Celebration: A Novel

April 1975

APRIL 15 Dreaming. Dreamt I was dreaming. Not surprised that I was small, a child. But amazed that my mother was so young, so beautiful. She came tripping toward me in her pointy-toed white patent-leather boots, fluttering the pigeons from the stones of the Piazza San Marco. The starched flounces of her jabot, crisp as peppermint candy and carved in the same frozen swirl, bounced on her breast as she hastened toward me where I stood, alone and defiant, at once frightened and happy to see her. Did I know why I was frightened? Yes, but I couldn’t admit it to myself. Most of all I was overcome by her beauty, the grace of her arm as she gathered up her ankle-length skirt, the tininess of her waist, the sparkle of her deep, laughing eyes.

Samuel! she cried. To run away on your birthday!

I dug my high-button shoes into the ground to keep from throwing myself into her arms. I could not hide the cornetto, so I brazened it out, licking at it openly. Nothing bad can happen, I said to myself, it’s just a dream, why else would she talk to me in English, not in Italian or in Russian?

Bending at the knee with the grace of a waterbird, Mama brought herself down to my level so that she could stare directly into my eyes. Her touch, as she brushed back my windswept hair with her gloved fingers, belied her stern look.

I was so worried, she crooned, smoothing the wrinkles from the white-starred collar of my new sailor suit. Why did you run away?

I had this money, I lied boldly, the lire that Nanny gave me, and I did so want a gelato. I was afraid that Papa—

Finish, quick! If he finds out you ran from the celebration he makes for you … terrible, don’t ask.

Delicious conspiracy! The thick rich vanilla mingles in my mouth, seemingly, with my mother’s Roger and Gallet scent. She won’t tell, she’ll put back the money I took from Nanny’s baguetto.

Around us, while she wipes the corners of my lips, with her tiny lace-edged cambric handkerchief, the clapping of pigeons’ wings as they alight before a stout purple-nosed German tourist, straining the seams of his red-piped waistcoat, grunting Ach ja, ach ja as he sows peanuts from a paper sack. All of my senses are alive at once, the campanile is bonging the hour behind the whirring of the pigeons, and through the gray fluttered veil of their weaving wings I see the giggling English girls gathered in a group for a pose, before the pockmarked Italian photographer with a spotted red kerchief tied round his sweating neck, adjusting his tripod, clenching the camera bulb in his fist, and above my mother’s goddess smile the sun glittering on the rampant Venetian horses frozen in flight and the clouds racing across the blue sky, and it is all delicious, delicious, delicious….

How reluctant I was to awaken! I almost found myself waving goodbye to my birthday dream, as if I were a reluctant passenger on a rocking gondola, borne away against my will from the dock at the foot of the Piazza San Marco….

I must have been smiling when I opened my eyes. Rog Girard, bending over me with passionless solicitude, was half-smiling himself. His familiar fine-cut features were obscured in the gloom, his black, black eyes all but concealed by those hooded lids—like the drawn blinds protecting me from the glare of the afternoon sun—but his thin lips were curved and parted, revealing almost reluctantly the astonishing white teeth that contrast with his smooth olive-skinned complexion. Sometimes I think he believes smiling is immoral, or reactionary.

My falcon secretary. I wish my vision were better if only so I could see him more clearly. He thinks he sees through me, doesn’t he, like an X-ray man. No, more like a surgeon doing an exploratory, groping through my guts for signs of … Well, what he does see he sees better than most.

I thought you might want to shave. Friendly but deprecatory, he tends to address me as if we were fellow UN delegates. He is reminding me indirectly of two points: First, that I can no longer see to shave by artificial light, and can do a decent job only when the sun is angling through the bathroom window onto the mirror over the sink. Second, that I have a horror of being unshaven, even before my own wife. Parading before Jennifer, even after ten years of marriage, with my white stubble sprouting I think of as almost as humiliating as letting her see my empty gums.

He knows that Jennifer will be driving up from New York with one or both of those television men, and that I will wish to be shaved and dressed to greet them properly. Facts. What he doesn’t know is that I am eaten up with unease. That dream: Was it a true recollection, did it really happen, am I succeeding, in my old age, in calling up incidents from the remote and forgotten past? If so, it can make more bearable some of the indignities, the losing of more recent names, places, dates. How delectable, to be reunited with your sweet-smelling young mother after an entire lifetime! On the other hand, supposing it was just a dream? Could it be only an invention, a fable, to ease the stupid burden of being old?

