It was a golden Indian summer day in late September. After working
up a sweat rollerblading on the rail trail I went for a long swim in the cool
waters of Mudge Pond. Only a few Canadian geese paddling off shore
broke the silence. I lay in the sand fi lling my open pores with the warm
rays of the sun. Th e docks were stacked in sections, the swimming area
buoys were gone. Th e rafts, no longer rocking on the waves of the lake,
sat forlornly on shore. Vacations over, the weekenders had returned to the
city, the lifeguards were back at college and the locals never came down to
the lake after Labor Day.
It was a delicious moment of peace. I surrendered to the pleasure of the
feeling of inertia. Rested and relaxed I gathered up my things, slipped on
my sandals and in my new blue Rav 4 headed up the hill to home.
Pulling into the driveway I was greeted by the sculptures I had created
out of driftwood from the Great Falls in nearby Falls Village. A magical
gold and green bird was poised to take fl ight next to the hemlock tree, a
large turquoise fi sh leapt over an azure wave in front of the cascading weeping
Japanese pine, while a multicolored sea monster emerged from a dark
blue ocean in the garden. A bench made of giant beams my wife Vicky
and I had hauled out of the Housatonic River was decorated with twisting
branches and sea shells we had collected during a vacation in Maine. Th e
many gardens we had created still off ered an assortment of colored fl owers
as I drove the car into the dark mouth of our purple garage.
Vicky was in the kitchen where she had been most of the day preparing
an elaborate feast of Indian cuisine for our family celebration of my 62nd
birthday. Although it was several days after my birthday, we had celebrated
our daughter Grace’s tenth birthday earlier in the week and decided to
postpone mine (the day after Grace’s) until the weekend.
After setting the picnic table for the party, outside the kitchen under
the maple tree, I headed to the mail box to collect the days mail. Along
with the usual bills, fl yers and catalogs I found a large white envelope from
the attorney who was executing my father’s estate.
Born on the same day of the year as myself, this would be the fi rst year
we would not be exchanging birthday greetings. Dad had passed away
nearly a year ago after turning 94.
His death, 24 hours after a fall, was preceded by a prolonged period of
deterioration from Alzheimer’s disease.
Stripped of his power, separated in a total care wing of the nursing
home from his wife of the last 40 years, my father spent the end of his life
aimlessly wandering the facility, often falling asleep on a stranger’s bed.
When I would call him twice a week it would take the nurses 15 or 20
minutes to locate him.
As they delivered him to the phone I would frequently hear him crying
out in pain from the rough way they were handling him. Th en, much to
his frustration, they would stand nearby talking so loud he could barely
hear me over their chatter.
During these calls he could not remember what he had eaten for lunch
ten minutes before or any other details of his current life but he still seemed
to know who I was talking about as I recounted recent news concerning
my family. He always told me he had nothing to report, however he communicated
clearly how frightened he was by the helplessness of his present
predicament.
He had spent a lifetime mastering skills of competence and independence.
So complete was his independence that when, well into his eighties, he
woke up in the middle of one night feeling intensely ill, (later diagnosed as
food poisoning), without waking his wife he got dressed and drove himself
to the emergency ward of a hospital.
After graduating from the State University of Iowa at 20 he went on
to get a MBA from Harvard University and a law degree from Yale University.
In his career he worked his way up to become a senior partner in a
prestigious law fi rm in New York City. During the much publicized steel
strikes of the 1960s he was the chief labor relations negotiator for Bethlehem
Steel, one of what was referred to as “the big three” steel producers.
He had other notable clients in his career (Time and Life to name but one)
and even once did some work for Mohammed Ali, whom he had met and
obviously admired.
My father himself was an intensely pugnacious man. Reluctant as he
was to resonate with any person, he came to life in confl ict. A member of
the debate team in college he continued to hone his argumentative skills
at home as well as at work.
He shared with me once that he didn’t like children until they reached
the age of 12 and had the ability to debate ideas.
My father’s style of debate however didn’t permit two sides to an issue.
An intensely opinionated man, he communicated moral indignation and
contempt, for any point of view that diff ered from his own.
Diminutive of stature, (his mother and sister both were under 5 feet
tall), he was a man with handsome features and jet black hair. What stood
out for me was his mouth. Th ere seemed to be a tremendous amount of
tension in his jaw, as if he was, only with great eff ort, restraining an impulse
to bite.
As a child he had been born prematurely. His petite mother, unable
to produce enough milk to feed him, found a neighbor to serve as his wet
nurse.
