Cora & Clarence & Cars

by Bob Judd

The Model T roadster is parked on the side of the dirt road, no top, no driver. Cora, pretty blue eyes, pale blue satin dress to match, is perched up high on the only seat, watching dust devils, wannabee tornadoes, hoover up topsoil from wheat fields that roll on and on to the distant sky. It’s July Fourth, 1931. Cora’s 19, a bride of two hours, a mile into her honeymoon, and and she’s thinking, maybe he’s not coming back. She keeps turning around, looking back down the dirt road toward Great Bend, Kansas, her hometown all her life. Which she is supposed to be leaving.

Clarence forgot to dip the hickory stick in the oval gas tank behind the seat. Forgot to check if his borrowed honeymoon chariot had gas. Cora’s thinking maybe something happened to him, when the gossip columnist from the Great Bend Sentinel drives by in his brand-new, grass green Model A Ford and waves. He wrote about it the next day: Editor of Rival Rag Ditches Bride.

Clarence is 24, the editor of the Larned Eagle Optic. He met Cora when he organized a St. Patrick’s Day Dance at the Congregational Church. She came down from Great Bend with her date and a bunch of kids on a school bus. Just follow the Arkansas River, pronounced Our Kansas in Kansas, 15 miles upstream and you come to the little town of Larned, formerly Fort Larned. She never got to dance with her date. Clarence, a dapper dresser and an equally nifty dancer, took up her whole dance card. When Cora came home, she told her mother, “I’ve met the man I’m going to marry.” She called him Juddy and they married that July.

Eventually, Juddy returned, long strides down the dirt road, his well-shined shoes and his new blue suit beige with road dust, gas can in his hand. Grin as wide as Kansas under his snappy fedora, coming back to his bride. They went on their way to honeymoon in Wichita, followed by a cloud of dust.

When I was a kid, they never celebrated their wedding day, they celebrated St. Patrick’s Day, the day they met. They’d hire a baby sitter, go into New York City, stay at a classy hotel and go to a show and a fancy restaurant. We’d eat macaroni and cheese for months after St. Patrick’s Day.

Cora had a suspicion of cars that never really left her, although what she really wanted, she said, was a red Ferrari. Her dad quit farming to become a Ford dealer. He died in a car crash when she was twelve.

I went back to Great Bend not long ago. Main Street’s retail smile was full of empty gaps, the brick sidewalks deserted. Factory farms don’t need family farmers, just minimum-wage independent contractors. The old farm house is still there. The white paint has gone gray; the windmill is down to its last five blades; black irrigation pipes lie across the front yard. I told my mother I’d found the old place.

“You did?” she asked, her hair by this time wild and white, her daily outfit, flannel pajamas and a blue fleece robe. “You found it?”

“I followed your instructions—three miles out of town on Walnut Creek. Ruts from the old Santa Fe trail run right behind the house.”

“You saw it? You went back there?”

“I did.”

“Why in God’s name?...”

Cora’s great-grandparents were the first settlers in Great Bend. Their two-room stone house, now part of the Barton County Museum, looks like a doll house. There were holes in the wall for shooting Indians. Buffalo trampled their crops. This was tall-grass prairie country, mild in spring, followed by fires and tornadoes in the summer and blizzards in the winter.

Juddy’s old hometown, Garden City, lies 125 miles southwest. The Santa Fe railroad followed the old Santa Fe trail and the Arkansas River to bring settlers out to that vast, treeless land. And to haul cattle back to the stockyards of Omaha and Chicago. When Garden City got its own stop, it became a destination for the great cattle drives up from Texas and Oklahoma. The town smelled like cow poop. Still does. I was having a prairie oyster with my beer in a bar across from a stockyard and a cowboy down the bar said, “Fella died eatin’ one of them last week.” He paused long enough for me to look up from the deep-fried oval on my plate. “Yup. Bull fell over and killed him.”

When Clarence left for college in 1923, the town had an opera house and the Windsor Hotel, “the Waldorf of the Prairie.” It also had a zoo with elephants and giraffes and the world’s largest municipal, outdoor, concrete, free, freshwater swimming pool. Mayor Trinkle had decided that what this dusty town needed (so dusty, Clarence said, you could track fish in the river by the cloud of dust they kicked up) was a swimming pool. The town fathers formed teams and built a pool the size of two football fields. When it was done, the zoo’s elephants waded in like it was a river in Africa, and gave themselves a shower. The board of health put a stop to that. The pool also doubled as a skating rink for the first two winters. The ice cracked the concrete so they stopped that, too. PR photos from the forties show a speedboat towing bathing beauties on water skis. Garden City calls it Big Pool these days. Clarence and his friends called it the mud hole.

Born between Orville’s first flight and Henry’s first Model T, Clarence was the preacher’s son. “God rewards those who help themselves,” my grandfather preached from his wheelchair on Sundays. A handsome man, he’d had a stroke at 46. He grew a long white beard and looked like God, my brother said.

My grandmother was a schoolteacher with no time for nonsense. “Let’s get dinner over with,” she’d say after my grandfather said the blessing. She wore granny glasses on top of a long nose. Her mouth was as thin as a clothesline. In that sparse landscape, you kept your mouth shut to keep out the dust.

Clarence went to college in Washburn, got all A’s, ran the half mile, then interned with a senator in Washington. Two months after his wedding, he visited his mom. And returned to his bride with his mother’s cookbook under his arm. “Takes 30 years to learn to make a decent crust,” my grandmother liked to say.

Dad boosted the Eagle Optic’s circulation with stories about Rudy Borg, a daredevil with a traveling aerial show. Borg’s specialty was wing walking—strolling out to the edge of a wing, and falling off. Then free falling and lighting flares on the way down. Opening his parachute long after it looked like he was a goner.

