Let Me Finish Read online

  I keep forgetting how hot it was, driving. Two summers along, in late August of 1934, my father replanned the second part of our trip by leaving my uncle's place in Green Castle, Missouri (the same haven Tex and I had been heading for), around noon and driving non-stop to Santa Fe. We'd do Kansas by night and stay cool. Our party—Father, my eighteen-year-old sister Nancy, her Concord Academy classmate Barbara Kidder (the two had just graduated), and I—were experienced car people by now. We hated motels, carried water in our two big thermoses (later, in New Mexico, we bought a waterskin and slung it on a front fender), and favored gas stations with the old-style pumps that were cranked by hand like an ice cream freezer while you watched your Sunoco or Gulf slosh into a glass ten-gallon container up on top, then empty into your tank. We knew how to open a Coke by sticking a silver dollar under the cap and banging the bottle with your fist, and we'd learned to stop wincing or weaving when another languid or headlight-entranced rabbit in the road—ba-bump—went to the great cabbage patch in the sky. The floor in the back of the car filled up with crumpled sections of the Kansas City Star or the St. Joseph News-Press that we'd picked up at the last diner.

  Nancy was driving by now, and could spell my father for two-hour stretches. She was a better driver than he was. Her hair was tied up with a string of red yarn, keeping it off her ears; at the wheel, she'd fire up a cigarette with the dashboard lighter, then hold it in the air in her long fingers, a ring of scarlet lipstick around the nearer end. Too classy for Bryn Mawr, I thought. I liked Barbara Kidder, who wore a blue neck bandanna and shorts, and had a nice store of rattlesnake and Gila-monster stories; her parents were archeologists—she was joining them later at a dig in Nevada. My father overcorrected while driving and favored long silences, but he was a soldier, a commandante, at the wheel, good for a five-hour bore through the blazing Indiana afternoon while we dozed and told dumb jokes. He didn't go in for jokes, but laughed out loud when we imitated him trying to order his breakfast café au lait from a waitress at our creaky small-hotel dining room. This always started our day. "I want a glass of milk," he began, speaking loudly and fashioning the shape of a glass in the air. "Cold milk, in a glass. Then, and in addition, I'd like a cup of coffee"—his hands moved to one side, forming an invisible cup with a saucer underneath—"and with it a pitcher of hot milk, to put into the coffee. Now, again: cold milk, please, in a glass"—he poured it and pushed it carefully to the side—"coffee, hot coffee"—he made a happy sniffing sound, at the Maxwell Houseness of it—"and over here our hot milk"—little finger waves to show heat rising—"to put into the hot coffee. Is that clear?" But of course it wasn't. The waitress, bewildered by this mixture of mime and command and terrified by the lawyerly glare in his dark eyes, had long since paused with her pencil. What Father got was generally coffee with cold milk in the pitcher, or coffee and boiling water, or, at least once, iced coffee. It never came out right. We shook our heads helplessly, knowing that he wasn't cruel or unfeeling: he just liked things nice.

  That night, in Kansas, Father held to course, upright at the wheel through the eight- or ten-mile straightaways, with the bright headlights forming—for me, in back—an outlined silhouette of his ears and bald head and strong forearms. I would fall asleep, and when I woke again it would be Nancy driving and smoking, with Father asleep on the right-hand seat and Barbara asleep beside me in back. The night air rushed in about us through the tilted wind portals at the front of the front windows and the smaller ones in back (we were in the zippy Terraplane that Tex and I had brought from Detroit), and with it the hot, flat scent of tall corn; a sudden tang of skunk come and gone; the smell of tar when the dirt roads stopped, fainter now with the hot sun gone; and, over a rare pond or creek as the tire noise went deeper, something rich and dank, with cowflop and dead fish mixing with the sweet-water weeds. I had a Texaco road map with me in back, and when we came through a little town or stopped at a ringing railroad crossing I got out my flashlight and tried to follow the thin blue line of our passage: Chapman and WaKeeney, Winona, and now—we must have turned south a bit—Sharon Springs. I fell asleep again. Sometime in the night, my hand found Barbara's hand and held on. When I awoke with the first sun behind us, we'd climbed out of the heat, and the field dirt around us had a redder hue. "Colorado," Father said softly. I lay back in my nest and Barbara's hand came out from under her thin Mexican blanket and took mine once again. That morning, we went through La Junta and Trinidad and over the Raton Pass into New Mexico. (We'd stopped earlier at a lookout where four different states were visible, surely, in the haze to the east and south.) The Sangre de Cristos came into view and the first soft-cornered adobe houses, and that night we ate at La Fonda with my Aunt Elsie, who worked for the Indian Bureau, and had Hopi snake dances and San Ildefonso pottery-makers and Mabel Dodge Luhan in store for us in the coming weeks. Almost the best part was still ahead.