Th is may explain, (as much as the fact that his own small town lawyer
father had owned a dairy farm on the edge of town,) why years later my
father bought a giant dairy farm in Virginia many miles from his home
in New York. Standing behind a cow he would rhapsodize over the size of
a cows udder. It might produce as much as 60 pounds of milk in a milking!
He was a driven man who grew up in the little town of Esterville
Iowa. Above all else he prized the virtues of discipline, frugality, and hard
work. Perfectionistic and uncompromising he permitted no possibility
of closeness. Except perhaps for the one indisputable love of his life. His
mother, for whom he built a home adjacent to our summer home in Connecticut.
Th ere, up from working in the city on the weekends, after golf and
gardening, he would walk the path through the fi elds to visit her and chat
about gardening or deliver a sermon on conservative politics.
His father had died in his early 60s and clearly he considered this a
blessing. One time during a heated confl ict in which I was expressing my
disappointment in him as a father, he shared with me that no matter what
accomplishment he achieved as a boy (and there were many) he received
no acknowledgment from his father.
When I was in my early twenties he gave me an article by Jean Paul
Sartre in which the French philosopher described his father. My father
had underlined a quote in which Sartre stated, (in words to the eff ect),
“Th ank god my father died when I was young. If he had lived he would
have smothered the life out of me.”
At the time he showed the article to me I felt my father was taunting
me with an insight into my own feelings about himself. It wasn’t until years
later that I realized he had probably been trying, in a rare moment of selfdisclosure,
to reveal something about himself.
What goes around comes around. My father came around me with a
vengeance. Th e only saving grace was that, being a workaholic, he was often
out of the house. When he was home he was like a black cloud crushing
all possibility of joy or pleasure out of my life.
In the process of relocating a woodpile one day my father uncovered
a nest of moles. I stood horrifi ed as a young child as I watched him wade
in with his big work boots stomping out the lives of the baby moles. I
defi nitely felt a kinship with them. In such a way I felt he waded into my
life, stamping out all life.
When he was home he worked on his garden, golf game etc. He had
no time for frivolous fun, or companionship with his family. We never
went fi shing. We never threw a ball. He was all business. Th e only way he
would relate was by supervising a long list of chores he had left on Sunday
evening before he returned to the city for the work week. My brother and
I ignored the list until Th ursday. Th en we got into high gear to try and
complete the tasks before he reviewed them on Saturday morning. We had
jobs like weeding and pulling all the Japanese beetles off the fl owers and
burning them.
As disappointing as he was in other ways, he was an excellent provider.
We had a luxurious fi ve-bedroom apartment in New York City on the upper
east side. We lived a block from Carl Schurtz Park (where the Mayor
lived in Gracie Mansion). In the summer we had a fi ve bedroom home
overlooking the Lakeville lake (Lake Wononskopomuc).
During the school year, my brother and I spent our free time playing
in the large court yard that stretched behind our building and three other
buildings on the block.
Th ere we spent hours playing, at fi rst cowboys and Indians and cops
and robbers, and later stick ball, handball, basketball and football. One of
our friends got tackled on the hard rough cement and lost his front tooth.
It didn’t impede his progress in life. He went on to become dean of Yale
Law School.

When we got hungry we would climb over the high metal gate at one
end of the courtyard, taking care to not get impaled on the sharp spear
like posts that were there to protect us from the outside world. Crossing
the street to a dark little bodega we would chose our snacks from cup
cakes, devil rolls, marshmallow pies or Mrs. Fields little apple, blueberry
or cherry pies.
Climbing back over the fence we would stop on top of the high cement
wall to eat our goodies and gossip or talk sports. We were endlessly
curious about a set of fi sh bones embedded in the top of the cement wall
where we sat.
Other times we would venture out of our walled citadel to visit the
dangerous but intriguing world of Carl Schurtz Park. Th ere we would
climb and explore the rocks bordering both sides of a large open area lined
with benches. We felt like authentic cowboys and Indians in the rugged
terrain but often our bravery was put to the test by tougher bands of less
privileged kids who would intimidate and fi nally throw rocks at us, driving
us back to the safety of our walled kingdom.
Next door to our building was a Gristedes supermarket where our
mother shopped for groceries. Accompanying her as small children the
butcher would often treat us to a gift of chicken feet. We got a kick out
of manipulating a joint at the top that would make them open and close.
Outside on the street, we particularly enjoyed dropping behind our mother
and demonstrating this to elderly people passing by.
