Tabula Rasa: Volume Six, by John McPhee

This is the sixth article in the “Tabula Rasa” series. Read Volumes One, Two, Three, Four, and Five.

A Legacy Taste of Cream

In July and August, 1946, I washed the breakfast, lunch, and dinner dishes of three hundred people. This was at Keewaydin, a summer camp on Lake Dunmore, in Vermont. The kitchen had two notable features—a big cast-iron woodstove on which everything was cooked, and a dishwasher that stood up like a blockhouse, designed to receive trays two feet by two with wire-mesh bottoms and sides four inches high. I loaded the trays and shoved them over rollers into the machine’s hot jets of soapy water. That was the least attractive aspect of the job. The most attractive aspect was the cream.

I got up soon after five in the morning, and first went to a large shed full of split wood and hauled some in a cart uphill to the kitchen. Next I went to the cold room in the icehouse, a small barn full of lake ice. A dairy farmer had put our milk there in ten-gallon cans. Unhomogenized, this was udder-grade milk of the Champlain Valley. The cans, heavy even when empty, were made of galvanized steel and had steel handles on the sides. Full, they weighed nearly a hundred pounds, and it was my job to drag them out of the cold room and up a ramp that reached the kitchen.

That done, it was time for my breakfast, before the camp was awake, and before stirring up a can and ladling the contents into three dozen pitchers. I filled a cereal bowl with cornflakes or shredded wheat. Sometimes the chef had made hot oatmeal. A well-muscled man of forty or fifty, the chef had rough edges. His name was Art Vebber and he ran a tight kitchen. His wife, Margaret, made pastries and desserts. I was fifteen years old and always hungry. I lifted the heavy, mushroom-shaped lid off a milk can and dipped a ladle into the cream. If you have ever tasted heavy cream, this was heavier. Call it viscous. Call it cream that would stand up like mayonnaise, cream that no taste bud would ever forget. It didn’t go into the cereal like milk, it went onto the cereal as a layer.

Guys my age worked with me there. Ted Griggs. Jack Haas. We ate together at a table on a small porch. One day, Ted Griggs was eating his cream-covered cornflakes when I said something that made him laugh. Jets of cream came out of his nostrils like spaghetti. Another memorable event occurred on a day when I was dragging a milk can up the ramp and Art the Chef, having completed some errand of his own in the cold room, was behind me. Nearing the top of the ramp, I tripped and fell, and the milk can fell with me. Its top came off and ten gallons of milk went down the ramp and up Art Vebber’s leg.

I am writing this eighty years later with almost no sense of the intervening time. Like a musical phrase that will not go away, the taste of that cream is still there, rarely showing itself, but I have learned where to find it. With a three- or four-ounce ball of burrata on a plate, I take a sip of whole milk followed by some burrata and I’m back in Vermont. The milk seems to be catalytic. It triggers no memory on its own but brings history out of the burrata. Some years ago, my wife, Yolanda, and I spent a month at a retreat on an island in Lake Como. The manager was from Campagna, south of Rome, and she went home for a couple of weekends while we were at the retreat. She came back with mozzarella di bufala, a signature product of Campagna—a mozzarella made with milk of the water buffalo. There is no faster way to get from Lake Como to Lake Dunmore. You don’t even need a catalyst. The mozzarella di bufala gets there on its own. Yolanda and I went down to Campagna ourselves one time, and cruised around—Pompeii, Herculaneum, a Greek temple at Paestum—but were ever mindful of a restaurant in Salerno, where we ordered nothing but a large platter covered with a dozen balls of mozzarella di bufala.

The Cobra in the Philadelphia Zoo

Reading Francine Prose’s biography of Cleopatra, I was surprised to learn that the alleged asp that came up out of a basket of figs, and struck the queen’s breast and killed her, may have been a cobra. Cobras coming up out of charmers’ baskets are generally six feet long. That must have been some basket. Some figs. It’s hard to believe that anyone could be cool enough to say, “Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have immortal longings in me,” when a flat-headed reptile with an oscillating tongue was about to rise up three feet. On the other hand, not everyone has my experience.