  I learned how to drive early, and in June of 1936 sent five dollars to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Augusta, Maine, along with a note saying, "I am fifteen. Please send my license in enclosed envelope." That was all it took. I appropriated the Whites' yellowy old Plymouth roadster, with its splayed fenders, wooden-spoke wheels, cracked leather front seat, and leaky ragtop roof. (I carried a thick roll of Johnson & Johnson adhesive tape under the seat, for rainy-day patch-ups.) There was a little hole in the floorboards, near the brake pedal, and if you glanced down there on a daytime errand you could see the grainy macadam streaming by under your foot. Soon I was taking girls to the movies on Tuesday or Saturday nights, upstairs at the Town Hall in Blue Hill, or to the Grand, in Ellsworth. I kept my headlights on low beam on foggy nights, suavely navigating through sudden thick blankets of damp, and found quiet places to park in East Blue Hill or out on Naskeag Point. I had become Andy Hardy. Making out in parked cars puts me into the movies or into a thousand cartoons, but what memory presents about these chilly long-gone summer evenings is the first five minutes under way, with my hands at ease on the nubbly wheel, and with the white highway ahead and the gleam from the looped roadside power wires giving back tanned knees, a sweet nose and strong chin, just there to my right. Intimacy.

  Late on a Sunday afternoon in February, 1938, somebody called up the stairs of my boarding school dormitory, "Angell, there are three women from Smith down here to see you." We were in the hilly northeast corner of Connecticut, far into the dreary winter-term stretches of my senior year, with spring vacation still six weeks away. A gag of some sort. Muttering, I came down and found Cynthia Coggan's blue Ford phaeton waiting by the door, and her tickled smile behind the snap-on winter side window—a friend from Maine, with crinkly blond hair and her own low, late-model white-wall speedster, the snazziest wheels I knew. She was about my age, but a year and a light-year ahead. Now, with two classmates for company, she'd driven seventy or eighty miles from Northampton on impulse, to press a surprise Sunday call. I rushed upstairs for a coat and permission, and in another minute was turning around from the cozy front seat to meet the new ladies in back as we sped away, delightfully in motion. I only had an hour—time enough for tea and cake at an inn in the next village, it turned out—and they got me back barely before compulsory evening Vespers. Walking into the chapel, I knew that every eye was on me and that my school clout had just taken a gigantic upward leap. I didn't have to tell anybody that Cynthia was a friend, not a girlfriend, or that the difference didn't matter to me. All I could think about was the ride and the compliment.

  Driving nowadays is nothing like it was. Mostly, it's a time of day: where we are before the mall, or around nine and six and—thank you, God—not later. On longer reaches, noise and wind rustle have been abolished, trafficfree stretches appear only late at night or in the moments when a red light has swept the road clean, and our powerladen machines provide an airliner sort of lift that does away with inertia and topography. We move in ceaseless company, each of us wrapped in cold air and an expensive and imperturbable anonymity. Only now and then, easing at seventy-six
miles per hour past the Audi going seventy-two, do we throw a glance at our neighbors three feet to the right and are startled—it nearly makes you jump—by pure genre: two or three young men gesturing and laughing at something in there, or an older woman holding up her book and reading out loud to her driver husband. Driving, for all its drags and trouble, puts us together—I'm amazed that its immense advertising never quite gets this right—and on some trips delivers a complicated fresh sense of ourselves. I think that pause with my mother on the Bronx River Parkway first stuck in my memory as an adventure but later on because she and I almost never had something happen just to the two of us. And if she thought back to that outing it could have been to see Andy White—perhaps they were not quite lovers yet—finding a boyish and confident joy in the unexpected. My Lincoln school classmates didn't hate me for my non-stop blather in our crowded Buick; they craved a little quiet, and bet that perhaps I'd enjoy it, too, given a chance. It was a long shot, but maybe I'd find, along about Poughkeepsie, that I didn't have to be on all the time to stay alive. Tex Goldschmidt never looked at his watch in the day and a half we hung out together in Liberty, New York, waiting for that distributor part, while my father would have seen the mishap as a test of some kind, and gone all stern and strong in response. But Father trusted Tex because he'd seen what his jokes and sweet spirit did for us; there was something easy and silly there that he longed for. I don't know what Barbara Kidder made of our holding hands like that. She was almost a woman that night and I still almost a boy, and I can't say why I'm so sure she never mentioned it to anyone.