Rudy was a big, rawboned man, with a brush of red hair that stood straight up. When Dad first saw him in the hospital, Rudy’s red hair was on top of a pile of plaster. “Goddamn fireproof matches were no good,” Rudy said. “Couldn’t get ’em lit. I kinda forgot about opening my chute.”

Juddy’s next job was reporting for the AP, the Associated Press. He paid $15 for a black and rust Maxwell sedan, hard used on a farm. He and Cora cleaned out the chicken manure, loaded up the car and roped their favorite chair on top, and headed for Louisville, Kentucky. Top speed 34 m.p.h., when the road smoothed out. Cora said they had 15 flat tires. Juddy said it was only nine. They rented a one-bedroom apartment over a garage.

My brother, Bill, was born in Louisville in 1934, the year Clarence got his big break, a series on Elliot Ness. Ness was a national hero axing Al Capone’s breweries in Chicago. Ness didn’t look like Robert Stack, or Kevin Costner, he looked like a college kid with apple cheeks, slicked-down hair, and no sense of humor. When Prohibition ended in 1933, the city of Cleveland hired Ness to be their director of public safety. They wanted him to clean up their corrupt police department. Ness set up wiretaps, and crime dropped 38 percent in two years.

Ness liked reporters for the publicity they gave his one-man war on crime. And he liked Clarence. They were both just over 30, and Ness knew Dad got his facts straight, didn’t have an ax to grind, and could write a story people would read. But he didn’t like Dad’s car. If he was going cover Elliot Ness, he was not going to do it driving a beat-up Reo. Ness wanted Clarence to look more important. And spend less time in the garages between Louisville and Cleveland getting the Reo patched up. Maybe he just wanted to do Clarence a favor. Make him feel obligated.

Ness shuffled some papers and gave Clarence the keys to a royal blue Pierce-Arrow the city of Cleveland had confiscated from a gangster. Dad said he couldn’t accept it, so the AP bought it for $200. Dad said the dark stain on the pale blue velvet front seat was coffee. Cora was sure it was blood.

By the midthirties, those beautiful cars—the Pierce-Arrows with the walnut paneling and nickel-silver handles, maroon Marmons, sky blue Packards, and the money green, supercharged Duesenbergs—were too expensive to run any more. In any case, it was embarrassing to be seen tooling around in an Isotta Fraschini like Norma Desmond.

The owners of these rolling mansions lost their fortunes and sold their cars for ten cents on the dollar. You could pick up a fine Stutz for $100. A Peerless for even less. Locomobiles, with their vast bronze casting for the lower half of the engine, were dismantled and melted down.

Baby carriages, though, got a free pass. My brother rode around suburban Louisville in a glossy black-lacquer, gold-filigree, satin-lined casket suspended from high, spindly bicycle wheels by long, single-leaf coach springs that gave him a gentle, rocking ride like Cinderella on the way to the ball.

Clarence’s stories on Ness ran in newspapers all over the country and made Dad a minor celebrity in Cleveland. The Cleveland Press offered him a job as a senior staff reporter with two full-time research assistants.

The job at the Press was a big financial step up for my parents. They rented a house that looked like a log cabin on a five-acre farm in Chesterland, just outside Cleveland. They bought an almost new ’38 burgundy red four-door Buick Sedan with dark chocolate broadcloth upholstery. It was posher than an Oldsmobile, just a step below a Cadillac.

In 1939, Bob Feller was winning games for the Cleveland Indians with his 100-m.p.h. fastball, and Cora had a crush on him. Listening to Feller pitch a two-hitter against the Red Sox on the maternity ward’s radio, she made a last-minute decision: I’d be named Robert, not Robin.

Cora and Clarence planted corn, tomatoes, onions, and two acres of acorn squash. They had grown up in farm towns, but they were rookie farmers, amazed that two acres would produce a mountain of dark green footballs. Cora found 67 ways to cook acorn squash. We had it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Juddy got a great deal on two dozen gallon cans of maple syrup. Here’s a useful tip. If you boil maple syrup, you can make the mold that grows on maple syrup after a year or so...disappear. Hardly taste the mold at all.

The Buick’s rear axle broke, and Dad bought his first new car, a red ’41 Mercury Coupe. It was ultra moderne, with a broad horizontal grill. Its chubby body was a fundamental change from the little box/big box car design of the twenties and thirties. Cars were changing shape, their edges softening into curves, melting into one faster, sexier, more aerodynamic shape as airlines lured passengers off trains and into the sky. Cora’s little sister, Vivienne, called Beanie, became a registered nurse so she could qualify as a “flying hostess,” as flight attendants were then called. DC-3s bounced around like Ping-Pong balls in the violent up and down drafts over the hot plains. “We kinda just threw the sandwiches at the passengers,” Beanie said.

When I was three, Cora’s younger brother, Uncle Bill, was a navigator in the Air Force. He gave me a toy bomber small enough to hold in my hand. Its solid metal body was painted olive drab, with white for the windows. I liked it, and it occurred to me that if I spun the propellers and flung it hard enough, it might fly. So I took it out on the lawn, spun the propellers, and threw it as hard as I could. A minute later, as I was looking for my plane in the prickers and mulberry bushes, my bomber rose in the Ohio sky, huge and loud, on its way to bomb the boys in Germany. I knew the plane that flew overhead couldn’t be mine, but there was room for doubt. I never found the toy.

Years later, when I was in advertising, the head of our German agency (a general at 22, commander of a tank division in Russia) told me the reason America won the war was our amazing ability to build a bomber every 15 minutes. Which we did. Packard, Buick and Cadillac, Pontiac, Nash, Hudson, Chevy and Ford... built planes, guns, Jeeps, tanks and PT boats, bombs and artillery.
During the war, Clarence got a job writing for BusinessWeek in New York. We moved to Long Island, to a brick house that seemed huge. It had glass chandeliers in the entrance way, in the living room, and in the dining room; you could see rainbows in their prisms. For a while, our new house smelled deliciously of the forbidden chocolates and cigarettes of two GIs in khaki uniforms who roomed in the front bedroom upstairs, before shipping out to Okinawa.

