by Savage Grace- The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich
I remember how my grandfather used to come to wake me up before sunrise in those early Florida years, give me a boiled egg and a hybridized grapefruit taken off one of his own trees—and then lead me out in the still-sleeping dewy dawn to see the rabbits and land crabs. Coconut Grove was still very wild in those days; the roads were all of crushed white coral.
Imagine an old man in loose, white, unpressed, probably mildewed cottons, a long shirt over them, and one of those still-worn white-cotton, crushable sailing caps, and a mousy-haired boy, his small, grubby hand in the baseball-mitt-sized big one of LHB, both of them talking continuously, neither listening to the other, and heading for a sail in the dinghy to Mathieson Island.
On the way the small boy learned all about outriggers, centerboards, sideboards, Medusas, man-o’-war birds, the main sorts of ocean waves—surficial and bottom-resonant—the prediction of weather from cloud formations, the various ways to treat snake bite, and—“But, Grandpapa, we have forgotten to bring our lunch!”—answered by Pan’s chuckle: “The best lunch you will ever have awaits you. The sea gives it to us.”
In the bottom of the tiny boat was a machete, and it was with this that LHB showed me how to open coconuts and husk them and then pierce two of their three eyes to get the delicious milk. We ate coconut meat, crabs, tropical oysters, sour oranges, and the orange hearts of sea urchins.
He never stopped talking, telling me the Latin names of the plants—many of which he had introduced from his travels all over the world—and the insects and birds and mammals, saying it was just as easy to learn a name that was the same anywhere as one that changed from language to language and country to country—which is, of course, why Tony knew as a small child the Latin names of so many things, for I continued with him LHB’s practice. From the time Tony started talking, which was early, I decided to give him the Latin names, when I knew them, for plants and animals. By the time he was ten he could read, understand, and remember the contents of texts like Buchsbaum’s Animals Without Backbones. That was the beginning of a lifelong intellectual bond between Tony and me. And it was not just intellectual and bookish but field-explorative.
Elizabeth Blow
If you saw Tony with Brooks, I don’t think you would connect the fact by looks that they were related. He had Barbara’s brown eyes and her red hair. He was just a marvelous-looking little boy. And at four years old he was already constantly prowling around and investigating insects and birds—he had a natural instinct for creatures of this earth. He knew all about them and he could be very instructive. I’ll never forget the marvelous remark he made to me one afternoon. He said, “B-Betty”—he stammered, you know—“did you know that b-b-butterflies have…” I can’t remember for the life of me what it was, it was some special thing that butterflies have—and it was something that I didn’t know. I quoted it for years because it always amused me so. It was that slight stutter, the combination of the “B-Betty” and the “b-b-butterflies” and the actually hard information which he proffered to me.
From a Psychiatric Report on Antony Baekeland ordered by the British Courts, January 5, 1973
I examined Antony Baekeland on January 3, 1973, and read the depositions and reports from five psychiatrists who have seen him at different periods. The history based on these reports is that Baekeland is an American subject, an only child brought up with his parents in New York till about eleven. His father is “a brilliant wealthy man who has never actually done any productive work though he made one expedition to South America and wrote an article about it,” and “charming but capable of no warmth to support his son.” The mother (the victim) was “an hysterical, narcissistic, and impulsive woman, quite incapable of giving a child the minimum of maternal security.” She was a great beauty and an accomplished artist. He suffered “marked deprivation of love from both parents, and was exposed to excessive intellectual stimulation beyond his capacity to absorb.”
Brooks Baekeland
Psychiatrists—who are professionally amoral—never understood my reluctance to enthuse about their abracadabra. They were interested in their tricks, and in drugs to numb rage, while in Tony I clearly saw the play of Good and Evil. That was a question not only about him but about a whole generation.
From “Dreams and Realities,” a Lecture delivered at Johns Hopkins University by Leo Hendrik Baekeland, October 23, 1931
A large part of the tragedy of the human race is caused by the fact that it is well-nigh impossible to transmit fully to others our reactions about the mistakes we committed in our younger years. So we see each succeeding generation ever ready to commit the same blunders over again, and suffer by it.
Brooks Baekeland
I remember the hold of my grandfather’s large, soft hand, and the rich flow of humor and information that never stopped pouring out of him during our walks those educative, garrulous, affectionate mornings, while the house and the village still slept and only we two were awake and aware of it.
On our returns, with the sun up and the house awake, he would disappear—where, a small boy did not know. It was to study, I now know. I later discovered that whenever he stood—he always seemed to be standing—leafing through some large tome, he was not leafing. He was reading every single word. He had remained a European and an intellectual.
From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, April 20, 1907
In the evening read “On the Danger of Overspecialization” at Anvil Club. Had a lively discussion afterwards on such subjects as morals, religion, ancient literature. I introduced my conception of morality based on reason and the conception of the big universal Ego and universal consciousness as opposed to the little Ego as conceived by the average man. The higher love as opposed to the little or partial (particularist?) love which dwarfs our conception of equity and justice and develops selfishness and fear and makes us question immortality because we commit ourselves too much as individuals and not enough as part of the big Ego. The latter conception sweeps away all thoughts of mortality and makes us a little ingredient of that sublime and universal Ego.
