Romance
One spring Saturday when I was seven going on eight, my mother
brought me with her on an automobile outing with her young
lover and future husband, E. B. White. She took our family
car, a slope-nosed Franklin sedan, and we must have met Andy
by prearrangement at our garage. He did the driving. We left
New York and went up into Westchester County for lunch-this
was 1928 and it was still mostly country. On the way back, my
mother, who had taken the wheel, stripped the gears while
shifting, and we ground to a halt, halfway onto a shoulder of
the Bronx River Parkway. Disaster. Andy thumbed a ride to go
find a tow truck, and my mother, I now realize, was left to
make this into an amusing story to tell my father and my older
sister at dinner that evening. She almost never drove-thus the
screeching and scraping sounds beneath us and the agonized
look on her face when she got lost in mid-shift and we broke
down. It was also unusual, an adventure, for me to be alone
with her and her office friend Mr. White, as she’d described
him. I think I wasn’t meant to be there; maybe a Saturday date
with a schoolmate had fallen through, and she’d had no
recourse but to bring me along. But she never would have taken
me off on an outing that would require me to lie about it to
my father afterward, so the trip must have been presented to
him beforehand as a chance for her to practice her driving,
with the reliable Andy White as instructor. I had no idea, of
course, that she and I were stranded in a predicament, but I
recall sitting beside her on the running board of the ticking,
cooling Franklin while we waited, with the pale new shrubs and
pastoral grasses of the Parkway around us, and the occasional
roadster or touring car (with its occupants swiveling their
gaze toward us as they came by) swooshing past. Then a tow
truck appeared around the curve behind us, with Andy White
standing on the right-hand running board and waving
excitedly. Yay, I’m back, we’re rescued! My father would never
have done that-found a tow so quickly or waved like a kid when
he spotted us.
The story stops here. I don’t remember that night or anything
else about our little trip, but in less than two years my
parents were divorced and my mother and Andy married and
living on East Eighth Street. They soon had their own car, or
cars: they kept changing. The Depression had arrived, but they
were a successful New Yorker couple-she a fiction editor; he a
writer of casuals and poetry and the first-page Comment
section-and they loved driving around in an eight-year-old
Pierce-Arrow touring car, with a high-bustle trunk, side
mirrors, and flapping white roof. After their son was born-my
brother Joel-they moved up to a staid seven-passenger Buick
sedan. In the mid-thirties, Andy also acquired a secondhand
beige-and-black 1928 Plymouth roadster-country wheels,
used mostly around their place in Maine. The Buick still
mattered to him. Back when it was new, thieves stole it out of
a garage on University Place one night and used it in a daring
bank stick-up in Yonkers. Andy was upset, but when he read
an account of the crime in the newspapers the next day, with a
passage that went “and the robbers’ powerful getaway car
swiftly outdistanced police pursuers,” he changed sides.
“C’mon, Buick!” he said. “Go!”
Every family has its own car stories, but in another sense we
know them all in advance now, regardless of our age. The
collective American unconscious is stuffed with old Pontiacs,
and fresh reminders are never lacking. Weekend rallies flood
the Mendocino or Montpelier back roads with high-roofed
Model A’s and Chevys, revarnished 1936 Woodies, and thrumming,
leaf-tone T-Birds; that same night, back home again or
with our feet up at the Hyatt, we click onto TCM and find The
Grapes of Wrath, or Bonnie and Clyde, or Five Easy Pieces, or
Thelma & Louise, waiting to put us out on the narrow,
anachronism-free macadam once again. (A friend of mine used
to drive around the Village in his 1938 De Soto hearse, except
when it was out on lease to still another Godfather movie.)
Grand-children, clicking to 50 Cent or Eminem on their iPods
in the back seat, sigh and roll their eyes whenever the old
highwayman starts up again. Yes, car travel was bumpier and
curvier back then, with more traffic lights and billboards,
more cows and hillside graveyards, no air-conditioning and
almost no interstates, and with tin cans and Nehi signs and
red Burma-Shave jingles crowding the narrow roadside. Give
us a break.