The day the war was over, our next-door neighbors, Mr. & Mrs. Strauss, whose house smelled of an age when men ate cabbage for lunch, hauled out a red flag with a black swastika in the middle. They invited us kids to stomp on it. Which we were doing, when another neighbor, Mr. Helmus, a man with a crew cut and broad shoulders, a machinist, I think, came over and asked us to stop. “The war is over,” he said.

Seeing Mr. Helmus stunned me with shame. His daughter was so beautiful. I can’t explain it, I suppose I wanted her attention. A couple of weeks before, I’d thrown a rock the size of an egg and hit her on the head. It knocked her down, she bled into her beautiful blonde hair, and she cried. Her father told my father what I’d done, and Dad gave me a knife and told me to go cut my own switches. There was a forsythia alongside our house with long and supple branches, perfect for whipping the backs of the legs of guilty, bad, bad boys in short pants. I howled, guilty and in pain before the first switch struck.

Cora wanted to nip my Lon Guyland accent, so we moved to Chappaqua, a woodsy town an hour north of the city, where Bill and Hillary live now. Where the public school is built of granite on Horace Greeley’s old farm.

Our house had been converted from a sheep barn in 1919. Twenty years later, an Englishwoman had added a long, low Bauhaus living room with picture windows. She’d arrived in America with a sprig of ground ivy called pachysandra, hidden in her hat band. Years later, when I went back to see the house, it was boarded up. And all of the gardens, lawns, and terraces were covered with pachysandra, a dark blanket thrown over everything like death.

When we first arrived, the lawns were trim and pretty, and the daffodils were trumpeting spring. The sheep barn had been part of a great estate centered on the 29-room mansion next door. It had been built in 1929 by a French financier, who then went broke. The new lord of the manor was a Wall Street titan, Tom Campbell. His house seemed a mile long to me. The dining room had a grandfather clock that Tom said would stop ticking when he did. The library had ladders to reach the top shelves, large, green leather sofas, and small marble statues of naked girls. Which was O.K., because they were Greek, I was told.

At the far end of the room, white marble steps led past a little fountain to a vast living room, with a concert grand player piano at the far end. I could drop in a roll, pump the pedals, and play a polonaise like Chopin. Or, as I preferred, much faster than Chopin.

My favorite was the game room, as Tom called it, with a pool table, a stone fireplace, and trophies from Tom’s days as a miler at Yale. He would have run in the Olympics if he hadn’t caught flu, he said. He was tall and gaunt, with a rough sense of humor and whiskey on his breath, like the randy uncle your parents try to keep you away from.

Tom’s great house was one playground, the fields and forest behind it were another. The original estate bred race horses. Old stone roads wound over the hill to an abandoned race track with a pond in the middle. At the far end of the pond there was a dam where cottonmouths liked to coil in a mass in the sun, heads rising if you got too close.

The horses were long gone, their places taken by foxes, woodchucks, possums, skunks, pheasants, wildcats, rabbits, and deer. The grass had grown long and lumpy with hummocks, you could sprain an ankle if you ran. In the middle of the grassy fields there were islands of tall, pale reeds, where the deer bedded down for the night. Deep in the forest was a swamp, dark and scary, but also strange and beautiful with grottoes of moss where you could find salamanders, and, at dusk, see bats flying low through the dark trees.

To my brother, those fields and forest were his real home. By the time he was twelve, he was a hunter with rifles and shotguns and beautiful varnished fly rods. He was five years older, embarrassed and resentful of my existence. We fought grimly, secretly. He was bigger and faster so I relied on sneak attacks. I stabbed the back of his hand with my fork one night at dinner. Shortly after that, I dodged a kick aimed at my shin and he blew a hole in the wall the size of a bowling ball.

He was beautiful, his dark, chiseled face riddled with acne. And he was shy, withdrawn behind a veil of cigarette smoke from around the age of 14. One sunny morning, he took me into his realm, allowing me to follow behind on secret, magic steppin stones across the swamp, hummocks that would not wobble and toss you in the muck. He showed me where the muskrats had their dens and how to lure a beaver out of its lodge. Where to look for woodcock and when to expect a partridge to explode out of nowhere.

Tom sold the land behind his house, and one morning I stumbled across wooden stakes connected with string. Took just a little while to work out that they were floor plans for new houses. I pulled them up. The developer sold the land to another developer. More stakes connected with string appeared, and I pulled those up, too, feeling the thrill of the suburban terrorist. Even at ten, I knew this was just a holding action.

The day I went back and saw the pachysandra covering everything, the fields and the forest had disappeared under an invasion of McMansions, stone-faced alternating with mock-Tudor, SUVs parked out front.

Tom had a series of mistresses who shared his four-poster bed with its great white canopy. Pretty women who smelled of spice and sin. Miriam, with cleavage I still remember, took me to Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes.

Tom’s mother, an ancient woman with hair on her chin and iced tea with a splash of gin in her hand, had a special rocking chair on the porch where she could “keep an eye on things.” She wore black, as if mourning her own death. After she died, the mistresses took on a haggard look, Tom was drunk earlier in the day, and the gardens turned to weeds.

Tom’s sister Nancy, a large, amiable, and weary southern lady, was put in charge of the house. Presumably to replace the moral force of her mother. Nancy wore long dresses down to her shoes and twisted her long gray hair into a bun.

