There it was on my Twitter feed –
what a word, “feed”!, like when little Lola looks at her
grandfather and with exquisite economy of words, opens her mouth and
points her finger down the gorge and says, “feed!” – a picture
from 1994, of Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, and Brian DePalma,
all of whom had ascended to movie immortality in the 70's, drinking
after dinner at Lucas's 50th, big smiles, white tablecloth, hair
still dark although some beards white, the immortals. What would
they do next? We know, because it's now the 20-teens, and the future
has been written, and we know that they never really descended, they
just moved on and in Spielberg's case even further up, and it's still
hard to say they weren't the best.
But what I know and others don't,
probably, even Brian himself, is what happened before, and where
another fork in the road ended up. Because I am just one year
younger than he is and for four years we went to the same school,
Friends Central School, just outside of Philadelphia, a Quaker school
that still had some Quakers but they were a minority in their own
school. We were Jews, of course, (not Brian, but the rest of us)
from West Philadelphia, I was on 47th just off of Osage,
Bob was at 46th between Osage and Pine, and Stuart was on
Osage between 46th and 47th. Our parents knew
each other, so we knew each other, and somehow all three families,
and Billy Loesher's family from 46th and Osage, too, all
had found FCS and had abandoned the inadequate local Henry C. Lea
Elementary School.
We commuted together in a dark green
station wagon supplied by the school, with a driver who came by and
picked us up at our houses and took us the 45 minutes or so over city
streets, out Walnut to 63rd and then North past J.
McCullough, Undertaker and various other landmarks that we imbibed
daily as we drank in the parts of the city we would never see
otherwise – well, maybe Bob would, but I wouldn't – and it was
Bob (then called Robert), the four of us Shenkin's, and Stuart Egnal.
And a few others. I must be misremembering, because how could such
a crew fit into that dark green station wagon, I wonder?
Stuart was a year ahead of me, and I
was a year ahead of Bob. Stuart was bigger than I was by a little,
his father and mother being a little bit bigger than my parents.
Mike Egnal was tall and lanky, a lawyer, and in the summer he ruled a
public tennis court down in Beach Haven, NJ, saying who would play
when. My father envied his dominance somewhat, I think, as he did
the social savoir faire of lawyers who, when a situation
arose, somehow knew how to take charge, while my father's dominance
was confined to the hospital, where his prestige as a neurosurgeon
conferred the rights that Mike seemed just to assume on the tennis
court. Mike's wife, Stuart's mother Sylvia, had a similar physique
to Mike's, above average height, wide shoulders, and more respectful
and non-intrusive than most of the Jewish women I knew and would come
to know. I came to understand that she had eyes on me for her
daughter Betty Ellen, a couple of years older than me and later on at
Radcliffe when I got to Harvard, but I didn't see her there, although
I think Sylvia wanted me to look her up and Betty was receptive
(maybe obediently) but she had her own life and I think she wound up
in London, like my youngest sister, Emily, and I think she was in art
history. I'm not completely sure she was in art history, but I think
she was, but I'm positive she wound up in London. Come to think of
it, I think Sylvia painted.
When you finished 6th grade
at FCS you moved across the roundabout at the end of the driveway to
the Upper School, which was to my eyes a Victorian sort of building,
with towers, wood floors, and narrow or medium sized hallways, and
classrooms with warm lights and windows that looked out on trees and
greenery that you wouldn't see around West Philadelphia. Sunlight
and green trees and grass and bushes and little swales filled me up
with something, a feeling of being saved, a feeling of luck, a
feeling of being taken care of by my parents, a feeling of luck, and
a feeling of being somehow out of their element and therefore a
little out of mine, too, but accepted by these Quaker step-parents
who were patient with me, even with my high-spirits, and some even
liked me, like Mr. Burgess. Everyone had to play sports, and even if
my parents weren't as big as his, and even if I was a little smaller
than he was, I still thought, I knew, that I was a better athlete
than Stuart. He was OK, but I was better. And even if Betty Ellen
was smart, which I didn't know at the time, I knew that Stuart wasn't
that smart. How do these genes sort themselves out, I wonder? It's
a puzzle, even if we know 99.9% of our genes are identical, that .1%
is pretty powerful, and I don't think it's just environment. Or
maybe it's just the differences we concentrate on. I don't know.