That writer who came for a season or two at the Sophia School to teach my students, and seduce them too, used to say that after he had rearranged some incident of his earlier life into a short story he could no longer distinguish what had actually happened from what he had made up.

Is that where I am now?

No one to answer such questions for me.

In a sense that is why I am starting a diary at the tail end of my life. For a man nearly ninety, perhaps it’s a ludicrous operation. I will not look back on it (whether with rue or without) in years to come, because it is highly unlikely that there will be many of those. I can hardly see to sign my name any more. But for some little time I should be able to touch-type like this, if Rog gets on with the correspondence and the daily reading sessions. All I aim to do is what this first entry has already done—tell myself the dreams and memories that no one else could understand.

I have to be careful too. The television men may try to draw just those things from me; so I should set down here certain things I don’t wish to be made public by interviewers, even for my ninetieth birthday celebration. Mama and me in Venice … if only that were all.

APRIL 16 They came, the two of them, accompanied not just by Jenny, but by Larry Brodie. Well, the whole idea of having me tell my life story to the TV cameras was his. Jenny accepts it, it brings me back in the public eye, painlessly, it’ll increase her pride. Rog goes along too, seduced by the prospect of such a huge forum to promote my eccentric notions.

They’re all so eager to get me to talk! Or to write! From the way they carry on, you’d think I had secrets, arcane wisdom, God knows what. The world’s appetite for revelations is insatiable. Now they’re dying to find out what I type in here when I’m alone, wondering whether I’m writing something.

Well, I am. And I want to settle up accounts in my own way. I want to say not how I feel about each of them from day to day—after all, I have nothing to hide from dear Jenny … except maybe (aha!) my sometimes reservations about Larry, the Great Disciple—but most important to me, how I feel about myself, now that I’m getting to the end of the line. Clear the tracks, Eternity, here I come.

The most remarkable thing about those TV men, supposed bearers of instant immortality, is how ordinary they are. A producer, a correspondent, between them they earn, I gather, several hundred thousand dollars a year. How else do you measure success in America? Celebrity status? By the mere act of celebrating people like me, correspondents like Dick Wells become celebrities themselves.

When they talk to me, when they begin to ask the probing questions, it is pitiful. The producer, Gabriel Gibbons, the older man, is rumpled and unassuming and perfectly pleasant, betraying nothing of the battles he must have been through in order to make it to the top. A family man. He speaks with pride of his children. More significant, he betrays no effects of having been exposed to accomplished and remarkable human beings. He is as deferential as if I were the first well-known old man he has ever met. For one awful moment I thought he was going to call me to my face the Father of Progressive Education. In caps. But he stopped short of that. I guess someone told him about Dewey. His hair is gray, but whose isn’t, except for politicians and personalities like Wells, the correspondent, who have to pander to the youth cult? Even the grooves, one on either side of the smiling mouth, prove nothing much other than that he is a nice fellow.

As for Wells, he was far more courteous than I would have guessed from watching him bait people in his dogged, humorless way. But he gave no slightest hint that he or his researchers had a clue as to what questions might elicit some hitherto unrevealed truth.

There are to be at least three more sessions after this, one for each season of the year. Then the whole thing will be edited for posterity, or the instant oblivion of an hour-and-a-half special. They all seem prepared for me to be iconoclastic, witty, skeptical, amusing, maybe even a bit shocking. Is it still possible to shock?

What they won’t get out of me, no matter how hard they try, are the private things, the most important things. Dick Wells has lived in this world for forty-eight years or so (maybe more, it is hard to tell behind that jet-black hair, that healthy tan, that professionally clear-eyed gaze), but he is apparently still under the youthful delusion that if you ask enough questions you can find out everything there is to know.

Maybe he is just doing his job, as the others are doing what they think is best for me, fulfilling the assignment of presenting the human side of an inhumanly deified old man. Should be a simple task for a professional humanizer, if the subject is at all cooperative.

