Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (8 page)
My grandmother started something in Yonkers—Prospect House. It was a settlement-house-type place for children whose parents were working in the factories there. As Grandmother said, “The children come after school to be bathed, fed, and to have their talents encouraged.” Grandmother always believed in a good meal and a bath!
She was a vegetarian, and a theosophist for many many years, and she brought to this country Indian gurus. And Grandpapa hated all of that. He was a real atheist—he didn’t like anything that had to do with anything religious, he didn’t like that at all. And then the funny thing was that Grandmother finally went to India and when she came back she stopped being a vegetarian, she quit theosophy, she would have nothing to do with gurus anymore—she was horrified by what she had seen in India. She thought, “If that’s the way it is there, if that’s what their religion has done for them…”
Dr. Frederick Baekeland
I had a lot of contact with my grandmother over the years, as everyone in the family did. She was a very matriarchal person, rather controlling in some ways but extremely generous also. She was an extraordinary person. She started to paint rather late, at the age of fifty. She was sort of an Impressionist. She studied with Hobart Nichols—which was quite a good thing—and she had a couple of shows.
As a young woman she almost became a concert pianist, but she could never play the piano when Grandpapa was home because he didn’t want to be disturbed. He often worked in the house, this sort of old-fashioned house along the Hudson River. It had a tower and that’s where his study was and he would sort of secrete himself up there. My contacts with him were extremely limited—I personally spent maybe three times with my grandfather when I was a child. Once he took me into his lab, which was on the property, and electroplated some pennies with mercury for me, and another time he took me up to his study and gave me a scarab. I had it for years and later lost it.
Brooks Baekeland
I once asked my Aunt Nina, my father’s sister, what it had been like, really, growing up at Snug Rock, my grandparents’ house in Yonkers. Such a question to my father would not have been thinkable. Her reply startled me: “‘Shhhh! The Doctor is working.’”
Céline Roll Karraker
My grandmother often played the piano for us on Sunday, after lunch, and Grandpapa would just go someplace else. Later I read somewhere that as a young man he used to go to concerts when he was visiting different places. This surprised me because I always felt he was so anti-music. Yet he did go to concerts by himself—you know, alone. I think there was real rivalry between my grandparents.
Brooks Baekeland
One of my grandmother’s teachers was Edward MacDowell, a famous composer and pianist. He wanted her to “go public”—how vulgar that phrase sounds, even now—that is, give public recitals, be a professional. This was nixed by my grandfather and always grudged against him by my grandmother.
She loved playing the unplayable pieces of Liszt, but her heart was with Debussy, Fauré, Ravel, and Chopin. When I had grown up enough to read poetry and understand women—and understood the passionately un-slaked nature of my grandmother as it was revealed to me at her Steinway grand—those lines from “Kubla Khan” used always to come into my mind, particularly when she was playing one of Chopin’s celestial nocturnes: “A savage place! as holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover!”
When my grandmother sat with her head bowed—not in benediction—before her piano and then started to play, I often felt tears come to my eyes, especially when she was very old and her playing was full of faults. As a child I made her play and play and play, and repeat and repeat, and play again and again. In my ears the sounds she made were like those of gold coins falling into a chest to a miser.
But my grandfather could not stand her music—that “noise”—and her theosophy, suffragettism, the Prospect House with Harry Hopkins, later an FDR
eminence grise
, and suchlike “nonsense.” Nor, she had more than once hinted to me, the fact that her French was better than his and that she sometimes disagreed with him. His German was of course better, and this was part of a Teutonic-Latin tension between them. He had married far above himself socially in marrying her—and never quite forgave her that. We know practically nothing about his own family because he was ashamed of them. His father was an alcoholic who ended up—sometimes—repairing shoes, and my grandfather from the age of twelve was, according to my grandmother, the main support for his whole family. That he was a genius there is no doubt—and that he had the most tremendous motivations. That he had adored his mother, though he would never speak of her—or of any of his family—that is not generally known. He simply obliterated the past. There had been no past. Time had started with him. Baekeland time, that is. That is the Zeus of those turn-of-the-century photos, the stern, tall man with the beard. Zeus.
