Let Me Finish (11 page)

And out he came in due course—a plump brown gent with a towel on his shoulders and long damp locks smelling of Conti's Castile. Elsie, who was well along in her fifties and had never married, didn't see my consternation—and if she had she'd have told me to forget about Cochise and Crazy Horse, this was Tony Luhan, the Taos Indian husband of Mabel Dodge Luhan, the writer who was so close to D. H. and Frieda Lawrence. You know—Lawrence the novelist. Elsie was implacably literary.

She was the
New Republic
war correspondent aunt who'd gotten herself blown up in 1918, while visiting an abandoned and supposedly safe sector of captured trenches, with a young French officer as guide. Another journalist in the party at Mont Bligny, a Frenchwoman, idly picked up a German potato-masher grenade, which exploded. The woman died, the officer lost an arm, and Elsie, with two smashed ankles, ended up in the French military hospital at Neuilly, to begin a long recovery. She got a book,
Shadow
Shapes,
and a slight limp out of the accident, which never quite fitted the rest of her life story. Thick bodied and slow-moving, eleven years older than my mother, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant had written for
McClures
early in the century, had known Willa Cather and Robert Frost (she wrote a memoir of the first and a biography of the second) and Eugene O'Neill, and had been a student or an analysand of Carl Jung's in Zurich. Before this, she'd lived and studied in France and Italy, and had attended the Sorbonne. I have a dim photograph of her standing in a crown and a sweeping robe before a costume party in Sicily in 1904. Her six books were respectfully reviewed, but feel stilted and airless whenever I take down a volume now. One of them, a 1927 collection of literary essays, has a riveting title:
Fire Under the Andes.
She had genuine intellectual credentials. She had translated Giraudoux and other avant-garde French writers. She visited Jung for some weeks in 1930 and was a participant with him in a seminar, "Interpretation of Visions." In a lengthy portrait she wrote for the May, 1931
Harpers,
she finds him washing out his blue jeans outside his tower, near the Zurichsee. "Dr. C. G. Jung," she begins, "is the only European thinker I know who belongs to the earth people."

I was impressed with Aunt Elsie when my father and Nancy and I stayed with her in 1934, in Tesuque, New Mexico, where she was working for the U.S. Indian Bureau. She was friends with John Collier, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and also seemed close to many pueblo children and aspiring students. She knew the mountain back roads, and kept in touch with the outer pueblos. She
told us to keep an eye out for the black pottery at San Ildefonso, and directed us to one of the mesa-top villages in Arizona on the right day for one of their semi-secret Snake Dances. Other meetings with her, back east, became strained because she'd spotted me as an active young reader and wished to lure me to the higher intellectual ground. At tea or lunch in New York, she'd ask what I was reading and if I said Sherlock Holmes or Stevenson she'd bring up Yeats and Pound and Eliot, all still strangers to me. When I was about twelve, she invited me to a midweek afternoon event at the Ninety-second Street YMHA—a lecture on Greek archaeology, perhaps, or something about Navajo folk songs. While she was chatting with an acquaintance during the intermission, I recalled that my dog Tunney and perhaps the new issue of
Baseball
were waiting for me at home, a bare two blocks away, and when Aunt Elsie wasn't looking I skimmed out a side door. This was big trouble, of course. Elsie, fearing kidnappers, had called my father at his office, and he lit into me lengthily that night. Then my mother weighed in, by the telephone. In both parental tirades, however, I also detected a gleam of wonder, even admiration—"You mean you just
walked away
?" Maybe they'd wanted to stick a pin into Elsie once in a while, too.