Tom married mistress number five, but, as Nancy told me, it had not been easy. They had gone into the city to be married at Riverside Cathedral, but the minister threw them out because Tom was drunk. So they drove a caravan of Tom’s Minerva, his ’39 Mercury, his cream-colored Lincoln Cosmopolitan, and the assorted cars of the 160 guests, looking for a church to marry them. They found one on Seventh Avenue. “It was a nice wedding,” Nancy told me. “A very nice wedding. I just wish Tom had been sobah.”

Benny, Nancy’s 19-year-old son, loomed tall and sleek with his hair slicked back. He was dangerous and to be avoided, my mother said. Always broke, he was doomed to maintain his uncle’s cars and to restore the Minerva. It must have taken a year. Maybe two. The engine was silver and as long as a Lincoln. The wheels were as tall as I was and had big aluminum discs to cover the wire wheels to make them look more modern. The car was a wonderful dual-cowl phaeton built in Belgium for heads of state and conquering generals. It had two windshields. One in front for Tom, and one in back for me, sitting on the burgundy leather seats, with the walnut picnic tables neatly folded and the crystal decanters locked away. Tom, drunk as usual, sang as we roared around Croton Reservoir. Sometimes we’d head out in his Fordillac, a ’50 Ford with a Cadillac engine and a top speed, he said, of 145 m.p.h. We never went over 120. Maybe 125.

After the war, the great old cars were out of fashion. Couldn’t find parts. Gas guzzlers. Their makers out of business. Some of the grand leviathans survived, but they were neglected, worn and shabby, like old sofas with cracked leather and mice deep in the upholstery. Few people had indentured nephews, like Benny, who knew how to pull a clutch.

Even the mass-produced cars had their foibles. Our ’34 Ford had two forward-opening “suicide” doors. I was leaning on to the armrest as the car struggled up the last hill before home, the door swung open, and I flew out. I was wearing a snowsuit with the hood up. No harm done, although the old Ford was demoted to train-station duty.

My parents bought a battleship gray ’47 four-door Dodge Custom Sedan. It was solid, comfortable, and slow. As if it had seen action during the war and now performed civilian service with the ponderous dignity of a retired Rear Admiral.

A stone wall covered with honeysuckle separated our land from Tom’s. And it was there, next to the break in the wall and the path next door, that Cora and Juddy transformed a flower garden into Kansas, with a good crop of sweet corn, tomatoes, and sunflowers. Cora was especially fond of the sunflowers. Not only the Kansas state flower, but the seed of choice for the juncos, grosbeaks, and sparrows she fed in the winter. We had a picnic table there, where Juddy turned hamburgers into juicy charcoal and you could reach behind you and pull a ripe, hot-from-the-sun tomato off the vine to slice for your burger.

By this time, Cora was president of The Women’s Society—200 graduates of Vassar, Holyoke, Smith, etc., their children in school, bored with housework, tennis and golf. Cora never went to college and didn’t have the contacts or catch the references to house parties and mixers. But she was as bright as any of them, and would rather die than let them know how intimidated they made her feel. The local paper listed eleven committees for the autumn church supper and auction. Each committee had a chairwoman, cochairwomen, and subcommittees. And enough backbiting and gnashing of teeth to make us think Cora was on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

In 1950, my father bought a brand-new dollar green Buick Special, its grill drooling chrome over the front bumper. The Special was a Chevrolet with fatter fenders, thicker upholstery, and a straight-eight engine. The hood ornament was a rocket passing through a hoop—adventure, power, sexual success. The hood had three portholes. The Buick Roadmaster had four portholes, a sign of even more power and sexual success. When Buick first designed these cars, the portholes had red lights hooked up to the distributor so every time a cylinder fired, a porthole lit up. Cost and production snags kept Buick’s pinball effect off the streets of America.

Dad brought the car home from the showroom just in time for our first annual two-week summer vacation in the Adirondacks. The smell of fresh rubber, glue, and still-curing plastic meant it was a virgin, untouched by other human drivers. Getting all our luggage, sleeping bags, and my brother’s bamboo fly rods in was tricky, but, finally, the big trunk lid slammed shut. Making Dusty the dog leap out of the car and bark. It was time, he decided, to play you-can’t-catch-me. Finally, we were all in the car, raring to go. Except Cora still had “things to do” in the kitchen—making deviled eggs, iced tea, and ham sandwiches for the trip. Cleaning up. Changing her dress. Changing her dress again. Finally, Juddy brought her and the picnic basket out of the house and she got in the front seat next to the dog. “I’m not going,” she said. “It’s not worth it.”

She meant it. It was what she always said before we set off on a trip. And we always spent the next 15 minutes getting her to calm down enough to sit still while we drove down the long gravel driveway to the road. Where Juddy’s mind tended to wander. He was a dreamer and a thinker. From time to time, we’d have to remind him that he was on his third lap around a traffic circle. He had moved on from BusinessWeek to Marketing Research Director for Fairchild Publishing (Women’s Wear Daily, Supermarket News, Footwear News). It must have been the money.

Every other kid in my class has a TV, I told my dad. Why-oh-why was I being punished, alone in the dark with just a radio? After months of wheedling and whining, Clarence gave in. “You can either have a TV,” he said, “or a power mower.”

Power mower, no question. Those six lawns took me over two hours to mow, an eternity for a twelve-year-old. Clarence would have preferred I mowed the lawns twice, first one way, then crossways, for a checkerboard effect, the way he did it. The Garden City, Kansas, boy must have been so proud of those lush, green Westchester County lawns. He had an Eagle Optic eye for four-leaf clovers. Look, he’d say, there’s one. I’d look and look and not see it. When I gave up, he’d bend over and rise with one between his thumb and forefinger.

He was lucky. He won an air conditioner when the world had barely heard of them. He won a disc voice recorder, a lump that must have weighed 30 pounds and recorded your voice on a floppy, round, black paper disc on a turntable. He won a Ceil Chapman dress for Cora. She looked like a page in Vogue, with high heels and a leaf of a hat with a veil.