Stuart hung around with Brian; they
were in 8th grade when I was in 7th in the
Upper School, just getting used to the Victorian architecture instead
of the less elevated functional architecture of the Lower School,
where Miss Reagan would still take a half-hour now and then to read a
book to us all in class – can you get that, reading a book
collectively to 6th graders? I'm sure that doesn't happen
anymore – and I remember she read to us about Chaim Solomon, who
was depicted as the brains behind the financier Robert Morris, who
funded the American Revolution. Was there a reason they picked that
book, were they nipping at anti-Semitism in a school populated by a
significant number of suburban gentiles who chose private school over
the quite acceptable suburban public schools, the gentrified business
people of the Main Line? Or in the case of Brian De Palma, the son
of business but of a physician my father knew, whom my father thought
he outranked even though he was Jewish, because after all my Dad was
a neurosurgeon, and one who had excelled as a resident at Penn,
indeed, had been legendary (if abrasive). Tony De Palma was an
orthopedist at Jefferson, and when Brian's name came up, my Dad
recalled that yes, he knew his father. Doctors tended all to know
one another in those days, I think, there were so many fewer, and
orthopods and neurosurgeons were sometimes rivals.
As I carefully roamed the narrow
hallways and back stairs with windows to the natural world of the
Upper School, since I was in 7th grade and then 8th
grade – my last year at FCS, since we moved to Lower Merion over
the summer and I switched to Ardmore Junior High and then Lower
Merion High – I was conscious of myself the way an early teen is,
for the first time, although I didn't notice that I had grown a new
part of my brain that seemed to observe me. Those are the years of
your life that you turn into different streets of life, not
necessarily mean streets, especially in the suburbs, when girls stop
being just an annoyance, when you can do the harder math pretty
easily, when your shots start falling into the basket more readily.
These are the years that a parent wants you to be around good
influences, caring people, and nice kids, to be able to see trees and
bushes and the sky around you and to smell the spring and trample on
the turf. Those are the years when you find out more about what
you're good at and what you like, and where you continue to find out
where you stack up.
I was lucky. I was good at things. I
was good at math and science and reasoning and I read on my own,
although I don't think I was much of a writer. And I was the best
basketball player in my grade and I played shortstop and I hit well,
and I even was good at football where I ran the ball and intercepted
well on defense and could field a punt surely. Stuart was a year
ahead, with Brian, and even though his father was a lawyer and his
mother intelligent and his sister would be going to Radcliffe, Stuart
just wasn't that smart. I guess we were rivals, but I'm competitive,
so I guess we competed, at least in my mind, I guess predominantly in
my mind, reflecting my father's mind which always seemed to have a
tennis ranking system in place, with intelligence as traditionally
conceived the means of ranking, and with intelligence mediated by
grades. I got good grades for achievement and lesser grades for
behavior. I imagine the parents talked about their kids' grades and
struggles and achievements, and compared and competed and worried
(what anguish that could be), and hoped. Hoped the way Coppola's
Brando wanted Michael to pass into the ranks of the pezzonovante, a
Senator or Governor or something like Kennedy, I would think. Years
later, when I decided to be a pediatrician and not a hotshot academic
or something in government, my mother observed that I had chosen “a
little life.” My Mom had a way with the cutting bon mot,
concise, hurtful, she thought realistic. I don't think Sylvia
indulged in that, but who knows outside the family?
My Mom sat me down one day and told me
I was smart enough that I could be anything I wanted, except maybe a
mechanic or someone who put things together. I objected that I could
be a mechanic if I wanted, and her desired positive insight and
support turned into a stalemate. I guess she wanted me to put an eye
on the prize as I wandered, and it was true, I wasn't good at
choosing, never was, and not helped by her who kept choosing for me,
maybe trying to help, but maybe just impatient with me, when she
chose rapidly and decisively and I could hardly figure out later on
which brand of shaving cream to settle on down at Ricklin's Hardware
in Narberth. They say that sometimes in a family temperaments are
mismatched, and that's what I've settled on for my diagnosis.