It was an amused old Pan that I knew as a boy. I imply no sexuality, only humor,
joie de vivre
, a love of wine and endless—his own—talk. The man who not only would not suffer fools gladly but not at all. The man who stopped people from kissing, giving them a vivid description of the Niagaras of filth in the forms of bacteria and viruses that they were transferring to each other’s foolish mouths. The man who lectured “sillywomen” about the constituents of their lipsticks and creams and the sucker’s prices they foolishly paid for them—all this with the highest and most godly good humor.
Céline Roll Karraker
Grandpapa would take us up to his lab and he’d put various chemicals together and make colors or sweeteners. It was very exciting to go up there. And the smells! I can smell them to this day.
The house is gone now. It burned. But it hasn’t burned in my memory. It was idyllic to be there. A wonderful haven for all of the children.
There was an incredible bathroom. It was huge. And from the middle of the wall up was a relief of cattails and ferns and birds and it was all colors and was absolutely beautiful. And there was a stained-glass window as well. And in the corner was a square sunken bathtub. And we kids would go in there and make up a batch of soapy suds. We’d go from one part of the bathroom which was all tile and zoom across the floor into the tub, splashing. Grandmother used to say this was Grandpapa’s bathtub and we were not to do that.
From
I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography,
May Sarton, W.W. Norton, New York, 1959
How imaginative it was of the Baekelands—for the Belgian inventor and his wife were our hosts—to insist that Mother and I come to them first, and be cherished and spoiled a little before the serious business of our new life was attempted. Their house, rustic stone and brown shingles, with its turrets and verandas, its stained-glass windows, its large portecochere in front, and all surrounded by expanses of clipped lawn, seemed to me very grand. It had, for instance, a polar bear rug in the drawing room. What luxury to compare with that of sitting on a polar bear’s head! It also had a square glass aquarium, in which lived a small, wicked alligator who devoured raw meat and looked at me with indifferent, beady eyes. The real glory was the master bathroom with its huge bathtub. A bathtub? Rather, a tiled swimming pool, six feet square and sunk two feet into the floor. Around it lay huge sponges from Florida, and shells with rosy mouths that sang of a faraway ocean. In this bathtub, one could be a seal or a mermaid with no trouble….
I never did feel Dr. Baekeland as a person I knew; rather he seemed to be some frightening masculine force—a god who must be placated, a piece of weather. I realize now that, with his fierce, shy eyes and black mustache, he looked something like Rudyard Kipling; and I realize now, too late, that, though I was frightened of him, he took me into his heart and really loved me in the admiring way of a grandfather with a first grandchild, for he used to come in after I was asleep and look down at me tenderly, and he was amazed that I could play so happily alone. But then, I fear, all I wanted was to run off and be free to go to [the chauffeur’s] house where I felt more at home. On my way there I passed the garage, and above it, I had been told, was the laboratory, a very secret and important place where Dr. Baekeland retired to work like a sorcerer, and no one was ever allowed to go. There he was busy concocting queer things in trays, rather like today’s ice-cube trays, but the cubes were of a hard yellow translucent material, no good as toys, though he gave me some one day—no good for anything as far as I could see. The name of this invention was Bakelite, still in an experimental stage, and not yet the fabulous djinni it would become….
