One spring Saturday when I was seven going on eight, my mother brought me with her on an automobile outing with her young lover and future husband, E. B. White. She took our family car, a slope-nosed Franklin sedan, and we must have met Andy by prearrangement at our garage. He did the driving. We left New York and went up into Westchester County for lunch—this was 1928 and it was still mostly country. On the way back, my mother, who had taken the wheel, stripped the gears while shifting, and we ground to a halt, halfway onto a shoulder of the Bronx River Parkway. Disaster. Andy thumbed a ride to go find a tow truck, and my mother, I now realize, was left to make this into an amusing story to tell my father and my older sister at dinner that evening. She almost never drove—thus the screeching and scraping sounds beneath us and the agonized look on her face when she got lost in mid-shift and we broke down. It was also unusual, an adventure, for me to be alone with her and her office friend Mr. White, as she’d described him. I think I wasn’t meant to be there; maybe a Saturday date with a schoolmate had fallen through, and she’d had no recourse but to bring me along. But she never would have taken me off on an outing that would require me to lie about it to my father afterward, so the trip must have been presented beforehand as a chance for her to practice her driving, with the reliable Andy White as instructor. I had no idea, of course, that she and I were stranded in a predicament, but I recall sitting beside her on the running board of the ticking, cooling Franklin while we waited, with the pale new shrubs and pastoral grasses of the Parkway around us, and the occasional roadster or touring car (with its occupants swivelling their gaze toward us as they came by) swooshing past. Then a tow truck appeared around the curve behind us, with Andy White standing on the right-hand running board and waving excitedly. Yay, I’m back, we’re rescued! My father would never have done that—found a tow so quickly or waved like a kid when he spotted us.
The story stops here. I don’t remember that night or anything else about our little trip, but in less than two years my parents were divorced and my mother and Andy married and living on East Eighth Street. They soon had their own car, or cars: they kept changing. The Depression had arrived, but they were a successful New Yorker couple—she a fiction editor; he a writer of casuals and poetry and the first-page Comment section—and they loved driving around in an eight-year-old Pierce-Arrow touring car, with a high-bustle trunk, side mirrors, and flapping white roof. After their son was born—my brother Joel—they moved up to a staid seven-passenger Buick sedan. In the mid-thirties, Andy also acquired a secondhand beige-and-black 1928 Plymouth roadster—country wheels, used mostly around their place in Maine. The Buick still mattered to him.
Back when it was new, thieves stole it out of a garage on University Place one night and used it in a daring bank stickup in Yonkers. Andy was upset, but when he read an account of the crime in the newspapers the next day, with a passage that went “and the robbers’ powerful getaway car swiftly outdistanced police pursuers,” he changed sides. “C’mon, Buick!” he said. “Go!”
Every family has its own car stories, but in another sense we know them all in advance now, regardless of our age. The collective American unconscious is stuffed with old Pontiacs, and fresh reminders are never lacking. Weekend rallies flood the Mendocino or Montpelier back roads with high-roofed Model A’s and Chevys, revarnished 1936 woodies, and thrumming, leaf-tone T-Birds; that same night, back home again or with our feet up at the Hyatt, we click onto TCM and find “The Grapes of Wrath,” or “Bonnie and Clyde,” or “Five Easy Pieces,” or “Thelma & Louise,” waiting to put us out on the narrow, anachronism-free macadam once again. (A friend of mine used to drive around the Village in his 1938 De Soto hearse, except when it was out on lease to still another “Godfather” movie.) Grandchildren, slipping 50 Cent or Eminem into their Discmans in the back seat, sigh and roll their eyes whenever the old highwayman starts up again. Yes, car travel was bumpier and curvier back then, with more traffic lights and billboards, more cows and hillside graveyards, no air-conditioning and almost no interstates, and with tin cans and Nehi signs and red Burma-Shave jingles crowding the narrow roadside. Give us a break.