I wonder what Sylvia would say to
Stuart. His default would be to be a lawyer like Mike, and like his
younger brother Johnny would be, but Stuart wouldn't have been up to
it. He was spirited, though. I remember walking through the Upper
School hallway and coming upon Stuart and Brian, just outside the
door to one of the classrooms and beside an exit to the second floor
stairs, with driveway below and trees and sloping field out the back,
towards where now the Lankenau Hospital has filled in the entire
landscape, which we saw arising just at that time with orange girders
looming above the football field, and there they were, the two of
them, spirited. They had bent down in half deep knee bends so their
thighs stuck out in front of them, and in unison they were clapping
their hands together then hitting their thighs and doing a drumming
beat and they were chanting, I remember so clearly, something I had
never heard before, “It's a treat to beat your meat on the
Mississippi mud, it's a treat to beat your meat on the Mississippi
mud,” with naughty smiles as their classmates walked out of the
room and onto another class. Their voices had changed and the chant
was low-pitched. This is my memory of them, two friends with a
common spirit.
The last time I saw Stuart was outside
the American Express office in Paris, as we picked up mail in the
summer of 1962 on vacation, just running into each other. I was with
my brother, about to pick up a blue Volkswagen bug and drive it down
to Greece and back to Amsterdam and send it home so Bobby could drive
it to the University of Michigan where he would be a sophomore.
Stuart was there with other friends, and he told us with excitement
and expectation and a little bit of wonder that he was there and
doing that, that they were going to Spain. Spain was ruled by
Franco, and cautious as I was, inherited from my parents' McCarthy
days experience, I wouldn't for a minute think of going there. We
took off for Italy instead, untutored in the world, driving a lot,
and getting homesick maybe, meeting some girls, not knowing how to
have too good a time, maybe, I'm not sure. But Stuart was headed to
Spain.
And Stuart had decided to be an artist.
An artist? Who decided to be an artist? Who knew he could draw?
Could he draw, or paint? Who knew? Who did that? Who didn't become
a doctor or a lawyer? The way Russians and Indians become engineers.
Stuart an artist? But yeah, Sylvia painted, I'm sure she did.
I actually still have a painting that
Stuart did, I think, maybe somewhere, or maybe just in my mind. It
was a pottery vase, yellow, with a plain medium blue background,
maybe it was OK, or good, or who knows, it wasn't Picasso, but it
sure wasn't something that I could have done, either. A 36 inch tall
picture, maybe. But after that meeting at the Paris American
Express, the next time I saw the Egnal family was a few years later,
when they were supposed to be sitting shiva after Stuart died of
thyroid cancer. He must have been in his twenties, and my parents
pushed me in through the front door of their house without knocking,
because as far as they knew that's what the tradition was, and
because my mother said “Stuart was Buddy's friend,” and because I
always seemed to be pushed forward, and we saw the Egnal family à
table, just the four
of them then, and they looked up surprisedly and didn't know what to
make of the intrusion at first, and then Sylvia looked up from her
end of the table that was facing me, and said, “Buddy!” and came
over and was emotional and welcoming and I wondered if I had been
closer to them and to Stuart than I knew. Johnny had visited Stuart
everyday he was in the hospital, out at Temple I think I remember,
and been a good brother to the end, somewhat to my wonder because I
just remembered him as a kind of clutzy younger brother. What does
one say when a child dies, even if he had struggled there were still
hopes and love and what do you do? You just lean on yourself and
others and even if you're not religious you lean a bit on God, I
think, and hope there's something in the world or beyond it,
something somewhere.
But
there was Brian, so much like Stuart in my memory, with Marty and
George and Francis and Stephen – but no Stuart, and of course even
absent the cancer, there would have been no Stuart in that picture,
of course. It's only in my mind.
The
last time I saw Sylvia was at someone's funeral, maybe my Dad's, I
don't know. She was still living at their house on Osage, by
herself, Mike having died many years ago after years of debility, and
she seemed a little smaller but still somewhat rangy, still driving
herself, at the age of 96. Amazed at herself. I wonder if she liked
Brian's pictures? I wonder if she saw them.
Budd
Shenkin
