Chapter 4
The greatest continue to develop until their
deaths and leave behind unfulfilled
expectations.
Furruccio Busoni,
letter written near the end
of his life to Philipp Jarnach (1923)
One day in that spring of 1970 we were walking down Lexington Avenue. Guy was telling me about Lyndon Johnson—his astonishing command as majority leader as contrasted with Guy’s first impression of the man. “Dave Kammerman stopped Johnson as he burst out of the chamber. Dave said, ‘Senator, I’d like to introduce you to our newest staff member,’ and when Johnson shook my hand he reminded me of a used-car salesman preoccupied with another sale but, sensing that he could take my money later, was friendly but hurried.”
I laughed. Guy’s stories always made me laugh. It was a sunny day in New York, or maybe it was cloudy. I don’t remember. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been pouring. We were walking down Lexington, and I had my arm in Guy’s.
Guy was a Republican. I voted Democrat, as did everyone I knew except my parents. But this made no difference. He launched into another story, drawing a David and Goliath scene of this young Senate aide (himself) standing up to the Senate minority policy staff director, a crafty, small-minded tyrant named Art Burgess who wielded great power and meant to keep it. Guy felt that he was right over the issue (I can’t recall what it was), and the staff director was wrong, so he went to Styles Bridges, the ranking Republican leader in the Senate, and offered his resignation. “I had the notion Senator Bridges would fire Burgess rather than lose me,” Guy said.
We crossed an intersection, Guy grabbing my hand as we ran against the light. “What happened?” I kept expecting this story to turn funny.
“Burgess simply hounded Bridges into firing me.” Guy sprang onto the sidewalk in front of me, waving his arms. His eyes were electric.
“I would have stood up to that staff director,” I said. “If you thought you were right, you did the right thing.”
“After that Gerald Ford hired me to work on a big project,” Guy continued as I tucked my hand back into the crook of his arm. “And then came the 1960 campaign.”
I knew Guy had been on Nixon’s speechwriting staff for that presidential election. It was the second thing I heard about Guy Waterman after I came to the Gunks. The first was that he was always seen at the cliffs with his sons. The third was that he’d committed to memory the first seven books of Paradise Lost.
“Everyone knew Art Burgess was a madman abusing authority, but I’m sure they were asking themselves: ‘What is Waterman trying to prove?’ ” He sent me a toothy grin, all bravado, like Bobby Kennedy. But I also picked up puzzlement in his gray eyes that said: If I was right, what went wrong?
“I had this idea,” Guy went on, “that I was so good that the rules that applied to everyone else didn’t apply to me. The upshot was, I was out of a job on Capitol Hill.”
Guy, the fifth and last child, was born on May 1, 1932. He spent his early years on “The Farm,” as the Waterman family called their ten acres of fields and woodland in North Haven, Connecticut. From this country spot, Guy’s father,Alan T.Waterman, made the eight-mile commute into New Haven—considered a long distance in those days—where he taught physics at Yale. Mary Mallon Waterman, Guy’s mother, was raised in Cincinnati, the eldest in a family of eight, and had come east to college, as had her five brothers.Alan and Mary bought the old farm in the late twenties. Every spring Alan, with his oldest sons, Alan Jr. and Neil, plowed up the ground for the vegetable garden with the help of Dolly the workhorse. With Dolly, they had leveled land for a tennis court. One of Guy’s earliest memories was of the hurricane of 1938, which uprooted the apple orchard. His father and brothers hitched up Dolly and pulled the trees upright again. There was a grape arbor, a barn where the cats lived, and a henhouse. There were always dogs at the farm, but the dog of legend was Donny—formally Donald the Hunter, a collie-shepherd cross. Intelligent, loyal, brave, and true, Donny instilled in Guy a lifelong bond with the canine world. On Sundays there was always a picnic down by the steep-sided brook. Invitations were open, and friends, as well as Alan Waterman’s graduate students, came to partake in this Sunday ritual that they could count on even in rain or snow or sweltering summer heat. Father and sons had constructed an outdoor cooking place, much like what they used on their canoe trips in Maine, with large pots balanced on heavy cross sticks hanging over an open fire. Here Alan Waterman presided as woodsman and chef; his specialty was raised biscuits browned in “bakers” before the fire.
