So here am I

With nothing to do but sigh

in the long night, the lonely night

of winter coming on.

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.

My grandfather’s proprieties wore down my grandmother. She also had to deal with Harry’s mother and his unmarried sister, Florrie, who also lived at 407 and took his side.

Mil got her revenge, though, when her youngest son, Peter, was born, in 1922. She “spoiled him rotten,” my mother would say with satisfaction. He was a wild child who saw the family’s decorum as a joke, not an obligation. At the age of three, the legend had it, he ran crying into the house: “Goddam bee stung me.”

He would go on to a series of school expulsions and car wrecks, gambling debts, a teen-age elopement, and lost jobs. He was also a war hero decorated for risking his life to put out a fire in his B-24 over Europe. He was the smartest son and the funniest. I named my first son after him.

I knew from family stories that there had been much fun at 407. At the dinner table on festive occasions, they would put napkins on their heads and say to each other in turn, “This is a very serious occasion,” until they were laughing too hard to continue. On holidays, the best part of dinner for me was the desserts that Rose and Pauline made with brandy—pies and hard sauce. The alcohol fumes were supposed to catch fire but, despite the lighting of many matches, flames were fugitive.

Rose and Pauline stayed on until 407 was sold. By that time, there was a new suburban way of life that excluded servants and the schedules that went with them. On Sundays, they had gone to early church, and then cooked Sunday dinner for the family to eat when they returned from the eleven o’clock service. In our little postwar house, one county over from 407, my mother cooked Sunday dinner while my sister and I had to wait in our church clothes, knowing our friends were outside playing.

Grandpa visited us but he looked uncomfortable in our house and complained of drafts.

In 1938, my father was on the floor of the Stock Exchange when the bell rang to stop trading, a rare and drastic event. There was an announcement. Richard Whitney, former president of the Exchange, treasurer of the New York Yacht Club, master of the Far Hills Hunt, and the model of everything admired at 407 had been arrested. The crime was the sleaziest of betrayals on Wall Street then: embezzlement from funds he oversaw.

“Richard Whitney!” my father said to me. “Richard Whitney! Impossible!” It was reported that people crowded in Grand Central Station to see him taken off to prison in handcuffs.

After commanding a landing ship through the carnage at Okinawa, and satisfying any craving he still had for the sea, my father defied my grandfather and quit Wall Street to sell wholesale silverware. He liked selling. He was good at it, though later he was not as good when he moved into management. Grandpa insisted that he describe himself not as a salesman but as a “district sales manager.” Along with his boyhood, the Navy was my father’s greatest success. Meanwhile, my uncles lived as if they were in exile, moving through futureless jobs in out-of-the-way cities. David ran an Eastern Airlines ticket office in Atlantic City, I remember, and Peter moved from rental to rental, one step ahead of the landlord.

Whiskey, the sovereign remedy for the pain of change, became a way of living that was also a way of dying. Drinking is a borrowing against a future that never comes. Instead, there are business disappointments, debts, and marrying down—a regression to the mean.

Its hat factories long gone, Orange was turning shabby. Before the tracks were torn up, my grandfather took me for a ride so I’d know what a trolley had been. Family legend had it that a distant cousin had travelled from New Jersey to Rhode Island on the interurban trolley that once linked towns on the East Coast.

With stunning crassness or encroaching dementia, my grandfather remarried in his late sixties in a grand church wedding with flower girls, the flinging of rose petals, and a celebrity minister—Norman Vincent Peale, the author of “The Power of Positive Thinking.” The new wife, named Molly, turned out to be a middle-aged drunk and a hanger-on of ministers who bilked her and us. My mother said that she gave 407’s Oriental rugs—and who knows what else—to someone she called “the Revender Cooper.”

In a last chance for 407, my grandfather offered to sell it to my father, but he or my mother or both of them said no. I liked the idea—my last chance at equalling my father’s boyhood—but I recall them saying that it would cost a fortune to heat.

Grandpa and Molly moved to a stuffy apartment in a building that my father called “Menopause Hall.” Grandpa died there during a nap, after church, on Easter Sunday. My sister and I were not allowed to go to the funeral. I don’t know why. I wonder now if the mistress was there with her son, our half-uncle.

The widow pestered my father with drunken late-night phone calls. She stepped in a paint pot and fell downstairs. We heard that she’d gone into a nursing home and then we lost track of her. I think my father felt she was the living corruption of everything that 407 and his mother had stood for. In a burst of cynicism, he said that his father had married her because he thought she had money.

Now I am the oldest member of the family. I have lived my life in the exile of bohemia and journalism. After claiming some casualties, the family disease is finally in remission—I haven’t had a drink for more than twenty years. There are great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren with newfound energy and delight in life—from a law partner, a school principal, and a ski champion to a four-year-old in a tutu on Halloween. This chronicle may mean little to them; history stops at your grandparents. And when my sister and I die, along with a few cousins, there will be no one to remember our 407, no one to honor its tutelary deities, which is to say that there will be no 407 at all by our lights, just an old house in an exhausted city in New Jersey.

Henry Allen wrote and edited for thirty-nine years at the Washington Post. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, in 2000.

Images, from top: The author’s grandmother Mildred Bowen Allen, with her sons, in a sailboat. The author’s grandfather Henry Southworth Allen, Jr., who was called Harry. A drawing by the author, done from a photograph of his father at St. George’s. The author’s grandmother in a car with her dog Fluffy Ruffles.