Just the same, I can’t help but think that what Jung said about Richard Wilhelm would be utterly beyond Wells’s comprehension. I had R. look it up to refresh my memory, but couldn’t bring myself to quote it to Walter. Getting soft? It belongs here:

"Whenever I attempted to touch the actual problem of his inner conflict, I immediately sensed a drawing back, an inward shutting himself off—because such matters went straight to the bone. This is a phenomenon I have observed in many men of importance. There is, as Goethe puts it in Faust, an ‘untrodden, untreadable’ region whose precincts cannot and should not be entered by force; a destiny which will brook no human intervention."

Suddenly tired. When I started, I thought I could type for hours. Simple eye strain and fatigue? Or something called up by old Dr. Jung, who was so wise—and such a credulous old fool?

It wears me out just to think of how to keep this in a safe place. To say nothing of going on with it.

APRIL 17 This television business is not as simple as I had thought. Certainly they all tried to make things as easy for me as possible. The technicians drove up unobtrusively in two crammed station wagons and practically tiptoed around the house, even though they had what seemed to me like tons of camera and sound equipment. Nice men too. The Italian cameraman a sloppy-looking fellow, rumpled, big belly, but a sensitive face. And the sound man, a survivor I saw as soon as he took off his jacket and revealed the tattoo on his forearm.

Gibbons must have gone over my daily habits with Jenny and Rog, because he asked if I had any objections to having Dick Wells accompany me and my old coonhound on our walk to the post office and then to Walter and Lily’s on the way home with the mail. It struck me as a bit artificial, what with de Santis and Freedman, one with a cigar, the other with dark glasses, tracking us; but that’s where Wells knows his trade, putting you at ease.

What’s the dog’s name? he wanted to know, and when I said Lincoln Steffens, he laughed and remarked that he was going to remind me of that later, when we get to my muckraking years.

Matching my slow step, he kept me company to the post office, questioning me on the way about my routine. After I threw the mail in my bookbag, I took him over to the Honigs’, since that’s where I stop to catch my breath for the mile-long walk back here. Lily had been baking, the house smelled delicious, we all four had some of her strudel with hot coffee and talked about neighborhood things, indigo, wildflowers, vegetable gardens, spring planting.

Only when we were back here and relaxing in the living room did Wells lead me into a conversation about my childhood. The idea is for viewers to see me as I live now, here in the country and maybe in the New York apartment, while they hear me discuss my life. After they finish with me, after Wells and I have walked and talked three or four times in the course of the next few months, Gibbons will boil it all down to maybe two programs of an hour and a half each—rather like having someone take mountains of notes and do a two-volume biography of you, only with you posing for it. And, in a way, controlling it.

Didn’t try to conceal the fact that I was afraid of my father. But who wasn’t, eighty or ninety years ago?

Wells kept trying to get me to reminisce about the early days in Florence and my parents, Philip Lumen, the bearded expatriate painter, and Marta, the beautiful young Swedish-Russian wife he’d met and married there. Romantic enough, but how much has it to do with my turning into a general hell-raiser, a schoolmaster, and an advocate for children who couldn’t speak for themselves? Wells was eager to bring out (rather crudely, I thought) the connection between my exotic origins and my becoming what I seem to be now. It’s people like Wells himself who are responsible for glossing over the in-between—the hell-raising—or at least sanitizing it.

Partly it’s a function of my being old. In this country if you live long enough your sins—in my case, bohemianism, radicalism, a jail term for subversion—are converted into cuteness. If you’re the oldest living hoodlum they promote you as a onetime Robin Hood, or a symbol of the Old West.

Anyway, I did point out to Wells (and as with certain children, I could see the idea slowly taking root in his mind) that far more significant was the fact that as a little boy, like my father before me, I had had an old man for a parent. He was asking me about those years, the early 1890s, playing on the floor in a corner of my father’s studio while he painted those forgotten landscapes, etc. etc., when I said, My father was a charming old man.

Don’t you suppose your father was charming as a young man? he asked with a touch of the sharpness I’d been led to expect from him.

I thought my answer to that was fair and honest and I am putting it down here because how do I know what Gibbons & Co. will edit out in the final version? I said, I never met anyone who knew him as a young man. My own mother never set eyes on him until he was almost fifty, a bachelor of fifty.