I can’t remember what grade I was in—seventh? eighth? early adolescence, in any case—but the rest seems like yesterday. Some forty of us and our teachers went by school bus forty-five miles to the Philadelphia Zoo. As we walked from building to building there—from the baboons to the tigers to the tortoises—our ranks thinned out, because some people moved along rapidly and others lingered. In the Reptile and Amphibian House, I lingered. The other kids must have found its inhabitants repulsive or boring, but I was drawn to a cobra that was lying flat out and minding its own business. Soon, from the tile floors, there were no more echoing steps, and I was alone with the cobra, sheet glass between us.

We had made eye contact. I had the snake’s undivided attention. And I began to sway. Tilting my shoulders right and left, and right and left, I didn’t move my feet or look anywhere but into its eyes. Right. Left. Right. Left. If my motion had been accompanied by music, the music would have been Ravel’s “Boléro.”

Lah, I am looking at you, my hooded friend,

and I’d like to see that part of you,

lah dah loo lah hoo.

Right. Left. Right. Left. Ravel’s première performance caused a sexual riot. Right. Left. Two pairs of staring eyes, in intimate contact. Slowly, very slowly, the serpent’s erectile head came up, up, cantilevered from its upper body, its firm, columnar upper body. Right. Left.

Now, we are sensing where the music will go,

in its juvenescent way, lah dah loo lah hoo lah doo lah,

and the right-left sway.

The cobra now was swaying, too. The head was up two feet. The hood was spreading, forming its cupped oval. Right. Left. The head, erect, was up a country metre. Right sway. Left sway.

Smash.

Straight at me, the cobra struck. Its head hit the glass. Its venom was on the glass. I ran out of the Reptile House, looking for my teachers and my class.

The City of Brotherly Loot

In the nineteen-thirties, when I was not yet ten, a chicken farmer named George Duell regularly delivered eggs to us, and he didn’t just drop them off—he came into the house, sat down at the kitchen table, and talked, especially if my father was there. We always referred to this visitor as Farmer Duell. He was a heavy, jowly man, who had a way of sitting down that suggested no intention of getting back on his feet. He was a recent immigrant from Germany and he may have sensed that on my father’s maternal side the family name was von Roemer. In any case, the scene that puts him front and center on this page occurred in our kitchen one spring when my father asked him if he had yet filed his federal income tax. “Vaht?” boomed Farmer Duell. “Vaht? Me get on daht sucker list?”

Farmer Duell’s summation of internal revenue was all I cared to hear on the subject as I grew into and past my college years, when I encountered pieces in magazines—often by writers of the front rank who, to me, were literary gods—whining and mewling about penalties they had to pay as a result of un-American audits. The genre embarrassed me.

This attitude was still firmly in place when, at the age of seventy-four, I went to Philadelphia at the invitation of the Academy of Natural Sciences to receive its “Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art.” The evening was billed as “A Conversation” (with me), and consisted of off-the-cuff responses to questions from an audience of several hundred. With the gold medal, I was pleasantly surprised to find a check for a thousand dollars.

Eighteen months later, I was confused by a letter from the Philadelphia Municipal Court, titled “Code Enforcement Complaint,” and identifying me as “Case 0000374156.”

WHEREFORE, the City of Philadelphia requests this Court enter a fine jointly and severally against each defendant in the Amount Due $10,000.00, Court Costs $55.00; TOTAL CLAIMED $10,055.00.

As far as I could make out, I was the only defendant. With a check for ten thousand fifty-five dollars, I could get out of jail free. But what had I done? To whom? Where? I hadn’t been in Philadelphia since Princeton last beat Penn. I was in the dark, perplexed. This had to be a weird clerical mistake. I don’t even live in Pennsylvania. Where did they get my Princeton address? The letter was as baffling as it was threatening, written in broken-bottle prose by someone who had been trained at a professional school that taught “First, do harm.”

I threw the letter in the trash. A month later, another one came. I was still Case 0000374156, and now, for as long as I failed to pay up, the court would fine me ten thousand dollars a day. As mystified as ever, I looked up numbers and tried to call. I spent about four hours on the phone, most of it on hold. Finally, a man at the Philadelphia end, responding to one of those calls, asked me if I had been paid a thousand dollars by the Academy of Natural Sciences on December 1, 2005.

