New Selected Poems Read online

  Commander Billy’s drinking was a “pain in the neck.” He would take possession of Father’s sacred “rhino” armchair, sprawl legs astraddle, make the tried and true framework groan, and crucify Mother by roaring out verbose toasts in what he called “me boozy cockney-h’Irish.” He would drink to our cocktail shaker. “’Ere’s to the ’older of the Lowelldom nectar,” he would bellow. “Hip, hip, hooray for señor Martino, h’our h’old hipmate, ’elpmate, and hhonorary member of ’07—h’always h’able to navigate and never says dry.” We never got through a visit without one of Billy’s “Bottoms up to the ’ead of the Nation. “’Ere ’s to herb-garden ’Erb.” This was a swaggering dig at Herbert Hoover’s notoriously correct, but insular, refusal to “imbibe anything more potent than Bromo-Seltzer” at a war-relief banquet in Brussels. Commander Billy’s bulbous, water-on-the-brain forehead would glow and trickle with fury. Thinking on Herbert Hoover and Prohibition, he was unable to contain himself. “What a hick! We haven’t been steered by a gentleman of parts since the redoubtable Teddy.” He recited wet verses, such as the following inserted in Father’s class book:

  “I tread the bridge with measured pace;

  Proud, yet anguish marks my face—

  What worries me like crushing sin

  Is where on the sea can I buy dry gin?”

  In his cups, Commander Bilge acted as though he owned us. He looked like a human ash-heap. Cigar ashes buried the heraldic hedgehog on the ash tray beside him; cigar ashes spilled over and tarnished the golden stork embroidered on the table-cover; cigar ashes littered his own shiny blue-black uniform. Greedily Mother’s eyes would brighten, drop and brighten. She would say darkly, “I was brought up by Papà to be like a naval officer, to be ruthlessly neat.”

  Once Commander Billy sprawled back so recklessly that the armchair began to come apart. “You see, Charlotte,” he said to Mother, “at the height of my climacteric I am breaking Bob’s chair.”

  Harkness went in for tiresome, tasteless harangues against Amy Lowell, which he seemed to believe necessary for the enjoyment of his after-dinner cigar. He would point a stinking baby stogie at Mother. “’Ave a peteeto cigareeto, Charlotte,” he would crow. “Puff on this whacking black cheroot, and you’ll be a match for any reeking señorita femme fatale in the spiggotty republics, where blindness from Bob’s bathtub hooch is still unknown. When you go up in smoke, Charlotte, remember the Maine. Remember Amy Lowell, that cigar-chawing, guffawing, senseless and meterless, multimillion-heiress, heavyweight mascot on a floating fortress. Damn the Patterns! Full speed ahead on a cigareeto!”

  Amy Lowell was never a welcome subject in our household. Of course, no one spoke disrespectfully of Miss Lowell. She had been so plucky, so formidable, so beautifully and unblushingly immense, as Henry James might have said. And yet, though irreproachably decent herself apparently, like Mae West she seemed to provoke indecorum in others. There was an anecdote which I was too young to understand: it was about Amy’s getting her migraine headaches from being kept awake by the exercises of honeymooners in an adjacent New York hotel room. Amy’s relatives would have liked to have honored her as a personage, a personage a little outrée perhaps, but perfectly within the natural order, like Amy’s girlhood idol, the Duse. Or at least she might have been unambiguously tragic, short-lived, and a classic, like her last idol, John Keats. My parents piously made out a case for Miss Lowell’s Life of Keats, which had killed its author and was so much more manly and intelligible than her poetry. Her poetry! But was poetry what one could call Amy’s loud, bossy, unladylike chinoiserie—her free verse! For those that could understand it, her matter was, no doubt, blameless, but the effrontery of her manner made my parents relish Robert Frost’s remark that “writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net.”

  Whenever Amy Lowell was mentioned Mother bridled. Not distinguishing, not caring whether her relative were praised or criticized, she would say, “Amy had the courage of her convictions. She worked like a horse.” Mother would conclude characteristically, “Amy did insist on doing everything the hard way. I think, perhaps, that her brother, the President of Harvard, did more for other people.”

  Often Father seemed to pay little attention to the conversation of his guests. He would smack his lips, and beam absentmindedly and sensuously, as if he were anticipating the comforts of civilian life—a perpetual shore leave in Hawaii. The Harknesses, however, cowed him. He would begin to feel out the subject of his resignation and observe in a wheedle obscurely loaded with significance that “certain cits, no brighter than you or I, pay income taxes as large as a captain’s yearly salary.”

