ANDY.(Andy White)

From the 2003 New Yorker Festival, a conversation between Roger Angell and David Remnick

Lately I have been missing my stepfather, Andy White, who keeps excusing himself while he steps out of the room to get something from his study or heads out the back kitchen door, on his way to the barn again. He'll be right back. I can hear the sound of that gray door--the steps there lead down into the fragrant connecting woodshed--as the lift-latch clicks shut. E. B. White died in 1985--twenty years ago, come October--and by "missing" I don't mean yearning for him so much as not being able to keep hold of him for a bit of conversation or even a tone of voice. In my mind, this is at his place in North Brooklin, Maine, and he's almost still around. I see his plaid button-down shirt and tweed jacket, and his good evening moccasins. One hand is holding a cigarette tentatively--he'll smoke it halfway down and then stub it out--and he turns in his chair to put his Martini back on the Swedish side table to his right. It must be about dinnertime. What were we talking about, just now? We were close for almost sixty years, and you'd think that a little back-and-forth--something more than a joke or part of an anecdote--would survive, but no. What's impossible to write down, soon afterward, is a conversation that comes easily.

Here we are, instead, on a frigid December day in 1929, walking up a steep stretch of Pinckney Street, on Beacon Hill, in Boston. The narrow brick sidewalk is snowy in places, and the going is harder for Andy than it is for me, because he's wearing ice skates. He's been complaining--who can blame him--and finally he sits down on somebody's front stoop to pull off the skates, and goes on, snow or no snow, in his socks. We've been here on a family visit from New York to the Newberrys' house at 87 Myrtle Street--my Aunt Rosie (she's one of my mother's sisters) and Uncle John's place--and Andy and I brought our skates along, just in case. Christmas is two or three days away, and on a clear and cold afternoon he and I head down to Charles Street and then over to the frozen lake in the Public Garden. There may be a red-ball sign standing out on the ice, telling us it's safe to skate, but there's no place you can go to buy a ticket, and no shack with a stove inside, where you could keep warm while you lace up your skates. We find a park bench instead. Andy hides our shoes under a bush and we step down an embankment and sail away. Other skaters are here already--some of the men are in overcoats, along with kids in striped scarves and big mittens--but it's as if we had the place to ourselves. There are wintry trees and park lampposts with a different shape than the ones in Central Park, and though the sense of Boston is close at hand, we could almost be in the country. Wind has cleared patches and paths through snow for us to skate on. The ice is rough, with frozen ripples here and there to trip you up, but Andy and I are good skaters, and we laugh when we come to a curved bridge and, bending low, shoot under and out the other side. It's a great afternoon--right up to the moment when we come back to our bush and see that Andy's shoes are gone. I don't recall that we made a fuss or much of a search; this was hard times, the onset of the Depression, and even a poorly fitting pair of shoes was better than a handout or a hot meal for a lot of men just then.

Andy was shy and self-conscious--he was a slight man, never one to bluster his way through things--and I could see him turn his head away in embarrassment as people coming toward us down Beacon Street began to smile when they saw him tiptoeing along on his hockey skates. Sometimes after they'd gone by he stopped and bent half-double, laughing at himself. " 'The Skater,' " he said, shaking his head. It was a relief for me to laugh, too. What came to me later--I was nine but prone to thought--was that this adventure would not have happened with my father. I'd done more skating with him, on rivers and ponds everywhere--he'd started me when I was small--but he'd have taken us home when we found there was no place to check our shoes. Or if he had lost his shoes somehow he'd have found a cab or made a phone call before ever walking a dozen blocks in his skates. Andy was ten years his junior, and younger than my mother, too. He was a grownup, but there was a readiness for play in him that lasted all his life. Luckily, I didn't need another father and that freed us up.

Andy makes light of the lost shoes in a tiny Notes and Comment piece he wrote for The New Yorker afterward, and I've remembered the day for boyish reasons--it was an adventure and it put me alone with someone I loved but didn't see all that much. Actually, the story is right up his alley. In "One Man's Meat," the celebrated collection of his essays published in 1942, he recalls his dreamy seventeen-year-old self at home in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1917, just before he entered Cornell as a freshman. He was thinking of a girl he had skated with the winter before, when "the air grew still and the pond cracked and creaked under our skates," and "the trails of ice led off into the woods, and the little fires burned along the shore. It was enough, that spring, to remember what a girl's hand felt like, suddenly ungloved in winter." The shift from the winter general to the sudden particular of the girl's hand is a White special, as is the self-deprecation. And pegging along on a sidewalk in skates was an embarrassment that he would have made more of in a piece later on and played out with relish, as he did so often in his writings, turning the awkward moment into a charming and then telling paragraph, even as he dwells on his fears. He was the most charming man I've known, and he got that side of himself into his writing, like everything else, without effort.

Another winter scene is coming--this one a half century later--but first it should be explained that E. B. White was a lifelong hypochondriac, perhaps world class, but not a solemn one. Munching a canape on my porch in Maine one ...