Still, we drove, and what startles me from this great distance
is how often and how far. I was a New York City kid who knew
the subways and museums and movie theatres and zoos and
ballparks by heart, but in the 1930s also got out of town a
lot, mostly by car. I drove (well, was driven) to Bear
Mountain and Atlantic City and Gettysburg and Niagara Falls;
went repeatedly to Boston and New Hampshire and Maine; drove
to a Missouri cattle farm owned by an uncle; drove there
during another summer and thence onward to Santa Fe and
Tesuque and out to the Arizona Painted Desert. Then back
again, to New York. Before this, in March, 1933-it was the
week of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural-I’d
boarded a Greyhound bus to Detroit, along with a Columbia
student named Tex Goldschmidt, where we picked up a
test-model Terraplane sedan at the factory (courtesy of an
advertising friend of my father’s who handled the
Hudson-Essex account) and drove it back home. A couple of
months later, in company with a math teacher named Mr.
Burchell or Burkhill and four Lincoln School seventh-grade
classmates, I crammed into a buckety old Buick sedan and drove
to the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago; we came back
by way of Niagara Falls, and, because I had been there before
and knew the ropes, took time also to visit the Shredded Wheat
factory, some tacky mummies, and a terrific fifty-cent
roadside exhibition of dented and rusty,
candy-wrapper-littered barrels and iron balls in which
various over-the-brink daredevils had mostly met their
end. With one exception, all of us in our party were still
speaking.
If I now hop aboard some of these bygone trips for a mile or
two, it is not for the sake of easy nostaalgia-the fizz of
warm moxie up your nose; the Nabokovian names of roadside
tourist cottages; the glint of shattered glass and sheen of
blood around a tree-crumpled gray Reo; or the memory of
collies and children, unaccustomed to automotion, throwing
up beside their hastily parked family vehicles-but in search
of some thread or path that links these outings and sometimes
puts Canandaigua or Kirksville or Keams Canyon back in my
head when I wake up in the middle of the night. Effort can now
and then produce a sudden fragment of locality: the car
stopped and me waking up with my sweating cheek against the
gray plush of the back seat, as I stare at a mystifying
message, “VEEDOL,” painted on a square of white tin so bright
in the sun that it makes me wince. Veedol? Beyond it, against
the stucco gas-station wall, is a handmade sign, wavery in
the gasoline fumes rising outside my window. Where are we? I
want to sit up and ask my father, standing out there in his
sneakers, khaki pants, and an old shirt with rolled-up
sleeves, who is fishing his thick brown wallet-we’re on a long
haul to somewhere-out of a hip pocket, but I’m too dazed to
speak.
The first day of that 1933 school trip to the Chicago World’s
Fair went on forever, and it was after dark when we topped a
hillside in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, slowed at the vision of
Pittsburgh alight in the distance, and felt a little lurch and
jolt as the right rear wheel fell off the Buick and rolled
gently on ahead for a few yards by itself. I can’t remember
dinner, but it was past midnight when, rewheeled, we pulled up
at the McKeesport YMCA and settled for two double rooms, plus
cots. Jerry Tallmer, a surviving member of the party, tells me
that a fellow traveler, less suave than the rest of us,
confessed to him later that until this moment he’d held a
childhood notion that if you weren’t in bed by midnight you
died. Out in Chicago, we took in the House of Tomorrow and
Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Car; ogled Sally Rand’s “Streets
of Paris” but didn’t attend; went to the Museum of Natural
History; laughed at Chicago’s dinky elevated cars; and in our
little notebooks wrote down that Depression soup kitchen lines
in Chicago looked exactly like the ones in depressed New York.
We were smart and serious, and would be expected to report on
this trip in Social Studies, come fall. The Century of
Progress, we concluded, was mostly about advertising. One
afternoon, the temperature went down twenty-nine degrees in
an hour and a half as a black storm blew in from over Lake
Michigan; the next morning we read that the sightseeing plane
whose ticket window we’d seen at the Fair had crashed, killing
all aboard. Three days later, wheeling south from Niagara
Falls, my companions (including the heroic Burkhill or
Burchell, who did all the driving) offered to pay me two
dollars apiece if I’d just shut up for a change, and not speak
another word for the rest of the trip. Unaffronted and short
of cash, I agreed, and collected my princely ten bucks while
we were passing under the new George Washington Bridge, just
about home.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Let Me Finish
by Roger Angell
Copyright © 2006 by Roger Angell.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Harcourt Trade Publishers
Copyright © 2006
Roger Angell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-1510-1350-0
