Читать книгу As It Was: A Memoir - Robert M. Pennoyer - Страница 8

My brother, Paul, was five years older than me. The family had taken to calling him Paulo when he was young, because he was black haired and dark complexioned and altogether “looked Italian.” I was close to all my sisters, but I looked up to him, followed him around, copied him. He sailed, I sailed. I never mixed and mingled in Long Island society the way I could have, with the boys and girls my age at the Seawanhaka Yacht and Piping Rock clubs, because he didn’t. And because he didn’t ride horseback, I didn’t. At St. Paul’s he skipped the sixth form in favor of spending a year in Europe before going off to Harvard, and this led me, when my time came, to leave at the end of the fifth form when I was seventeen to go to Harvard. When I got back from the war and began to lead an independent life and met Vicky, I stopped following him. But I went on loving him.

Politically he and I were poles apart but we never had an argument, which was not surprising because I do not recall anyone in our family ever having an argument. We had a deep bond as brothers rooted in mutual respect and trust that lasted a lifetime. He was as well a great friend to Vicky and an unsurpassable son to our parents (he lived all his long life in the converted stables at Round Bush, and made it a point to see my mother pretty much every day until her death).

At the age of thirteen, Paul had a twelve-foot dinghy with a red sail that he kept on the beach at Matinecock Point, Grandpa’s estate on Long Island Sound. On summer mornings after breakfast I would hide in the hall outside his bedroom, hoping he would take me sailing. When he emerged he would pass me wordlessly, but then, at the curve of the stairs, pause and give me the nod I’d been longing for. Out on the water he would continue to say not one word, except perhaps to grumble about the wind being too light. One day we left Matinecock in a strong wind, going some eight miles along the coast past Bayville and around the point to Seawanhaka in Oyster Bay Harbor. The trip took several hours, Paul at the helm and me doing my best to bail out as white-capped waves surged over the gunwale.

By the time I was twelve we were keeping the dinghy at Seawanhaka Yacht Club where Dad had an S Class sloop that he raced on weekends. One summer day I hoisted the red sail on Paul’s boat and headed down the harbor toward the town of Oyster Bay. I had a fair wind and the boat was gurgling along, leaving a wake of bubbles. I was enjoying the sense of freedom, of being able to do this alone, when suddenly two porpoises going faster than my dinghy surged out of the water, passing within inches on either side. They could easily have tipped me over, but they meant no harm and disappeared. I will never forget their beauty.

As we grew older we took to larger boats, and cruised the coast of New England almost to the Canadian border. We were shipwrecked once in 1940 when I was fifteen and Paul was twenty, sailing south off the Atlantic coast of Cape Cod when the forty-two-foot Alden schooner he had chartered lost its rudder in a gale off Monomoy Point at the southern tip of the cape. Paul’s superb seamanship saved our lives.

Boats ran in our family. When I was eight my parents took me to Quincy, Massachusetts, to see my Uncle Harry Morgan’s wife, my Aunt Catty, whose father, Charles Francis Adams, had been secretary of the navy during World War I, christen the five-hundred-foot U.S.S. Quincy, built for the navy in the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company yard. The Quincy rested on two wide wooden ways that ran down an incline into the harbor. The yard workers had greased the ways with tons of rotting bananas that would help the ship slide into the water. I remember the stench, and the cheer that went up when Aunt Catty smashed a bottle of champagne against the bow, the yard hands knocked out the props, and the ship began very slowly to slide down the ways until, gathering speed, it set up a great wave as it surged out into the harbor. (An awful fate lay in store for her: in August 1942 the Quincy would be torpedoed in the battle of Savo Island, off Guadalcanal, and sunk, bow first, with the loss of 370 men.)

Paul also taught me how to use guns. He kept a rifle and pistol, both .22-caliber, in the house. We would take these, along with rounds of ammunition, to the woods and practice shooting at targets nailed to a board. My experience with handling guns came in handy later. While training in the navy at Harvard we used rifles for weekly target practice in the basement of Memorial Hall, and studied the guns we would use when we went to the Pacific.

Paul was no more talkative when we target-practiced than when we sailed. He could go whole days without uttering a single word at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My father once took me aside to ask if I knew what Paul was thinking. Wordsworth wrote that the child is father of the man. Not so with Paul. His early taciturnity did not persist: he would become an eloquent advocate as a litigation lawyer and an accomplished crafter of words for legal briefs.

I think of Paul every time I pass the little garden of the Frick on Seventieth Street, a masterpiece of the great English landscape designer Russell Page. Paul served as a trustee of the collection for many years and was the lawyer for the museum. He told me that in order to get that garden approved he had had to appear before a number of city agencies, including the Landmarks Commission. At one of the many hearings he had said, “I give you my word that if you grant us your approval, the Frick will never attempt to build an extension on that lot.” At which point one of the commissioners countered, “Why should we take your word for it?” Paul said to me, “This made me angry, because in our family, when we give our word, it means something.”

I have walked past that garden regularly for years. In 1985 Vicky and I moved just down the block from it, to a cooperative apartment at Seventieth and Madison, with our little wire-haired dachshund Gidi, who lived to be fifteen, succeeded by Zizza (named for the concierge at the Baur au Lac Hotel in Zurich, who found her for us and sent her over alone at age six weeks on Swiss Air). So for almost thirty years I was reminded of Paul each morning and evening as I walked our wire-haired dachshunds past the little garden that he had helped to bring into being.

Paul on his carrier, the U.S.S. Monterey, 1944

Paul was eighty-nine when he died, in 2010. He had asked to be buried in a plain wooden box. His sons Tad and Sheldon cut the timber in a shed behind the stables at Round Bush, using elm and cedar, locust and pine. The handles were made from rope from his forty-eight-foot ketch Arabella, which for over more than forty years had taken him and his wife Cecily and their children to every harbor along the New England coast from Long Island to the Canadian border.

Paul had crossed the threshold that the rest of us have soon enough to cross, and I ended the eulogy I gave at St. John’s of Lattingtown with these words from Tennyson:

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning at the bar

When I put out to sea.

He had been awarded the Navy Cross for sinking a Japanese carrier during the Battle of the Philippine Sea in the summer of 1944. When his funeral service ended and we were emerging from the church, we were met with a deafening roar that shook the ground underfoot as four jet fighters, in the navy’s last salute to him, came thundering in at low altitude, and moments later left us in silence as they climbed into the pale blue of the February sky.