Brooks Baekeland
From his most profound beliefs my grandfather despised publicity, money, fashion, sensation, exploitation, and all the people whose lives were dedicated to such. He was an idealist, a feudal-socialist, a radical theorist, an antimaterialist millionaire. All this was in the same curious spirit as his benefactions during the Depression, such as I got a hint of once when I was with him at the Chemists’ Club. He had gone somewhere—to pee? to buttonhole a colleague?—and a sandy-haired, middle-aged man came up to me and asked me who I was. When I told him, he said, “No one will ever know how many of us your grandfather brought through the Depression or what would have happened to us without him.” He said this to me very emotionally. I had never heard of this. I asked my grandmother later. She had never known, either. And this was the man in sneakers and one suit who was known as a miser!
He was a benefactor by impulse: utterly without cynicism, without regard to self. Victorians—especially Victorians of his class, the academics—believed in Man and Family. They never doubted Life’s purposes.
My real education began at the example and from the words of my Belgian grandparents, who were not unsusceptible to Honor but tended to deride it in its social, self-lauding, self-loving forms—the forms we all in fact love so much. Because we love ourselves?
My grandfather, in particular, held all that mutual backslapping in ridicule—despite his own multiple honors, at the reception of each of which he always let the side down by saying it was all due to “luck” and his “marvelous wife.” How could he say: “due to my genius and your ridiculous system of self-congratulation”?
The academic class in Europe that my Baekeland grandparents came from put very high value on nonmaterialistic achievements. It despised show. It despised the accumulation of money and power. In the nineteenth century the European university world considered itself—and was considered—an aristocracy. In its heart it
put itself above royalty, and did so without any hesitation whatever! It was guilty of an almost monastic pride, and its scientific members put Truth, the Truth, above Man—or any man.
So, from those two immigrants—totally out of phase with a society given over entirely to show, power, and gain, all of which they soon had, too, almost automatically, due to “luck” and LHB’s “marvelous wife,” of course—I learned everything, early.
Their only son, my father—George Washington Baekeland—was entirely the opposite. As was my first, ambitious, beautiful, backgroundless wife, Barbara.
Sylvie Baekeland Skira
Brooks admired the way his grandfather and grandmother had led sort of separate lives—but in harmony, because they had similar values. Perhaps this was something he missed, because certainly he couldn’t have done that with Barbara, ever.
Letter from Leo Hendrik Baekeland to Professor Camiel De Bruyne, University of Ghent, Belgium, August 27, 1931
Dear Friend De Bruyne:
My wife, who is at present with our whole family in the Adirondacks, feels as if she were in the “Seventh Heaven”! One of the sketches which she painted last year during a short visit to Bruges has been selected as a front cover for the latest number of the Literary Digest, one of our best known publications—I am mailing you a copy.
It is a great honor for an amateur; an honor even much sought after by professional artists; because there is always an abundant choice amongst the many offered sketches. I should mention that when her painting was selected, none in the Literary Digest organization knew who Céline Baekeland was. I have reason to doubt whether even today they know it—and she got paid for it, too!
The reason why I write you on this occasion is that when I saw the issue with the sketch, it evoked times long gone by, when you and I walked over that same little bridge, when we were both at the beginning of our career, colleagues at the same Normal School. Could I have imagined then that some time I was to raise a family here, and that I was to have this thrill in seeing the picture of that same bridge published here, painted by the daughter of my former professor, who was to become my wife, as well as mother and grandmother of a new clan in America.
Cordially yours,
L. H. Baekeland
From the “Very Truly Yours” Column, Helen Muir, Miami Herald, January 18, 1940
Céline Baekeland is well known as a painter and Dr. Baekeland, whom Miami claims as one of its distinguished citizens, is very proud of her accomplishments. “She rarely sells a painting; she likes to give them away. But she is naturally proud of the prizes she has received,” he declares, from the terrace of “The Anchorage,” his bayfront home in Coconut Grove. In his study is a painting his wife did for him of a scene in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Westchester County, New York. He chuckles as he explains it is his future burial place.
Brooks Baekeland
LHB died in 1944. He had been greatly gaga for several years—senile dementia, taking sometimes violent forms as the oxygen and glycogen were gradually starved from that massive brain. In his middle or late seventies he no longer always liked it when I asked him specific questions. He would reply testily, “It is not polite to ask me such questions as the name of some exotic hybrid now. Old men’s memories fail.” Or he would upbraid me for standing in front of him with my legs apart—done, though he did not realize it, to shorten my six feet four to a more agreeable height, he being just under six feet—by saying, “You don’t have to emphasize your height like that!” His temper worsened, and I think his loneliness—of which state I was already a precocious sufferer myself—was almost intolerable for the simple reason that not even delivery boys and Pullman Car porters would listen to him anymore. Shall I talk of loneliness? Of the loneliness of that kind of greatness? In the end he became a pathetic, a tragic figure, and had to be sent away from home to be “taken care of.” He was violent long before he died, of the final massive cerebral hemorrhage.