Yes.

He said there was no record of my ever having had a Philadelphia Business Privilege License.

No kidding.

Before the December 1, 2005, event, I should have filed an application and paid two hundred and fifty dollars for a Philadelphia Business Privilege License. By April 15, 2006, I should have filed a Philadelphia Business Privilege Tax return and paid a tax of a hundred and twenty-seven dollars. Since I had not done any of it, the Code Enforcement Complaint had been filed with the Philadelphia Municipal Court.

One cobra strike and one business privilege tax were enough for one lifetime. I vowed never again to go to Philadelphia. Mewl. Whine. For some years afterward, I steadily received notices from Philadelphia demanding returns when my Philadelphia income had been zero, and even demanding returns for the seven years before 2005, years in each of which my earnings in Philadelphia had been zero, as they had been since 1931, the year of my birth.

Philadelphia! My mother’s native city! My mother—Quaker daughter of the Quaker daughter of a Chester County farmer, my thee-and-thou mother, who spoke Plain Speech with her own mother, and with her sister Rachel, until the end of Rachel’s life. Philadelphia: the city of brotherly privilege tax. Mewl. Whine. Driving south, I used to go through Philadelphia, but never again. Mewl. Whine. Pardon my venom.

Maraschino

I have two friends with a common flaw. They completely fail to comprehend, to sense or savor, let alone appreciate, the bourbon-soaked maraschino cherry. Their names are Jim and Patrick, but we can let that go. They have been editors, writers, publishers of their own and other people’s books, and professional consultants at mysterious depths. You would think they would know something, anything, on this topic, but to them a cherry is a cherry, class dismissed.

Cartoon by Dan Misdea

The cherry I’m thinking of is not your Castignano cherry, your Vicenza cherry, your patrician if not patriotic Upper West Side cherry, the fact notwithstanding that it is best described as an al-dente cherry. You just won’t find it in a boutique with an unpronounceable name where the world’s most expensive maraschinos roll out like grape skins stuffed with perfumed applesauce. You want Aisle 7, north side, top shelf, Pennington Quality Market, or wherever you get your I.G.A. cherries. The larger the jar, the larger the cherry, in generally discernible fractions, so you want the sixteen-ouncer. I.G.A., of course, is the Independent Grocers Alliance, and this is your vox-pop cherry, your socialist cherry, but politics is not why you drown it in bourbon. Texture is why. The national flycaster Ian Frazier, who eats live mayflies so that he can share the experience with rising trout, says the best thing about them is the “chitinous crunch.” He could as well be describing a bourbon-soaked maraschino cherry, masticated al dente.

Career Panel

Career Panels, at Princeton University in the nineteen-sixties, were meant to give seniors and juniors guidance in approaching their professional lives. The various panels consisted mainly of alumni who were employed already where the students wanted to be, and were convened in their so-called eating clubs, a form of sorority or fraternity whose naming an editor might have improved.

Future editors were among the students at a club called Dial Lodge one autumn morning in 1962. Broadly speaking, the panel was addressed to the arts, not only the visual arts but also all forms of writing, including journalism. Nine years out of college, I was the regular writer of a section of Time magazine called “Show Business.” Ninety-five years old at this writing, I can’t remember the names or affiliations of any but one of the others on the panel, as I could never forget John D. Rockefeller.

Great-grandson of Big Bill Rockefeller, who hustled patent medicines onstage at county fairs, grandson of John D. Rockefeller, who founded Standard Oil, and son of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., this one was fifty-six years old and thirty-three years out of Princeton, from which he had been graduated magna cum laude in—who could imagine—economics. It would snap credulity to say that his career and mine were apples and oranges. Whoever put that panel together must have been on laughing gas. There we were, though, shaking hands, sitting down behind a long table, and trying to be helpful to a roomful of students. No one could say he didn’t belong there. He was the president and founding chairman of Lincoln Center, and the president of the Rockefeller Foundation. A fund he was establishing at the time of the career panel became the Asian Cultural Council, which, according to Wikipedia, has provided grant assistance to thousands of Asians and Americans in the area of the arts.