The power mower was a Snapper Turtle, one of the first rotary mowers with a green shell and a turtle head in front. It was self-propelled by heavy rollers for slow and solid turtle progress. Naturally, I hot rodded the thing. I took off the muffler, sanded down the head to raise the compression ratio, and ran it flat out on rubbing alcohol, until its crankshaft exploded like shrapnel.

My other task was to clip the hawthorn hedge. The house was called The Hawthorns, after a hedge that was taller than I was. Your hawthorn is a beautiful hedge with black wood and dark green leaves and white blossoms in the spring. You see hawthorn all over rural England and France as hedgerows. Its long thorns separate the sheep from the wolves. And make a fine scrimshaw of scratches and punctures on the arms of the poor, suffering clipper. More wheedling and whining until we got an electric hedge clipper. It wasn’t the breakthrough I was looking for; I kept snipping through the extension cord.

Our next car was a black ’51 DeSoto two-door. We got a hell of a deal on it, because it was a rebuilt wreck from a body shop. Like the Dodge, it was a comfortable, placid car with the added advantage of a Fluid Clutch. Which meant you didn’t have to push in the clutch when you stopped. The car looked new, but groaned and squeaked from internal traumas. Fluids marked the spot where it was parked. One of the rear fenders was prone to droop. One sunny Saturday afternoon, on the way out of the driveway, Juddy at the wheel, it wandered left off the gravel drive and into the apple orchard, left wheel sticking out like it was ready to dance.

One day that fall, when the leaves were red and gold and flying, my mother was driving me to school. Normally, I would wolf my breakfast, race out the front door, across the terrace, down the steps onto the front lawn, down a grass path to the bottom lawn, and sprint up the path through the woods to the end of our driveway, where the school bus would be slowing down to pick me up. But that morning, the back of the bus was disappearing down Millwood Road. My mother hated driving me six miles to school, but today she didn’t seem to care.

We were on Seven Bridges Road, almost to Quaker Street when she started crying. She pulled over, shaking, unable to drive, face in her hands. Her sister Beanie, who lived on the other side of town, was sick. Very sick. She’d had a stroke giving birth to twins. She could die. Might be dying. Might be dead.

Cora was the beauty, Beanie was the cutie, the little sister with a sense of humor. She met a handsome TWA exec on a Kansas City/Peoria/Chicago flight. They got engaged in New York. “Oh, Johnny had proposed lots of times before. But when we were in New York in December, and I had a runny nose and my face was all red with a cold, he proposed to me in the Times Square subway station and I thought if he still wants to marry me when I look like this in a place like this, I better say yes.”

When Beanie’s twins came home from the hospital, she stayed behind, unable to speak or move her right side. We left our house and moved in with Johnny, their two sons, and the twins, bringing Dusty the dog. Mary, a large gloomy Catholic girl, moved in as “a helper.”

Cora quit her job at the Women’s Society, sick of it anyway. Taking on a houseful of babies, children, teenagers, husband, brother-in-law, and a helper was more demanding than running the Women’s Society, but it was something she could put her heart and her soul into.

We ate in shifts. My brother and I shared a room in the attic. We were roused before six every morning by the uproar of crying babies, which meant we could luxuriate in bed for the hour it took for the bathroom to clear after everybody had their baths.

Uncle John drove a dark green ’50 Dodge Wayfarer two-door sedan, as simple and as unassuming a device as has ever worn tires. He wasn’t into the iconography of cars. As vp of scheduling at TWA, he took the charts and graphs he’d invented to shuffle TWA’s planes around the world—juggling planes, passengers, route times, competitors’ schedules, load factors, equipment, fuel costs, local time, down time, connections, giving up one route to gain another—to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where Einstein was in residence. “We were wondering if these new things you are calling computers might help us?” The Princeton folks said they might. Not now, but maybe in ten years.

My father was always the last to come home. After everybody else had had supper and was going to bed, he would wash and dry the great pile of dishes in the sink, still in his pinstriped suit and those long, narrow wingtip shoes.

My brother would have 21 hot rods by the time he was 21. They would all go 100 m.p.h. for 100 yards, then die. I would have given my arm for any one of them. Their flathead Ford V8s had a mellow baritone rumble like the mahogany speedboats on Lake Placid. If you put pennies in the heat risers by the exhaust manifold, they would rap-rap-rap like a machine gun when you let off the gas.
The year Bill was 16, he got his first motorcycle, an old Harley that sang basso profundo. You could tell if it was coming or going from a mile away. I found another smaller motorcycle in the back of Uncle John’s garage, an old green one-cylinder BSA. I would sit in its worn leather saddle and make roaring sounds, leaning into make-believe corners. That motorcycle is in a museum now, in Anchorage, Alaska. In 1939, Uncle John had ridden it, with an Alaskan trapper, Slim Williams, from Anchorage to Seattle, blazing the trail for the Alcan Highway. They rode and pushed their bikes through scrub and forests, over mountains, and through unmapped valleys. They built rafts from saplings. They were lost for days. They shot a moose and roasted the meat over a campfire, using twisted string for a rotisserie. Once, Uncle John said, he was so hungry he would have gladly paid a hundred dollars for a raisin pie. It took them the better part of four months, but they made it, proving that a route was possible. They presented their plan to the public at the Chicago World’s Fair. After Pearl Harbor, the Army Corps of Engineers built the Alcan Highway, part of it along another route, which, Uncle John says, isn’t as good as the route he and Slim Williams staked out.

