My mother’s father, Howard Barnes, was a man of the 20th century, in the modern sense. He was sophisticated and wore his erudition on his sleeve. He was a drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune, an alumnus of Yale and Oxford, a man about town and one heck of a piano player (at least to my three year old ears.)
He was also a drunk and a womanizer. But that is not what I remember. I remember sitting on his knee at the piano, banging the keyboard with him intoning, “Gently, gently”, at my ear. He was endlessly kind and patient with all of us and now that I see my friends with grandchildren, I begin to get it, but with him, I just took it for granted.
He and his third wife, Cassie, had an apartment in New York city on the upper east side of Manhattan. My memories of visiting him there are mostly smells and taste. I can taste the New York water in the little fridge in the tiny kitchenette. I can smell the florist down on the street, the cut flowers in the foyer of their building, the delicious aroma of bakeries with croissants and brioche.
He was elegant and handsome but not a smooth handsome. His face was lined and drawn, lived in, the crags dug both by the picks of experience and the storms of tobacco and drink. I like to think of him as a bourbon man, but I guess I don’t really know. I believe he smoked Camels, but it might have been Chesterfields like my dad. He also smoked a pipe. These smells sit with me to this day.
Cassie worked at Macy’s, one of the executives and a powerful working woman, back before it was a thing. The two of them were part of the Manhattan high society in the forties and fifties. They both had illustrious friends from their professional lives. My mother would tell the story of how they took her to the famed New York restaurant, 21, on her 21st birthday which they celebrated with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
Cassie and Granddaddy gave the best Christmas gifts. Once I got a clarinet and another year I got a microscope.
When he wasn’t reviewing plays and she wasn’t pushing fashion, they retired to their country house in New Hartford, Connecticut, Hickory. He had it built in the mid thirties on a beautiful side of a hill. It had a long driveway leading up to a landing between the house on the left and the meadow below. The house was simple, a long ranch with a big living room in front and the master bedroom behind it. The kitchen was on the other side of the stairs in the entryway. Upstairs were 3 bedrooms where we stayed. There was a long hall going down the middle of the second floor leading to my parents’ room. The hall was kind of creepy and mysterious. It was dark and it echoed. It was claustrophobic yet big at the same time.
Outside, to the left of the house and up a little hill was a cement swimming pool built on a rock ledge and fed by a cold spring. It’s hard to say how big it was but it might have been as small as ten by ten. But it was perfect for kids. We spent a lot of time in the pool.
In the back of the house, out behind the kitchen, was a big cubical rock. It was too big for us to climb to the top of easily and we spent way too much time trying to figure out how to get up there.
At the end of the parking area, there was a shed. This was the domain of Mr Hecht, Granddaddy’s all around handyman. Mr Hecht was missing part of a finger which he lost in a chainsaw accident. It weirdly fascinated me and to this day I have a timid respect for the tools.
Down below the meadow lived the cleaning lady and her two kids, a boy and a girl about our ages. We spent a lot of time playing with them. His name was Michael, I think, but I can’t remember anything else.
But I don’t really remember a whole lot about Granddaddy himself. He was there, a kind presence but really more comfortable with the adults than us, probably. I remember his “stuff”, his armchair and his chestnut coffee table which I believe Mr Hecht built. I still have both of these things and cherish them. One of the best songs I have written is “My Grandfather’s Chair” so I hope he sings through me.
Cassie died in 1964 or so and then he met Eileen in an AA meeting. They both fell off the wagon, got married and then he got Emphysema. My last memories are of him sitting in the kitchen coughing his lungs out while we packed up the car to go home.
We had a funeral in New Hartford with a reception at Hickory and that was that. He didn’t leave a will so the bulk of his estate went to Eileen, most importantly, the house,but we got several acres which we never developed or even visited. We sold that land some time in the seventies.
I hope other people will chime in with their memories of Howard Barnes. I see so much of him in me, from the music to the drinking to the smoking but, unfortunately, not the womanizing…. 😜
Conceptual Irregularities 