Still, we drove, and what startles me from this great distance is how often and how far. I was a New York City kid who knew the subways and museums and movie theatres and zoos and ballparks by heart, but in the nineteen-thirties I also got out of town a lot, mostly by car. I drove (well, was driven) to Bear Mountain and Atlantic City and Gettysburg and Niagara Falls; went repeatedly to Boston and New Hampshire and Maine; drove to a Missouri cattle farm owned by an uncle; drove there during another summer and thence onward to Santa Fe and Tesuque and out to the Arizona Painted Desert. Then back again, to New York. Before this, in March, 1933—it was the week of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural—I’d boarded a Greyhound bus to Detroit, along with a Columbia student named Tex Goldschmidt, and we picked up a test-model Terraplane sedan at the factory (courtesy of an advertising friend of my father’s who handled the Hudson-Essex account) and drove it back home. A couple of months later, in company with a math teacher named Mr. Burchell or Burkhill and four Lincoln School seventh-grade classmates, I crammed into a buckety old Buick sedan and drove to the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago; we came back by way of Niagara Falls, and, because I had been there before and knew the ropes, took time also to visit the Shredded Wheat factory, some tacky mummies, and a terrific fifty-cent roadside exhibition of dented and rusty, candy-wrapper-littered barrels and iron balls in which various over-the-brink daredevils had mostly met their end. With one exception, all of us in our party were still speaking.
If I now hop aboard some of these bygone trips for a mile or two, it is not for the sake of easy nostalgia—the fizz of warm Moxie up your nose; the Nabokovian names of roadside tourist cottages; the glint of shattered glass and sheen of blood around a tree-crumpled gray Reo; or the memory of collies and children, unaccustomed to auto-motion, throwing up beside their hastily parked family vehicles—but in search of some thread or path that links these outings and sometimes puts Canandaigua or Kirksville or Keams Canyon back in my head when I wake up in the middle of the night. Effort can now and then produce a sudden fragment of locality: the car stopped and me waking up with my sweating cheek against the gray plush of the back seat, as I stare at a mystifying message, “VEEDOL,” painted on a square of white tin so bright in the sun that it makes me wince. Veedol? Beyond it, against the stucco gas-station wall, is a handmade sign, wavery in the gasoline fumes rising outside my window. Where are we? I want to sit up and ask my father, standing out there in his sneakers, khaki pants, and an old shirt with rolled-up sleeves, who is fishing his thick brown wallet—we’re on a long haul to somewhere—out of a hip pocket, but I’m too dazed to speak.
The first day of that 1933 school trip to the Chicago World’s Fair went on forever, and it was after dark when we topped a hillside in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, slowed at the vision of Pittsburgh alight in the distance, and felt a little lurch and jolt as the right rear wheel fell off the Buick. I can’t remember dinner, but it was past midnight when, rewheeled, we pulled up at the McKeesport Y.M.C.A. and settled for two double rooms, plus cots. Jerry Tallmer, a surviving member of the party, tells me that a fellow-traveller, less suave than the rest of us, confessed to him later that until this moment he’d held a childhood notion that if you weren’t in bed by midnight you died. Out in Chicago, we took in the House of Tomorrow and Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Car; ogled Sally Rand’s “Streets of Paris” but didn’t attend; went to the Museum of Natural History; laughed at Chicago’s dinky elevated cars; and in our little notebooks wrote down that Depression soup-kitchen lines in Chicago looked exactly like the ones in depressed New York. We were smart and serious, and would be expected to report on this trip in Social Studies, come fall. The Century of Progress, we concluded, was mostly about advertising. One afternoon, the temperature went down twenty-nine degrees in an hour and a half as a black storm blew in from over Lake Michigan; the next morning we read that the sightseeing plane whose ticket window we’d seen at the Fair had crashed, killing all aboard. Three days later, wheeling south from Niagara Falls, my companions (including the heroic Burkhill or Burchell, who did all the driving) offered to pay me two dollars apiece if I’d just shut up for a change, and not speak another word for the rest of the trip. Unaffronted and short of cash, I agreed, and collected my princely ten bucks while we were passing under the new George Washington Bridge, just about home.