The legendary “canoe trips,” as they were known in the family, took place during the long summer vacations of the 1930s, when Alan Waterman took his two older sons through the northern lakes of Maine and down the Allagash River. Along with the scientist Karl Compton, then president of MIT, and his sons, they were gone for six weeks, on their own in the deep woods, where to spot another party was rare. Their companion, Bill Arthur Eastman, was a Maine guide who became a close family friend. Guy remembered watching his father and Bill Arthur sitting side by side on a log in the evening, exchanging an occasional quiet word and tending the fire, first one adding a stick, then the other. Guy’s father would become a licensed Maine guide himself, one of only two out-of-staters at that time.
Guy, as the youngest by six and a half years, missed out on those early canoe trips, which ended with World War II. He experienced only a few much-shortened postwar versions, much as happened with his own son Jim, who was too young to join in on the excitement of the early White Mountain romps with his father and older brothers.
Guy thought of himself as coming from a large and close family, but he grew up much like an only child, playing by himself down by the brook, creating whole worlds among the hemlock roots.The four years of World War II were an exception. During this time university families in America agreed to house children from British university families, and Christopher and Ted Braunholtz, twins Guy’s age whose father taught at Oxford, came to live with the Watermans.
The war brought other changes. When Guy was ten the idyll at the farm ended. Alan Waterman, swept up in the scientific part of the war effort, moved the family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked at MIT in close association with his canoeing partner Karl Compton. During those years Guy went to the Shady Hill School. Right after the war, in 1946, the family moved again, to Washington, D.C. Here Guy’s father continued his scientific career, which culminated with his appointment by President Truman as first chief of the National Science Foundation. Guy felt that his own commitment to public service sprang from his father’s example. From his mother, who had an acerbic wit and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Vassar, he gained a lifelong love of books.
At the age of fourteen, Guy was sent to the Taft School in Connecticut, a residential preparatory school where he spent two miserable years. At Taft he remained aloof, entering into no athletic activities—always a defining part of prep school life—or extracurricular offerings.
It wasn’t until late in our marriage that Guy began to talk about just how much he hated Taft and how lonely he was there. His parents selected the school because his mother’s brothers had attended it. In the Mallon family Taft was regarded as a stepping-stone to Yale. Guy didn’t graduate from Taft, and he didn’t go to Yale. He did well in his studies, but he isolated himself from his fellow students on the grounds that the whole place reeked of upper-class snobbishness. “The steady stream of anti-Semitic jokes,” Guy wrote in his recollections, “was excruciatingly painful to me. I don’t look at this as an admirable display of social liberal ism, but as some kind of identification with other outcasts, which I felt myself to be.”
“Did any teachers reach out to you?” I asked.
“There was one who attempted, but I was probably pretty unreachable. I was reading 13 Against the Odds, biographical sketches of African Americans I admired like Paul Robeson, Joe Louis, and Jackie Robinson, and feeling enormous guilt that I had no black friends.”
I thought of Holden Caulfield—another self-styled outcast—and his branding of everyone he came across as “phony.” A few years later, when we read The Catcher in the Rye aloud, Guy took an instant dislike to Holden. I expected Guy to identify with this alienated youth, or at least to feel some sympathy for his predicament, which, as we read the book together, struck me as not unlike Guy’s. Instead, Guy said, “He irritates me. He’s a whiny, spoiled, self-absorbed young man who feels sorry for himself.”At the time I couldn’t bear to think that probably described Guy when he was at Taft.
What relieved the gloom of his junior year—his last at Taft—was falling under the tutelage of fellow student and jazz pianist Bob LaGuardia.
The Waterman family was musical, and Guy retained happy memories of his brothers and sisters gathered about the piano in song, with Hawee —as everyone called Guy’s father—at the keyboard. Alan Waterman could play just about any instrument he picked up. He kept a set of bagpipes in his office at the National Science Foundation and was known to play them there, pacing up and down the corridors. Guy had taken one reluctant year of piano lessons, and eight of violin. He spent four summers bowing away at Greenwood, a music camp in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Though he never progressed much beyond the back bench, this was a happy, carefree time.
