Roger Angell remembers his father’s spirit as a single parent, in this Personal History from 2000.
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.
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.
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.
He wasn’t cruel: he was scared to death. Not much was going right with him, his money was running low, and he had to borrow from his sister, Hildegarde, to keep things going; my mother, who was doing well at, paid an increasing share of the school bills for Nancy and me—a bitter blow for him. He had taken on the burdens of being a single parent—both parents, actually—with little talent for the work and no firsthand example or memory to draw upon. He had no idea what kids were like.
What a marriage that must have been—hers and my father’s, I mean—stuffed with sex and brilliance and psychic murder, and imparting a lasting unease. Get hold of Sophocles or bring back Groucho: it’s time to sweep up these bodies.
What lightened us up for good was Father’s sudden notion, in the autumn of 1931, of finding a young Columbia student to come by late in the afternoons to provide me with some company until he got home from the office. Arthur Goldschmidt turned up for the job—a slight, smiling political-economy major from San Antonio, with a slant of blond hair across his forehead, and fingers stained yellow by his incessant Chesterfields, and after Father caught my eye he asked him to stay on for dinner.
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