The strain between my mother and Elsie was more than an everyday family tangle. Elsie, lit'ry and sociable, always looked down on Mother's successful career and busy life at
The New Yorker
—"that vulgar magazine," she'd once let slip—and perhaps her marriages as well, but she could never forget that it was the magazine's success and Mother's hard work that kept her afloat with privately arranged allowances
and a nice extra check at Christmas. Mother was loyal to Elsie all her life but could not bring herself to say warm things about her writing. She never mentioned her sister's financial dependency or the emotional strain it exacted on both sides, but worried about Elsie's health and living arrangements, even while she was being driven wild by her vagueness and intellectual hauteur. Andy White believed that Mother was secretly afraid of her, for reasons that went back to their childhood, but it may also be that Bryn Mawr was in play between them all along. Elsie had graduated in 1900, eight years before my mother entered the demanding and exalting Bryn Mawr of President M. Carey Thomas's time. The high shrine required four languages, prodigious reading, and a permanent engagement with the classics and a life of the mind. My mother did well there—she graduated fourth in her class—but two decades later, when she'd become the most significant woman editor in New York, was editing Mary McCarthy and Vladimir Nabokov and John O'Hara and Elizabeth Bishop, and week by week having a hand in every aspect of the
New Yorker,
she may have also crazily believed that she'd abandoned the groves of Spenser and Goethe and Kant, where Elsie strolled every day. The two met now and then, but were not capable of the offhand joke or passing embrace that would have blown all this away. My mother found a life-saving lightness in Andy White, but Elsie had no such resource—which inexorably caused my mother further guilt, and added that fresh twinge to the others.

Elsie never wavered. Toward the end of her life, she went resolutely back each summer to MacDowell, the writers' colony in New Hampshire, even in seasons when she'd not been invited to return, again occupying one of the cottages where lunch was left silently at the door in a little basket, and then joining the other artists and poets for jolly dinners and interesting conversations each evening. I happily remember her in her seventies, when she was a neighbor of mine in Rockland County, upriver from New York. She had a tiny house tucked behind a stone wall in the village of Piermont, a cottage so bijou that you had to grab a banister rope while ascending the steep circular staircase to the second floor. Here on a summer Sunday, Elsie would have me and my family to tea on her terrace, a bare few yards from the pallid Hudson. Appearing with her thick braid coiled on her head and wearing amber or ivory beads, a Navajo bracelet, and a white lawn dress that dated back to 1908 or 1910, she would pour tea into thin family China cups, and have me pass round the slivers of cinnamon toast while she talked affectionately with my wife, Evelyn, and our daughters. Roaring outboards sometimes made for a pause in our conversation, and my daughter Alice would slip away from the table to keep watch on the saucer of milk that Elsie had put down for the garter snake said to live in the wall. Elsie, resuming, would mention her neighbor Horace Gregory, the poet, her archaeologist friend Hetty Goldman, and her good friend Thornton Wilder, the playwright. "You've read
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
?" she asked Callie, who was then about ten. "No? Well, one day
soon,
I'm sure." A little before this time, when my brother Joe White and Allene Messer were getting married and preparing to get into the boat-building line of work,
Elsie picked out a nice book for their wedding present:
The Life of Nietzsche.

Ill and old, she ended up in a retirement home in Westchester County, with her books and a few sticks of her own furniture. Visiting New York one day, at eighty-three, she died at the Cosmopolitan Club, with a check from her publisher in her pocket-book—an advance, issued that day, against her next book. Way to go out, Elsie!

 

Two more glimpses of Aunt Elsie have surfaced, arriving within three weeks of each other last spring. Dr. Marilyn Norcini, a cultural anthropologist whom I encountered by chance while on a visit to the University of Pennsylvania, turned out to be a wellspring of knowledge about Elsie's days in New Mexico in the 1920s and '30s. She mailed me a packet of my aunt's writings and records, which center on her efforts to appreciate and preserve the expiring culture of the Pueblo lands and people, and to fight for them a little on the political front. In 1935 she appears to have been instrumental in the adoption of a constitution by the Santa Clara Pueblo, which brought claims by various tribal groups into accord. It was signed on one of those iron-cold January mornings in the Southwest: a photograph shows Elsie standing in the snow amid several bundled-up sachems and elders, one whom is wearing an eagle-feather bonnet. There is also further documentation of her studies with Jung, and, most touching to me, a bibliography which lists eighty-three articles she wrote for national periodicals between 1910 and 1963—the steadiest flow is in the teens and twenties—for magazines like
The Nation, The Saturday
Review, Dial,
and
The Atlantic.
It begins with "Toilers of the Tenements," for
McClure's
in July 1910, and includes "Must Great Women Be Ruthless?" in the
Ladies Home Journal
for February, 1928, and "New Deal for the Indian" in the June 15, 1939,
New Republic.
A nice body of work, if never quite a livelihood.