Within a week of arriving on Taft’s campus that fall, Bob LaGuardia, who had decided to become a clarinetist and needed a piano player to accompany him, whisked Guy off to the inner recesses of the practice rooms beneath the school auditorium and began to drill him in basic New Orleans piano style. “LaGuardia,” Guy wrote, “heaped disdain on anyone as modern as Duke Ellington, had me listen to Jelly Roll Morton records by the hour, and browbeat me into abandoning all previous ideas on how to play popular music, insisting on a pure form of New Orleans piano. I developed into a simon-pure, basic Jelly Roll–style piano player.”
If this was Guy’s way of protesting against what he so disliked at Taft and rebelling as well against his parents who sent him there, his flight underground to the practice rooms—refuge and haven for an unsure young man who wanted to establish himself as different—carries a kind of innocence. There was no drug experimentation here, no rule breaking for the sake of violating the rules. Rather, here was honest intellectual effort with an older student in the role of mentor. The music Guy mastered was different—wildly different—from what he’d heard at home. This music sustained him all his life. With it he communicated his feelings of longing and loss, regret and despair, as well as happiness and joy—everything that was so hard for him to put into words. He told me once his father never came to hear him in any of the nightclubs where he later played.
Guy spent the summer of 1948 at a “work camp” sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee and held at a church-run orphanage in York, South Carolina. “I believe that my parents saw that I was motivated to ‘do good’ and thought this opportunity might satisfy that craving to be socially useful.”
Here Guy worked with the orphans, making cinder blocks and constructing a small outbuilding for the farm that was attached to the orphanage.“I loved those weeks,” Guy wrote. “We were housed with the orphans and got to know them well, which I particularly welcomed as here were real-life poor people who I could finally call my friends.” Then he took it all a step further in a deliberate decision to change his own image. This was his first reinvention, but by no means his last. “With my new smoking and drinking and necking, I became a flaming radical and moderately defiant of what little authority was exerted over me.”
The defining moments of that summer were the much-anticipated football matches held during the last three Sundays of the camp, “campers” versus “orphans,” tackle football played without equipment. In the first game the orphans trounced the campers. In the second the campers won back the crown, scoring four touchdowns to three; that game set the stage for the final winner-take-all contest. Guy, the smallest but one of the fastest, played center and found himself looking across the line at the orphans’ star back—a brawny, fast, and very tough sixteen-year-old, and a big scorer on his high school team. Guy did well, hurling himself into the crushing tackles to the cheers of his teammates; his performance was contributing to his new image. In the final game, a rip-snorting seesaw battle, with four touchdowns apiece, the star back slipped through the campers’ frantic efforts to bring him down and won the game. After the cheering and congratulations, Guy recalled “going into one of the outbuildings all by myself and lying down on the floor and crying uncontrollably, not for grief at losing but for joy at the great effort expended, and the comradeship we had all felt.”
But I think he was sobbing for something more. The summer was over, and a high point had been reached that could never be regained in the same way ever again. Guy intuited what this loss meant, and the sadness of it was unbearable to him. In some sense this was his tragedy. The final party where he was voted “friendliest,” and the final image of himself playing catch in his good clothes with two of the orphans who had become his friends before boarding the bus back up north to Washington, must only have deepened his sense of loss.
That fall Guy went to Sidwell Friends School in Washington, where his parents felt he would be better off socially if he repeated his junior year. Though still privileged and admitting no black students, at least Sidwell was nonresidential and coeducational. Guy consolidated his image change and found himself swept up by a fast crowd of seniors—the social elite—his entrée being his magnetic piano playing and his penchant for getting drunk at any opportunity. He began going around with one of the popular senior girls. Not long before Emily’s graduation, the couple had gone to a movie, then hung around downtown until it was so late that Emily was afraid to go home and confront her father, who had a violent temper. The upshot was that they ran off together, heading for York, South Carolina, the scene of those idyllic times for Guy at the orphanage the previous summer.