Th e neighborhood we lived in was Yorkville. It had a large German
population. One year, Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi
party, attempted to hold a rally there. To show their repugnance for his platform
of bigotry the shopkeepers put American fl ags in their windows.
I appreciated the neighborhood because it retained a fl avor of an older
world.
Occasionally a gypsy violinist would stroll past our buildings playing
his music. My mother would give us quarters wrapped in toilet paper to
throw down to him on the sidewalk below.
Other times a blacksmith would make an appearance in his horse
drawn cart to sharpen the kitchen knives brought out by the neighborhood
wives.
Th e private school we attended was determined to give us a serious
education. A Latin teacher in the fi fth grade would throw open the window
as wide as it would go in the middle of winter. He would make us
conjugate verbs while we did calisthenics. We got a crack on the knuckles
with a ruler if we made a mistake.
One teacher in the school ignited in me a life long love of reading. A
poor reader in the fi rst and second grades, my parents were concerned and
hired a reading tutor to work with me. In the third grade I was blessed
with a new teacher to the school. He had just arrived from England. He
stood out from the other teachers I had had. Th ey seemed (like my father)
to detest children and determined to treat them accordingly.
Mr. Corbett was a sensitive soul. I felt he liked and appreciated me. He
was enthusiastic about literature. Poetry in particular. With his encouragement
I developed a love of reading.
I read Hardy Boy books and horse stories by Walter Farleigh. I read
all the Landmark histories and biographies. I found a hero in Abraham
Lincoln who had led the war to free the slaves. I felt like a slave myself to
my father and much of the adult world. I longed for the good father that
would set me free. I drew a charcoal portrait of Lincoln and started collecting
every book I could fi nd about him.
Mr. Corbett was the fi rst adult who saw some value in me and nurtured
it with encouragement. He was to return to England at the end of the year.
I rallied my classmates to contribute a few dollars each. We bought him a
clock as a memento of our class. He wrote a letter to my parents in which
he expressed his appreciation for how much my friendship had helped him
feel welcome in a land far from his home.
He was a rare example of a gentle aff ectionate man in a world that
otherwise seemed full of rejecting, competitive and violent men.
My father had a heavy wooden paddle with a handle for enforcing his
authority. When my brother or I misbehaved he would make us lie face
down on his bed. He would spank us on the bare behind with a look of
fury on his face. In rare instances of aff ection he would scrape his heavily
whiskered face against my sensitive skin or dig his fi ngers into the joint
above my knee.
He hated any sign of my sensitive nature. I would try and wear pajama
bottoms underneath the woolen slacks I was required to wear to school to
protect my skin from the rough scratching. Th is infuriated him.
He couldn’t stand any sign that one was sensitive, eccentric or weak. At
dinner he compelled me to eat foods that made me sick. Th ese were usually
animal organs like liver or kidneys. But the dish that invariably made me
the sickest was chipped beef. Unfortunately it was one of his favorites and
a common item on our dinner menu.
Occasionally dad would march us on foot to church. Th e trip was
many long city blocks from our home. Forced to wear leggings, galoshes
and aviator hats that we found completely humiliating, we would crawl like
snails behind his vigorous stride. Turning every so often to scream at us to
keep up he would march us to church. Th ere we listened to the minister’s
sermon about the importance of obeying our parents. We found it odd
when the minister would extol the virtues of poverty. We knew he owned
the shiny silver Rolls Royce parked outside the church.
I struggled to stay awake during the sermon. I would dream about
stopping off on the way home for lunch at my favorite restaurant, the Peach
Tree Inn on Madison Avenue. Th ey had plump char broiled hamburgers
with mouthwatering French fried onion rings one could wash down with
thick coff ee ice cream milk shakes. For desert the plump friendly waitresses
would roll up a desert cart fi lled with eclairs, napoleons smothered in whip
cream, layer cakes and pies. Each could be topped with a scoop of ice cream
for an additional fi fty cents.
Invariably however after church my father would march us to the Horn
& Hardarts automat on 86th Street. Th ere we were compelled to buy his
favorite dish. Franks and beans with a glass of skim milk.
Famous for his frugality, my father, when compelled by my mother
to attend the theater, opera or a concert, would, dressed in evening wear,
march them several blocks up the street to the Lexington Avenue subway.
He could get two or three dippings out of a tea bag and was a fanatic about
leaving lights on.
He got infuriated at me in my twenties. I took a check for $250 my
mother had given me for Christmas and bought myself a luxurious winter
coat. He could have gotten a whole wardrobe for that amount he castigated
me!
