Let Me Finish

by Roger Angell

  When I click on an old movie nowadays, on TCM or some middle-of-the-night back channel—it isn't the stars who keep me awake but a dazzling pack of supporting actors: Frank Morgan, Patsy Kelly, Alan Hale. William Demarest, Billie Burke, and Douglass Dumbrille; C. Aubrey Smith, Andy Devine, and Edna Mae Oliver. "Hey," I murmur, "it's Roscoe Karns. And here's Lynn Overman again." These were all broad types, to be sure, notable for their quirks and reliable charm, and as soon as I name one, others leap to mind. Here's a heart-of-gold Claire Trevor—and Glenda Farrell and Una Merkel. Here are the bumbling Guy Kibbee and Eugene Pallette—and Raymond Walburn. If this is Spring Byington, can Fay Bainter be far behind? And here I recall a later moment, recounted to me by my New Yorker colleague Burton Bernstein, about the night when his brother Leonard Bernstein brought their mother along to a big Hollywood party on a Saturday night in the 1950s, and there introduced her to the blonde Anita Louise, an established second-level star. "Anita Louise! Anita Louise!" Mrs. Bernstein cried. "Why, I named my daughter Shirley after you!" Lenny understood his mom's mix-up in a flash, just as I did when the tale was told to me. She was thinking of Ann Shirley, of course, a different reliable blonde in another bunch of movies.

  I had a family of my own, back in my movie-sneaking youth, but the addition of so many vivid and confidently eccentric faces and mannerisms to my store of adults was a comfort to me. Sig Rumann, Ann Revere, Jack Oakie, Franklin Pangborn, Eduardo Cianelli, and Porter Hall are still neighbors or perhaps cousins of mine: folks you can count on. I liked it when some of these friends began to turn up in larger roles: they'd made good and done us proud. Mischa Auer, for instance, played the moody Balkan free-loader in the splendid My Man Godfrey, and then attained a unique niche of reference when Fred Astaire, singing to Joan Leslie in The Sky's the Limit, comes to the last verse of the Johnny Mercer lyric to Harold Arlen's classic "My Shining Hour":

  This will be my shining hour,

  Lonely though it may be,

  Like the face of Mischa Auer

  On a Music Hall marquee.

  I began sneaking off to movies just when the successive earthquakes of the Depression and the Second World War were coming along, and there was a yearning for a broader and more sophisticated set of attitudes in this country. The movies did it for us; they were just the ticket. The great cresting tide of late-thirties and early-forties Hollywood—an Augustan era, when the studios were cranking out five hundred films each year—swept over us and changed us forever: Astaire and Rogers, Bogart, Judy Garland, Olivier, Cary Grant (wrestling with Irene Dunne's fox terrier, which has his—well, not his, it turns out—derby in its mouth); Gable and Tracy; the Joads and Rupert of Hentzau and Aunt Pittypat; Miss Froy's name drawn on the fogged train window, and David Niven, under fire in his Spad, wiping a spray of engine oil from his aviator goggles. Grant and Hepburn step into a waltz as the old year dies, von Stroheim snips his geranium, and spoiled heiress Bette Davis has this brain tumor that brings about a brief, strange happiness with her brain surgeon husband George Brent.

  Anyone who was the wrong age or in the wrong place for this stuff—my parents and my children, for instance, and even those who picked it up later from videos and American-studies classes—never quite caught up. We were the lucky ones, we first citizens of film, and we trusted the movies for the rest of our lives. We sat down in our Loew's or Bijou or Pantages as strangers to each other but together absorbed fresh gestures, new tones of voice, and different tones of mind and style, as taught by the dashing, elegant, or stricken figures up on the screen: the same wished-for, uniting experience that sends us out to the movies today but too often without reward. I still go to the movies, of course, and one of the overcrowded plexes I frequent—with their squalid queues and deafening trailers—is the same Orpheum, sans stage and soaring balconies, that I used to emerge from, guilty and entranced, into the speckled shade of the Third Avenue El.

