Bloodied Ivy
Authors: Robert Goldsborough
A Nero Wolfe Mystery
Robert Goldsborough
For Suzy, Bob, Colleen, and Bonnie
INTRODUCTION
R
ECENTLY, SOMEONE ASKED ME
what it was like to be Rex Stout’s daughter. I’ve learned to interpret the familiar gleam I noticed in the eye of the questioner. She was really saying, “Come on, tell me the real story, the juicy stuff.” I was sorry to disappoint her, and I finally had to admit that the Stout family has no closetful of titillating secrets. In fact, the world as I knew it when I was growing up was satisfying, interesting—and most remarkable for its ordinariness.
My family lived in Manhattan for a few years, but most of my childhood was spent at High Meadow, my parents’ sprawling haven on the New York-Connecticut border, about fifty miles north of New York City. The U-shaped house, designed and built by my father, the gardens, the orchards, and the acres of rolling hills provided the setting for our daily lives. The High Meadow years were quiet, happy, and filled with experiences that countless other American children would recognize.
I enjoyed school, although, like any child, I looked forward to the end of day so that I could run down the street to find my father and his car. Since we lived too far from Danbury for me to walk to school as most of the other children did, Dad would come many afternoons to pick me up in the chocolate-colored Cadillac that would be the family automobile for nearly twenty years. One blustery autumn day, a third-grade friend caught up with me as I was running down the street toward the Cadillac. She tugged at my sleeve and whispered in my ear, “What’s it like to have
him
for a father?”
Well, that stopped me for a moment; I thought about her question. My first notion was that I liked it when Dad helped me with my homework. He checked on my progress and encouraged me, but he never gave me the answers, making sure, instead, that I knew how to arrive at the solutions myself. Then I thought about bedtime, when he’d come upstairs, grab my sister Barbara and me in his arms, and sing “Good Night, Ladies” and then toss us gleefully onto our beds.
Still, at age eight, I wasn’t quite sure what there was about my father that would be quite so impressive to a classmate. I smiled and told her that having him for a father was fine.
“Only fine?” she asked, her face scrunching into a skeptical frown as she eyed the white beard resting on his chest. “Don’t you think it’s
terrific
to have Santa Claus for a father?”
That was my first inkling that Dad was notable.
It was about that time in my life that I began to wonder what my father did for a living. It wasn’t a worry—just a curiosity that came and went at idle moments. After all, other fathers went off with briefcases on the commuter trains, or worked at farms or stores. What I did know was that several times a year a scenario was repeated that started with my father moving through the house and puttering in the gardens without really hearing what anyone said to him. He’d become vague and distracted, and Barbara and I soon learned to talk to him only when it was necessary during those periods. As I grew older, I realized that he was working—getting to know his characters, setting out the story—before he moved into his writing routine.
Then, when he began the actual writing, Dad would disappear into his study precisely at noon and reappear for dinner promptly at six-thirty. Even when we couldn’t hear the old manual typewriter clattering away, my sister and I weren’t allowed to play in the court beneath his window during those hours. In fact, loud conversation in the kitchen would evoke admonitions from above to be quiet. This would go on for a couple of weeks, occasionally for as long as two months, and then, his book or story complete, he’d be done for a while.
Later in my life, when I learned that my father never rewrote anything and that his books were published exactly as he first set the words down, I was more than a little amazed—but for years I assumed that everyone else who wrote fiction worked in the same way.
He brought the same high standards to other tasks. In addition to his writing, Dad was an avid gardener and an enthusiastic carpenter. He spent long hours making furniture that he designed himself, using old-fashioned doweled construction to build pieces that are marvels of craftsmanship. His dresser drawers still, after thirty years, slide without sticking on the runners; whatever he made seems to stand up to the test of time.
His shop was always filled with boxes of fragrant scrap wood, which delighted me when I was a child. Under his tutelage, I began my carpentry lessons by learning to wield a hammer, and eventually graduated to the use of his electric saw—the same machine that claimed a part of one of his fingers when he became distracted while using it.
For all his involvement with writing, gardening, and carpentry, Dad thrived on contact with people. Even when he was working on a book, he had regular conferences with Harold Salmon, who worked at High Meadow taking care of the grounds and generally seeing to maintenance. As a young child, I thought of Harold more as a part of the family than as an employee. Then, after World War II, my parents sponsored the Yasamotos, a Japanese-American family who came to stay with us at High Meadow after they’d lived in the internment camps. They became an integral part of our household, sharing dinner, joining in the nightly game of Twenty Questions, and enlarging our family once again.