When I was 47, during the worst crisis of my life, I made an impulsive
overnight trip to New York City. In my despair, I called my father. During
the course of the conversation he inquired what hotel I was staying in.
When he learned I was staying in the St. Moritz, for $109 for the night (
a special), he got so angry he hung up on me. He didn’t speak to me for
nearly a year.
In fi fth grade I had a teacher called Clunko. He gave a book for every
fi ve a student would read. Th is was another enticement that turned me
into an avid reader. I had a large bookcase in my bedroom. Soon I was
fi lling it up.
I was also discovering dishonest ways of enlarging my library.
Every Friday after school my parents had me enrolled in Durham’s
Dancing School held in a large banquet hall at Th e Colony Club. Th e girls
wore long dresses and white gloves and lined up on one side of the room.
Th e boys, in blue suits, lined up on the other. At the start of each dance
the boys had to cross the cavernous room to ask a girl to dance.
Painfully aware that girls disdained dancing with a shorter partner,
like myself, the journey across the room was agony. It was made even more
painful by the wall of mirrors circling the room. Th ere I, and everyone else
in the room, could follow my awkward progress.
Mr. Durham was a stiff red faced task master but his wife was a pleasure
to behold. She was very attractive with large heaving breasts amply
displayed by a very low décolletage dress. She would select a boy to demonstrate
each step and frequently pressed him close to her resplendent bosom.
I think I was never chosen for this pleasure, but the very thought of it was
highly intoxicating and was one of my earliest erotic fantasies.
On dance school Fridays we took a small suitcase to school. It contained
the blue suit we were required to change into. Th e bus route from
school to Th e Colony Club took us past a bookstore on Madison Avenue.
Th ere my best friend, Graham and I would stop to fi ll up our suitcases
with books before continuing to the dance. Eventually the owner saw what
we were doing. He chased us down the street. I got away but my friend
was apprehended. He didn’t reveal my identity but that was the end of my
literary crime wave.
I was fi nding that my height was not only a handicap with girls. It also
didn’t help coping with my classmates. Although I was athletic and one of
the tougher kids in the class in the fi rst years of school, when I returned
from summer vacation to enter fi fth grade, all my classmates had grown
a head taller. I had hardly grown at all. It became increasingly diffi cult to
hold my own in the rough and tumble of the school environment. Playing
on the forward line of the soccer team I was fi nding it harder and harder
to get past the other team’s two huge fullbacks. Once I was hit so hard I
was knocked unconscious. I was ignominiously carried off the fi eld on a
blanket.
I was fi nding the grandiose fantasies of my childhood harder and harder
to maintain. My heroes were larger than life men like Burt Lancaster,
Kirk Douglas and the real life hero, the most decorated soldier of World
War ll, Audie Murphy. I was beginning to ask myself, could I ever hope to
accomplish such feats of glory if I couldn’t get past a fullback?
I saw my height as the major obstacle to a life of glory. I begged my parents
for pituitary shots to help me grow. Th ey would hear nothing of it.
Books were a way to vicariously experience deeds of daring and escape
from the more depressing realities of my life. Th ey were also a way to see
inside the hearts and emotions of other people, an intimacy that wasn’t
available in my family life.
My father was a workaholic, my mother an alcoholic. I became a bookaholic.
Books were a way to escape my childhood.
My mother had been a heavy drinker prior to her marriage. Before the
wedding my father had demanded that she stop drinking.
My parents met each other through my uncle, my mother’s brother.
He attended Yale Law School and roomed with my father. A fun loving
extrovert, the complete opposite of my father, my uncle told me my father
had been an example of self-discipline that helped him persist in his studies
through school.
My uncle brought home a number of his friends from school, but his
older sister, my mother, easily skewered them with her wit as sharp as a
rapier. My father was up to the task. He could parry her sharp thrusts. So
competent was my father at dominating her that I don’t believe she survived
the contest. Depressed and frustrated she slipped deeper and deeper
into an alcoholic haze during their relationship.
In truth her problems predated my father.
My mother was the oldest child of Archibald and Helen Forrest. She
had two brothers, John and the younger Harper. Th e family lived in a mansion
in Rye, New York. My great maternal grandfather had been one of the
three founders of Remington Typewriter. In his late 70s he had remarried
his young nurse, with whom he had two children, Douglas and Gamble.
Th ey lived with their mother in a fi ve story brownstone between Madison
and Fifth Avenue on the upper east side of New York.
Our family would get together with them once a year to exchange
Christmas presents.