Bells went off in Wells’s head. He was dying to get me to say that I had become a substitute father for generations of kids because I’d been a young child with an old father. I told him the simple truth, that late marriage runs in our family, as in some English households. My grandfather, old Sam for whom I was named, was forty-seven when my father was born. Sam was born in 1789, the year Washington took the oath of office. I added, with a certain satisfaction, The memory of that family history gave me the confidence, in 1966, to marry a woman more than fifty years younger than I.

Well, he said, it’s true she was a young woman, but Jennifer Lumen is your third wife, isn’t she? I changed the subject.

But all that will turn up one day on television. What matters right now is reminding myself that the greatest threat to my integrity does not come from Wells or Gibbons, much less from those decent technicians, de Santis and Freedman. If anyone subverts me, inside the household or out, it will be because I want them to.

At supper, after Wells & Co. had left, Rog asked if I still felt up to a reading session or if I’d rather skip it. Jenny reads to me occasionally, things that take her fancy, but it’s irregular because she is away on assignment so much of the time. I get great pleasure from R.’s reading—he knows just how fast to go, how much to inflect, even how to stop gracefully when I get drowsy. It’s a real bond between us, his steady voice and my listening, and I dislike missing it, even when I’m worn out.

What shall it be? he asked, and was startled when I told him to find Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. He knows I can’t keep long novels in my head any more, and I usually leave it to him to pick out salient passages from new books that I want to know about.

I told him that he needn’t worry, I had no desire to go all through that novel again, I just wanted to recall Dostoyevsky’s narrator’s description of a famous old writer (couldn’t remember his name, but I think it was a portrait of Turgenev) who turns up early in the narrative in the provincial town of the story. It took some hunting, but R. is quick. He found Dostoyevsky’s shrewd commentary on how rapidly some geniuses fade in old age, which goes like this:

It happens not infrequently that a writer who has been for a long time credited with extraordinary profundity and expected to exercise a great and serious influence on the progress of society, betrays in the end such poverty, such insipidity in his fundamental ideas that no one regrets that he succeeded in writing himself out so soon. But the old grey-heads don’t notice this, and are angry. Their vanity sometimes, especially towards the end of their career, reaches proportions that may well provoke wonder. God knows what they begin to take themselves for—for gods at least!

I let R. read on to the end of the scene—a charming one in which the flustered narrator almost stoops to pick up the Great Man’s coyly dropped reticule—before I stopped him. But R. is no fool. He said, That’s not you. That could never be you.

Don’t be too sure, I said. Just leave the book on the desk on your way out.

APRIL 18 Today, that first moment of breathtaking mildness which does not last, but simply breathes upon you briefly, like a sudden soft kiss on the neck. My God! I thought, sniffing the air on the back porch looking out over the meadow, I’ve lived through another winter and it’s still good to be alive, to look forward to one more summer!

I stood as silent as I could, clenching the head of my cane. I didn’t even want the boards to creak for fear of signaling my presence to J., who was crouching with her camera, long-legged and intent, like some exotic bird, tracking the life that must be springing from the earth but that I can no longer see. It seemed almost as though that penetrating puff of warm air had brought her to me as a gift—she is often in her Manhattan studio, or on the road, in search of flora and fauna, with those elongated lenses like monstrous bug eyes. I dared not look too pleased for fear that if she did glance up she would observe my joy and feel guilty that she is not here more often to give me pleasure. She knows I am happiest when she is doing her photography here, home, rather than elsewhere. Maybe she even knows that I like to think of her being here, or even just coming here, long after I am gone.

I continued to stand there for a while, sniffing the air, after her tan jacket had slipped from my view below the slope of the meadow. Found myself thinking not of her but of my mother and father, seated across from me in the railway carriage en route from Florence to Genoa and the ship that was to take us to the United States.

It was the spring of 1894, Father had been wiped out (I had no idea what that meant, I thought it had to do with what he did to his canvases and sketch pads) by the collapse of his railroad investments in the Panic of 1893. He sat heavy-bearded and heavy-browed, hands folded stiffly in his lap, tense (I think now) from not having pencil or brush to clutch. Mother sat beside him, her fingers tearing at the little handkerchief. He made no move to comfort her, nor did I, since I didn’t know the source of her tension. But I asked, and when she assured me that it was simple weariness I felt complete release from fear, even from uneasiness.

