Let Me Finish

by Roger Angell

  Later—not long ago—here comes one of those fierce fair-weather afternoon squalls which descend so quickly in these parts, this time a bit north of Hat Island Ledge, blackening the distant waters and churning the waves around us to a froth. Aboard a sturdy forty-five foot cutter, we're in no real difficulty but we need to take in sail. I get the engine going and hand over the helm to a visiting friend of ours, a retired two-star admiral who had recently been an intelligence advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Just keep her in the wind," I say and go forward with Carol to rein in and drop our big genoa. Only he doesn't. Down on my knees, with the wind grabbing at us and the rain streaming and our arms full of slippery flapping nylon, I feel the boat yaw this way and that while loose sheets and heavy blocks bang about over our heads. "Hans!" I yell back at the Annapolis-trained skipper astern. "What the fuck are you doing!"

  I've given up big boats now that I'm in my eighties, and one repayment for this loss is that I will no longer find myself sailing grandly past that working lobsterman amid the pot-strewn waters of Western Way or Casco Passage. Boats like his are bigger and more powerful than they were when I first started sailing around here, and they're stuffed with electronics. But he's fishing four hundred traps now, a huge enterprise, and his loans have gone sky-high, even as his overburdened, over-managed fishery slides into decline. No reason remains for him to look upon me as a neighbor; he may even know my ancient waterfront cottage, which has been climbing crazily in value and remains one of the reasons he and his kids can't get access to our common shore. (All this pain and irony is reported on at length in an essential new book, The Edge of Maine, by Geoffrey Wolff.) There's still a chance, I tell myself, that he won't mind Shadow, since she's been around here even longer than he has. Mostly, though, I stopped chartering forty-footers because I'm afraid of making a dumb mistake. Everybody who has sailed this drowned coast of Maine, with its great depths and steeply shoaling ledges and tall islands, has had the experience of idly watching the dark water below his hull turn a paler blue and then bring up the terrifying white of an unexpected shoal or giant boulder—Christ, what have I done!—just below. You swing the wheel and pray.

  No, thank you. Here I am, still aboard Shadow and thinking about the pleasures at hand. Even at this easy level, I am dealing with shifts and forces and counter-flows—wind and tide and current—that are nearly invisible to the hapless nonsailing friend I have brought along this time, who now (the wind has freshened) looks at me with dislike, because I am in another realm: a medicine man in a baseball cap. It can't be helped, but sailing is exclusive. What the landsman senses and perhaps envies is exactly what grabs me at odd moments in a small boat in August. Here—for the length of this puff, this lift and heel—I am almost in touch with the motions of my planet: not at one with them but riding a little crest and enjoying the view. I smile across at my friend but say nothing. Eat your heart out, pal.

  La Vie en Rose

  A SATURDAY evening in May, 1949, and I am taking a moonlight leak in the garden at Ditchley. Hedges and statuary cast elegant shadows nearby, but I've had a bit of wine and it probably doesn't occur to me that this is one of the better alfresco loos I have visited—the Italianate garden installed by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe in 1935, as a culminating grace note to the celebrated Georgian pile of Ditchley Park, in Oxfordshire, designed by James Gibbs and built in 1722. Ditchley, with a deer park and a village within its borders, is headed inexorably for the English Heritage Register but for the moment remains the country home of my old friend Marietta FitzGerald and her delightful, fairly recent second husband, Ronald Tree, who is standing a few feet to my left here, in identical posture, his chin in the air as he breathes in traces of boxwood and early primrose. Beyond him, also aiming, is Major Metcalfe, a neighbor of Ronnie's and another dinner guest of his on this evening. He is the same Major Metcalfe who proved such a staunch friend to King Edward VIII at Fort Belvedere during the difficult abdication days, in 1936, and who stood up as best man the following year, when the King, reborn as the Duke of Windsor, married Wallis Warfield Simpson in Monts, France. Major Edward Dudley Metcalfe, M.V.O., M.C., I mean, who at any moment, surely, will invite me to call him Fruity, the way everybody else does. He and I are in black tie, and the moonlight lies magically on his satin lapels, just as it does on mine. Ronnie is wearing a beige velvet smoking, perfectly O.K. for a country host, I guess, but he looks less dashing or narrow, less right, than Fruity and I do. Good old Fruity.

