and to fill her guest bedrooms with as many Lardners and Abbotts and unrelated visitors as she could possibly coax into them. The other impulse (often in conflict with the first) was to be the most helpful wife she could be to an ever more famous man, assuming the roles of social secretary, business agent, and protector against his many admirers and his inclination to do favors for relatives and friends. These duties expanded steadily as his health and his resistance to alcohol declined.
The passage of time has not fully vindicated Miss Feldman’s approach to child-raising. Besides providing us with a diet packed with cholesterol and rigidly supervising our toilet visits, she was obsessed with the benefits of fresh air. The third floor of our house was occupied by servants, generally three of them, among whom Miss Feldman, as she frequently reminded us, was not one. The six bedrooms on the second floor should have been more than a reasonable number for seven people, but not the way they were actually allocated. Dad and Mother, at her insistence because of his drinking and working habits, each had a room; so did Miss Feldman, and there were two guest rooms. That left one room for the boys, but it didn’t even have a single bed in it; we used it as a dressing room. The four of us spent our nights, including the ones when we froze the tennis court, sleeping on a screened porch with awnings that could be lowered against anticipated precipitation. The unanticipated kind made its way through the screens with considerable freedom. I can recall lying awake while an inch of snow accumulated on the floor. Each of us waited in silence for a more enterprising brother to get out of bed and let down the awnings.
After entering the house to dress and have breakfast, we would be dispatched to the playground until the time came to leave for school. John, from the age of nine on, was regularly driven to a private school in a neighboring community and picked up daily by our current chauffeur-gardener. Jim and I, and eventually David, were transported in the other car to a different, expensive private school by Miss Feldman, relentlessly dressed in a white, starched uniform and matching nurse’s cap. Mother, who had driven during the first two years of her marriage, never took the wheel after a Chandler, with the standard soft-top of the day, overturned and John, then a baby, was thrown out unhurt. It was at Dad’s request that she gave up driving.
While all the other children had lunch at school, Miss Feldman, more days than not, arrived in uniform and cap to whisk us off to the superior fare she provided at home, and then, if there was time, to our private playground, before returning us to the afternoon session. The school day usually wound up with athletics outdoors: the colder the winter weather, the better the hockey on the school pond. Even so, we were invariably dispatched to the playground upon our return home. For roughly the duration of Daylight Savings Time, that was also where we went after supper until darkness impended. As for summer vacation, I doubt if we ever averaged more than two hours out of twenty-four indoors on a rainless day.
Our father didn’t communicate much with Miss Feldman directly, but when it came to exercise they were very much on the same wavelength. His own upbringing had been deplorably soft, he believed, and he didn’t want us to carry the same burden of indolence. One summer, he went as far as to hire an All-American end from Vanderbilt University to teach us basic gridiron skills. We devoted two days a week to our football studies for about a month, without any promising results. Jim, the only one of us with speed and agility, was too light for football, never reaching a hundred and fifty pounds. The other three of us were simply not the stuff of which athletes are made, and in this respect I was outstanding. Consistently overweight until my mid-twenties, I was also physically inept.
We certainly made use of the tennis court, the beach and, when we could gather enough visiting cousins or schoolmates, the baseball diamond. The start of one such game was briefly delayed when a visiting player noticed an unusual design on the ball and found, on closer examination, that it had been autographed by the entire New York Yankee team including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. We loftily informed him that we always played with autographed balls, replenishing our supply whenever we visited a ballpark and the players came over to greet Dad and offer us their standard gifts. It was the one piece of sports equipment he didn’t have to pay for.
But the great majority of our outdoor hours were spent reading—horizontally, as a rule, perhaps because we inherited the nearsightedness of the Abbotts. At any given moment, two or three of us might be stretched out on the ground with a book. For days when the ground was too damp or too cold, there was a swing with two facing seats and a capacity of four. I have never found a better test of an author’s grip on my attention than reading in that swing on a really cold winter day. Dumas was the most dangerous, especially The Count of Monte Cristo and The Vicomte de Bragelonne. (Who decided that one name should be translated, the other not?) His novels so engrossed me that I’d forget to stamp my feet occasionally to ward off frostbite.
Did we become readers by inheritance or acquire the habit by imitation? Dad always had a book in hand, but the amount of time he gave to reading kept diminishing. His favorite author was Dostoevsky; his favorite book, read many times, The Brothers Karamazov. In the last years of his life, however, he rarely read fiction, opting instead for one book after another about the American Civil War. Mother, then and always the only college graduate in the family, spent about the same amount of time revisiting the classics as she did covering current fiction. Among the children, it was a matter of course that you were able to read and write by the age of four, and by six it was practically a full-time occupation. (We all began to wear glasses in our teens.) In first grade, I was detached from my peers and assigned to the third grade for reading purposes only. We each skipped a grade at one point or another, though David required special coaching for the purpose. His tutors were Jim and I, at ten cents an hour apiece.
If any considerable part of the reading and writing we did at home had been devoted to schoolwork, we could have been prize students. Regrettably, homework had a low priority among us. Our report cards fell into a predictable pattern: high marks in English and one or two other subjects we liked, just getting by in the rest. The lowest marks were likely to be for “effort.” Jim was the only one who shared Mother’s facility for mathematics, which, along with his English skills, kept his grades above the family norm until his first year at Harvard, which he devoted to songwriting.
I was regarded as the difficult one in the family and invariably got myself into the most trouble, out of a spirit of undirected rebelliousness. Perhaps some of that was a defensive reaction to having brothers one and three years older. If I felt put upon, and I did, the forces that united, in kindergarten and at home, to correct my natural left-handedness by instructing me to write and eat right-handedly only compounded the problem. Undoubtedly, this explains the scrawl I’m left with instead of respectable handwriting. My junior position in the hierarchy probably also contributed to a stutter that plagued me intermittently until boarding school, when I deliberately went in for public speaking and whittled the problem down to a mere speech hesitation.
Jim and I, only fifteen months apart in age, were a sharp contrast physically. I grew to six feet and at one time over two hundred pounds. He was slight though remarkably strong. He played rugby and lacrosse in college and became a New England intercollegiate wrestling champion, incidentally mastering the technique of tearing a Manhattan phone book in half. His mental processes were superbly logical, and I never saw him, as boy or man, display anger or more than the mildest sort of enthusiasm for anyone or anything. Some observers have noted similar mental and emotional patterns in me, but they’re a pale imitation of his.
Despite our differences, Jim and I found ourselves in splendid accord most of the time We liked the same books, games, movies, radio programs, and people. We had an appreciation of, and sensitivity to, each other’s minds that enabled us to divine in most situations what the other was thinking. This paid off for us financially when we partnered at bridge.
None of the four of us was ever enrolled in a public institution of any kind. When we completed eighth grade, the local high school was not even seriously considered. I didn’t question this policy at the time, and I thoroughly enjoyed my four years of boarding school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the town where the Abbott family had settled in the seventeenth century. By the time my own children were ready for high school, however, I had developed a strong preference for public education. Happily, this evolution in my thinking coincided with a sharp drop in income as a result of the blacklist.
My