Let Me Finish Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Romance

  Movie Kid

  The King of the Forest

  Twice Christmas

  Early Innings

  Consultation

  We Are Fam-ilee

  Andy

  Getting There

  Dry Martini

  Permanent Party

  Ancient Mariner

  La Vie en Rose

  At the Comic Weekly

  Here Below

  Jake

  Hard Lines

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2006 by Roger Angell

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,

  or any information storage and retrieval system, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work

  should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed

  to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  "A Drink with Something in It" is copyright © 1935 by Ogden Nash and is

  reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Angell, Roger.

  Let me finish/Roger Angell.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Angell, Roger. 2. Sportswriters—United States—Biography.

  3. Authors—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  GV742.42.A76 A3 2006

  070.4'40796092—dc22 2005033067

  ISBN 978-0-15-101350-0

  ISBN 978-0-15-603218-6 (pbk.)

  Text set in Adobe Garamond

  Designed by Scott Piehl

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Harvest edition 2007

  K J I H G F E D C B A

  Introduction

  MOST of the true stories in this book were written in the last three years and came as a surprise to me, the author. I'd not planned a memoir, if that's what this is, and never owned a diary or made notes about the passage of the days. "The King of the Forest," a piece of mine about my late father, Ernest Angell, was inspired by a letter I'd received from a woman I didn't know, enclosing a story he'd written for the children's magazine St. Nicholas, in 1903, when he was thirteen, which tells a family tragedy in a fresh way. My own piece was well received when it ran in The New Yorker but got mixed reviews from others in the family, who shook their heads and told me that I'd pretty much blown my portrait of Father. "He was never like that," they said. "Not with me." Our stories about our own lives are a form of fiction, I began to see, and become more insistent as we grow older, even as we try to make them come out in some other way.

  There is a bit of melodrama attached to a golf game I once played in Maine, back in 1940—a turn of events so strange that I tucked it away as something I might write one day. But I never could get it right, couldn't find a form or a tone for it. I even tried to write it as a short story but quickly gave that up as well. I saved one paragraph, a description of the little harborside course and how it looked to us teenagers back then, as a memorandum or preservative, and that found its way intact into the chapter "Getting There," when it sprang to life in my head a year ago and got written in three days.

  These old stories we tell ourselves in the middle of the night require no more than a whisper or a street noise to get them whirring again in a fresh production. William Maxwell, in his autobiographical novel "So Long, See You Tomorrow," recalls himself as a small boy with an earache, back at home in Lincoln, Illinois, and his father, bending close, blowing cigar smoke into his ear to make him feel better. My story about my father begins with the perfectly remembered sound of his pen on paper while he writes letters in the evening, in our library on Ninety-third Street, in New York, while the ten- or eleven-year-old me awaits the larger swirl of his signature on the last page of the evening, after which he'll pick up Oliver Twist—"Now, where were we?"—and continue our reading aloud. Life is tough and brimming with loss, and the most we can do about it is to glimpse ourselves clear now and then, and find out what we feel about familiar scenes and recurring faces this time around.

  What is startling about memory is its willful persistence and its obsession with detail. "Hold on," it says. "Don't lose this." The other day I unexpectedly found myself seeing the shape of the knobs at the top of the low iron posts that stand along the paths of Central Park—a magnolia bud or perhaps an acorn—and then, long before this, the way such posts looked when they were connected by running strands of heavy wire, which were slightly bent into irregularity and almost loose to the touch. Going down a path in those days you could hook the first joints of your forefinger and second finger over the darkly shining wire and feel it slither along under your touch. In winter, you could grab the wire in your gloved or mittened hand and rush along, friction free, and make it bounce or shiver when you reached the next post and had to let go. But what's the point of this, I wonder: what's my mind doing back there? A week or so before my father died, in his eighties, he told me he'd been thinking about a little red shirt that he'd worn when he was four or five years old. "Isn't that strange?" he said.

  My stepfather, E. B. White, is in this book as well, and so are my first wife and some car trips and tennis games and, again and again, my mother, but these chapters don't add up to biography. Nor do they evoke a better time. To keep things moving, I have interspersed short entertainments about drinking or sailing or the movies—parts of my life as well, but in here mostly for the fun of it. One chapter, "Early Innings," may be familiar to some readers, but I've revived it because it evokes a different era in sports and continues or fills out what I've written about my father. Another section, "At the Comic Weekly," brings up friends and colleagues of mine at The New Yorker, as they once were. I don't yearn for the past—I doubt that I could have written much of this if I did—and my present-day family and friends and the people I see at work don't need to be put down on paper for me to notice and enjoy them.

  The title of this book, I should add, isn't about wrapping up a life or a time of life but should only evoke a garrulous gent at the end of the table holding up one hand while he tries to remember the great last line of his monologue.

