HARD LINES.(reflections on loss, and an appreciation of the late Walker Field)

One of my great-grandfathers, James Shepley, was born in Saco, Maine, in 1826, went to Bowdoin College, and set up a law practice in the frontier town of Red Cloud, Minnesota, where he had a hand in the writing of the state constitution. In his mid-thirties, he won a Civil War commission as an aide to a cousin of his, General George Shepley, but he contracted malaria and was confined for months to a hospital in New Orleans. Back home at last and eager to recover his health, he became a farm manager in Naples, Maine. He was married by this time, with three children, and in 1873, hoping to improve the Shepley fortunes, he bought into a sheep ranch near Fresno, California, and went west with a friend. He planned to bring his family out to join him, once he got settled. One spring night in 1874, while sleeping at a camp at Little Dry Creek, he was murdered--garroted with a piece of wire. Two Portuguese sheepherders were tried for the crime but acquitted; there was no evidence of a robbery or suggestion of some other motive, and the case was dropped. The mystery was never cleared up.

His widow, Mary Barrows Shepley, now abruptly deprived of income, moved to a house in Boston with her children and began taking in boarders. An impoverished gentility was preserved, though just barely, and rescue arrived at last as if from the pages of Jane Austen. One of the boarders, a young businessman named Charles Sergeant, fell in love with the youngest Shepley child--Elizabeth, known as Bessie--and in the spring of 1880, when she turned twenty-three, the two were married. Both of Sergeant's parents had died by the time he was seventeen, and he found himself the sole support for five sisters and a younger brother. A classic self-made man, rising from accountant to a district manager with the Eastern Railroad, he became a vice-president of the West End Street Railway Co.: the Boston El. As the new family prospered, they moved from Winchester, Massachusetts, to suburban Brookline, with their three daughters, the youngest of whom, Katharine, was my mother. All went well until the spring of 1899, when, on a visit to New York, Bessie Sergeant died of a burst appendix. My mother was six years old when this blow fell, but I never heard her speak of it. Not once. There is a family story, though, that her oldest sister, my Aunt Elsie, who was eighteen at the time, was not permitted to cry at their mother's funeral. Elsie went on to graduate from Bryn Mawr, and to become a bluestocking and a respected author, but nothing came easily for her. In her twenties, she was confined for a time in a mental hospital in Paris, and then in an asylum in Zurich, where she was treated by Carl Jung.

My father, Ernest Angell, lost his father at the age of nine, in a marine disaster, the 1898 sinking of the French liner La Bourgogne, in a night collision near Sable Island. He and my mother married young, had two children, and were divorced in 1929, when I was eight. One explanation for the divorce was that my father, who went to France in 1917 with the A.E.F. as a counter-intelligence officer--he spoke French and some German--adopted a Gallic view of marriage and was repeatedly unfaithful to my mother after he came home. Another was that my mother had fallen in love with E. B. White, a colleague of hers at The New Yorker, where she was an editor. She always insisted that there was no connection between her divorce and their marriage, which came three months after her return from Reno. Whatever. What can be said for sure is that each of my parents grew up with a critically missing parent--she a mother, he a father--and pretty much had to fake it in these roles with their own kids. They worked at this all their lives, though it sometimes pissed you off or broke your heart (choose one) to watch them.

The day my mother told me about the divorce, she took me for a walk to the waterfall at Snedens Landing, a hillside scattering of old houses on the west shore of the Hudson, fifteen miles upriver from New York, where we went in the ...