  Commander Harkness, unfortunately, was inclined to draw improper conclusions from such remarks. Disregarding the “romance of commerce,” he would break out into ungentlemanly tirades against capital. “Yiss, old Bob,” he would splutter, “when I consider the ungodly hoards garnered in by the insurance and broking gangs, it breaks my heart. Riches, reaches, overreaches! If Bob and I had half the swag that Harkness of Yale has just given Lowell of Harvard to build Georgian houses for Boston quee-eers with British accents!” He rumbled on morosely about retired naval officers “forced to live like coolies on their half-pay. Hurrah for the Bull Moose Party!” he’d shout. “Hurrah for Boss Curley! Hurrah for the Bolshies!”

  Nothing prevented Commander Billy from telling about his diplomatic mission in 1918, when “his eyes had seen the Bolshie on his native heath.” He had been in Budapest “during the brief sway of Béla Kun-Whon. Béla was giving those Hunkyland money-bags and educators the boot into the arms of American philanthropy!”

  Then Mother would say, hopefully, “Mamá always said that the old Hungarians did have taste. Billy, your reference to Budapest makes me heartsick for Europe. I am dying for Bob and Bobby’s permission to spend next summer at Etretat.”

  Commander Billy Harkness specialized in verses like “The Croix de Guerre”:

  “I toast the guy, who, crossing over,

  Abode in London for a year,

  The guy who to his wife and lover

  Returned with conscience clean and clear,

  Who nightly prowling Piccadilly

  Gave icy stares to floozies wild,

  And when approached said, ‘Bilgy Billy

  Is mama’s darling angel child—’

  Now he’s the guy who rates the croy dee geer!”

  Mother, however, smiled mildly. “Billy,” she would say, “my cousin, Admiral Ledyard Atkinson, always has a twinkle in his eye when he asks after your vers de société.”

  “‘Tommy’ Atkins!” snorted Commander Billy. “I know Tommy better than my own mother. He’s the first chapter in a book I’m secretly writing and leaving to the archives called Wild Admirals I Have Known. And now my bodily presence may no longer grace the inner sanctum of the Somerset Club, for fear Admiral Tommy’ll assault me with five new chapters of his Who Won the Battle of Jutland?”

  After the heat and push of Commander Billy, it was pleasant to sit in the shade of the Atkinsons. Cousin Ledyard wasn’t exactly an admiral: he had been promoted to this rank during the World War and had soon reverted back to his old rank of captain. In 1926 he was approaching the retiring age and was still a captain. He was in charge of a big, stately, comfortable, but anomalous warship, which seldom sailed further than hailing distance from its Charlestown drydock. He was himself stately and anomalous. Serene, silver-maned, and Spanish-looking, Cousin Ledyard liked full-dress receptions and crowed like a rooster in his cabin crowded with liveried Filipinos, Cuban trophies, and racks of experimental firearms, such as pepper-box pistols and a machine gun worked by electric batteries. He rattled off Spanish phrases, told first-hand adventure stories about service with Admiral Schley, and reminded one of some landsman and diplomat commanding a galleon in Philip II’s Armada. With his wife’s money he had bought a motor launch which had a teak deck and a newfangled diesel engine. While his warship perpetually rode at anchor, Cousin Ledyard was forever hu
rrying about the harbor in his launch. “Oh, Led Atkinson has dash and his own speedboat!” This was about the best my father could bring himself to say for his relative. Commander Billy, himself a man of action, was more sympathetic: “Tommy’s about a hundred horse and buggy power.” Such a dinosaur, however, had little to offer an ’07 Annapolis graduate. Billy’s final judgment was that Cousin Ledyard knew less trig than a schoolgirl, had been promoted through mistaken identity or merely as “window- dressing,” and “was really plotting to put airplane carriers in square sails to stem the tide of our declining Yankee seamanship.” Mother lost her enthusiasm for Captain Atkinson’s stately chatter—he was “unable to tell one woman from another.”