Breakdowns happened all the time. A year earlier, headed for Missouri with my pal Tex Goldschmidt, our car, another family Franklin, quit cold on a hillside in Liberty, New York. Towed to a garage, we learned that the replacement part we needed would arrive by mail in two days. We put up in an adjacent boarding house, where the large brown cookies permanently in place in the center of the dining-room table were just possibly varnished. Sitting on porch rockers that evening, with our feet up on the railing, we were terrified by a Catskill lightning bolt that flew along a grounding wire from the rooftop rod and down a viny column a yard or two from our toes. We sat on, listening to the thrash of night trees and the gurgle of water through the gutter downspouts, when—bam!—it happened again: an explosion and a blaze of white down the same path, and the smell of immeasurable voltage in the air around us. “Well, so much for that adage,” Tex said, rising. “I’m going to bed.”
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Arthur Goldschmidt, whom I’ve written about before, came from San Antonio, and was knowledgeable about cars and roadside stuff. He’d been hired by my father, with whom I lived on weekdays, to come down from Columbia a couple of afternoons a week and spend some time with me when I got home from school, but he was so smart and engaging that he became a fixture. Here, a few months later, he’d been given the family car and the family wiseguy to take out West; my father would come along by train a little later, while Tex continued south to see his folks. Driving, Tex smoked Chesterfields and talked about the Scottsboro boys, asked if I thought Babe Ruth wore a girdle, and wondered how much I knew about the corrupt but colorful governor of Texas, Ma Ferguson. We had no radio but stayed alert anyway. Tex was the one to spot the first buzzard aloft and the rare passing North Dakota license plate, and to pick up on roadside or billboard names. (“Sweet Orr Pants,” he said, musingly. “Coward Shoes?”) He challenged me to recite all the Burma-Shave jingles we’d encountered (“The bearded lady / tried a jar / she’s now /a famous movie star / Burma-Shave”; “Rip a fender / off your car / mail it in for / a half-pound jar / Burma-Shave”) and make up some of our own. He made me rate the girls in my class for looks and then for character, and said, “If our left front tire is six feet around, how many revolutions will it make by the time we reach Cleveland?” Late in our trip, wheeling down an unpopulated gravel highway west of Edina, Missouri, Tex slowed as we came up to three black sedans, oddly parked crossways on the road at a little distance from each other. As we passed the first one, to our left, the second moved forward from the right to block our path, but Tex spun us hard right, spewing gravel, passed behind him, and floored it up the road and away. Prohibition revenue inspectors, he thought, or maybe a highway stickup. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were around here somewhere, making do in hard times.
I keep forgetting how hot it was, driving. Two summers along, in late August of 1934, my father replanned the second part of our trip by leaving my uncle’s place in Green Castle, Missouri (the same haven Tex and I had been heading for), around noon and driving non-stop to Santa Fe. We’d do Kansas by night and stay cool. Our party—Father, my eighteen-year-old sister Nancy, her Concord Academy classmate Barbara Kidder (the two had just graduated), and I—were experienced car people by now. We hated motels, carried water in our two big thermoses (later, in New Mexico, we bought a waterskin and slung it on a front fender), and favored gas stations with the old-style pumps that were cranked by hand like an ice-cream freezer while you watched your Sunoco or Gulf slosh into a glass ten-gallon container up on top, then empty into your tank. We knew how to open a Coke by sticking a silver dollar under the cap and banging the bottle with your fist, and we’d learned to stop wincing or weaving when another languid or headlight-entranced rabbit in the road—ba-bump—went to the great cabbage patch in the sky. The floor in the back of the car filled up with crumpled sections of the Kansas City Star or the St. Joseph News-Press that we’d picked up at the last diner.