When Beanie had recovered enough, we moved back home. Cora took a deep breath, looked around, and took a job as the Congregational Church secretary. The minister had a cabin on a lake in Maine, and we went up for two weeks the next summer. The lake had big sandy beaches, the water was gin clear, and the sun set over the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Or so we were told. We never saw it set. It rained for two weeks. The outhouse was 50 yards away, down a deeply rutted, root-strewn path, and its roof leaked directly over the hole. Didn’t matter which way you leaned, if you sat on that hole you got dripped on.

We went back again, next summer. Cora and Clarence paid $3,500 for a “camp,” five boats, three outboard motors, a diesel generator in a shed for emergency electricity, and almost everything the previous owner had bought since they built the camp in 1915, including a kerosene iron and used razor blades carefully rewrapped in their original wrappers. Plus a ’29 Nash Twin Ignition Advanced Six Limousine, body by Moon. A rare and wonderful car, with wooden spoke wheels. It was parked in the barnyard of the farmer’s house, where it was a chicken coop in the winter, so it took some cleaning out before we began the task of persuading it to run again. It had roll-down shades, jump seats, and room for all of us and our luggage inside. It burned a quart of oil on the mile run down to the camp and a quart coming back. Years later, Clarence and my brother couldn’t get it running and had it towed to the dump. A crime I have not forgiven.

The next spring my dad brought home a brand-new black ’54 Ford Convertible with red and white upholstery, white sidewall tires, and a tan top. I could not believe that any car so cool would be ours. Parked in our drive. I was only a year away from my license, so the time to learn to drive was right now. This minute. Where are the keys? I drive it up and down the driveway until, backing up, holding the door open to look back, I tear it off its hinges on a rock.

I suppose I should feel some remorse for all the cars I’ve trashed—the Pantera I bent to a right angle on a tree trunk in Massachusetts; the 2CV I left scattered in a ditch in front of a cement factory near the Czech border.... But remorse doesn’t come into it. Well, that’s not quite true. My parents’ next car was a trim, baby blue, bottom-of-the-line ’56 Ford Mainliner with a hot V8. I drove that one 85 m.p.h. across a ditch, up a bank, back down, across the ditch again, across the road, through a stone wall, between two oak trees, and into a swamp, leaving most of the front suspension buried in the stone wall. I’d read in a Bacardi ad in The New Yorker that rum was a sophisticated drink, drunk by sophisticated people. So I got drunk on Bacardi rum to celebrate my 18th birthday. All my father said was that he was glad I wasn’t hurt. I wanted him to ask me to cut my own switches from a forsythia bush.

The ’54 Ford was trashed by my brother’s first wife, Mary. They had gone up to the camp in Maine for their honeymoon, the convertible being an all-around nifty car, especially for honeymoons. You would have to know my brother to understand why he would go fishing on his honeymoon. He played hooky from the second grade on opening day of trout season and has never missed an opening day since. He will probably go fishing on the way to his own funeral. He was fishing halfway across the lake, when a big storm blew up. Summer storms in Maine are sudden and ferocious, an uproar of lightning, thunder, typhoon winds, and rain. Naturally, Mary thought Bill had drowned, or at least capsized. Naturally, my brother had pulled into an island. Naturally, Mary wasn’t going to wait for his body to wash up on the beach. Never mind she had never driven a stick shift before. She roared up the hill in first, foot flat to the floor, to get help. Drove all the way into town in first.

The storm passed, the sun came out, and my brother, bouncing across the lake in his aluminum fishing boat, little outboard motor buzzing away, was surprised to see a small armada setting off from the beach to greet him. Their marriage went downhill from there.

As did the spiffy Ford Convertible. It came home blowing oil and smoke from a couple of busted valves, the front wheels pigeon-toed. It never recovered its original free-and-eager spirit. I did mourn the passing of that car. But not much: I had my own car by then, a pale green ’49 Ford Tudor, as Ford called their two-door cars. I went through three transmissions learning to shift without a clutch. Someone stole the back seat, so I put moving-van pads on the floor in the back. A wonderful idea, my brother thought. He’d swap his Jaguar XK120 Coupe for my Ford when he had a date for a drive-in movie—so I got to drive the Jag around town and, for the first time, Betty Ann Tierney might talk to me. Maybe even go for a ride, soon as I worked up the courage to ask.

Cora and Clarence swapped The Hawthorns and its archipelago of lawns and formal gardens for a little house on a tiny patch on a steep slope next to Aunt Beanie. Cora wanted to be near her sister, not just to help out with the babies and the errands, but because her sister was her best friend. And it made such a difference not to have to drive, especially in the winter when the snow could be two feet deep and ice slicked the road. She loved to walk across the street, walk in the front door. See how Beanie was doing. Have a laugh.

Just as I was about to go to college, Clarence lost his job, a complete and ugly surprise. My version was that his assistant, a tall quiet woman with one long eyebrow, offered to do his job for half as much. I may have overheard this or I may have made it up. But I wasn’t worried. I was going to Williams, I was 18, I would work to put myself through school, I could do anything.

Clarence got a job with George Neustadt, a marketing research company that analyzed retail advertising. They had an entire floor of an old building on Union Square. Dad and George Neustadt sat in a glass-walled office looking out on an enormous room where a hundred women cut out newspaper ads, measured them with rulers, and entered the numbers on charts.

George was bald, cranky, a little stooped, and had hair coming out of his ears. But he was on to something, Clarence said. George was a genius. George said, O.K., Clarence wouldn’t be paid much, but he would give Clarence the company when he, George, retired. George never retired. After he died, his heirs allowed Clarence to buy the company, paying them out of future profits. Some years there would be some, some years not.

Clarence and Cora sold their house in Chappaqua, sold the ’56 Ford, and moved to the top of a new, 14-story building in the Village. Clarence could walk to work. Cora was bored with life in the suburbs now that the kids were gone. She thought it would be a kick to live in the big city.