  Cousin Ledyard’s wife, a Schenectady Hoes distantly related to my still living Great-Grandmother Myers, was twenty years younger than her husband. This made her a trying companion; with the energy of youth she demanded the homage due to age. Once while playing in the Mattapoisett tennis tournament, she had said to her opponent, a woman her own age but married to a young husband, “I believe I’ll call you Ruth; you can call me Mrs. Atkinson.” She was a radiant Christian Scientist, darted about in smart serge suits and blouses frothing with lace. She filled her purse with Science literature and boasted without irony of “Boston’s greatest grand organ” in the Christian Science mother temple on Huntington Avenue. As a girl, she had grown up with our Myers furniture. We dreaded Mrs. Atkinson’s descents on Revere Street. She pooh-poohed Mother’s taste, snorted at our ignorance of Myers family history, treated us as mere custodians of the Myers furniture, resented alterations, and had the memory of a mastodon for Cousin Cassie’s associations with each piece. She wouldn’t hear of my mother’s distress from neuralgia, dismissed my asthma as “growing-pains,” and sought to rally us by gossiping about healers. She talked a prim, sprightly babble. Like many Christian Scientists, she had a bloodless, euphoric, inexhaustible interest in her own body. In a discourse which lasted from her first helping of roast beef through her second demitasse, Mrs. Atkinson held us spellbound by telling how her healer had “surprised and evaporated a cyst inside a sac” inside her “major intestine.”

  * * *

  I can hear my father trying to explain his resignation from the Navy to Cousin Ledyard or Commander Billy. Talking with an unnatural and importunate jocularity, he would say, “Billy Boy, it’s a darned shame, but this State of Massachusetts doesn’t approve of the service using its franchise and voting by mail. I haven’t had a chance to establish residence since our graduation in ’07. I think I’ll put my blues in mothballs and become a cit just to prove I still belong to the country. The directors of Lever Brothers’ Soap in Cambridge … I guess for cits, Billy, they’ve really got something on the ball, because they tell me they want me on their team.”

  Or Father, Cousin Ledyard, Commander Billy, and I would be sitting on after dinner at the dining-room table and talking man to man. Father would say, “I’m afraid I’ll grow dull and drab with all this goldbricking ashore. I am too old for tennis singles, but too young for that confirmed state of senility known as golf.”

  Cousin Ledyard and Commander Billy would puff silently on their cigars. Then Father would try again and say pitifully, “I don’t think a naval man can ever on the outside replace the friends he made during his years of wearing the blue.”

  Then Cousin Ledyard would give Father a polite, funereal look and say, “Speaking of golf, Bob, you’ve hit me below the belt. I’ve been flubbing away at the game for thirty years without breaking ninety.”

  Commander Billy was blunter. He would chaff Father about becoming a “beachcomber” or “purser for the Republican junior chamber of commerce.” He would pretend that Father was in danger of being jailed for evading taxes to support “Uncle Sam’s circus.” Circus was Commander Billy’s slang for the Navy. The word reminded him of a comparison, and once he stood up from the table and bellowed solemnly: “Oyez, oyez! Bob Lowell, our bright boy, our class baby, is now on a par with ‘Rattle-Ass Rats’ Richardson, who resigned from us to become press agent for Sells-Floto Circus, and who writes me: ‘Bilgy Dear—Beating the drum ahead of the elephants and the spangled folk, I often wonder why I run into so few of my classmates.’”

  Those dinners, those apologies! Perhaps I exaggerate their embarrassment because they hover so grayly in recollection and seem to anticipate ominously my father’s downhill progress as a civilian and Bostonian. It was to be expected, I suppose, that Father should be in irons for a year or two, while becoming detached from his old comrades and interests, while waiting for the new life.

  * * *

  I used to sit through the Sunday dinners absorbing cold and anxiety from the table. I imagined myself hemmed in by our new, inherited Victorian Myers furniture. In the bleak Revere Street dining room, none of these pieces had at all that air of unhurried condescension that had been theirs behind the summery veils of tissue paper in Cousin Cassie Julian-James’s memorial volume. Here, table, highboy, chairs, and screen—mahogany, cherry, teak—looked nervous and disproportioned. They seemed to wince, touch elbows, shift from foot to foot. High above the highboy, our gold National Eagle stooped forward, plastery and doddering. The Sheffield silver-plate urns, more precious than solid sterling, peeled; the bodies of the heraldic mermaids on the Mason-Myers crest blushed a metallic copper tan. In the harsh New England light, the bronze sphinxes supporting our sideboard looked as though manufactured in Grand Rapids. All too clearly no one had worried about synchronizing the grandfather clock’s minutes, days, and months with its mellow old Dutch seascape-painted discs for showing the phases of the moon. The stricken, but still striking gong made sounds like steam banging through pipes. Colonel Myers’ monumental Tibetan screen had been impiously shortened to fit it for a low Yankee ceiling. And now, rough and gawky, like some Hindu water buffalo killed in mid-rush but still alive with mad momentum, the screen hulked over us … and hid the pantry sink.