  Soon we three will amble back up the terrace steps, toward the tall lighted doors and the sounds of conversation and rattled dice within. My wife, Evelyn, ravishing in her silk top and shimmery gray skirt, will look up from the backgammon table, where she has taken on Ronnie's first son, Michael (he's in his late twenties), and has just realized that she's in over her head. "How much is eleven pounds?" she whispers urgently. It's around forty-five dollars, I figure quickly—big bucks, to us—but of course none of this is for keeps. Only it is, we find.

  Memory stops here. Nothing more can be made of that ancient weekend. Evelyn and I were impostors—not members of the bon ton but a visiting, unembarrassed American couple, still in their twenties, on a lucky six-week dive into England and France, mostly paid for by the magazine Holiday, where I was an editor and writer. I was scouting the Continent for writers and picture ideas, or some such scam. We had married in 1942, were separated by the war, and when it was over swiftly acquired New York jobs and friends, an apartment in the upper reaches of Riverside Drive, a two-tone Ford Tudor, a bulldog, and, sixteen months before this, a baby daughter, now in the hands of an affectionate grandmother. The works. But, given this chance, we grabbed it, booked passage on the slowpoke liner De Grasse—the only French Line vessel as yet restored to the Atlantic run after the war—and after six entrancing days and nights debarked and did the tourist thing. Westminster Abbey, the bombed-out City, St. Paul's. Green Park in the spring sunshine. The British Museum. Oxford and the Trees. Paris. The Orangerie and the Cimetière Père-Lachaise. Our rented Citroën Onze—with its chevron-striped grille, crooked-arm gearshift, low power, and sneaky reverse gear—would carry us faithfully along the uncrowded two-lane routes to the south. What was the French word we needed for "windshield wiper," after ours gave out during a thunderstorm outside Le Puy? Why, essuie-glace, of course. Who could forget that? There was a funeral going on at the cathedral in Chartres when we arrived, the soaring gray columns enfolded in black at their base. The next noon, on Ascension Day, we walked into Bourges Cathedral to blazing candlelight and mauve sunlit shafts above, just in time for a raft of first Communions. "Be joyful, mes enfants," said the white-hatted bishop to the three-deep rows of pink-cheeked, well-combed nine-year-olds. "You are being accepted into the one true Church, here in the most beautiful structure in the world." Why, yes—where do we go to sign up?

  We were lucky, but this was long ago and one wants more than a pee on the grass or the tink of a funeral bell, behind the altar at Chartres, to bring it clear. But only anecdote continues to work. Late at night aboard the De Grasse, Evelyn is dancing with our friend Tom Hollyman, a Holiday photographer, and Jean Hollyman with a young purser. At our tiny table, with its crowded champagne glasses and triangular white C.G.T. ashtrays, I am in deep converse with a fellow-passenger, Alfonso Bedoya, the Mexican movie actor who was such a hit last year as the bandito chief in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. (Encounters like this happened all the time on the Atlantic run just then. The dearth of shipping—the De Grasse herself had recently been raised from the bottom of the Gironde estuary, where the Germans had scuttled her—made for a travelers' bottleneck, where celebrities and the rest of us squashed cheerfully together for a few days at a time.) Here, sometimes in French, sometimes in Spanish, Bedoya is discussing monetary or agricultural issues—I'm not always sure which, though I nod in agreement—in emerging Latin America. Part of me is listening to him and another part following the ship's five-piece dance band as it shifts shamelessly from "La Seine" to "
J'Attendrai," but in truth I am only waiting for my new friend to flash his enormous teeth and cry, "Badges, badges—I don't have to show you any steenking badges!"

  In London, I know, we caught Laurence Olivier as Chorus and Vivien Leigh as an anguished Antigone at the New Theatre, but not a word or gesture of it comes back now. Instead, I see us sitting down to dinner at the Café Brevaux, in Paris, with The New Yorker's Janet Flanner, where another guest of hers, Tennessee Williams, seizes Evelyn's hand and presses it to his forehead. "What do you think?" he asks, and Evelyn, shaking her head sadly, supplies the right answer. "I think you're really getting sick," she says. Looking for a second opinion, he produces a thermometer from an inner pocket, shakes it down, and furtively takes his temperature behind a menu. "Go home, Tenn," says Flanner, in her field marshal's contralto, but he stays on and does away with a white-asparagus salad, his veal Marengo and fonds d'artichauts à la crème, and, a brave though gravely ill playwright, remains as well for a mousse au chocolat and the cheese platter and coffee and a tiny Armagnac and then, why not, one more.