You could see the Statue of Liberty from their living room. St. Vincent’s Hospital was across the street, with ambulances wailing day and night. The steel frame of the building telegraphed the sound of the subway so accurately you could tell when the subway doors opened and when they closed.

The rent went up and the money they had from selling their Chappaqua house ran out. They moved to a one-bedroom in Brooklyn, all they needed, really. They woke to a thundering roar the first morning, wondering what in God’s name it could be—they were wedged between the on-ramps for the trucks and trains crossing the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges.

Cora had taken a job as a medical secretary to a plastic surgeon. He had his practice and his home in a townhouse in Park Slope. He rented out the top two floors, eight rooms with a big kitchen. They lived there twelve years, longer than they lived anywhere else. They bought a used ’66 Pontiac Tempest LeMans, a 3/4 scale, plain-jane version of the barge-sized Pontiacs. They had a garden in pots on the roof. You could watch the sun set over New Jersey, see the ships in the harbor. “Hurry up and eat your soup,” my father would say, “before it gets dirty.” In 1971, they bought a brown and tan Mercury Comet. Perfect for the city because you didn’t mind the scrapes and scratches you got parking on the street.

They began to think of retiring. Cora’s older sister, Margaret, and her husband, Bud, raised appaloosa horses in Kansas. Bud could build them a house on the ranch. Nice shady spot by the creek. They could have their own horses.

They thought about Florida, California, a small farm in Missouri. After a year, chose Wayne, Maine, where they had owned the cabin on Lake Androscoggin for 20 years. They knew people in Wayne, had friends there. O.K., they were still newcomers and wore the mild curse of “summer people,” but they could get beyond that. There was a fine farm on top of the hill above the camp. With a windmill and a beautiful 1820s farmhouse connected to a two-story barn (big house, little house, back house, barn, in the usual rural Maine arrangement). A Greenwich banker had spent a fortune restoring the wide pumpkin-pine floors, the foundation, and the cabinets.

Cora moved in one summer, while Clarence stayed in New York. Cora seemed to shrink in the big farmhouse, with its dozen empty rooms. Clarence asked me to lunch one day and introduced me to his very good friend, Martha, his office manager. Martha was tall, gaunt, dark, in a businesswoman’s maroon crepe dress and high heels. She wore a musky perfume. She was from the Bronx, and nobody’s fool. She was as puzzled as I was. Why did my father think we should be friends? Or get to know each other better, as he suggested? I never saw her again.

Over the winter, Clarence realized that he could not retire and still make the payments on the Wayne farm. So, in 1973, they sold it and bought a little house in the village on Lake Pocasset. You could walk to the general store. And hop in the car in the evening and watch the sunset from the cabin on Lake Androscoggin. Cora joined the church, Friday Club, and the Study Club. Clarence joined the church, ran for selectman, and won. Not realizing that the other two selectmen (a selectman and select woman, to be precise) were having an affair. So it didn’t matter what Clarence did or said, the other two always voted together.

Clarence started his own newspaper, a weekly he called The Wayne Mainer. He was the editor-in-chief, reporter, copy editor, marketing and advertising department. He wrote it on a typewriter, with stories he gathered from the advertisers he visited, and from the usual gossip, rumors, and wacky stunts that keep a small town buzzing. One article pointed out that of the town’s seven bodies of water, Lake Androscoggin has 3,836 acres, Pocasset, 587 acres, Dexter pond, the smallest, only 120 acres, and that all seven lakes and ponds add up to 5,927 acres of water. Another laid out the strategy for a new town dump. Local people contributed stuff. Charley Whiting became the restaurant critic, roaming to Auburn and Gardner. Betsy Bowen wrote some nice nature pieces, and the little paper started to grow. The first issues were 15 cents a copy. “Dad,” I said, “you can’t make any money on 15 cents a copy. You gotta charge at least a quarter.”

He shook his head. “A fast nickle is better than a slow dime.”

Clarence hired a part-time bookkeeper and bought a new car. They had a little money left over from the sale of the farm. He wanted a Cadillac, had always wanted a Cadillac. Cora would not have it. Would not be seen in a Cadillac. Ostentatious, she said. Look at the people who drive Cadillacs, for heaven’s sake. He bought a gold Oldsmobile ’83 Regency Brougham with a vinyl roof. One of the last great American land yachts. It had pillows on the plush, gold-velour upholstery. It was the same body as the Cadillac, almost as opulent. Just one flaw: it was a diesel.

These were dark years for Detroit. The new emissions laws were killing them, Detroit’s moguls wailed in Washington. Those big V8 engines, formerly rated at 300 HP, were now wheezing at 130 HP. And they were balky, hard to start, choking to death, trying to run clean. Diesels, GM thought, might be the answer. They still might be, but GM’s Oldsmobile diesel was a dog. The problem was the diesel fuel often had water in it. Diesels run twice the compression of gas engines. And if water gets into the combustion chamber, it does not compress, and the bolts holding down the cylinder head stretch and bend, crankshafts crack, and con rods fracture and explode out the side of the cylinder block.

Most diesels had a filter that “dries out” the fuel. GM didn’t put a filter in theirs. Very few Oldsmobile diesels lasted 20,000 miles. Clarence’s went blooey at 14,000.

Later, Olds diesel owners would win a class action suit. In the meantime, Clarence did what a lot of them did—had a local mechanic install a gas V8.

