite pieces. Stillman and Chase had a magnificent concert grand that was my main reason for going to the office. It was the best Mozart piano I've ever played, and as I played mainly Mozart, what further can I say?

They also were not fond of the fact that I cannot wear a tie. I mean, I wear it, but loosened. If it's tight I feel that a hangman's noose is closing around my neck. The longest I can go with a properly knotted tie is about half an hour. Even when I was walking around with the Pope, the tie was loosened. The Pope didn't even notice. After all, he doesn't wear a tie.

My other idiosyncrasies? I can't wear shoes. My feet are highly unstable on account of the huge curvature of my legs. I was born several months ahead of schedule, with a lot of bones not exactly the way they should be. My leg bows give me almost supernatural strength—the Roman arch—but I need very stable shoes, so I wear only climbing boots. At formal functions, they tend to stand out.

And, finally, I need oxygen. Perhaps it is my history at Château Parfilage, or the constant pertaflexions of my brain, but I need huge amounts of oxygen. Though I get it mainly by being in the open, when inside I must have a fan blowing in my face.

Shortly after the White Mountains incident, Stillman and Chase remodeled the executive floors in such a way that the windows would no longer open. I was astonished. Fresh air is elemental. If you doubt me, try holding your breath for two minutes. How could anyone deliberately shut out the air? Buildings with windows that don't open may be economical but they are also insane.

The engineers told me that if they were to cut a window for me all the air would exit at that point, and the resulting lift would suck out everything not bolted to the floor—papers, books, lamps, my blanket, even me. I was in despair, and then I thought of scuba.

Only my secretary knew, and she would warn me so I could put the scuba tanks in a closet before I received a visitor. Once, however, I forgot that I was wearing them, and rushed to meet the Italian minister of finance at a partners' lunch. The directors were mortified, but the minister of finance, whom I knew, said, "Do you have those things, what do they call them, flippers, too? You must come next summer to my house in Portofino. There you can see many colorful fishes."

For whatever reason, the firm sent me to the winter conference, and I was eager to go because I love the mountains and in winter they are flooded with light and oxygen. There I was, at a huge square table seating thirty, rocking an imaginary baby in my arms like a nursing mother, as the conference began a discussion of certain economic theories of which I have always been highly skeptical.

Strategically located between the participants were silver trays upon which were a bottle of Glenlivet, ice, water, glasses, and peanuts. Soon everyone was drinking Scotch and eating peanuts. It smelled like the zoo in Edinburgh. When grown men eat peanuts they toss them into their mouths in a motion that makes them look as if they're challenging themselves to a duel. The fact that they were academic economists and rather inebriated made it all the stranger. I waited for music, perhaps
The Nutcracker.

Then I caught a glimpse of the only woman in the group. She was sitting three professors to my right, mainly obscured. Those in between us were rather bulky, and she had taken a nervously diminutive position, not knowing what to do or what to say. No one spoke to her, as, I noticed, no one was speaking to me, and she, like me, was not insulting herself with liquor and peanuts.

How could they not have spoken to her! She was such that even now, thirty-seven years later, upside-down and half a world away, I burn with my recollection of her. So many women make their mark or carry their beauty in their body, or their hair, or their coloring. All this she had, but with Constance it was her face, that basic and elemental portal and expression of the soul, that made her so absolutely arresting. The coalition of features that other women try to alter, enhance, or hide, drew my eye to it immediately and was the source of a thousand strong emotions.

I shall not name them: the list would be too long. The moment I saw her, I felt a rush of vitality that I recalled having experienced before only as I bailed out of an airplane that was on fire. For an instant, I stopped breathing. I tried not to look at her.

To look at her meant leaning either forward or backward and turning obviously to the right. My position would have been betrayed. And, then, her effect on me was one of paralysis and réévaluation. Every time I meet a woman like Constance (only three times, and the first time I was too young, the third time too old), I want to change my profession, move to a mountain cabin or a weather station on an atoll, and spend the rest of my life embracing her. And whenever it happens, I behave rashly.

I sat there, heart pounding, face flushed, gales of pleasure sweeping through my body like a strong summer rain sweeping over the sea. I prayed that she was not married, and that she would marry me. I suppose I knew she would, but I was deathly afraid that she wouldn't.

When at last I was face to face with her—and I'm getting ahead of myself—I was stunned by her name tag. It read: Constance Olivia Phoebe Ann Nicola Devereaux Jamison Buckley Andrews Smith Faber Lloyd.

"Which one are you?" I asked, archly.

"All of us," she answered in precisely the same tone.

"Your name suggests," I told her, "the merger of England and Venezuela."

What was I doing? I loved this woman with every atom of my body and each ether of my soul.

"The next thing I expect from
you,
" she said, "is that you'll ask if I'm Italian."

"No. I was just wondering if you were a platoon, and I wanted to tell you that your name tag is not in compliance with the housing code. You'll have to build an annex."

I sat back as if I had inhaled half a blimp of nitrous oxide. A buffet dinner was arrayed along a table under windows that looked over a snowfield. A fire was burning in the fireplace, and, of course, once I had caught a glimpse of Constance, in me.

To get from the train to the conference site one had to summon a horse-drawn sleigh, which would come, bells ringing, in the moonlight. It is hard to imagine that for the sake of automobiles that rush around like cockroaches we have forsaken the inimitable beauty of horses drawing sleighs over the snow.

Because I had had to make a stop at an affiliate in Boston I had arrived on the last train. My secretary was told that at the time of my arrival the sleighs would be engaged in a hayride, and that I would have to walk from the station. As it was a distance of five miles or so, I had changed into my cold-weather parka and pants, and I carried whatever else I had with me in a pack.

How delightful it was to walk in the light of the full moon and in the ten-degree air, from which every hint of corruption had been precipitated. I was forty-two years of age, I had survived the war, and I was ready once again to fall in love. Miss Mayevska, her husband, and children, were gone. I felt that I owed her my own happiness, and that in my children I would see hers. My feelings were conflicted, but I decided that at every opportunity I would seek the vital, the holy, and the beautiful; that for her sake, as well as for the sake of others, I was obliged to make the best of whatever came my way. And I did, I suppose, never allowing calculation to dim sadness or joy.

Arriving at the conference just in time, I carried my pack inside and laid it in a corner. Even before I saw Constance my face was burning from the cold, and I may have looked far younger than my years because I was relaxed and happy after the walk.

Circumstances beyond my control had spared me many of the signs of middle age. I had been demobilized only for a year and a half, and had kept the habit of air-crew fitness, even enlarging upon it with my three hours of exercise, my afternoon naps, and my ten miles of walking each day to and from Wall Street (Broad Street, actually). And, as you know, I don't drink coffee (subtract twenty years).

All of which is to say that they thought I was a student. When I came in I was handed a name tag, and as I didn't have my reading glasses I pinned it on without noticing that it said
STUDENT OBSERVER, WABASH COLLEGE
. I was entirely unaware of this until the next day, after much had transpired, when Constance proposed that she visit Wabash College.