Читать книгу As It Was: A Memoir - Robert M. Pennoyer - Страница 9

We children grew up enjoying the many places where our mother had grown up. Matinecock, a few miles from Round Bush, was Grandpa’s 250-acre estate on East Island in Glen Cove connected to Long Island by a stone bridge. A long, linden-bordered driveway led to the forty-seven-room Georgian brick manor house, complete with eighteen fireplaces and sixteen bathrooms, which he had built in 1908. There were broad, shaded lawns; a dairy farm with prizewinning Guernseys and Jersey cows and chickens; and terraces, greenhouses, and gardens—walled, cut flower, and vegetable. The flower gardens never failed to win blue ribbons at the shows. In 1935 my grandfather wrote to my mother: “Kelly [the superintendent of gardens] is building up quite a reputation for me as a gardening chap, which is very pleasant though rather undeserved. When I get into gardening circles my lamentable ignorance sticks out like a sore thumb!” And three years later: “The Flower Show is on this week—I went this a.m. and found Kelly one vast smile. We entered seventeen classes which is a very satisfactory performance. Kelly is now talking about taking a holiday from showing. The competition is becoming greater and the strain likewise and I agree with him it would be better to let someone else win some prizes.”

Among the other Matinecock amenities were a twelve-car garage, a tool and harness shop, a mile of private beach, and a long dock leading to the float where in spring and summer my grandfather, uncles, and occasionally my father would board the sleek-hulled diesel-powered Navette for the trip down Long Island Sound to the East River and Wall Street. I recall the early morning when I went with my mother to see my father off and, walking down to the float, looked through the glass windows of the deck house to see a sun-flooded cabin with a long table with a white tablecloth set for breakfast, a folded newspaper beside each setting.

Our grandmother Morgan had by all accounts been a very sweet person who did beautiful needlepoint and had a great deal to do with creating the quiet elegance of Matinecock’s interiors, as well as the supernal beauty of its gardens (she was an authority on horticulture and botany and involved with the Arnold Arboretum in Boston). In 1926 she was stung by a bee in her rose garden and developed encephalitis. The doctors assured my grandfather that she would recover, but she went into a coma and died after two and a half months of insentience. As a tribute to her he gave the town of Glen Cove twenty-six acres of choice waterfront property along Hempstead Harbor, which he named Morgan Memorial Park.

Matinecock on East Island, Glen Cove, built by Grandfather Morgan in 1910

Grandpa’s Camp Uncas was in the Adirondack Forest Preserve, south of Raquette Lake. It consisted of a rustic central lodge on a knoll above the lake, with overscale hand-wrought furniture, such as Adirondack beds (I remember the bright-red Hudson Bay blankets). There was a separate dining hall down the hill, with a mammoth oval table, rough-hewn fireplace, bearskin rugs, and a Steinway grand; a carriage house; a smithy where the horses were shod; a greenhouse; an icehouse; a boathouse; even a private fire engine, and stables and outbuildings for the staff. All this on thousands of untrammeled acres. As for the origin of the place name, the historical Uncas was a seventeenth-century sachem, or chief, of the Mohegans, not to mention a principal character in The Last of the Mohicans.

The main lodge at Camp Uncas

Cabin above the lake near the main lodge

The dining hall

The camp was built of logs felled on the property. In the main lodge and dining hall, the log construction was unusual in that the logs were not interlocked, as in conventional log buildings, but were pinned together at beveled corners. The scale was massive: the dining hall was twenty-four by thirty-six feet, the walls twelve feet high at the eaves, with a cathedral ceiling twenty feet high at the ridge. Floors, walls, and ceilings were all of polished planks and peeled and polished natural logs.

No cars were allowed. In the morning when the night train from New York to Racquette Lake made its special stop in the woods at the entrance to the road leading to Camp Uncas, we were met in summer by carriages, the one in front always drawn by a matched set of gray Belgians, named May and June. In winter there were sleighs to meet us, drawn by four horses with red tassels and sleigh bells on their harnesses; you sat on thick fur rugs, which you also had over you. The dirt road to the lake took us six miles through deep woods. Every mile there was a small wooden sign in the shape of a turtle (the Uncas logo) announcing the mile mark: five … three … one.

My parents’ good friend Edward Streeter, a journalist and novelist whose bestselling Father of the Bride would be made into a movie starring no less than Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor, wrote in the camp guest book:

Places can produce chords and dischords just as musical instruments. Every note fulfills every other note: the fat beds with turkey red blankets; the noise of wood fires in the building, heard through three blankets; glittering icicles hanging from deep eaves; little animals, clinging eternally to logs; the lake, under its creaseless blanket of white; dining room chairs on which one may rock slowly back and forth while eating; golden moments with a book after hours of being hurled violently to the ground; the hopeless straining rush down Sugar Hill and the masterful joy on reaching the lake unscathed; hot cocoa; steaming, fat horses; blue sky through the tops of trees …”

My mother was not musical, and I never heard her sing except in church and then so softly you could barely hear her. Although she regularly attended both the opera, where she occupied the Morgan box, and the Philharmonic, where my father was a trustee, the level of her musical appreciation can be gleaned from the fact that when we had a party for her eightieth birthday, at Piping Rock, the only song she asked the family to sing was “The Prune Song,” by the old vaudeville crooner and composer Frank Crumit. “No matter how young a prune may be it’s always full of wrinkles / Women get them on their face / Prunes get them every place / Prohibition bothers us but prunes don’t sit and brood / No matter how young a prune may be it’s always getting stewed.” All the Pennoyer children, including me—and I’m tone-deaf—sang these Crumit “silly songs.”