  Our real blue-ribbon-winning bête noire was of course the portrait of Cousin Cassie’s father, Mordecai Myers’ fourth and most illustrious son: Colonel Theodorus Bailey Myers. The Colonel, like half of our new portraits, was merely a collateral relation; though really as close to us as James Russell Lowell, no one called the Colonel “Great Grand Uncle,” and Mother playfully pretended that her mind was overstrained by having to remember his full name, rank, and connection. In the portrait, Colonel Theodorus wore a black coat and gray trousers, an obsequiously conservative costume which one associated with undertakers and the musicians at Symphony Hall. His spats were pearl gray plush with pearl buttons. His mustache might have been modeled on the mustache of a bartender in a Western. The majestic Tibetan screen enclosed him as though he were an ancestor-god from Lhasa, a blasphemous yet bogus attitude. Mr. Myers’ colonel’s tabs were crudely stitched to a civilian coat; his New York Yacht Club button glowed like a carnation; his vainglorious picture frame was a foot and a half wide. Forever, his right hand hovered over a glass dome that covered a model locomotive. He was vaguely Middle-Eastern and waiting. A lady in Mother’s sewing circle had pertly interpreted this portrait as, “King Solomon about to receive the Queen of Sheba’s shares in the Boston and Albany Railroad.” Gone now was the Colonel’s place of honor at Cousin Cassie’s Washington mansion; gone was his charming satire on the belles of 185o, entitled Nothing to Wear, which had once been quoted “throughout the length and breadth of the land as generally as was Bret Harte’s Heathen Chinee”; gone was his priceless collection of autographed letters of all the Signers of the Declaration of Independence—he had said once, “my letters will be my tombstone.” Colonel Theodorus Bailey Myers had never been a New Englander. His family tree reached to no obscure Somersetshire yeoman named Winslowe or Lowle. He had never even, like his father, Mordecai, gloried in a scarlet War of 1812 waistcoat. His portrait was an indifferent example from a dull, bad period. The Colonel’s only son had sheepishly changed his name from Mason-Myers to Myers-Mason.

  Waiting
for dinner to end and for the guests to leave, I used to lean forward on my elbows, support each cheekbone with a thumb, and make my fingers meet in a clumsy Gothic arch across my forehead. I would stare through this arch and try to make life stop. Out in the alley the sun shone irreverently on our three garbage cans lettered: R.T.S. LOWELL—U.S.N. When I shut my eyes to stop the sun, I saw first an orange disc, then a red disc, then the portrait of Major Myers apotheosized, as it were, by the sunlight lighting the blood smear of his scarlet waistcoat. Still there was no coup de théâtre about the Major as he looked down on us with his portly young man’s face of a comfortable upper New York State patroon and the friend of Robert Livingston and Martin Van Buren. Great-great-Grandfather Myers had never frowned down in judgment on a Salem witch. There was no allegory in his eyes, no Mayflower. Instead he looked peacefully at his sideboard, his cut-glass decanters, his cellaret—the worldly bosom of the Mason-Myers mermaid engraved on a silver-plated urn. If he could have spoken, Mordecai would have said, “My children, my blood, accept graciously the loot of your inheritance. We are all dealers in used furniture.”

  The man who seems in my memory to sit under old Mordecai’s portrait is not my father, but Commander Billy—the Commander after Father had thrown in his commission. There Billy would sit glowing, perspiring, bragging. Despite his rowdiness, he even then breathed the power that would make him a vice-admiral and hero in World War II. I can hear him boasting in lofty language of how he had stood up for democracy in the day of Lenin and Béla Kun; of how he “practiced the sport of kings” (i.e., commanded a destroyer) and combed the Mediterranean, Adriatic, and Black Seas like gypsies—seldom knowing what admiral he served under or where his next meal or load of fuel oil was coming from.

  It always vexed the Commander, however, to think of the strings that had been pulled to have Father transferred from Washington to Boston. He would ask Mother, “Why in God’s name should a man with Bob’s brilliant cerebellum go and mess up his record by actually begging for that impotent field nigger’s job of second in command at the defunct Boston Yard!”