Nancy was driving by now, and could spell my father for two-hour stretches. She was a better driver than he was. Her hair was tied up with a string of red yarn, keeping it off her ears; at the wheel, she’d fire up a cigarette with the dashboard lighter, then hold it in the air in her long fingers, a ring of scarlet lipstick around the nearer end. Too classy for Bryn Mawr, I thought. I liked Barbara Kidder, who wore a blue neck bandanna and shorts, and had a nice store of rattlesnake and Gila-monster stories; her parents were archeologists—she was joining them later at a dig in Nevada. My father overcorrected while driving and favored long silences, but he was a soldier, a commandante, at the wheel, good for a five-hour bore through the blazing Indiana afternoon while we dozed and told dumb jokes. He didn’t go for jokes, but laughed out loud when we imitated him trying to order his breakfast café au lait from a waitress at our creaky small-hotel dining room. This always started our day. “I want a glass of milk,” he began, speaking loudly and fashioning the shape of a glass in the air. “Cold milk, in a glass. Then, and in addition, I’d like a cup of coffee”—his hands moved to one side, forming an invisible cup with a saucer underneath—“and with it a pitcher of hot milk, to put into the coffee. Now, again: cold milk, please, in a glass”—he poured it and pushed it carefully to the side—“coffee, hot coffee” he made a happy sniffing sound, at the Maxwell Houseness of it—“and over here our hot milk”—little finger waves to show heat rising—“to put into the hot coffee. Is that clear?” But of course it wasn’t. The waitress, bewildered by this mixture of mime and command and terrified by the lawyerly glare in his dark eyes, had long since paused with her pencil. What Father got was generally coffee with cold milk in the pitcher, or coffee and boiling water, or, at least once, iced coffee. It never came out right. We shook our heads helplessly, knowing that he wasn’t cruel or unfeeling: he just liked things nice.
That night, in Kansas, Father held to course, upright at the wheel through the eight- or ten-mile straightaways, with the bright headlights forming—for me, in back—an outlined silhouette of his ears and bald head and strong forearms. I would fall asleep, and when I woke again it would be Nancy driving and smoking, with Father asleep on the right-hand seat and Barbara asleep beside me in back. The night air rushed in about us through the tilted wind portals at the front of the front windows and the smaller ones in back (we were in the zippy Terraplane that Tex and I had brought from Detroit), and with it the hot, flat scent of tall corn; a sudden tang of skunk come and gone; the smell of tar when the dirt roads stopped, fainter now with the hot sun gone; and, over a rare pond or creek as the tire noise went deeper, something rich and dank, with cowflop and dead fish mixing with the sweet-water weeds. I had a Texaco road map with me in back, and when we came through a little town or stopped at a ringing railroad crossing I got out my flashlight and tried to follow the thin blue line of our passage: Chapman and WaKeeney, Winona, and now—we must have turned south a bit—Sharon Springs. I fell asleep again. Sometime in the night, my hand found Barbara’s hand and held on. When I awoke with the first sun behind us, we’d climbed out of heat, and the field dirt around us had a redder hue. “Colorado,” Father said softly. I lay back in my nest and Barbara’s hand came out from under her thin Mexican blanket and took mine once again. That morning, we went through LaJunta and Trinidad and over the Raton Pass into New Mexico. (We’d stopped earlier at a lookout where four different states were visible, surely, in the haze to the east and south.) The Sangre de Cristos came into view and the first soft-cornered adobe houses, and that night we ate at La Fonda with my Aunt Elsie, who worked for the Indian Bureau, and had Hopi snake dances and San Ildefonso pottery makers and Mabel Dodge Luhan in store for us in the coming weeks. Almost the best part was still ahead.
I learned how to drive early, and in June of 1936 sent five dollars to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Augusta, Maine, along with a note saying, “I am fifteen. Please send my license in enclosed envelope.” That was all it took. I appropriated the Whites’ yellowy old Plymouth roadster, with its splayed fenders, wooden spoke wheels, cracked leather front seat, and leaky ragtop roof. (I carried a thick roll of Johnson & Johnson adhesive tape under the seat, for rainy day patch-ups.) There was a little hole in the floorboards, near the brake pedal, and if you glanced down there on a daytime errand you could see the grainy macadam streaming by under your foot. Soon I was taking girls to the movies on Tuesday or Saturday nights, upstairs at the Town Hall in Blue Hill, or to the Grand, in Ellsworth. I kept my headlights on low beam on foggy nights, suavely navigating through sudden thick blankets of damp, and found quiet places to park in East Blue Hill or out on Naskeag Point. I had become Andy Hardy. Making out in parked cars puts me into the movies or into a thousand cartoons, but what memory presents about these chilly long-gone summer evenings is the first five minutes under way, with my hands at ease on the nubbly wheel, and with the white highway ahead and the gleam from the looped roadside power wires giving back tanned knees, a sweet nose and strong chin, just there to my right. Intimacy.