They were two young kids hitchhiking, and eventually they were stopped and questioned by the police in Charlotte. Guy asked the cops to call his parents rather than Emily’s, because she was terrified of her father’s reaction. So Guy’s father and his older brother Neil drove down from Washington, a full day’s drive, to pick them up and bring them back in time for the first big family wedding, the marriage of Guy’s sister Anne, for which everyone had already assembled from across the country. The wedding proceeded smoothly, but afterward, in Romeo and Juliet fashion, the families managed to keep the two young people separate for the rest of the summer. That fall Emily was shipped off to college without seeing Guy.
Guy had one more year at Sidwell Friends. “I basked in the notoriety of the rumors over just what Emily and I had done the previous May,” Guy wrote. “I was arrogant to teachers and adults and openly defiant about getting drunk at weekend parties despite parental warnings.”
That fall Guy had made the football team, but he played in only one game. He quit the team, despite the entreaties of his coach and his parents to stay with it, and took a “real” job, his first, as a soda jerk at People’s Drugstore on the corner of Forty-ninth and Albemarle Streets, for sixty-five cents an hour. “I loved football and the prestige of being on the team,” Guy wrote.“But I carried a sense of guilt about being of the upper middle class. I craved being an ordinary working stiff.” This action too could be seen as rebelling against the adult world, but the pendulum had swung in a different direction.
Emily left Cornell after only one semester and returned to Washington. And the couple could not be kept apart.
By this time, at his parents’ urging, Guy had begun weekly sessions with a psychoanalyst. This did not go well. Guy wrote,“I was defiant and the doctor took the posture of being completely unsympathetic and caustically critical of my conduct.”
One Sunday evening Guy’s parents told him they were all going for a meeting with the psychoanalyst, where they would meet as well with Emily and her parents. “At this session the doc announced that I was a deeply disturbed young man,” Guy wrote, “and he recommended prolonged psychoanalysis. In fact I was not to return home that night. I was hauled off to the psycho ward in George Washington Hospital, and incarcerated there on a floor where the stairway doors and elevators were locked. I was kept for several days of tests—including one session where they administered some kind of truth serum and questioned me about my musical friends, who had marijuana. It felt like jail to me. I was very unhappy.”
After that, Guy’s parents deemed he would be better off far away from the Washington scene and sent him to finish out his senior year of high school in West Carrolton, Ohio, where he lived with his sister Bobbie and her husband Joe. In a sense, Guy found there what he wanted. This was a working-class town, with African Americans in the classroom. Even so, Guy fell back into the kind of isolation he’d experienced at Taft, making no friends and spending long hours playing his sister’s piano. He discovered also that the education in West Carrolton, where only two in his class of forty were headed for college, was far below the standard he was used to in the “privileged” schools he’d attended. “We read no Shakespeare,” Guy told me, “and when I mentioned to my English teacher I was reading The Mayor of Casterbridge, I was stunned to find out she had never heard of Thomas Hardy.”
Here, also, he had to travel into Dayton several times a week for sessions with the psychoanalyst. In this case, Guy said, both doctor and patient sat in silence.
Meanwhile, continuing in the mode of Romeo and Juliet, Guy and Emily had found a way to communicate through the intermediary of Emily’s sister and concocted a plot to meet in the Charlotte, North Carolina, airport during the interval between the end of classes and Guy’s graduation ceremonies.
This time they pulled it off, journeying from Charlotte across the border to York, South Carolina, where the age of marriage without parental consent was eighteen. The ceremony was performed in the back room of the county clerk’s office on May 20, 1950. Guy was the legal age by three weeks. The newlyweds sent a telegram to Emily’s sister quoting the final words of the civil ceremony: “Whom God and the laws of South Carolina have joined together, let no man put asunder.” Though the families welcomed the young couple back into the fold, as Guy said of himself at the time, they were “defiant to the end.”
By 1951 he and Emily were living in Washington. Guy had embarked on a career as a jazz musician and was both a full-time student at George Washington University and a family man. Their first son, Bill, was born in 1951, and Johnny followed just seventeen months later.