Th e furniture on the fi rst four fl oors was covered with sheets. We would
take their private elevator up to the top fl oor to visit with them. Having
inherited the bulk of my great grandfather’s estate, about $50 million,
they enjoyed shopping impulsively. One year Douglas developed a passing
interest in scuba diving, (Lloyd Bridges had made the TV show Sea Hunt
popular at the time). He bought the fi nest scuba gear at Abercrombie
Fitch. Th ere, on the top fl oor of the brownstone, he sat in an infl atable
boat, fully attired in scuba gear, saying to his mother, “Look mom, I’m
scuba diving.”
Years later Gambel made the front page of the New York newspapers
with her elopement with a Rumanian chauff eur whom the tabloids portrayed
as a gigolo.
My grandfather, Archibald, was a man’s man. He was an avid fl y fi sherman
for salmon in Canada, and a hunter of wild birds. He had a large
kennel of bird dogs for hunting. He also enjoyed entertaining his friends
in his luxurious billiard room after supper with brandy and cigars.
My grandmother Helen, or Nanti as I knew her, was a warm light
to me in this family of darkness. Raised in privilege, she never attended
school. She was tutored in the classics while she accompanied her parents
traveling to castles in Hungary, estates in England and villas in Mexico. An
ardently romantic soul, she had written books of poetry published under
the nom de plume, Celia, Duchess of Towers.
Ungrounded in the real world, my grandmother had red hair like my
mother’s, and a remote look in her eyes. Not cut out for maternal duties,
her children were raised by an assortment of nannies and servants, including
maids, cooks, butlers and a chauff eur who lived in quarters over the
multi-car garage.
Th e children were confi ned to the nursery except on rare instances
when they were brought, in suits and stiff starched dresses, to be displayed
to friends and acquaintances on social occasions. My grandmother told my
mother on her deathbed that she had never cared for her as a child, but
come to love her as an adult in the latter years of her life.
My mother had never been mothered. She lived her life as an insatiably
hungry child. She gave her own children the same lack of care.
She was her father’s daughter. Her eyes sparkled when she spoke of
him. He demonstrated no more parenting skills than his wife. While my
mother suff ered from polio as a child and had to wear a brace on one leg,
her father demanded she excel in athletics with all the other girls.
When I knew my grandmother (my grandfather died shortly after my
birth), she was living in the all women’s Allerton Hotel, on 57th Street
between Lexington and Park Avenues. She had sold the family mansion in
Rye for $25,000, unfamiliar with the value of property or money (and not
believing it was a ladylike concern).
She loved the movies and spent her afternoons seeing her favorites over
and over in the many movie theaters in the vicinity of her hotel. She especially
loved westerns because of the horses. She marveled at their beauty
and their cleverness to execute diffi cult stunts. When she was dying I cut
school for a week and sat by her bed listening to stories of her childhood.
Horseback riding in Mexico was one of her favorite memories.
She saw Red River, with two of her favorite stars, John Wayne and
Montgomery Cliff , thirty fi ve times. She loved movie stars and read movie
gossip magazines about them. She loved Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable,
and Gary Cooper. She also adored Queen Elizabeth of England.
Once or twice a month my grandmother would send a limousine to
pick my mother, my brother and I up for a luncheon engagement. Th e
limo would take us fi rst to the Allerton Hotel to join my grandmother.
My brother and I enjoyed the fold down seats between the front seats and
the back. Connected by a hinge they had a spring in them that catapulted
us back and forth as we bounced through the city looking at the shop
windows and the people on the streets.
My grandmother always dressed in fl owery silk dresses and sported
a large elaborate colorful hat. She smelled of her favorite scent, her lace
handkerchiefs were soaked in lavender. A small plump woman she carried
a cane to compensate for a bad leg. She appeared to roll as she walked.
When we arrived she would take us up to the restaurant (the only room
in the hotel males were welcome) to proudly show off her grandchildren to
the other elderly women that smelled equally heavily of perfume.
Returning downstairs she would take us in the limousine to one of
her favorite restaurants in the area. We ate at Pavilion, Th e Four Seasons,
the Dorchester, Th e King of the Sea, or the Drake Hotel. Every doorman
received a crisp $20 bill for greeting us.
When we would whisper to our mother about the extravagance we
would get the evil family eye. It told you the subject was off limits. My
grandmother had no concept of money and would be horrifi ed to discuss
it. It was a taboo subject.
My mother always enjoyed these luxurious luncheons. Her face lit
up when she ordered rare roast beef, a baked potato with sour cream and
asparagus with hollandaise sauce.