  The King of the Forest

  EVERY night when I was a boy, I sat and read in our living room, listening to my father writing letters. He wrote on his lap in longhand, with the letter paper backed by one of his long yellow legal pads, and the scratch and swirl of his black Waterman pen across the page sounded like the scrabblings of a creature in the underbrush. There were no pauses or crossings out, and in time I realized that I could even identify the swash of a below-the-line "g" leaping diagonally upward into an "h" and the crossing double zag of an ensuing "t," and, soon after, the blip of a period. When he reached the bottom of the page, the sheet was turned over and smoothed down in a single, back-of-the-hand gesture, and the rush of writing and pages went on, while I waited for the declarative final "E" or "Ernest"—the loudest sound of all—that told me the letter was done. When the envelope had been addressed, licked, and sealed with a postmasterish thump of his fist, he would pluck a Lucky Strike out of its green pack and whack it violently four times against his thumbnail, like a man hammering a spike, then damply tongue the other end before lighting up. By the time the first deep drag appeared as a pale upward jet of smoke, another letter was in progress. I went back to my book. Sooner or later, the letters would be over, and he would be ready to read aloud to me. "Finished," he would announce, picking up Oliver Twist. "Now, where were we?"

  Friends my age—I am past my seventies—tell me that they, too, often find themselves caught up in details of their childhood, but I wonder if they ever find, as I do, that they are reliving a parent's life as well as their own. My father, a New York lawyer, was lean and tall, with long fingers, brown eyes, and an air of energy about him. One of his great-grandmothers was a Seneca Indian—the Angell family had come from western New York State—and his high forehead, strong nose, and long upper lip affixed an Iroquois solemnity to his expression that he did not always feel. Handsome and dashing in the flattering, tightly cut suits and jackets of the 1930s (like Gary Cooper, he remained unstuffy in a vest), he strode swiftly, banged doors behind him, and swarmed up stairs, appearing always on the verge of some outdoor errand or expedition. Bravura came naturally to him. In Snedens Landing, a hillside enclave twenty miles upriver from New York where we sometimes passed our summers, there is a small waterfall made by a brook that splashes steeply down into a mossy and perpetually shadowed woodland pool. When I was a child, there were always large Sunday picnics there, in an adjoining pergola that looked out on the Hudson, and my father, on the slightest urging and sometimes with no urging at all, would climb up to a scary, almost invisible niche in the cliff face, nearly thirty feet above the water. He would stand there interminably—a bald, narrow Tarzan in floppy bathing trunks—and then at last launch himself out over the boulders in an elegant swan dive into the exact center of the tiny pool. I can still see the waves sloshing over the spillway as he came up, spouting and triumphant. It was a parlor trick, of a kind, and, like all parlor tricks, perhaps insufferable—except to a small son of the diver.

  We stopped going to Snedens when my parents were divorced, but I remember returning to the pool with Father once when I was in my teens. He climbed up the cliff again and poised and dived, but this time I tried to talk him out of it; I was embarrassed by the whole dangerous performance. The truth was, of course, that I didn't have the nerve to try it myself, and I lacked the spirit that made it all so important to him.

  It was this spirit, brought to mountain climbing, to figure skating, to tap dancing, to tennis and trout fishing, to skiing and canoeing and gardening and so forth, that sometimes inspired us in the family to call him the King of the Forest. His tennis game was thunderous but erratic, and it took years for me to realize that his real physical grace was non-suburban. He could flick a Royal Coachman fly again and again into a backwater beneath an alder thicket twenty yards away; he knew how to carve an axe handle; and he swam, otterlike, with an oily smoothness that left no ripples. He was a terrible tap dancer, by contrast, but undauntable. Late one night in Paris (he was in his sixties), while in company with his friends the British writer V. S. Pritchett and
his wife, he broke into a creaky, Gene Kellyish spatter of kicks and taps across the sidewalk and up against the store shutters of a steep little side street in Montmartre. I was appalled when the Pritchetts told me about it later, but they didn't agree. "No, no," they said, laughing. "It was simply extraordinary."