After the panel ended, there was no limo waiting at the curb for him; he was a Rockefeller, not a movie star. He and I walked across campus to the P.J. & B.—Princeton Junction and Back, the shortest passenger-rail line in the United States. Moderns call it the Dinky. In Pennsylvania Station, he remarked that we should take a taxi together, because he was going uptown, too, and I could get out at the Time & Life Building. At Eighth Avenue and Thirty-second Street, we got into a standing cab. At Fiftieth Street, it turned right, went a couple of blocks, and pulled over to the uptown curb, my cubicle twenty-five stories overhead. This was 1962 and—it seems incredible—the meter hadn’t made it past seventy-five cents. I reached into my wallet and offered him a five-dollar bill. I was offering John D. Rockefeller a five-dollar bill. I have never seen, nor could I ever hope to see, a more benign smile.

Anybody Can Write a Book

If not a book, somebody should write a Profile of Andrew Szanton. He is a former student in my writing class and I don’t write Profiles of former students in my writing class. It was a competitive course in the sense that six dozen students, or thereabouts, would apply, and I would choose sixteen. The application was to be accompanied by a fifteen-hundred-word example of the applicant’s prose and a letter saying why the applicant wanted to take the course. It was a spring-semester course. Andrew, a senior, applied in the fall of 1984. From his letter, I remember only that he apologized for the length of his prose sample but said its effects would depend on my reading all of it. The piece was called “Coach,” and its length approached twenty thousand words.

I read all of it. The protagonist was Andrew’s high-school football coach, at Sidwell Friends, in the District of Columbia. Slowly, incrementally, Andrew disassembled the coach, until hundreds of little bits of him were scattered from Rockville to Manassas.

Andrew was unknown to me. I met him on the first day of the spring semester, and within a week formed a first and permanent impression of a quiet, polite, soft-spoken, thoughtful, gentle, and brilliant person. He was paired that day with another student, and their assignment was to interview and profile each other. Across forty-five years, my course began that way. Three days passed. The pieces poured in. Andrew’s was about something else. I forget what.

In the first half of the semester, the specific assignment was a factor in each paper due, and Andrew wrote nothing that covered, went into, or even mentioned the factor assigned. I read what he did write and the pieces were very good. In private conferences about them, I think I did not refer to what was missing, nor did he. In the second half of the semester, my assignments have always been called Free Choice 1, Free Choice 2. I had him there.

Four or five years after Andrew’s graduation, I happened to be on the telephone with Sybil Stokes, the wife of the dean of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, talking about something or other on the Princeton campus. Out of the blue, she mentioned Andrew Szanton. “Andrew Szanton?” I said. “How do you know him?” Sybil said, “He is my nephew.” At this writing, Andrew is forty years out of college. He has successfully pursued an independent (what else?) career writing books for other people—ghosted books, as-told-to books, oral histories—some for clients, some not. His projects have been with athletes, politicians, chief executive officers, the director of a botanical garden, a physician, a Nepalese monk, a theoretical physicist. He did one with Charles Evers, brother of Medgar Evers, the N.A.A.C.P.’s field secretary in Mississippi, who died on June 12, 1963, after a rifle bullet passed through his heart. Andrew Szanton was born in that year. He would become a participant in the Smithsonian Institution Archives’ Oral History Program and a teacher of expository writing at Harvard. He is married to Barbara Cannon, M.D., a psychiatrist. They have two children and live in Newton, Massachusetts.

Reminding him that he is a highly skilled writer on his own, I once asked him why he does not write books by Andrew Szanton.

He said, “Anybody can write a book.” Absent a function like his, there was not going to be a memoir by Medgar Evers’s brother.

For One Person

After her husband died, Betty Constable lived alone in her house on Orchard Circle in Princeton. When autumn came, and winter, she did not turn on the heat. Asked why, she said, “For one person?” Heat six thousand square feet of living space for one person?