We enjoyed being spoiled ourselves. Nanti would insist her grandchildren
have one or more shrimp cocktails, the largest lobsters the chef could
fi nd and as many petite fours off the silver dessert tray as we could stomach.
She only had one request. Th at we allow her to pour our cokes from their
cold smoky green glass bottles into our glasses. She delighted in the bubbles
fi zzing and popping as they splashed into the glass.
After dinner, stuff ed and bouncing on the limo seats, we would frequently
stop at A. B. Fitches, as my grandmother called the top of the line
department store. We enjoyed looking at the extensive sports equipment
and frequently were treated to a spontaneous gift. I loved perusing the
fi shing gear, hunting guns, tents and canoes. I particularly liked the display
case fi lled with knives.
Weaponry had rapidly replaced coins and stamps as my hobby of
choice. My school was on 98th between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue.
My home was between York Avenue and East End Avenue on 86th Street.
But after school I often took a detour to a famous weaponry store on 65th
and Lexington called Robert Abel’s.
Entering the dark shop I was transported back in time to a more
romantic and heroic era. It was fi lled with suits of armor, swords from
all over the world, knives, medals from ancient foreign wars and antique
guns of every description. I loved them all, particularly the old cap and
ball percussion revolvers and the derringers one could carry concealed in
one’s sleeve.
At an early age I had developed a taste for larceny. I regularly pillaged
my mother’s pocket purse in her large walk-in closet in her bedroom. She
usually had wads of twenties, tens and fi ves in her wallet. Because she was
usually drunk I didn’t think she would miss a fi ve or ten dollar bill. Th is
gave me money to spend on the way home from school, either on candy
and ice cream or on war memorabilia and weaponry. I had a collection
of patches and medals from wars, two bayonets (one that was curved), a
German sword with a fi nely etched blade, and an Egyptian sword (with
holes in it because it was made from scrap metal) in a fi nely tooled leather
sheath that could be worn on the arm. Eventually I acquired a .44 cap and
ball percussion revolver and a .38 Smith and Weston by having them sent
to my address in Connecticut. I also had an extensive collection of hunting
and throwing knives. I practiced throwing them at a large plywood board
in my bedroom leaning against the bookcase.
My collection, a small arsenal, was probably an attempt to cope, if
mostly in fantasy, with another threat to my daily life, my brother.
He was two years older than myself and demonstrably ambivalent
about my arrival in the family. My mother enjoyed describing to me how
he amused me shortly after my birth. He would climb into my playpen
and hold a large heavy metal fi re truck over my head. Th is was a touching
demonstration of sibling love, my mother assured me. How lucky I was to
have such an older brother.
He expressed his aff ection for me in a variety of other ways throughout
childhood. He woke me from naps with a pillow pressed over my face. He
held me under water in the lake or in pools. He cast fi shing hooks into me,
splashed a bottle of fl ammable liquid on my face, (requiring me to be taken
across the street to Miseracordia Hospital for treatment of the burns). He
directed me to pull a lever that he said was for depositing mail. It turned
out to be a fi re alarm. He fl ed the scene leaving me to face the angry fi re
fi ghters alone. He left me on the top of a mountain during an overnight
hike. He insisted I keep him company riding the ferris wheel. When our
chair reached the top he rocked it as far upside down as it would go. Th en
he punched my arms as I hung on for dear life.
Every day he treated me to noogies (knuckle punches in the muscle of
the arm) that left me regularly black and blue. He had temper tantrums and
jumped on top of me punching and kicking me. He constantly belittled
my thoughts, my feelings and my body.
If he lost at badminton he would smash his racket. At bowling he
would air-ball the ball and get us thrown out. Losing at golf one time he
chopped up the ninth green with his putter and got us evicted from the
club. When I won a trophy at school for a tennis tournament he broke the
arm off the fi gure serving on top of the trophy.
I was raised to believe my brother was extremely fragile. My job was to
protect his self-esteem. I felt more compassion for him than for myself. I
lived in terror that he might turn his anger on himself and be self-destructive.
I tried to absorb his anger and frustration.
I have no memory of my parents interceding in my behalf during any
of his violent acts. My mother told me my brother adored me. I was blind
to the nature of our relationship. I worshipped him and believed we were
the best of friends.
Not until many years later, in my mid twenties, did I have a moment
of revelation about the truth of our relationship and the role my mother
had played in his sadistic activities.