One cold February morning, the sun was low behind Clarence as he stepped out onto 202, the main drag into Maine’s state capitol. He was coming from Clarke Marine—just sold them two ads in the next two issues of The Mainer. Preoccupied as usual, his head deep inside the hood of his slate blue parka, breath steaming out, he never saw the truck he stepped in front of. It was a 3/4-ton Dodge. Jimmy Devens, 34, two kids in grade school, running late, on his way to his part-time job as a mechanic, didn’t even have time to step on the brake. His broad, chrome front bumper struck Clarence in the hip, shattering the bone and knocking him high over the truck to land on the pavement behind. The truck bounded off the road, hit a sign, and stopped. A total wreck.
They took Clarence to the hospital in Augusta. He had a fractured hip, three broken ribs, severe bruising, and multiple fractures in his pelvis. The orthopedist said there was no point in operating. His shattered bones needed too much work, and he was too sick. Better to let him die painlessly in a cloud of morphine.

I was working in London, and it took two days to get a flight. “Don’t worry,” Cora said, “there’s really nothing you can do. Nothing any of us can do.”

But a young orthopedic surgeon at the Maine Medical Center in Portland heard about Clarence’s accident and wanted to try out a new idea—build a cage inside him to hold his bones together while they healed.

By the time I got there, metal rods stuck out of Clarence’s hip and there was the outline of another metal rod low on his back. He had been on his feet for a moment that morning.

I had driven down in the gold Olds, its new gas engine salvaged from the junkyard. The mechanic warned me it still needed work. Did it run? Yeah, it runs, but it needs work. The trip to Portland took three hours, because the car would run for a while, stumble, cough, then stop. If you were patient and waited five minutes, it would start again. It seemed like every time it gave up on the Turnpike, there was a tractor trailer six inches behind, doing 75.

“You’re going to be O.K.,” I said to my father.

“Of course, I am,” he said, managing a grin.

“It looks like you hurt.”

“I hurt, but the stuff they’re giving me takes some of the edge off.” The grin faded into a grimace.

“You have to let me do a story. For The Mainer.”

“On what?”

“On you. On your accident. It’s news: Truck Hits Editor. You need to let your advertisers know what happened to you. How come you’re not coming around, asking for advertising.”

He said O.K., but he wasn’t happy about it. I wrote it that night, keeping it as straight and simple as I could. Just the facts. Editor hit by truck.

He read it and put it down like it was hopeless. “Goddamn it, Bobby, I’m 82, not 83. I’ll write it.”

When I returned to Wayne in August, he came bustling out of the house, “Let me help you with your bags, Bobby.”

When Reagan ran for a second term, Clarence voted Democrat. “Why,” I asked? “You’ve voted Republican your whole life.” “Well,” Dad said, “Reagan was very persuasive.”

The Oldsmobile never did run right, and Clarence sold it to the mechanic who had done the engine swap. Maybe to punish him for and with his crimes.

Their last car was a light blue ’79 Capri. Theoretically a sporty car, it was closer in spirit and comfort to their Model T. Like the Model T, it had a four-cylinder engine. It did have a radio and a roof, but it was about as simple as cars could get. Maine winters took their toll. And it shrank, corners bashed against the garage, fences, fire hydrants...as Clarence lost his depth perception and his mind wandered off, taking longer and longer to come back.

Cora, by this time, rarely moved from her chair. It was a tufted brown velvet, deeply upholstered rocker that swiveled on its pedestal so she could turn toward the kitchen or toward the shelves of books she no longer read. But, mostly, she would stare out across Lake Pocasset, framed by the picture window and the big maples on the shore. She had been in Study Club and in the Friday Club. She had had friends. But one by one they offended her. And all the old pleasures—of working in the garden, going to Gardner for lunch—turned stale. She sat and watched the lake. Old friends would stop by, but she didn’t want to see them. She had taught Sunday school on Tuesday afternoons. She had her first and second graders doing calisthenics outside in the snow, “to tone them down.” She had them do a play, which they performed in Augusta at the Armory. But they gave her colds, and she gave them up, too. “It’s a gray day,” she would say. And say again and again. She ate almost nothing. Gave up cooking and housework and sat.

By the time Clarence died in his sleep at 92, he had sold The Mainer and begun collecting empty cardboard boxes in the cellar. I bought him a computer, but after a lifetime on the typewriter, his fingers could no longer work the keys. Never mind. He gave his six-year-old great-grandson, Juddy, the ride of his life, bouncing in a wheelbarrow, pushed at full tilt, Clarence the old half-miler at full stride, grinning like he was gonna be the first to the finish line.

By the time he died, Cora was deep into Alzheimer’s. “I’ll cry tomorrow,” she said at least a hundred times. Later, when she asked what happened to Clarence, I told her he’d died. Her face fell in sorrow and loss and she would try not to cry. And then forget and ask again, “Where’s Juddy?” I finally learned to say he’d gone to the store.

She would spend days in bed, too tired to rise. Sometimes in the night, she would think it was Thanksgiving and the whole family was coming to dinner. “I haven’t done the shopping,” she said, worried sick. “What are we going to feed them?” She stared out at the black night and thought it was day.

One morning, I told her it was the day of the Fourth of July parade. “I’m not going,” she said from her bed.

“It’s Wayne’s bicentennial. Two hundred years.”

“I’ll go to the next one.”

An hour later, a couple from town came in with their twin five-year-old daughters. Cora was up and out of bed like a shot, gathering up her robe. “Why didn’t you tell me? There’s going to be a parade.”

Her white hair stuck out of her head like electricity. She sat in a folding chair, blue fleece robe wrapped around her, as the bicentennial parade rolled past. There was a red Stanley Steamer hissing steam; Clark Marine’s float, like a big speedboat, with the owner’s teenage daughters in one-piece bathing suits; the Volunteer Fire Department’s rumbling American LaFrance truck that had been retired years ago. State senator Ault waved from his ’29 L-29 Cord, fresh dark blue paint with pale blue pinstriping. And the grand-prize float: the General Store’s hoagy sandwich with all the trimmings in red, green, and yellow crepe paper.

Cora held a little American flag on a stick with a gold spindle on top and smiled like a child.