  Southward in our Citroën, we came out of the mountains at Alès and on from there to Les Baux (no one else turns up for lunch at the fabled Baumanière) and Arles and Nîmes (there's a bloodless Provençal bullfight in the blazing-hot Roman amphitheatre) and Tarascon, and, with the sea now shining off to our right, Saint-Tropez and Antibes. Arrived at our destination, we're at breakfast on the terrace of the modest Hotel Metropole, in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, when we are startled by the unmistakable sounds of a Boeing 377 starting its four propellers—WHEE-EEE-eee-ouzzzze—and warming for takeoff—RhhhOUUMMMM!—from a room on the second floor. It is the S. J. Perelman family—Sid and Laura and twelve-year-old Abby and ten-year-old Adam—or, more accurately, the pair of caged mynah birds they have brought along from Singapore to this wildly accidental meeting, here by the lapping Mediterranean. The Perelmans had been in the Far East for three months and, with many stops along the way (giving the mynahs a chance to tune up their act), were by degrees heading home.

  Perelman, already a Mt. Rushmore eminence on the landscape of American humor, was more a friend of my mother and stepfather's than mine, but, anxious for company as tourists are, we two families palled up, ate and drank and swam and talked together and, jamming all six of us into the Citroën, drove up the corniches and then back down from Menton, mousing around (as Sid put it) among the white villages, with their withered trees, dusty pétanque courts, and alley-like streets, half empty in this off-season. Mornings, Abby serenaded our breakfasts from above, practicing on her well-travelled cello. Sid, natty and with his gagman's jaw always fractionally agape, followed every conversation with terrifying attention. He and the tall, dark-eyed Laura liked it here and arranged to rent a villa in Èze for an extra week or two. When we looked the place over one morning, the kids went rocketing off down a steep path to the shore, while Perelman conferred with the owner and a rental agent. There was a discussion of some sort between the two locals, and Sid, his eyeglasses glittering, offered free translation: "Hélas, these hectares themselves find encumbered."

  That afternoon, we went to Monte Carlo in two cars, and, while Laura took Abby and Adam off somewhere, ventured into the Société Anonyme des Bains de Mer et du Cercle des Étrangers de Monaco for a spot of gaming. The long rooms were not stuffed with slot machines and customers in shorts, as they are said to be now, but did not exactly come up to expectation. A bare two tables were in business in the curtained, fusty Public Gaming Rooms, with others shrouded in tattered baize. The handful of players, bending over their skimpy stacks of thirty-franc chips, appeared to include some local widows, making a late-afternoon stop-off before the evening rates and lighting came on. But the quiet commands from the formally garbed croupiers were straight out of E. Phillips Oppenheim, and the suave Sid now faltered a moment before a vacant seat. "Do you know how to do this?" he whispered. "Sure," I said and slipped in. I lost two early bets on Rouge and another on Passe, got eleven chips back for my one on a Transversale Pleine, and, encouraged, plunked down four on No. 26—the traditional spot for an opening thirty-seven-to-one long shot. Around went the little ball, to the croupier's "Mesdames, messieurs, faites vos jeux. Les jeux sont faits—rien ne va plus!," then slowed and bounced—rickety-tackety tipitty-tup—and nestled sweetly into my slot. There was a gasp—it came from me—and piles of oblong chips, triangular chips, and variously tinted round chips slid smoothly to my part of the green. "Jesus, what did you do!" Perelman cried, but I was no longer of his party. Seizing a casual stack of counters from the top of the pile, I tossed it toward the man at the middle of the table—I really did this—who raked it into a slot next to the wheel. "Merci, monsieur," came the murmured response (with little bows) from the band of croupiers. "La maison vous remercie." I smiled, extracted a Sobranie from my silver case, and accepted a light from the slender, white-gloved countess at my shoulder.

  I had won perhaps fifty dollars and, staying on, added a lucky ten or fifteen more before we arose. Perelman, betting his kids' birthdays, then his hotel-room number subtracted by the number of letters in his name, worked like a trooper and wound up seven or eight bucks to the good. "Never again, Étienne," he said as we walked out into the late sunlight. "You must swear to stop me." Not till the next day did I give him a break and confess that my expertise and gambling manners had all come out of the Encyclopædia Britannica, consulted back home before my departure, which had a terrific "Roulette" entry in the "RAY–SAR" volume. I took notes.