At George Washington, Guy, as in the past, took no part in college life. But he was possessed by a desire to learn and studied relentlessly between classes, at first in his car, until it got too cold; then he found out where the study halls were located. His excellent grades reached the notice of the president, who wrote him saying, in effect, we don’t know who you are but want to congratulate you on your outstanding work. Guy became a Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year, graduating in two and a half years, number one in his class with a major in economics.
Meanwhile, at night he changed into his tux and red bowtie—the outfit he wore as a piano player with a Revival band called the Riverboat Trio, led by trumpeter-vocalist Scotty Lawrence. From 1951 through the first half of 1953, matching his college years, Guy played in the cocktail lounge of the Charles Hotel in the 1300 block of R Street, N.W., and as the off-night band on Tuesdays at a huge nightclub under the K Street Freeway known as Jazzland and sometimes as the Bayou. Guy relished the fact that these spots were in the black sections of segregated Washington, as his presence there pointed out just how far he’d traveled from those miserable years at Taft. Following ex-alcoholic Scotty’s abstemious lead, Guy drank coffee, strong and black, during the breaks.
Shortly after he began playing in Washington, Guy met Roy Carew, who, as a typewriter salesman in New Orleans around the turn of the century, had become an early fan of jazz and friends with Jelly Roll Morton. Mr. Carew had begun collecting ragtime sheet music as it came out, especially Scott Joplin. His dining room cupboard was stuffed with it, Guy said. He began to visit Mr. Carew almost every month, borrowed two rags, slowly mastered them (he was a poor sight reader), then brought them back to play for Mr. Carew, when he’d borrow two more. Gradually Guy learned almost all of Joplin’s forty or so rags and began playing them in Washington nightclubs at a time when no one else was.
In 1953 he wrote two articles about ragtime that were published by a minor jazz journal called The Record Changer. “I saw this,” Guy wrote, “as an effort to demonstrate that ragtime fully deserved respect as a music independent of jazz.” These articles were anthologized twenty years later as the interest in ragtime and Scott Joplin grew.
Guy gloried in the image of himself as a jazz piano player and in the nightly ritual of moving up to the bandstand, where he stood a moment to light a cigarette and survey the crowd. Seated at the piano bench, he played a couple of chords and gave Scotty his A, then waited until Scotty gave the signal to launch into “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby,” the song they invariably opened the evening with. Guy wrote, “On my better nights, I could stand the audience on its ear with a powerful rollicking barrelhouse style, or tormented gutbucket blues.”
By mid-1953 it was over.“I recall a feeling,” Guy wrote,“of deliberately bringing the hitherto productive relationship with Scotty to an end.” The breakup of the trio Guy attributed to “that self-destructive streak in me which, throughout my life, has tended to surface and destroy whatever good things come my way. After that, I began to drink again.”
When I met Guy I knew very little about jazz and had barely heard the word ragtime. I was brought up in a household where classical music, almost exclusively opera, my father’s great love, commanded the airwaves. That’s what my ears were adjusted to. I can remember, when I was about thirteen, being in the car with my father when he switched on the radio for the news but instead got Teresa Brewer’s hit-of-the-moment “This Old House.” For a few seconds her high-powered, hard-driving nasal sound filled the car. My father said, “Do you like that?”
“No,” I said. From the look on his face I knew my father didn’t like it either. Yet I also knew this was what kids my age were listening to.
I instantly took to Guy’s piano. To my ears Joplin sounded classical. Guy opened up for me a new musical world. At our apartment in Marlboro, after the train ride out from the city, he’d put on a stack of records. Fats Waller. Bessie Smith. His Jelly Roll Morton recordings from the Library of Congress series. Maybe some Pete Seeger—Guy had known that family in Washington and jammed with Pete’s brother Mike.
Often during a weekend of climbing friends would come to our place for dinner, or we’d find ourselves at someone’s house with a piano, and Guy would play, with a grin on his face, his tam at that jaunty angle, his climber’s forearms hammering out the tenths. When he played for our friends like that I was shot through with an unstoppable happiness watching how everyone responded to his music: glowing faces, tapping toes, swaying bodies. I loved being with Guy, this amazing man who could make people laugh, whom everyone wanted to be with just as much as I did.