Betty Constable was the first coach of women’s squash at Princeton University, a job for which she was preëminently qualified. As Elizabeth Howe, she had grown up in New Haven, Connecticut, and was eleven years old when William Pepper Constable graduated from Princeton. He was the star fullback and captain of Princeton’s football team, which lost one game in his three seasons and won the national championship twice. (Freshmen were not then eligible for varsity teams.) Pepper, as he was called, was also Phi Beta Kappa, contender for the Heisman, and the president of his class.

My father was close to this story, because he was the football team’s physician. Some years later, when I was teen-aged, he brought home 16-mm. films of Pepper’s great games. Over and over, I ran those films on our family projector, watching Pepper Constable (6’1″, 191) go off-tackle, shucking Yalies, Harvards, on his way to the end zone. I could make the players run backward as well as forward. Betty Howe, seven years older than I was, had actually been to a number of those games. Moreover, she knew Pepper. Her family and his lived in cities a couple of hundred miles apart, but each had a house on Nantucket. According to my mother, Betty Howe, in her teens, decided that someday she would marry Pepper.

He married someone else first, earned his M.D. at Harvard, and was a flight surgeon in the South Pacific during the Second World War. He also divorced. Seventeen in 1941, Betty forewent college to serve in wartime as a Red Cross nurse’s aide. Her mother had been the women’s national squash champion in 1929, 1932, and 1934. Betty did not take up the game until she was in her twenties. The year she married Pepper, in 1950, she herself was the national champion. Her principal opponent in those years was Peggy Howe, her twin sister, born in Natick, Massachusetts, minutes after Betty was. They were not identical. Betty was left-handed, Peggy right-handed. Peggy described her own playing style as dainty—at least, in her word, “daintier” than Betty’s, of which Peggy used the word “bulldog.” On a squash court, Betty was something like Pepper going off-tackle. Betty and Peggy were in the 1953 national final playing against each other. Peggy was the champion in 1952 and 1953. Betty was the champion in 1950, 1956, 1957, 1958, and 1959—Betty Constable, pleasant, humorous, graceful, formal, practical, sensible bulldog. She was pregnant while she was winning championships and gave birth to two daughters. A third, Liza, was born in 1960, as was my daughter Sarah. They became best friends. Betty’s Princeton squash teams won a hundred and seventeen matches and lost fifteen. Her players called her Mrs. Constable.

In the nineteen-eighties, Pepper developed Alzheimer’s disease, the synecdoche in those days for all forms of dementia. As a physician, he had followed the disease to its conclusion and could time his expectations. On a day he chose, when he and Betty were at their house on Nantucket, he went into the ocean and swam in one direction away from the island until he could swim no longer. On a table on their porch, Betty found his clothes, each garment neatly folded, and understood what he had done.

Charlie Ufford

The best squash player I ever played against was C. W. Ufford, Harvard ’53. I was not a squash player. He was. But we played in some unusual ways and places. The ocean liner Queen Elizabeth had a squash court, and we played there in September, 1953, on our way to the University of Cambridge. A squash game in those days was fifteen points, three games to win a match. To start each game between us, Charlie would spot me fourteen points. Yet the advantage was all his. He knew what he was doing and I did not. He had been the captain of both squash and soccer at Deerfield Academy, and of those teams, as well as tennis, at Harvard. He was nationally ranked, twice the national collegiate champion. Charlie’s credentials as an athlete did not lack range. He was an All-American soccer player. I had come to know him as a 1949 classmate at Deerfield, where I had spent a gap year after deferring my admission to Princeton. He came from Haverford, Pennsylvania, and—according to him—owed a great deal of his hand-eye coördination to a Ping-Pong table at Pocono Lake Preserve, a summer site full of Philadelphia families like his.

Charlie’s father, a physics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had been an instructor at Princeton when Charlie was born, four months after I was, same hospital. In the nineteen-sixties, Charlie became a resident of Princeton, New Jersey, after he married Letitia Wheeler, whom he had met when he was at Harvard, she at Radcliffe. Letitia was the daughter of the cosmologist John Archibald Wheeler, who was one of the greats in the history of physics, specializing in the densest places in the universe, which he named black holes. Charlie had been through law school and was commuting to a firm in Manhattan. He belonged to a squash-and-tennis club on Pretty Brook Road in Princeton, and, it should go without saying, spotted me fourteen points a game there. Why was he doing this? We were friends. There was no other explanation in the universe.