  There's a famous story by John Updike called "The Happiest I've Been," which ends in a long car trip. In it, the narrator, John, a college sophomore, is driving back to Chicago after a Christmas visit home in the middle of Pennsylvania. The trip back is a seventeen-hour haul and he shares a car with a friend named Neil (it's his father's car). Before heading west, they stop at a drunken party, and late that night John holds a girl in his arms on a sofa, mostly because they're both so cold. He kisses her a little and she falls asleep. Dawn is coming when the trip begins at last (the girls are gone), and Neil unexpectedly lets John drive the car. Then Neil falls asleep, too. As I read this story for the first time, in 1959, when it came out in The New Yorker, my mind went back, as if on radar, to Barbara Kidder.

  "When we came into tunnel country"—the last passage goes—"the flicker and hollow amplification stirred Neil awake. He sat up, the mackinaw dropping to his lap, and lit a cigarette. A second after the scratch of his match the moment occurred of which each following moment was a slight diminution, as we made the long irregular descent toward Pittsburgh. There were many reasons for my feeling so happy. We were on our way. I had seen a dawn. This far, Neil could appreciate, I had brought us safely. Ahead, a girl waited who, if I asked, would marry me, but first there was a long trip; many hours and towns interceded between me and that encounter....And there was knowing that twice since midnight a person had trusted me enough to fall asleep beside me."

  Movie Kid

  TRACKING shot, please, of a twelve-year-old boy running north on Lexington Avenue as a 1933 twilight begins to fall. He is sprinting for home, on Ninety-third Street, and guilt makes him fly. He must be there in time to get a little homework under his belt before his old man arrives from the office, and in time to assume the bored, everyday look of a kid just back from his school's afternoon rec program, instead of from King Kong at the RKO 86th Street, where he has really been. Panting, he lets himself in the front door, checks out the mail for a Popular Mechanics, checks out the dog, grabs a banana, falls on his bed, opens a math book, and gives himself over to thoughts of Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, Fay Wray (Fay Wray!), jungle drums, aerial machine-gun fire, and the remembered velvety dark of a movie theatre in the afternoon. The thought Lucky again crosses his mind, and in time he may actually find a pencil and begin to write down fractions. The boy (he is me) went on being lucky. No one at home or at school ever twigged to his stolen movie afternoons, and for the rest of that school year, as in the year before, he made it down to the Eighty-sixth Street casbah a couple of times a week, where there were five theatres to choose from, each offering a double feature, to deepen his budget of guilt and joy, make critical inroads on his allowance, and hook him, once and for good, on the movies. Afternoon ticket prices stood at an invariable fifteen cents, and another nickel covered a Milky Way, a Hershey's Almond, or a tube of chalky Necco Wafers, from which I discarded the licorice layers in advance. Now and then, one of these palaces would decide to enforce the city's "No Unaccompanied Minors" ordinance, whereupon I would hold out my sweaty dime and nickel to the nearest approaching pervert or dope fiend, and say, "Take me in, Mister?" as was the convention. "The kid's wit' me," he would say to the woman in the booth, as was also the convention, and we would walk in as family and wordlessly part forever.

  What I saw on those stolen afternoons (and, on the up and up, sometimes on weekends) was a cross-section of early-thirties Hollywood, which was just then coming into high gear. Paul Muni in Howard Hawks' Scarface and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang slip into view, as do Cecil B. De Mille's The Sign of the Cross (with Claudette Colbert as a Roman temptress bathing in ass's milk), the Barrymores in Rasputin and the Empress, Dick Powell in another Busby Berkeley musical, the Marx Brothers (with the dopey Zeppo singing "Everyone Says I Love You" to Thelma Todd), the vine-borne Johnny Weissmuller, Jimmy Cagney shot dead in his pin-striped suit in The Public Enemy, and Laurel and Hardy forced to share their bed with a chimp and a flea circus. One afternoon, I found myself alone in the dark with Bela Lugosi's pallid, orally fixated Count Dracula, and realizing, even as I stared, that I wouldn't be able to call out for help that night, when he returned, in his cape and slippery hair, to break in on my sleep.