  Where this élan came from is a mystery, for he was not a trivial sort of person, not an entertainer. He didn't get it from his father, a slight, almost frail man, who had been crippled by childhood polio. My father didn't know him for long, in any case. Elgin Adelbert Angell was aboard the French liner La Bourgogne—one of the last North Atlantic blue-ribbon ships with masts as well as steam—which sank, en route to France, on July 4, 1898, off Sable Island, southeast of Newfoundland, after a dawn collision with a British merchant vessel, Cromartyshire, with the loss of five hundred and forty-nine lives. It was a famous marine disaster of its day. My grandfather, a Cleveland lawyer, had embarked the day before, and was looking forward to a reunion with his wife and daughter—my father's younger sister, Hildegarde—who had been in Europe for six months. The story behind this is that my grandmother had exhausted herself nursing my father through a long bout of typhoid, and had been sent abroad, on doctor's advice, to recover her health. My father, who had just turned nine, had been booked aboard La Bourgogne as well, but he came down with chicken pox and had to be left behind. Fortuitously, my grandmother's brother, Frederick Curtis, was the head of a small school for boys in Brookfield, Connecticut; my father had been enrolled there during his mother's absence, and there the disappointed patient had to remain, while his father went on alone. My father never said much about this episode in his life, but he did once tell me that his Uncle Fred, who had a long beard, used to make the rounds in his nightshirt, carrying a candle, to kiss each of the boys good night. I don't know when my father got word about La Bourgogne or how many weeks or months went by before he was reunited with his mother and sister, but this Dickensian scene is what comes to mind when I try to imagine the moment: the wavering candle held by his approaching, sadly murmuring uncle, who wakes him up for the bad news.

  Ernest Angell (school friends sometimes called him Sincere Cupid) grew up in Cleveland, did well at the private University School there, and was sent off to Paris and Munich for a year of studies before entering Harvard, in 1907. A photograph of him at the time shows the stiff collar, upright carriage, and chin-up, serious gaze that we have come to associate with the optimism of those times. He took six subjects in his freshman year, including physics, German 4 (a Goethe course), Latin composition, and Greek. Somewhere along the line, he had taught himself trigonometry. He took a cold shower at seven-thirty each morning, and resolved to "make a hard try for ØBK"—a successful one, it turned out—and strove even harder, I think, to find friends. He went out for and failed to make the Crimson and the freshman baseball team but got over it. He attended sermons and concerts and galleries and operas (he heard Caruso in "Il Trovatore" at the Boston Theatre); performed in a German play with the Deutsche Verein; went to dinners and dances and football games; frequently called on a Cambridge girl named Evelyn Bolles and her family; and berated himself for a generally wasted year. "Outside of regular work I've done nothing that counts for anything," he writes in his diary on May 23, 1908. He passed his summers at Chocorua, in the midst of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, as he had since boyhood, and here, I think, his insatiable energy brought him more happiness. He became an accomplished woodsman, bushing out new trails along the Sandwich Range, camping for days at a time along the Albany Intervale, and canoeing and fishing with the other young summer people; there are snapshots of him there in winter as well, grinning in bearpaw snowshoes. It was in Chocorua that he met my mother, Katharine Sergeant, whom he married after he got out of Harvard Law School, in 1913. "Ernest was easily our leading spirit," a lifelong friend of his, Stuart Chase, said many years later. "Sometimes we called him 'the Great Man.'" One summer, there was a tragedy at Chocorua, when two young Irishwomen, immigrant domestics with one of the visiting families, got into a canoe on their day off and disappeared. When they were discovered in the lake, a day or two later, my father was the one who dived down and brought up the bodies; what he remembered about it, he told me once, was that the turtles had been at them.

  On one or perhaps two of those college summers, he sailed north in a schooner from Boston with Sir Wilfred Grenfell's mission to the Eskimos and fishermen along the outer Labrador coast: an odd journey, for him. I think he was impelled more by the adventure of it than by the good works. He took along a huge .45-90 rifle that I was sometimes allowed to heft when I was a kid; he'd wanted to bag a polar bear, he said, but never got off a shot. Only lately has it dawned on me that these summers may have had a purpose that he himself didn't wholly understand, and that the voyages out and back must have brought him close to the foggy cold waters where he had lost his father.