By this time he had married for the third time. His second wife and
he had had a son. She had remarried (an Indian man) with whom she
had a second child, a daughter. My brother’s second wife and her sister
were stopping in New York for a few days to allow the boy a visit with his
grandmother. My mother invited me to visit my nephew. He was nine and
a half at the time.

I arrived at her apartment and joined them in the living room. I sat
on a chair. My mother, my brother’s second wife and her sister sat on the
couch. Music was playing on the stereo.
In the middle of the fl oor barely able to sit up on the rug was the baby
girl. Her half brother, who had been recently studying karate, danced
around the child, demonstrating his karate punches and kicks to the admiring
adults. Over and over again he struck and punched his infant sister.
She proceeded to scream and cry. All three women, clearly entertained by
the performance, told the baby to stop crying. Her brother was entertaining
her. Struck dumb by this scene I got up and left. I took a bus back to
my apartment across town and got into bed. I broke out in hives, became
violently ill and couldn’t get out of bed for fi ve days.
When I recovered I realized a reality of my life that had been buried
from my awareness. My brother had been my worst enemy. My mother
had been entertained by his cruelty.
My nephew was himself a victim of abuse.
My brother proudly told me, one time during a visit I made to his
home in Minneapolis, how he got revenge on his infant son for waking
him early in the morning with his crying and screaming. My brother set
the alarm clock for an earlier hour. He got up and went into his room
and screamed as loud as he could at the side of his son’s crib. Cruelty begets
cruelty. Th e abused becomes the abuser. Deviating from the cycle is
extraordinarily hard and excruciatingly painful. I have spent much of my
life fi nding this out.
Th e weapons I collected were not entirely without practical application.
I do remember once grabbing one of the larger more intimidating
knives when my brother was threatening me. With a maniacal glint in my
eye and a menacing gesture I drove him from my room.
My grandmother contributed one especially prized addition to my
collection.
I met her for lunch one day by myself. After lunch we went for a stroll
around A. B. Fitches. She noticed me eyeing one display case with Scottish
dirks, the small knives Scotsmen were known to wear in their socks.
Each was adorned at the top of the handle with a semiprecious stone. My
grandmother asked the price. Th e salesman mumbled some fi gure that
sounded quite reasonable. She asked me to pick out two of the knives,
one for myself and one for my brother. When the salesman returned with
them wrapped, my grandmother handed him what she understood was an
appropriate amount of cash in her hand. Th e salesman told her an amount
far exceeding the fi gure we both thought we had heard. I immediately told
my grandmother they were not that important to me. I said we should
skip it. She became visibly fl ustered. Her embarrassment was not only a
result of her misunderstanding. She was appalled by the very discussion
of money. She instantly reached into her pocketbook and produced the
additional money. She would hear no more about it. Money was a topic
too tacky to discuss.
Nanti personifi ed the spirit of generosity. She off ered more than food
and gifts. We shared the same romantic, poetic nature. We were soul mates.
She made me feel I was special to her. She was special to me.
I carried the Forrest family name as my middle name. It was a lasting
connection to her. She also named her beloved Archie my godfather after
his death.
I started writing poetry at an early age. I loved poetry. If a poem spoke
to me I could remember it eff ortlessly. When I was ten years old my family
once challenged me to recite poetry on the two-hour car trip from our
home in Connecticut to New York City. I recited Horatio at the Bridge
by Th omas McCauly, Th e Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet by Alfred Tennyson,
as well as other Romantic poems by Byron, Keats, Shelley, Blake and
Wordsworth. I kept it up all the way to the city without running out of
fresh material. Many of those poems remain in my memory today. Poetry
spoke to me in a way that nothing else in my world did. It had feelings.
It had soul. I started writing my own verses in the fourth grade. Poetic
images fl ooded my mind at all times of the night and day. All I had to do
was write them down.
Poetry moved me, touched me, expressed me. It helped preserve me
through many years of childhood and adolescence. Th en increasingly songs
began to speak to me in their place.
Poems by T. S. Elliot and William Butler Yeats became mantras that
inspired, sustained and focused me repeatedly in my life. Th ey resonated
with the deepest yearnings of my soul.
Occasionally I would try and share my love of poetry with my father.
He would say, “Th ey are just words.” Th ey were unimportant compared to
actions. To me, because they expressed all the feelings my family were trying
so hard to avoid, they were more important then actions. Love and fear,
anger and grief, pain and joy were real. Th e poets confi rmed the experience
of being human, something my parents were unable to do.
Novelists also, like Th omas Hardy, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy reassured
me that the questions I struggled with were not mine alone.