When you walked into the living room of the main lodge, the first thing you saw, sitting on the table near the door, was the wind-up Victrola. The only record there, aside from those Crumit ballads, was another great favorite of my mother’s, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” a late-nineteenth-century hobo song that, according to hearsay, may have been scribbled on the wall of a prison cell to boot by a character called “One-Finger Ellis.” It’s traditionally sung to the tune of the Presbyterian hymn “Revive Us Again.” The refrain goes, “Hallelujah, I’m a bum / Hallelujah, bum again / Hallelujah, give us a handout / To revive us again.” So no Cole Porter, no Irving Berlin, no Gershwin, nothing but Frank Crumit and One-Finger Ellis. That was the extent of my musical education. When I met Vicky I had never heard a Beethoven symphony. It was entirely through her that I learned to appreciate classical music.

The high point of a typical summer day at Uncas was rowing in Adirondack boats along the half-mile-wide lake to a stream that led to Picnic Rock. We could catch crayfish with our bare hands, and on the way back might hear a beaver slapping his tail against the smooth surface of the water and, around the point leading to the boathouse, the croaking of bullfrogs basking on the lily pads that grew in the shallow water near the shore. In winter when the snow was deep a friend and I would build a snow fort near the path leading from the main lodge down to the dining hall, and bombard my sisters and their friends with snow balls as they ran by, squealing.

My mother came of age in a long-since-vanished England. She told me her most vivid early memory was standing on a table in her grandfather Pierpont Morgan’s house at 14 Princes Gate when she was four, in 1901, watching Queen Victoria’s funeral procession. (In 1922 her father donated that house to the U.S. government for use as the residence of American ambassadors to the Court of St. James’s; today it is the headquarters for the Royal College of General Practitioners.) Her father and grandfather had taken turns every six months running the respective Morgan banks in London and New York. As a result my mother and her older sister never went to school, but were well tutored and became fluent in French and German. They never had an opportunity to make friends. This explains the sad fact that she had no bridesmaids at her wedding. Her sole attendant was her sister.

Having lived in England for six months a year as she was growing up, my mother felt perfectly at home there. My grandmother, being a Bostonian, had taken naturally to the understated British way of life, country life especially. And my grandfather loved the countryside and the life of an English country squire. He maintained an undying loyalty to England, and continued to believe that that country and the United States must “stick together at all costs.” In 1933 the Times of London, looking back to the First World War and perhaps ahead to the Second, sang his anthem in an editorial: “It has been said, but too little remembered, that our victories were gained as often in the counting houses as on the fields of battle. Without the willingness to help, the integrity, and the confident resolution of Mr. J. P. Morgan, much that was accomplished by the treasuries in those desperate years could hardly have been undertaken. The memory of these services will not fade on this side of the Atlantic.”

The family’s base in England was Wall Hall, a two-thousand-acre landholding consisting of several farms in Hertfordshire, just twenty-six miles north of London. Through the mid-1930s we children were taken regularly across the Atlantic to stay there for weeks at a time, making the passage on some of the Cunard’s great liners: the Berengaria, Aquitania, Mauritania, and Scythia.

For a young boy ocean travel in the 1930s was an adventure, and it gave me the chance to know and respect the Atlantic in all its moods. The liners of that day had no radar, and no depth finders. To reduce the risk of collision, east- and west-bound ships were assigned separate lanes miles apart, but the captain relied on the vigilance of lookouts to warn of other seagoing traffic. At night every ship had to carry red and green running lights. If you saw both red and green on another ship you knew you were on a collision course and had to take immediate steps to avoid collision. If you saw only red or green you knew the other ship was heading off to starboard or port. In fog this was no help, and the ship would slow to five knots, and sound a long, booming blast on its deep-throated horn every few minutes through day and night until the fog lifted.

To find the depth on entering a harbor, with the ship barely moving, a sailor on a platform hanging out over the side below the bridge would take a piece of lead on a thin line, tied with bits of ribbon every six feet to mark off the fathoms. He would hang the lead over the side and, as he paid out the line, swing the lead fore and aft along the side in an ever-widening arc until it dropped into the water way forward, and as it sank to the bottom he would call out the depth in fathoms—“by the mark six … by the mark five … ”—to the bridge.