In 1941, when he was very old and already quite dotty, I called Snug Rock to ask my grandmother if I could come and crouch there. My grandfather answered and said that my grandmother was in the Adirondacks but that I must come anyway, he needed my help. It was an order: I was to come at the swiftest.
Now, I loved my grandmother more than anyone I had ever loved, but this time my motive for wanting to come to Yonkers involved a girl with a divine body, long red hair, green eyes, a taste for Richard Strauss, and whose father was a football coach—this was just before I met Barbara Daly. So I said, “Yes, Grandpapa.” I knew Dick the chauffeur’s number, called him, and had him pick me up at the station.
My grandfather immediately made me privy to his problem. In fact, he had two problems. The first he did not know but I recognized immediately—he had gone over the edge since I had last seen him—and I wondered: “Who is taking care of him? This is dangerous.” The second problem was the following: He had just arrived from Florida, he had four heavy suitcases with him, and they were all locked and he had no key.
What he had done is lock the first case, put the key in the second, lock the second, put the key in the third, lock the third—and so on. You see, in that way, you did not have four bulky keys in your pocket but only one. But he had lost that one! He was in despair.
I was not his grandson for nothing. “Are there any other keys in the house?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
So we went looking, and of course we finally found a huge ball of keys all snarled together, for every good old house has one—keys that no one knows the origin or the function of anymore but that no one dares throw away.
Do not forget that he was talking the whole time, perhaps telling me how he had just escaped with his life from the head-hunting Dayaks in the Sunda Straits in 1913 or about the famous oral exam that he and some colleagues had trained one of their dear but, alas, nitwit friends to pass, and how the friend, asked to explain the polarization of light—a question they had not trained him for, deeming it too abstract for his limited brains—had cleared his throat and said, “Messieurs, in order to explain to you how light is polarized, I must first describe to you the principle of the suction pump”—a question they had trained him for. And with that bunch of keys, as I was saying, I began to try, Edison-like, the six thousand possibilities. Of course, I soon got all the suitcases open, to my grandfather’s fervent joy.
And what was in those four suitcases? Books, papers, diaries, notebooks, checkbooks, manuscripts. He had forgotten to pack clothes!
Now, to me this was not just a sign of senility, but an indication of his lifelong priorities. And you may imagine what a great woman it took to wife a man like that and keep her good humor.
I was overwhelmed with pity and so I started unpacking for him, hoping to find at least a pair of pajamas and a toothbrush somewhere in all that incunabula. Nothing. Not a handkerchief.
What I found that startled me was literally dozens of pocket checkbooks from different banks all over America. Ten would not have attracted my attention. There must have been fifty or more, maybe a hundred. As I remember, one suitcase was full of nothing else.
“What are these, Grandpapa?”
He chuckled. “Banks,” he explained, “are insolvent.”
When he saw my puzzled expression, he went on. “They lend money they have not got—that is, they give credit without backing. In fact, they are all bankrupt.”
I was still looking puzzled.
“The backing is the depositors’ money, but the loans they make are many times, often ten times that. It’s a fraud. As long as the depositors don’t know and as long as the debtors pay their debts, the banks make money—other people’s money, of course—and the banks are called ‘solvent.’ It should not be allowed. It is highly dangerous. In fact, there is not a solvent bank in the United States.”
Poor old man, I was thinking.
“So,” he went on, “I play the numbers.” He giggled. “I spread the risk. I keep money in banks all over t
he United States instead of in just one or two where a run of a few days during a panic could wipe me out.”
Senile. I offered him the loan of my pajamas. “Healthier,” he said, “to sleep naked.” He always had. Goodnight. He had some reading to do. I had a long, cool, green-eyed girl to see, but of course it would not have done to tell him. He was, as I said, one of the last great Victorians.
But the memory I treasure is this. When I got back, at three a.m. to Snug Rock, afoot—it was not far—I found the house hermetically sealed. I had forgotten my dear grandfather’s growing paranoia. I tried every door, every window, every crack—it might have been Bodiam Castle. I was humiliated to think I could not scheme some way into that ancestral home. My mind set to working. I would not admit defeat; it was not theoretically possible—whatever I, Brooks Baekeland, wanted, I, Brooks Baekeland, could and would discover a way to get. It was an almost Mosaic law.
But in fact, there was no way short of storming that would let me in. So, just as the first birds were all singing grand opera, making promises too grand to keep, I lay me down on a wicker sofa on the porch facing the Hudson River and the majestic Palisades on the other side—it was a warm July night—and, with a perfectly bad—that is, good—conscience, I fell asleep.
The next thing I knew, the door from the dining room opened and there was Grandpapa looking at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, as I got up and brushed back my hair. “I got back late and didn’t want to disturb you.”
I had not a clue as to how he might react to this development. What he did was to give me a discourse on the climbing vine called wisteria, genus Wisteria, named after Caspar Wistar, an American anatomist who had died in 1818, and which had been developed into I forget how many hybrids by the Dutchman Claus something-or-other into however many varieties, of which this one on our porch was…“Would you like to take a bath?” he finally asked. “We will be served breakfast in half an hour.” “Thank you, sir,” I said.