My mother, during this period, made a name for herself in a separate arena. She designed and eventually manufactured her own fabrics; Dad encouraged her enterprising independence. For a time my mother even endured the long commute from Brewster, New York, to Philadelphia, to her mill. She, too, was nourished by her creativity and was particularly proud of her wools. When the Philadelphia Museum announced that Mother would be given an award to honor her textile designs, Dad decided that we should all attend in clothing made of her fabrics. I can still remember the beautiful green wool dress I wore; Dad, too, stood up proudly in his wool suit. The fact that the ceremony was held on a sweltering, humid midsummer Philadelphia day was of little consequence in Dad’s choice of wardrobe—he was determined that we would all show off Mother’s handiwork!
When he wasn’t planning or writing his next tale, the house was often filled with visitors. Marian Anderson, Mark Van Doren, Kip Fadiman, my aunt Ruth Stout, and countless others would come to High Meadow to share the conversation, laughter, food, and drink. Barbara and I, indeed, any children who happened to be around, were always treated as social equals in a group. We listened, we joined the discussions, and we had a grand time.
Dad particularly loved barbecues, and a series of traditional gatherings at High Meadow, starting with the blooming of the first iris each spring, would find him at the huge stone fireplace under the trees. He presided like a monarch over the wood fire, anointing the chickens with his homemade sauce dripping from his special baster: a long dowel to which he’d attached chicken feathers at one end. Memorial Day, Fourth of July (my sister and I were always decked out in red, white, and blue), and Labor Day, whatever the progress of his latest book or story, Rex Stout became chef for the occasion and grilled chickens, two-inch-thick steaks, corn, and potatoes: a feast to feed his hungry friends.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the comings and goings of such famous people in my life, it wasn’t until I was a high school sophomore at Oakwood, a Quaker prep school in Poughkeepsie, New York, that I really became aware of my father’s celebrity status. I was on my own, and for the first time I sensed the ways in which my childhood truly was different from many of my classmates. I developed a friendship with Gail Jones, Lena Horne’s daughter. Without understanding the initial reasons for our unspoken bond, we later recognized the common experiences we shared as the offspring of famous parents.
Never at a loss for something to say about the world in which he lived, it’s not surprising that my father had strong opinions about education. He felt that everyone should be well grounded in the basics of reading, writing, and mathematics, but he didn’t place special value on higher education, although he never discouraged my sister and me from attending college. Dad never went to college himself, but he didn’t consider that a disadvantage. An educated person, he liked to say, is one who has the capacity to distinguish the important from the unimportant, has the ability to recognize good literature, has acquired sufficient knowledge of history to make connections between the past and the present, and can sustain a curiosity about the world and a desire to continue learning. Certainly, by those criteria, he was summa cum laude.
I can hardly remember an instance when my father raised his voice in anger or to make a point. Instead, an eyebrow would shoot up and he’d say very evenly, “Do you think that’s a good idea?” The message was unmistakable—he didn’t think it was good idea. But part of the lesson was to figure out just why he didn’t like the idea and then come up with an acceptable alternative. He seldom told my sister and me what to do; in fact, he rarely even gave advice. We learned early on that if we wanted his opinion, we’d have to ask, “What would you do, Dad?” When we did, his responses very often centered around the concepts of fairness, reasonableness, and consistency.
If I was confused about what I saw in the world, he’d wait until I expressed a specific concern, giving me the opportunity to work things out without intervention if I could. I recall wrestling during my adolescence with the feeling that it wasn’t fair for some people to have great material comforts when others didn’t. When I finally told him what was bothering me, my father counseled, “There’s no need to feel guilty about what you have as long as you’ve worked for it and you share it with others. Everyone has different opportunities; it’s what you do with the opportunities you have that counts.”
Out of such moments, I began to understand what was important to my father. As an adult, I realize that most of what I’ve learned from him was communicated not so much in his words as through the example of his life.
He placed enormous value on honesty. (I never even considered lying to him. Whatever the consequences of telling the truth, they were easier to live with than his reactions to a lie.) Organization and responsibility were traits high on his list. (He never complained about paying taxes and always paid all his bills as soon as they arrived. This habit has been so persistent with me that I’ve managed to pass it on to my own children without even once telling them that it was something they should do.) He taught me about generosity by demonstrating how much joy comes to the giver. He never attached strings to his gifts—even though the recipient might want to imagine some. He never held a grudge. He hated phonies utterly. He believed that the writer’s job is to tell a good story and to comment on human behavior, because above all, Dad valued people.