Guy had big hands. He had muscled, stocky fingers and thick palms. His knuckles bore nicks and scrapes from climbing. He had a way of splaying his fingers on the keyboard that allowed him to cover bunches of notes. This flat-and-spread hand position was the antithesis of how I’d been trained to curve my fingers above the keyboard. If this had been anyone but Guy, I would have been musical snob enough to have trouble overlooking what I considered improper training.
The way he grabbed for the notes, then offered them in fistfuls, typified how he communicated best. He poured into his music all he couldn’t say in words. It was oblique, and often I wanted words. But after he had lost his sons and there were no more words, when he played “Over the Rainbow”—a song he connected to Johnny—I would find my eyes wet. I knew he had found release, and I had too. The strains of the day would dissolve as Guy’s message reached me through his music.
By the time Guy was twenty-nine he had already burned through two careers. His adolescent decisions, aimed at the dramatic, the rebellious, the grand gesture, rang as a cry for attention from both the adult world he was at war with and from his peers, whom he sought to be a part of yet held himself aloof from. A self-destructive streak lay behind his exit from the Washington scene as well as from his truncated career in jazz. I saw none of this. Instead, I was drawn to the heedless boy who didn’t want to grow up and put on a coat and tie. I too wanted that enchanted life on a faraway island. There was as much Peter Pan in me as there was in Guy. In Guy I had found the other half of my own response to childhood, my own wish to throw off serious adult responsibilities for adventures and just plain fun. But I also saw in this Peter Pan a bedrock integrity, an innate honesty, a commitment to standing up for values he believed in.
Guy told me about his drinking problems the first evening we had supper together in New York, when I had a glass of wine and he drank ginger ale. After he left Washington and took a corporate job in New York, he had drunk himself into a stupor nearly every night. The General Electric job was flat. Gone was the excitement of giving all he had for issues that mattered, working until 2:00 a.m. over a speech a senator needed at eight the next morning. Still, he rode that commuter train for the next twelve years. He was in demand as a speechwriter among the senior officers at General Electric because he was good, but he knew he was just coasting, carried along on the reputation for rapid, accurate work he had earned in Washington.
“How did you break out of the drinking?” I asked him.
“It was climbing. I wanted to be fit. I wanted to take my boys to the mountains.”
All my parents’ friends at the Lawrenceville School drank, and the stories about teaching classes with hangovers always got laughs. I’d grown up helping myself to the cherries at the bottom of their cocktail glasses, also considered funny. But I was thinking about my own family. My father was usually drunk by dinnertime.
Guy had stopped drinking. That was all I needed to know. On some intuitive level—there was nothing rational about it—I knew he would stay sober.
It felt to me then that what each of us believed deep down, even what drove us, was similar. Partly it was. But back then I couldn’t see that what drove Guy was often very different.All the same, from the beginning I felt in tune with Guy. I trusted him. I felt at home. I couldn’t imagine not feeling this way toward him. Though I cannot say about Guy what Catherine Earnshaw says about her soul mate Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, “I am Heathcliff,” there was some of this. But basically I wasn’t thinking. I just knew that what had started as enjoying the same books and sharing a love of climbing had plunged to a deep spot that had more to do with how Guy could make me laugh. I saw that he longed to do the right thing, an impulse also strong in me. With Guy I could keep on growing. I could have articulated none of this.All I knew was that what I had been searching for I had found in Guy.
From our first conversation a bridge spanned between us even though he had told me:“I disappoint the ones I love most. I let people down.”
I didn’t understand, and I didn’t ask him to explain. But I was convinced he would never disappoint me or ever let me down.
Years later Guy posted this quotation on the calendar we kept at Barra. It’s from T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, and I give it here the way Guy copied it out:
Merlin: Well, anyway, suppose they did not let you stand against all the evil in the world?
Wart: I could ask.
Merlin: You could ask.
That intangible quality behind the “I could ask” Guy never lost. His desire to do right stirred in me something impossible to explain, because how can we explain love?