Indeed I was free to revel in a kind of elation, much like what I felt at watching Jennifer float through the meadow below me. I remember no unhappiness, quite the contrary, only the most intense delight at the greening poplars and vineyards drifting by as we chuffed through the Tuscan spring, with me sucking on peppermint sticks from a white paper sack, whose shape is as sharp and clear as if I held it in my hand at this moment, rolling onward to a great voyage, a new land, a new life….

But then later, while I was dictating letters to R., Jenny came in, apologizing for intruding, excited. Larry will be coming back tonight from Washington.

I know she sees L. in Washington and New York. She knows I know. The excitement wasn’t on her account, it was on mine. After all, he was just here, he arranged the TV thing and stayed to see that the first interview went off all right. Now what?

She won’t say, but we’ll see soon enough. I do resent the idea that they are all involved in activities having to do with me that are being kept from me, then revealed only in bits and pieces as if I were a child, to be protected from both good news (he’ll be overstimulated, he won’t sleep well) and bad (the shock will be too great, why should he have to know about such things?).

APRIL 19 It all came out last night. Larry was bursting with it, charming, laughing at himself, for his clumsy impossible excitement. It’s no wonder he couldn’t settle for being a psychology professor. Or that J. is so taken with him. How could she resist the charm, added to the combination of his being my first disciple, as he proclaims it, and a presidential adviser?

He tried to be grave, stalling, insisting on telling it his way. OK, we all enjoyed it around the dining-room table—Jenny and me, Walter and Lily, Rog, Mrs. Hoskins in and out with her special pork and rice in honor of the occasion.

Larry’s chunky body radiates a ferocious kind of energy. He saws the air with his squarish hands (when he greets me he is careful not to squeeze too hard), shaking his thick shock of graying curls above the broken nose that makes me think of a Roman head in the Forum. He has not turned out to be handsome as I expected he would, in his schoolboy days, before life’s shocks altered his features. But he’s enormously attractive all the same. And no matter how much I kick against his having built his career on me, from the Ph.D. thesis on the Sophia School all the way to this bureaucrat’s job, I must admit that he not only speaks to me with love, he speaks of me with love.

J. leaned forward over the round oak table, her shoulders shaking with laughter, the tail of her tied-up hair swinging free as she shook her head in mock dismay.

Walter and Lily were smiling too, as much out of happiness for me, I am sure, as at Larry. Lily’s invincible air of sweet gentility I always associate with reliability. I doubt that she was ever wildly desirable to Walter in all their forty-odd years of comfortable marriage, but I can’t imagine her ever letting him down. And Walter with that lawyerlike pensiveness, his impeccably clean fingertips making a steeple even during the dinner-table joshing. In the glow of the three candles Jenny had lit I could see the precise part in Walter’s gray hair, his pink scalp gleaming.

And then Rog. He has always intrigued me at dinner by sitting quite far from the table—so far that, especially when it is candlelit, he is almost entirely in shadow, his back to the fireplace, his facial reactions all but concealed from those around him. Perhaps because of his dark saturnine complexion I almost expect him to do the opposite, to lean right into his plate, rolling up the rice into little balls between his fingers and popping them directly into his mouth without that Western pretense of distance from what you fork up and convey to your insides. I could feel him withdrawing further and further as Larry told how he had described my first interview session to his boss.

The President, Larry said, was most impressed—especially since his own childhood had been nothing to brag about—with my recounting to Wells the story of our days on 28th Street. He looks forward to seeing the interview: me explaining how I, the gently raised son of an expatriate artist, adapted to the shock of being one more kid on the streets of New York, minding the counter and the register of my mother’s sweet shoppe when she went off to give piano or watercolor or sketching lessons to the daughters of those who could afford to hire a European gentlewoman.

My mother’s gallant courage enthralls him—the contrast with my father, contracting consumption and going off to the Adirondacks to bring up blood into his starched handkerchiefs while I was being beaten up by neighborhood toughs.

Anyone would be impressed, R. murmured in his even way. Then he said to Larry, I wonder, though, what your employer—he said that word politely, even amiably, but none of us could miss the cutting edge—is going to make of the Lumen contribution to native radicalism.