And then, right after the Elsie trove, here came a little packet of letters written by my mother in the 1950s and '60s to a garden or garden-and-literature correspondent of hers in New York named Ambrose Flack. These had lately been unearthed in the attic of a cottage on Fire Island by a renter who didn't know Flack or Katharine S. White but somehow remembered my name and connection, and sent them along. Most of these are about generiads and slipper gloxinias, and the like. But in March 1965, my mother responds at length to an inquiry from Flack about Elsie's book,
Willa Cather: A Memoir,
beginning with the news that when she herself was in college Elsie had taken her on more than one occasion to visit the novelist at her New York apartment on Bank Street. Then, in May 1921, the three meet again at the Central Park Casino, "...where the hanging violet-blue wisteria clusters seemed part of the Victorian age." The lines are from Elsie's memoir, which goes on about her subject to say, "Her way of delivering herself completely to the situation of a little party she was giving and making a friend feel welcomed was most charming. The warm, assertive, direct outgoing side of her nature still came up from the depths of her distance to meet the occasion."

Here is my mother, on the same moment: "My report on the day when Miss Cather, my sister, and I met for tea
under the wisteria vine in Central Park would have been very different from the one in my sister's book! It was a matter of two writers, each obsessed with their own books in process, and each hardly allowing the other to get a word in. Miss Cather won. My sister had been wounded and was just back from a long and dreadful experience (of which she wrote or was writing in
Shadow Shapes,
her wartime French diary) and she trustingly thought that Miss Cather was there as a friend to hear about her, Elizabeth's, ordeal. It soon became evident to
me
that Miss Cather was there for another reason—to get factual detail and background for her own novel in progress, since she had not been in France at all and was writing
One of Ours.
(It turned out to be her poorest novel.) I resented this at the time, though my sister did not, and I probably still do."

 

One more aunt. My father's sister, Hildegarde Angell, three years younger, had the same long face and grave look as he but much larger brown eyes; there was something exotic and thrilling about her, for me. When I was quite young she told me about a day the summer before when she'd taken her bathing suit off while at the beach in Provincetown, and, seeing no one else about, had gone for a walk along the shore without a towel. If another woman hove into view in the distance it wouldn't matter, she told herself, and if the figure turned out to be a man she would reverse course and stroll back to her towel and
maillot.
In time a tiny figure did appear up ahead, and by the time she could make out that it was a man she saw that he, too, was naked. She forged ahead, telling herself not to be the first
to bail out. They approached each other, exchanged nods and friendly "Good afternoons," and went on by. I made her tell this to me all over again.

Another reason Aunt Hildegarde still holds a bit of glamour is that I don't know enough about her. She graduated from Wellesley but I don't remember what her work was after that. Now there's no one left for me to ask about this. She passed extended times in Mexico and South America, and in 1930 Norton published a serious, well-regarded biography of hers,
Simon Bolivar.
It's my belief, uncorroborated, that she went through an extended, never-resolved love affair with a married man. She was often around on weekends after my parents were divorced and came skating or hiking with us and friends of Father's, sitting out in the open with sandwiches and hard boiled eggs on their laps afterward, with everyone smoking and talking heatedly about books and plays and painters and politics. She joined Nancy and Father and me in the middle of a vacation at a small ranch in Montana in 1930, and on hot afternoons on the trails above the Little Big Horn would sometimes take off her shirt and ride along ahead of me in jeans and bra. One day, I rode up beside her while she was reading a letter that had just come in the mail, and announced what I saw at the top of the page "'Darling Hildegarde—'"

She screeched and slashed her hat at me, but the news held up. Later that year she married the letter-writer, Granville Smith—wonderful, delightful Granville, another man in the family at last and a pal for life. He must have been in his late forties then: a lively bow-legged man out of Kansas City and Yale. He was bald, with a round jaw, crinkly
narrow eyes, and a Roman nose that shot down from his high forehead. He knew Mexico, too, and the very next summer Nancy and Father and I joined the brand-new Smiths in the Gulf Coast refinery town of Tampico, where we all lived in the mayor's house—actually,
El Calde
lived upstairs, so there was always a cop in a sombrero on guard or asleep at the foot of the steps. One day, at siesta time, there was a loud report outside our windows, where the guard of the moment had fired his rifle at a kid trying to steal my sister's bathing suit off the line, but missed. Each afternoon, Granville came home from his job at the oil camp covered with smudges of creosote—some of it came off on Hildegarde—which he wiped away with a cloth dipped in gasoline before heading off for his bath. He was an oil man but perhaps closer to roustabout than tycoon.