These were the days before air conditioning, so you opened the porthole in your cabin, and at night enjoyed the sound of passing waves and whistling wind. A change in the weather might bring mounting seas that, if you were on one of the lower decks, would cascade through the porthole until you leapt up to close it.

In the 1930s liners had no stabilizers, and pitched and rolled when passing through an Atlantic gale. You would be forced to stay off the outer decks, and hold on to railings as you made your way to the dining room, where you would be offered a limited menu in a room emptied of passengers who were lying in the cabins in misery. When the storm abated you could go on deck and watch a large sea bird close to the water glide effortlessly up the side of a twenty-foot swell before disappearing over the crest and floating down into the trough on the far side before lifting to the crest of the next wave. There were days when the sea was glassy smooth, and you might see mist spouting from a whale, or a school of porpoises cavorting in and out of the waves as they swam along beside the ship.

In those early days a ship at sea had no radio, and could send and receive messages only by Morse code, where the operator would tap out a message with a key using dots and dashes for each letter. A ship in distress would send out an SOS—dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot (the acronym for “save our souls”)—and give the latitude and longitude for the ship’s location. The code of the sea required any ship within range to go to the rescue, and more than once our liner diverted course and increased speed to go to the aid of another ship until assured that ships closer to the stricken vessel would handle the rescue. Harrowing accounts of disasters at sea were front-page news. In 1934 when I was nine I was thrilled by pictures of the Morro Castle, a cruise ship that caught fire during a storm eight miles off the coast of New Jersey, with heavy loss of life, and of the gutted hulk when a few days later it washed ashore on the beach at Asbury Park; and in 1937 by pictures of the flaming death of the six-hundred-foot zeppelin Hindenburg, Hitler’s pride, when, after flying passengers clear across the Atlantic from Germany, the hydrogen gas that kept it airborne exploded during a thunderstorm as it was trying to land at Lakehurst, New Jersey.

In the diary that I kept intermittently in my teens I described Wall Hall as “ideal,” remarking “the English breakfasts, and the Woolsey, a small twenty-year-old coupe, which I learned to drive in 1939, the beautiful gardens, and the rabbit shooting.” It was all out of Wind in the Willows: Wall Hall could have passed for Toad Hall. I remember the Percheron horses that plowed the fields; Blackbird Farm, where they kept the machinery for tilling the fields and shearing the Suffolk Down sheep that our farmer crowed outranked the king’s; and, across the lane behind the little fourteenth-century Norman church, Church Farm, whose prizewinning white pigs were a source of pride for my grandfather. I also well remember the Home Farm near the main house, with the prize herds of Jersey cows and a prize albino bull that bore the pompous name of Histon Royalist Darlington.

The building itself embodied the comfort and beauty of an ample English country manor house, although it boasted some of the trimmings of a castle, with a porte-cochère at the front entrance and a crenellated roof. The interior was bright and homelike, with a large living room with vaulted windows opening to the croquet lawn; a smaller sitting room with French doors opening on to a shaded lawn where in summer we took afternoon tea (that buttered bread!); a passageway off the dining room leading to the greenhouse filled with the pungent warm smell of happy, well-tended plants; and a large entrance hall with a wide staircase winding up to the second floor. The banister railing was of polished wood, and when no one was looking I would leap onto the railing and slide quickly down, rounding the curve and easily beating my sisters to the bottom.

The second-floor nursery cupboards were filled with the toys that my mother and her siblings had played with as children. I remember Nanny leading me over to the nursery window when I was about six, and pointing down at my grandfather strolling across the lawn in the company of a man who was wearing lurid purple knee britches, and telling me, “That’s His Eminence the archbishop of Canterbury.”

On another visit to Wall Hall, when Kay and I were riding our bicycles on the dirt road between the dairy barn and the back entrance of the house, my bike tipped over and I fell off and hit my head—I still have the scar. I passed out, and Kay was unable to rouse me. At that moment one of the farmers, with a big horse and a cart with enormous wheels, happened by and carried me back up to the house, where I was laid out on the kitchen table. My parents were in Holland, and my mother flew immediately back.

Wall Hall was run by Miss Curley. Bingley was the head butler (his immediate predecessor had possessed the most disagreeable name Biles), and William was the under butler or head footman. The footmen wore striped pants and dark-green coats that had silver buttons emblazoned with Grandpa’s coat of arms (a stag head) and motto (“Onward and Upward”).

Having known and loved Wall Hall as a boy I make no apology for going on loving the England that I knew, when the king still ruled the empire; for identifying so strongly with the incredible courage of the English people through the Blitz; for responding, even now, emotionally, when I hear recordings of Churchill’s speeches promising that England would never, never surrender, summoning his people to ultimate victory against Hitler; or for embracing the ravishing beauty of these lines from Shakespeare’s King Richard the Second:

The north side of Wall Hall. The large room on the left was the library, the most used room in the house. The window on the third floor at the right was the nursery where RMP heard the pigeons cooing in the dovecote on the right when he was put to bed as a small child for his afternoon nap.

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle …

This precious stone set in the silver sea …

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.