  Mostly, I would turn up at the Orpheum or the 86th Street Garden while the second feature was in progress—a low-budget murder or a B-musical starring Lupe Velez, say, or a Wheeler & Woolsey comedy, or Leo Carillo's carefree gaucho act—and then wish for its ending to hurry along (as I tilted my wristwatch toward the screen), so that I might squeeze in a full main feature before my deadline. The better movies ran long, though, and I don't think I ever did learn the foredoomed end of Garbo's Mata Hari—although the moment when she leans over and blows out Ramon Novarro's bedside icon candle has stayed with me. I didn't know what this meant but zowie! Walking into the middle of movies was the common American thing during the double-feature era, and if one stayed the course, only minimal mental splicing was required to reconnect the characters and the plot of the initial feature when it rolled around again. The demise of the double bill has done away with this knack and has also expunged "I think this is where we came in" from the language—a better phrase, all in all, than "déjà vu," and easier to pronounce.

  Quality was not much of a factor in my afternoon choices, but I had already noticed that although the flicks were clearly wasting my mind, as my father would have put it, they were richly nutritious to some other side of me. One bathed in this scummy Ganges and arose refreshed, with surprising memories. Most of my friends still go to the movies, but not many of them are movie-goers in this sense, and while I sometimes wonder at the thousands of hours I have spent in the popcorned dark, there was an avid, darting kind of selection one learned there—a process at once ironic and romantic which plucks up scenes and faces, attitudes and moments to save from the rush of events—that felt like a saving knack of some sort, and passkey for later times.

  When I moved along to high school and then college, I found movie-permeated friends waiting for me. Bigscreen dialogue and scenes filled our talk and if one of us unexpectedly held up an invisible lorgnette, like the dandified eighteenth-century spy Leslie Howard, and began, "They seek him here, they seek him there / Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. / Is he in Heaven," the rest of us in the room would join in: "Is he in—" (lorgnettepoints downward) / "That demned elusive Pimpernel?" I graduated and went into the Air Force
and eventually off to the Pacific. At Hickam Field, in Hawaii, we'd check out the post theatre in the evening and, if we didn't like what was on, slip through a hole in the fence into adjoining Pearl Harbor and walk to the sector of docks where five or six destroyer escorts were tied up side by side. (The Navy always had the latest releases, for some reason.) Sailors on board would tip us about which ship had the best feature that night, and we'd step over—saluting the con as we came aboard—and settle down with the crew on the fantail, just in time for the Mickey. One night, late in 1944, while I lay under the stars and watched Gene Kelly and Rita Hay-worth dancing to Jerome Kern tunes in Cover Girl, it came to me that this war might end some day, and there would be more life and movies to come.

  Before that, much earlier in my time in the service, I had joined a reluctant audience in a sunstruck Army shack one afternoon, where we enlisted men had been assembled to watch another morale booster or sex hygiene film. The compulsory sex one-reelers had once been grisly, military-produced affairs, whose main effect was to breed some lifelong sexual repressives among their captive audiences of young farm boys and dropouts, but now Hollywood had got into the production end, with professional crews and actors. This time, the lights came down and on the screen a colonel looked up from his desk to talk to us about the Articles of War. "Men," he began in a manly, authoritative way, when he was drowned out by our shouts and clapping. "Hey, it's Mister Dithers!" we yelled. "Look—it's Dithers, the old fart got drafted!" The man up here on the screen—narrow face, pointed nose, fussy manner—was the character actor Jonathan Hale, here recognized in a flash as Mister Dithers, Dagwood Bumstead's boss in all those Blondie movies, back in peacetime. We talked it over afterward and said it was great casting. Dagwood—he was Arthur Lake, of course—would have beaten the draft, because of his kids and his dumbness, but Mister Dithers, with his chickenshit ways, was pure officer material. The movie had built our morale after all.