We called it 407 after its address, 407 Highland Avenue—an early Victorian, a big house on a street of big houses. It had high ceilings, airy and claustrophobic at the same time, like a church. It had a cured smell, the comfortable pungence of a can of pipe tobacco or mink coats in closets. There were huge Oriental rugs, wingback chairs, and standup ashtrays. On tables were objects of crystal, bronze, and sterling silver with monograms—cigarette boxes, porringers, picture frames, and a tea set of architectural splendor. To me, at the age of ten or so, it all had the air of furnishings for a ritual, however outworn.
My grandfather, Henry Southworth Allen, Jr., was called Harry. (My father is the third with that name, and I am the fourth.) He was a managing partner at Spencer Trask, a Wall Street investment bank. It was a station in life that gave him much satisfaction. He bought 407 after the First World War. An artist had owned it once, and had added a studio that went up two stories, enclosing an exterior wall whose bedroom windows overlooked what became the living room. After bedtime, we children could peer down on the mysteries of grownups, the men backhanding logs into the fireplace and lighting the women’s cigarettes.
When the three Allen sons, my father and his two younger brothers, got together there on holidays, they had wary smiles, as if life at 407 were an inside joke. They had grace, too, gliding around in pleated trousers that hung from high nineteen-forties waists. They lightly hitched them up by the creases before they sat down; they held cigarettes at the last knuckle of their fingers and smoked only half of them. They had spent their youths on the right lists, for coming-out parties at the Ritz-Carlton or the Plaza. That was before the war. (...)
I was born in 1941; my grandmother died soon after, of asthma and heart disease, at the age of fifty-six. She and her death seemed to occupy 407, at the edge of our peripheral vision. My grandfather took refuge in a small, dark, ground-floor bedroom. He would lead me and my younger sister, Julie, in there, lift us up, and let us put one hand in his penny jar. We could keep all the pennies we could hold—a lesson in the fundamentals of capitalism.
He had a little potbelly, quick eyes, and a busy precision about him. In middle age he had learned to figure skate in the old style, gliding backward to draw figure eights. He believed in homeopathy. He was superstitious. If he saw a man on crutches during his morning ferry ride to Wall Street and then the market went down, he’d come home grumbling about the “goddam cripple.” After very bad days, he would throw away the necktie he’d worn.
Into the nineteen-forties, he still went to New York on Saturdays to work a half day in the old style. He would not return until evening. My father asked him once what he did with the other half of the day.
He said: “I have lunch with Kerensky and then we go antique shopping.”
Kerensky! Alexander Kerensky, who lived in New York then, had been the Prime Minister of Russia, the last chance for democracy before the Bolsheviks overthrew him. I love the bravado of this lie. The truth was, my grandfather spent Saturdays with his secretary and their son: he had another family.
I wrote a poem about this:
She resented him for allowing one and only one martini to be served before dinner. He kept a close eye on the drinking, a family disease. I suspect she also didn’t like having to fight him for my father’s loyalty. He insisted that my father—though not his younger brother, David—follow him to Wall Street, as if it were a family legacy. My grandmother thought that he should be an Episcopal priest, but she was overruled. I think he would have found the clergy tedious, but he found working as a bond broker tedious, too—and he lacked the knack for making money. As for my father’s own youthful ambitions, he mooned over two impossible romances: Broadway songwriting and going to sea, as he had read about it in Joseph Conrad. (...)
Near the end of his junior year, he quit Princeton to attempt a transatlantic sail in a thirty-six-foot Friendship sloop with two friends—a feat that was covered in at least one New York newspaper. The boat sprung a board five hundred miles out, and they had to pump their way back to Nova Scotia. While repairs were being made, my father got a job harpooning swordfish. He hated the cruelty of it.
He told me about his boyhood failures, perhaps to comfort me for mine. Once, at St. George’s, he was running down a football field with the winning pass arcing toward him, and dropped the ball. I was sorry he told me.
In Southport, before the Depression, my father crewed on a Star boat that tied for first in the Eastern championships. The skipper had already rented a flatcar to haul the boat to San Francisco for the Nationals. In the sail-off, the other Star went out looking for wind on a reach and found it, and that was that. So many almosts, so many not quites.
He had a little potbelly, quick eyes, and a busy precision about him. In middle age he had learned to figure skate in the old style, gliding backward to draw figure eights. He believed in homeopathy. He was superstitious. If he saw a man on crutches during his morning ferry ride to Wall Street and then the market went down, he’d come home grumbling about the “goddam cripple.” After very bad days, he would throw away the necktie he’d worn.
Into the nineteen-forties, he still went to New York on Saturdays to work a half day in the old style. He would not return until evening. My father asked him once what he did with the other half of the day.
He said: “I have lunch with Kerensky and then we go antique shopping.”
Kerensky! Alexander Kerensky, who lived in New York then, had been the Prime Minister of Russia, the last chance for democracy before the Bolsheviks overthrew him. I love the bravado of this lie. The truth was, my grandfather spent Saturdays with his secretary and their son: he had another family.
I wrote a poem about this:
Grandpa had a mistress.My grandfather was everything to my father. My mother despised him. “He was such a phony,” she would say.
The mistress had a son.
When Grandpa died the cancelled checks
Would show what he had done.
She resented him for allowing one and only one martini to be served before dinner. He kept a close eye on the drinking, a family disease. I suspect she also didn’t like having to fight him for my father’s loyalty. He insisted that my father—though not his younger brother, David—follow him to Wall Street, as if it were a family legacy. My grandmother thought that he should be an Episcopal priest, but she was overruled. I think he would have found the clergy tedious, but he found working as a bond broker tedious, too—and he lacked the knack for making money. As for my father’s own youthful ambitions, he mooned over two impossible romances: Broadway songwriting and going to sea, as he had read about it in Joseph Conrad. (...)
Near the end of his junior year, he quit Princeton to attempt a transatlantic sail in a thirty-six-foot Friendship sloop with two friends—a feat that was covered in at least one New York newspaper. The boat sprung a board five hundred miles out, and they had to pump their way back to Nova Scotia. While repairs were being made, my father got a job harpooning swordfish. He hated the cruelty of it.
He told me about his boyhood failures, perhaps to comfort me for mine. Once, at St. George’s, he was running down a football field with the winning pass arcing toward him, and dropped the ball. I was sorry he told me.
In Southport, before the Depression, my father crewed on a Star boat that tied for first in the Eastern championships. The skipper had already rented a flatcar to haul the boat to San Francisco for the Nationals. In the sail-off, the other Star went out looking for wind on a reach and found it, and that was that. So many almosts, so many not quites.
by Henry Allen, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: courtesy Henry Allen