  Our last stop—Evelyn and I had to start back—came the next afternoon, when we pressed a call on W. Somerset Maugham at his Villa Mauresque, next door on Cap Ferrat. Perelman, a fabled reader, told me he had once written the grand old man of British letters to express admiration for his effortless style, and won a similar mash note in return. Now they had a date. In the Perelman wheels this time, I think, we noticed Maugham's adopted Moorish symbol—for good fortune—here worked into an iron arch at his entranceway. The same sign appeared on the covers of Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence and Cakes and Ale and the rest, which the world had snapped up in staggering numbers over the previous decades. A flood of bestsellers and long-running West End plays had earned him this comely retreat, in a part of the world that even then looked lightly on his private life. Here, twisting and turning around corners, up hill and down dale, we followed the raked driveway onward through stunning groves of palm and pine and splashy bougainvillea. "The royalties! The royalties!" cried Sid in pure admiration and purer envy, as we drew up at last at the flowering stone steps and spreading red-tiled roofs of the shrine.

  Maugham appeared, a frail gent of seventy-five, slightly bent in his soft shirt, pleated summery trousers, and suede pumps. With his skimpy, slicked-back hair and heavily lidded eyes, he suggested a Galápagos tortoise, wise and of immense age. He shook hands with us each, repeating our names, and told Abby and Adam to make themselves at home. Indoors, tea was produced and Maugham's cheerful partner, Alan Searle, introduced. Two house guests, the tall poet C. Day-Lewis and a slim, long-necked woman in gray, floated in and silently took places in the vast low living room. All went well except the conversation, which soon became a trickle, unhelped by Maugham's famous and extraordinarily demanding stammer and my sudden realization that the woman next to me, Day-Lewis's companion, was the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, whose Dusty Answer and The Weather in the Streets I had sighed over while in college. Silences fell, broken by thumpings and running feet above, from Abby and Adam. "They're in my st-study, I believe," Maugham said, smiling, as Sid bolted from the room. Dadly noises arose from the stairs. We picked up a bit after a round of Maugham Specials, a grenadine concoction prepared by Searle. Sipping mine, I saw Evelyn gesture with her eyes toward the window over Maugham's shoulder, and, shifting my gaze, caught sight of a paper airplane as it sailed slowly down from above and impaled itself in a jacaranda.

  Ever the host, Maugham pulled over his footstool and sat down again, one leg tuc
ked beneath him. "Tell me, Mister Angell," he said, "have you ever worn a s-s-sarong?" I had to ask him to repeat the word and then said no, not yet. "Oh, but you m-must!" he cried, wrinkling his wrinkles with kindness. "V-very cool—but they do f-f-fall off!" On the way back, Perelman lit into his progeny. "This was a big, big disappointment," he said. "I don't see how we can take you anywhere." Silence. "Listen," he resumed in a different voice, "what was it like up there?"

  These tales and name-droppings grow dim with repeating, and hearing them once again, in the fashion with which we stare into the too small black-and-white snapshots in a family album, we look into their corners and distant porches or mysterious windows in search of something more—times of day, a day of the week, other names and other tones of voice, beyond recall. What in the world did Evelyn and I talk about—beyond our adored but absent baby, I mean—all those weeks and miles? How did we survive the shrivelling boredom of long days on the road, through landscapes relentlessly renewed and snatched away but never entered? Conversation saved us, but I can't bring back a word now. What books were we reading, which crisis were the French and British papers and the Paris Tribune full of each day? What fears or sadness woke us up at night, either or both of us, and made it hard to sleep again? With effort, if I wait not too eagerly, I can sometimes bring back her voice. She was happy on this trip, and could prove it. She was a fullblown diabetic, but here in France, while eating two exceptional meals every day, all over the map, and drinking down the splendid wines, she was able to cut down her daily insulin—a stab in the thigh, mornings and evenings—to her lowest levels in a lifetime. We divorced in the sixties and she died—can it be?—almost ten years ago.

  On the De Grasse again, homeward bound, we were old hands. We told our new friends the Sidney Simons—he was a painter and sculptor coming back from a spell in France—which deck chairs were out of the wind and which dinner service to sign up for (the deuxième, except on cabaret nights, so you could leave earlier and grab a better table by the floor). In our cabin, Evelyn told me that she had wept a bit in the taxi on the way to our train to Cherbourg, but couldn't tell if it was from leaving Paris or missing Callie. I said we could do this again, maybe next year, and make it a shorter trip. We never did. Life and work and a second daughter intervened, and there was the money problem and the kids' summers to think about, and almost before we knew it the De Grasse and every other Atlantic passenger vessel were gone, swept clean away by the airliners' seven hours to Orly, and by Eurail Pass and Junior Year Abroad, and by the hundreds of thousands of kids and travelers and shifting populations, from all over the world, who filled the fabled capitals and charming roads and did away with our postwar afternoon, leaving only these moments.