I liked that, even if the others didn’t. Larry accepts the totality of my life, he has tried to deal with it in his own way, but it is true that in his hands I come out as a Lovable Old Guy. And I am not. God damn it, I am not. R. is the one man who knows this.

This was the moment at which Larry’s horseplay ended. He said quietly, I believe I have an answer to that. Sam, the President wishes your permission to name the National Children’s Center for you.

Well, my God! Jennifer was glowing. I have never seen her more beautiful. Mrs. H. waddled in with a tray of brandy and glasses to go with the coffee, Walter Honig was on his feet with a toast, Lily was kissing me on the cheek, even old Steff roused from the hearth, wagging with happiness for me, and began to bark.

I must admit here, if not to anyone else, that ever since I was first consulted on the planning and design of the Center I have suspected something like this was in the works. I muttered that it would be more seemly if they’d wait until I was dead.

Larry rubbed his hands as if they were extended over the fire and said, It all has to do with your being so alive, Sam. We’d like you to consent to a brief formal ceremony. You know, we really do hope that the building will be ready for use by the time of the bicentennial.

I said, I really can’t see myself doing that playacting.

L. cut me off. I know, I know. The President said to tell you that if you think the trip is too much, or whatever, he’ll come to you. But he wants the dedication to coincide with your ninetieth birthday.

The logs were snapping and the glasses were clinking and everybody was talking and laughing. I was suddenly exhausted. At that moment I caught sight of something in Rog Girard’s face that was absent from the others’ … and I realized that there were going to be impediments to my playing the Great Old Man game.

I used to think that the unique quality of great age lay in its beautiful challenge to refine, to purify, to discover simplicity. Now that suddenly I am terribly old, I have the uneasy feeling that I had been romanticizing, out of ignorance. Because nothing seems simple to me now. Everything is complex, mysterious, impure, starting with my own motives and conduct….

APRIL 20 I think perhaps I shall never be happier than I was yesterday at our little dinner party. Or that I shall never again be happy in quite that way. I can only think of the dream that followed it, after I had typed my diary and gone to bed, as a kind of presentiment. My dreams lately have been so full of charm that they seduce me into sleep. What if that changes, and they become dreadful?

I was seated on a little platform in the mall at Rockefeller Center. Behind me, although the weather was balmy, the giant Christmas tree was ablaze. At the lectern, Dick Wells, the President of the United States, natty in his red, white and blue outfit, was reading from a text to a huge crowd gaping up at us. His First Lady, seated near me, was Jennifer. Although she was naked, her legs were modestly crossed at the ankles. Her bearing was regal, her smile demure, as the President sang my praises. I was suffused with happiness as the crowd responded with bursts of applause to the President’s recital of my career. Fathers held their children on their shoulders so that they could catch a glimpse not only of their President but of me.

But then I observed that Jennifer was holding the Vice President’s hand in her naked lap. It struck me as poor taste considering that the Vice President was Larry Brodie. A series of little annoyances began to obtrude—a certain restlessness in the eddying currents of the crowd, a swaying motion of the temporary platform on which I sat, a sudden glint of envy, yes, outright envy in the usually mild and temperate eyes of Walter Honig, in the front row below us.

My happiness began to fade. This was only a show, it could not last. The crowd was beginning to melt at the edges, restless, bored. Suddenly my keen eyes (sharper than they have been for twenty years) spotted Rog Girard at the outskirts of the crowd, arms folded while the President’s words boomed out over the tinsel-decorated loudspeakers. His enigmatic smile became a grin, then a leer, and I felt mortified, as though it were not Jennifer but I who sat there naked, as though it were not her lovely body but my shrunken, sagging flesh that was being exposed to public mockery. When I saw the man at Girard’s side panic overwhelmed me. Young, slouching, heedless of authority, he commanded a band of youths—toughs, the motorbike gang type who sneer at everything worthwhile, every decent effort even when it is in their behalf.

They were going to break up the meeting. The police who ringed the Plaza would do nothing to stop them; they too were grinning. Even while rage and fright commingled in my chest and rose to my throat, I strained to see who he was, that young agitator. When finally I recognized him after a searching stare in which our eyes met, a scream choked my throat. I awoke sweating and trembling, convinced for a moment—until the terror subsided and I had oriented myself to the familiar confines of my solitary bedroom at