Did he get any exercise? Some. Relentlessly, he toyed with me, his obvious goal being to prevent both of us from winning. That fifteenth point took forever and ever. If I hit a perfect drop shot, caroming in a corner above the telltale, it came back as a soft high lob, sending me to the back wall, but not hopelessly unplayable, always hanging up long enough for me to get to it by sprinting the length of the court, and with enough space around it for me to do whatever came into my head next. He simply would not lose or win. I had never had so much exercise in so few minutes. We were in our forties then, avoiding, I guess, flab, the voyage on the Queen Elizabeth long behind us, pitching, rolling in the North Atlantic, and playing with an English ball, which ran me even more ragged, because it was soft, unlike the hard rubber of the American ball, and wherever it fell it didn’t get up. At his college graduation, Charlie had been awarded the Lionel de Jersey Harvard Scholarship for graduate study at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, where John Harvard had matriculated in 1627.

My own college was Magdalene, not exactly next door, and I saw Charlie only now and then across the Michaelmas term. Having vowed to myself that I would try to play a sport at Cambridge that was purely English and would therefore augment my experience in the U.K., I went out for basketball. I joined a team that had one English player, one Scot, two other Americans, two Welshmen, a Trinidadian, and a son of the Philippine Ambassador to the Court of St. James. We lacked height. In those years, I topped out at five feet seven. Everybody else was of course taller, but not in basketball’s conventional range. We did O.K., travelling the Midlands to various universities, losing to Oxford at Oxford, playing our home games in a building on which big letters by the front door said “Department of Human Ecology.” We won more than we lost. We beat the Royal Fusiliers in London. We made it into the national tournament, surprised that there was one.

As the tournament tightened, I got more and more nervous about the height problem. Probably in the dead of night, an inspiration struck. Charlie Ufford! An athlete if ever there was one. Tall. Not by later standards, but six-something and taller than anybody we had. Honed to a fare-thee-well in hand-eye coördination. What difference if the ball was two hundred and twenty times the size of the ones he was used to? I made a recruiting visit to John Harvard’s college. Whatever else Charlie was, he was also malleable and ductile. He agreed. Sure. If I wanted him to play basketball, he would play basketball.

I coached him, and gave him stern instructions. He was to crowd the boards, go up and get rebounds. Defensive. Offensive. Rebounds. And when he came down with the ball, he was always to throw it to me. We won a couple of tournament games. Then we faced the United States Navy. Yes. Your eyesight is stable. A unit of the U.S. Navy was attached to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and the happy-go-lucky Brits had put them into their national basketball tournament, putting us out.

Mrs. Pigeoner

One of my daughters left a bag of wild cherries here in June, 2023, and set the clock back eighty-five years. New Jersey forest cherries, bright yellow, blushing red. The colors suggest wind-borne pollen from ornamental trees, or pits carried by birds. Prunus avium. Across the street and three doors down, in 1938, such a tree was in the front yard of Mrs. Pigeoner. Belial’s daughter out of Evil Moon, Mrs. Pigeoner.

Her tree was rich in cherries that June, and some dropped on our stickball games among parked cars, others on the sidewalk, but most in Mrs. Pigeoner’s yard. We went for those blushing cherries in Mrs. Pigeoner’s yard. She came out of her house rasping. She had a broom and she chased us with it. She was an old crone. We thought she was more than a hundred years old. She may have been fifty-eight. Whatever she was, she hated kids. She glared at us on the street. And with her sharp tongue and ready broom, she kept us away from her cherries. We were seven years old.

One day, a thunderstorm broke—lightning flashes, powerful wind, and Mrs. Pigeoner’s cherry tree fell across the sidewalk, its fruited canopy in the public domain, aswarm with children, in the middle of the street. We ate up the cherries and missed them in 1939. ♦