[Dr. Baekeland’s wife] was known to everyone as Bonbon, a name so appropriate that it must have been used by St. Peter at the gate of Heaven, for kindness flowed from her in every sort and size of package, tangible and intangible. Her presence was a present. A small, round woman with bright, dark eyes under a mass of fuzzy gray hair, she wore for as long as I can remember the same round beaver hat and long beaver scarf over a suit she had recopied exactly every year. She could not have worn the beaver hat in summer, yet I see her so clearly in this hat and no other that she must be painted in it here. She came from an intellectual bourgeois family in Ghent, very much like my father’s, but now she had moved into a different world, she had not changed. It was only that riches became her so well, as if she had always been intended to be a fairy godmother; she had the rare gift of transforming money into joy, her own joy and everyone else’s, so there was no bitterness in it. Some of this I came to know later, but from the beginning she had my unwavering devotion because I sensed in her a dimension like saintliness, like poetry, which set her apart. Concrete evidence of this was the fact that because of her feeling for animals she would eat no meat. I loved animals, too, and even made resolves to follow her example, but then when everyone else at table except Bonbon accepted the breast of chicken or young lamb, apparently without a qualm, I forgot my resolve…. Bonbon did not blame us cruder beings, nor make us feel guilty; that was her triumph. When she and I sat shelling new peas from the garden on the back veranda…I felt a wonderful sense of security and something like being at home, at least for a little while. I could talk to her, I found…. I loved her Belgian accent, the way she said “Meerses” instead of “Mrs.,” an accent that gave character to everything she said. She was very American in her lavishness, but she was also still so Belgian and so unsophisticated that she was, as I see it now, the perfect bridge from my Belgium to my America.
New York with Bonbon was Fifth Avenue, the Flatiron Building, Woolworth’s (at that time still
the
skyscraper), and she had the newcomer’s pride and delight in the city, as if, almost, it had been her own creation…. And New York was the Plaza Hotel where we had tea among the palms, and ate little many-colored iced cakes, while, at Bonbon’s request, the orchestra played a soulful rendition of the “Song of the Volga Boatman,” and were rewarded with a crisp ten-dollar bill taken over to them on a silver plate. Perhaps I loved her so much because her taste remained the taste of a child, and her love of life, her excitement (as years later when she waved her hand at all of Yonkers glittering with electric lights and said proudly, “Every one of those light bulbs has Bakelite in it”) was as innocent as a child’s.
Céline Roll Karraker
My grandmother told me she cried for five years in French when she came here to live, and she went back to Belgium whenever she could. My grandfather did exactly the opposite. She never lost her accent. He lost his as fast as he could and named his son George Washington Baekeland.
When he sold Velox to Eastman Kodak, he bought Snug Rock for my grandmother, but he resented the socializing that went on in it. He didn’t want any part of that.
From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, April 27, 1907
The complications of our unnecessarily complicated living irritate me. If I could do without inconveniencing my wife I certainly would go and live somewhere where we could dispense with servants and lead a simpler and more natural life. But my wife cannot live without some so-called “Society,” a stupid conventionalism and the cause of all our unwarranted conventional and complicated living. What do we want such a large house for, and why all these servants? Why all that complicated trash of unnecessary furniture? All this complication becomes more and more irksome to me. Trash—vulgar—idiotic—trash.
Céline Roll Karraker
Grandpapa was a great proponent of the simple life—physically. Lived it himself. In fact, my grandmother said—and you know, she believed in reincarnation—that he was a monk in his former life! After he retired he lived down in Florida, in a very simple house.
Brooks Baekeland
The Anchorage in Coconut Grove had belonged to William Jennings Bryan, “The Great Commoner,” and my grandfather used to crow with delight in telling the Victorian elite who dined with him that “that great bag of wind did not have a single book in his house except a Bible!”
The plantation-style house was deliciously cool—made of blocks of pure-white coral and terra-cotta roofs. Its windows in winter were always open, as were its doors, and its greatest charm was a central patio, hung with orchids. It had a fountain jetting high in its center. There was an aqua-marine swimming pool at the front of the house, where one “bathed,” not “swam.” But what I remember now, when I close my eyes, is the perfume of the flowering trees and that so-characteristic soft interminable clack-clack-clack of coconut palm fronds, day and night—it never stopped—and the windjammer-creakings of the great bamboo groves from Sumatra, towering to one hundred and fifty feet, down near the anchorage itself, which had been made for my grandfather’s yacht, the
Ion.
By day the wind blew in over the sea, and by night it blew out again.