  Romance

  ONE spring Saturday when I was seven going on eight, my mother brought me with her on an automobile outing with her young lover and future husband, E. B. White. She took our family car, a slope-nosed Franklin sedan, and we must have met Andy by prearrangement at our garage. He did the driving. We left New York and went up into Westchester County for lunch—this was 1928 and it was still mostly country. On the way back, my mother, who had taken the wheel, stripped the gears while shifting, and we ground to a halt, halfway onto a shoulder of the Bronx River Parkway. Disaster. Andy thumbed a ride to go find a tow truck, and my mother, I now realize, was left to make this into an amusing story to tell my father and my older sister at dinner that evening. She almost never drove—thus the screeching and scraping sounds beneath us and the agonized look on her face when she got lost in mid-shift and we broke down. It was also unusual, an adventure, for me to be alone with her and her office friend Mr. White, as she'd described him. I think I wasn't meant to be there; maybe a Saturday date with a schoolmate had fallen through, and she'd had no recourse but to bring me along. But she never would have taken me off on an outing that would require me to lie about it to
my father afterward, so the trip must have been presented to him beforehand as a chance for her to practice her driving, with the reliable Andy White as instructor. I had no idea, of course, that she and I were stranded in a predicament, but I recall sitting beside her on the running board of the ticking, cooling Franklin while we waited, with the pale new shrubs and pastoral grasses of the Parkway around us, and the occasional roadster or touring car (with its occupants swiveling their gaze toward us as they came by) swooshing past. Then a tow truck appeared around the curve behind us, with Andy White standing on the right-hand running board and waving excitedly. Yay, I'm back, we're rescued! My father would never have done that—found a tow so quickly or waved like a kid when he spotted us.

  The story stops here. I don't remember that night or anything else about our little trip, but in less than two years my parents were divorced and my mother and Andy married and living on East Eighth Street. They soon had their own car, or cars: they kept changing. The Depression had arrived, but they were a successful New Yorker couple—she a fiction editor; he a writer of casuals and poetry and the first-page Comment section—and they loved driving around in an eight-year-old Pierce-Arrow touring car, with a high-bustle trunk, side mirrors, and flapping white roof. After their son was born—my brother Joel—they moved up to a staid seven-passenger Buick sedan. In the mid-thirties, Andy also acquired a secondhand beige-and-black 1928 Plymouth roadster—country wheels, used mostly around their place in Maine. The Buick still mattered to him. Back when it was new, thieves stole it out of a garage on University Place one night and used it in a daring bank stick-up in Yonkers. Andy was upset, but when he read an account of the crime in the newspapers the next day, with a passage that went "and the robbers' powerful getaway car swiftly outdistanced police pursuers," he changed sides. "C'mon, Buick!" he said. "Go!"

  Every family has its own car stories, but in another sense we know them all in advance now, regardless of our age. The collective American unconscious is stuffed with old Pontiacs, and fresh reminders are never lacking. Weekend rallies flood the Mendocino or Montpelier back roads with high-roofed Model A's and Chevys, revarnished 1936 Woodies, and thrumming, leaf-tone T-Birds; that same night, back home again or with our feet up at the Hyatt, we click onto TCM and find The Grapes of Wrath, or Bonnie and Clyde, or Five Easy Pieces, or Thelma & Louise, waiting to put us out on the narrow, anachronism-free macadam once again. (A friend of mine used to drive around the Village in his 1938 De Soto hearse, except when it was out on lease to still another Godfather movie.) Grandchildren, clicking to 50 Cent or Eminem on their iPods in the back seat, sigh and roll their eyes whenever the old highwayman starts up again. Yes, car travel was bumpier and curvier back then, with more traffic lights and billboards, more cows and hillside graveyards, no air-conditioning and almost no interstates, and with tin cans and Nehi signs and red Burma-Shave jingles crowding the narrow roadside. Give us a break.

  Still, we drove, and what startles me from this great distance is how often and how far. I was a New York City kid who knew the subways and museums and movie theatres and zoos and ballparks by heart, but in the 1930s also got out of town a lot, mostly by car. I drove (well, was driven) to Bear Mountain and Atlantic City and Gettysburg and Niagara Falls; went repeatedly to Boston and New Hampshire and Maine; drove to a Missouri cattle farm owned by an uncle; drove there during another summer and thence onward to Santa Fe and Tesuque and out to the Arizona Painted Desert. Then back again, to New York. Before this, in March, 1933—it was the week of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inaugural—I'd boarded a Greyhound bus to Detroit, along with a Columbia student named Tex Goldschmidt, where we picked up a test-model Terraplane sedan at the factory (courtesy of an advertising friend of my father's who handled the Hudson-Essex account) and drove it back home. A couple of months later, in company with a math teacher named Mr. Burchell or Burkhill and four Lincoln School seventh-grade classmates, I crammed into a buckety old Buick sedan and drove to the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago; we came back by way of Niagara Falls, and, because I had been there before and knew the ropes, took time also to visit the Shredded Wheat factory, some tacky mummies, and a terrific fifty-cent roadside exhibition of dented and rusty, candy-wrapper-littered barrels and iron balls in which various over-the-brink daredevils had mostly met their end. With one exception, all of us in our party were still speaking.