  I want to bring back this sad, formidable man as he was in the early nineteen-thirties, when he and I and my older sister, Nancy, were living together in a narrow brownstone on East Ninety-third Street, with the steep front stoop of its time. We are comfortable enough there, God knows, with a succession of governesses to keep an eye on us kids, and a delightful French couple, Joseph and Edmonde Petrognani, living in the basement. Joseph does the cooking, while Edmonde, thin and beautiful, keeps house and waits on us at dinner. These are hard times, all the same. The Great Depression is deepening, and some of Father's friends who come for dinner have lost their jobs and are silent with anxiety; now and then we take in a frayed banker or architect friend for a week or two, a man who has lost his house or apartment and his savings as well, and has sent his family off somewhere while he stays in the city and looks for work. New York has taken on a shriveled appearance; nothing is painted or shined, and the people one passes on the sidewalk move slowly, with a stunned look on their face. Our house is mortgaged, and the time comes when Father tells Edmonde and Joseph that he's sorry, but he can no longer keep them on. They have no place to go, though, and so they stay on and, for the time being, agree to work for nothing. ( Later on, he paid them back.) Our mother, Nancy's and mine, has been gone some years since. There has been a bitter divorce—in love with another man, the young writer E. B. White, she went off to Reno. My father's pride was injured, and he fought her hard, wore her down, until he won an agreement for joint custody of his children that would keep them under his roof, not hers; he swore that he would take her to court and shame her unless she agreed. A mistake all around: neither of them ever talks about this deadlock, and no wonder. Nancy and I don't talk about it, either. We go off to school together each morning on the double-decker No. 3 Fifth Avenue bus, to the lively, faintly cuckoo Lincoln School, up near Columbia; we can hardly wait for the weekends, when we visit our mother and Andy White in their happy, sunlit apartment down on Eighth Street. They have a Scottie named Daisy and a new baby, our brother Joel; there is a Ping-Pong table in one room, and the place is full of laughing, chain-smoking young writers and artists from The New Yorker, where they all work.

  It doesn't occur to me to blame anybody for this setup, but it is plain that something has gone wrong. Nancy, graver now and more grown up, goes off to boarding school outside Boston. I am living on the top floor at Ninety-third Street, where the bathroom connects via an odd skylight airshaft to my father's bathroom, directly below, and sometimes in the morning I silently unlatch the little window there and listen to my father talking to himself while he shaves. He mutters and exclaims under his breath. What! I hear, and No, I won't! There is a harsh, mumbled discourse—I can't make it out—and then a quieter trailing off: perhaps a more complicated thought about some law case of his. Things aren't going well down at his office, I know that much. Then I hear an If she thinks ... that's almost shouted: he's back on my mother again. My name turns up, too, some days: Rog-er, with the syllables broken in half like a stick, or Why can't he ever ... I close the window.

  This stuff scared me, not just b
ecause of its severity and barely suppressed anger but because Father and I were in this together now, and he was suffering in spirit. I didn't put it to myself that way, but I sensed we were in danger. I knew I was letting him down in school, where I had stopped working. My notebooks were in a hopeless mess, and I was always in trouble, often being turned in to the principal's office. I broke windows and lab objects, slid off to afternoon movies, and skipped gym. One day, I dropped some pistol cartridges from a high window onto the sidewalk below, to see if they'd go off; a couple of other times I was found in the crawl space under the auditorium, where I had smoked vile messages on the ceiling with a candle. Father was angry when news of my school malfeasances came home; veins stood out on his forehead and he shouted. Bad manners also set him off. He never whacked me but sometimes I wished he would. Instead, he sat me down and flailed me with long, lawyerly arguments about my shortcomings. "Where is your sense of responsibility?" he said. "I see no signs of it, young man. There has been no progress whatsoever." On and on he went, for twenty minutes at a stretch. He appeared barely able to contain his disappointment in me or his fears for my future. I sat in silence, waiting for it to be over, and secretly counted the detested "young man" appellations. At times these courtroom dramas took me to tears. One night, it became too much for me. "You make me want to be dead!" I burst out, and saw the shock of it turn him pale. He stopped at once, and then it was a long time before the next lecture.