By the time I was a teenager I aspired to be a poet. I wrote poetry all
through high school and went on to be accepted as a freshman into the well
known graduate writing poetry workshop at the University of Iowa.
I read a poem I had written for my grandmother at her funeral. Many
years later I would become a painter and open a gallery space adjoining my
studio. Th e gallery would be named after a poem she had written.
One or two people see who you are and touch your soul as a child.
Th at becomes a seed that grows into your life.
While my grandmother encouraged the blossoming of my spirit, my
father did all he could to bury it.
On the rare occasions he did interact with me, he was relentlessly
competitive. When I was very young he would take out his own report
cards (which his mother had saved) and lay them along side of mine. He
had visible proof of his superiority and my inadequacy.
He said I would be a bum. He described how he would be high up
in the Chase Manhattan Building eating lamb chops. I would be rifl ing
through garbage cans for moldy crusts on the Bowery.
Nor was he the only cloud on my horizon. My mother sank deeper and
deeper into depression and alcoholism each succeeding year. My brother
and I couldn’t fi gure out what caused her bizarre behavior. At fi rst we
thought it might be the cigarettes she chained smoked. We destroyed them.
Soon we fi gured out it must be the strong smelling drinks from bottles
underneath the kitchen cabinets. We poured them down the toilet. We
never seemed to cut off her supply.
Coming home from school if I didn’t fi nd her in the kitchen I would
smell her coff ee cup. Washed and turned upside down in the dish rack, the
smell of bourbon lingered.
Forewarned I knew she would be passed out in her bedroom. When
she did wake up she would stumble down the hall. Her face was white with
powder, her lipstick crooked, her negligee falling off her body. She wreaked
of liquor. She also wreaked of anger, despair and unsatisfi ed sexuality, all
mixed together.
As a teenager I had a set of black pearl Ludwig drums in a spare room.
I would retreat there after school to play along with jazz, Dixieland or rock
and roll records on the phonograph. I could fl ail away at the skins of the
snare drum, the tom toms, the cymbals and the high hat in an attempt to
release my frustrations and sorrow.
Maury Baker, a friend of mine in high school had turned me on to the
drums. His mother (by far the prettiest mother I had ever seen) was remar

ried to the band leader of the orchestra at the Hotel Pierre. A good friend
of Maury’s stepfather lived upstairs in the same apartment building. He
was the legendary drummer Gene Krupa. He would drop downstairs and
teach the young boy some riff s. Maury tried to pass them on to me.
On the weekends I took my dates to New York jazz clubs like, Birdland,
Basin Street East, Th e Metropole, Th e Round Table, Th e Five Spot,
the Needle’s Eye and Th e Village Gate and the Village Vanguard. Here in
the dark smoky clubs packed with people, I would try and get a table close
to the drummer. Th ere I sat mesmerized, hoping to absorb the talent of the
most gifted drummers of the day, like Buddy Rich, Jo Jones, Art Blakey,
George Whettling to name a few.
Because liquor was served, one had to be 18 to get into the clubs. To
deal with this I had bought from a friend (who eventually got a dishonorable
discharge from the Marine Corps) a forged ID card. It verifi ed that I
was a Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps.
Girls had to be returned to their homes by midnight. Afterwards everybody
I knew would meet at Wynne’s, a bar on Madison Avenue and 91st
Street to drink and discuss their dates until closing time.
My mother and I did share one interest at this time. It was an interest
in the theater. In the fi fties and sixties New York was rich with great
theater. My mother and I saw as much of it as we could. We saw Tennessee
Williams’ plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Street Car Named Desire,
Sweet Bird of Youth, Orpheus Descending, Th e Rose Tattoo and Period of
Adjustment. We also saw Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night,
Th e Hairy Ape, Mourning Becomes Electra, Moon For the Misbegotten,
A Touch of the Poet and Th e Iceman Cometh. We saw plays by Arthur
Miller, Carson McCullers, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee and many more.
We saw the great stage actors of the day like Jason Robards Jr., Colleen
Dewhurst, Uta Hagen, Paul Newman, Rip Torn, Elizabeth Ashley and
Geraldine Paige. We saw Richard Burton play Hamlet.
All of the plays were tragedies that portrayed dysfunctional families,
unfulfi lled lives, twisted psyches, unrequited love and dreams. Th ey refl
ected our predicament. We were bonded in hopelessness and despair. It
was the only way to relate to my mother I realized years later when I tried
to share with her a fl eeting glimpse of hopefulness and joy.

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