  If I now hop aboard some of these bygone trips for a mile or two, it is not for the sake of easy nostalgia—the fizz of warm moxie up your nose; the Nabokovian names of roadside tourist cottages; the glint of shattered glass and sheen of blood around a tree-crumpled gray Reo; or the memory of collies and children, unaccustomed to automotion, throwing up beside their hastily parked family vehicles—but in search of some thread or path that links these outings and sometimes puts Canandaigua or Kirksville or Keams Canyon back in my head when I wake up in the middle of the night. Effort can now and then produce a sudden fragment of locality: the car stopped and me waking up with my sweating cheek against the gray plush of the back seat, as I stare at a mystifying message, "VEEDOL," painted on a square of white tin so bright in the sun that it makes me wince. Veedol? Beyond it, against the stucco gas-station wall, is a handmade sign, wavery in the gasoline fumes rising outside my window. Where are we? I want to sit up and ask my father, standing out there in his sneakers, khaki pants, and an old shirt with rolled-up sleeves, who is fishing his thick brown wallet—we're on a long haul to somewhere—out of a hip pocket, but I'm too dazed to speak.

  The first day of that 1933 school trip to the Chicago World's Fair went on forever, and it was after dark when we topped a hillside in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, slowed at the vision of Pittsburgh alight in the distance, and felt a little lurch and jolt as the right rear wheel fell off the Buick and rolled gently on ahead for a few yards by itself. I can't remember dinner, but it was past midnight when, rewheeled, we pulled up at the McKeesport YMCA and settled for two double rooms, plus cots. Jerry Tallmer, a surviving member of the party, tells me that a fellow traveler, less suave than the rest of us, confessed to him later that until this moment he'd held a childhood notion that if you weren't in bed by midnight you died. Out in Chicago, we took in the House of Tomorrow and Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Car; ogled Sally Rand's "Streets of Paris" but didn't attend; went to the Museum of Natural History; laughed at Chicago's dinky elevated cars; and in our little notebooks wrote down that Depression soup kitchen lines in Chicago looked exactly like the ones in depressed New York. We were smart and serious, and would be expected to report on this trip in Social Studies, come fall. The Century of Progress, we concluded, was mostly about advertising. One afternoon, the temperature went down twenty-nine degrees in an hour and a half as a black storm blew in from over Lake Michigan; the next morning we read that the sightseeing plane whose ticket window we'd seen at the Fair had crashed, killing all aboard. Three days later, wheeling south from Niagara Falls, my companions (including the heroic Burkhill or Burchell, who did all the driving) offered to pay me two dollars apiece if I'd just shut up for a change, and not speak another word for the rest of the trip. Unaffronted and short of cash, I agreed, and collected my princely ten bucks while we were passing under the new George Washington Bridge, just about home.

  Breakdowns happened all the time. A year earlier, headed for Missouri with my pal Tex Goldschmidt, our car, another family Franklin, quit cold on a hillside in Liberty, New York. Towed to a garage, we learned that the replacement part we needed would arrive by mail in two days. We put up in an adjacent boarding house, where the large brown cookies permanently in place in the center of the dining-room table were just possibly varnished. Sitting on porch rockers that evening, with our feet up on the railing, we were terrified by a Catskill lightning bolt that flew along a grounding wire from the rooftop rod and down a viney column a yard or two from our toes. We sat on, listening to the thrash of night trees and the gurgle of water through the gutter downspouts, when—bam!—it happened again: an ex
plosion and a blaze of white down the same path, and the smell of immeasurable voltage in the air around us. "Well, so much for that adage," Tex said, rising. "I'm going to bed."

  Arthur Goldschmidt came from San Antonio, and was knowledgeable about cars and roadside stuff. He'd been hired by my father, with whom I lived on weekdays, to come down from Columbia a couple of afternoons a week and spend some time with me when I got home from school, but he was so smart and engaging that he became a fixture. Here, a few months later, he'd been given the family car and the family wise guy to take out West; my father would come along by train a little later, while Tex continued south to see his folks. Driving, Tex smoked Chesterfields and talked about the Scottsboro boys, asked if I thought Babe Ruth wore a girdle, and wondered how much I knew about the corrupt but colorful governor of Texas, Ma Ferguson. We had no radio but stayed alert anyway. Tex was the one to spot the first buzzard aloft and the rare passing North Dakota license plate, and to pick up on roadside or billboard names. ("Sweet Orr Pants," he said, musingly. "Coward Shoes?") He challenged me to recite all the Burma-Shave jingles we'd encountered ("The bearded lady / tried a jar / she's now / a famous movie star / Burma-Shave"; "Rip a fender / off your car / mail it in for / a half-pound jar / Burma-Shave") and make up some of our own. He made me rate the girls in my class for looks and then for character, and said, "If our left front tire is six feet around, how many revolutions will it make by the time we reach Cleveland?" Late in our trip, wheeling down an unpopulated gravel highway west of Edina, Missouri, Tex slowed as we came up to three black sedans, oddly parked crossways on the road at a little distance from each other. As we passed the first one, to our left, the second moved forward from the right to block our path, but Tex spun us hard right, spewing gravel, passed behind him, and floored it up the road and away. Prohibition revenue inspectors, he thought, or maybe a highway stickup. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were around here somewhere, making do in hard times.