could gather enough visiting cousins or schoolmates, the baseball diamond. The start of one such game was briefly delayed when a visiting player noticed an unusual design on the ball and found, on closer examination, that it had been autographed by the entire New York Yankee team including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. We loftily informed him that we always played with autographed balls, replenishing our supply whenever we visited a ballpark and the players came over to greet Dad and offer us their standard gifts. It was the one piece of sports equipment he didn’t have to pay for.
But the great majority of our outdoor hours were spent reading—horizontally, as a rule, perhaps because we inherited the nearsightedness of the Abbotts. At any given moment, two or three of us might be stretched out on the ground with a book. For days when the ground was too damp or too cold, there was a swing with two facing seats and a capacity of four. I have never found a better test of an author’s grip on my attention than reading in that swing on a really cold winter day. Dumas was the most dangerous, especially The Count of Monte Cristo and The Vicomte de Bragelonne. (Who decided that one name should be translated, the other not?) His novels so engrossed me that I’d forget to stamp my feet occasionally to ward off frostbite.
Did we become readers by inheritance or acquire the habit by imitation? Dad always had a book in hand, but the amount of time he gave to reading kept diminishing. His favorite author was Dostoevsky; his favorite book, read many times, The Brothers Karamazov. In the last years of his life, however, he rarely read fiction, opting instead for one book after another about the American Civil War. Mother, then and always the only college graduate in the family, spent about the same amount of time revisiting the classics as she did covering current fiction. Among the children, it was a matter of course that you were able to read and write by the age of four, and by six it was practically a full-time occupation. (We all began to wear glasses in our teens.) In first grade, I was detached from my peers and assigned to the third grade for reading purposes only. We each skipped a grade at one point or another, though David required special coaching for the purpose. His tutors were Jim and I, at ten cents an hour apiece.
If any considerable part of the reading and writing we did at home had been devoted to schoolwork, we could have been prize students. Regrettably, homework had a low priority among us. Our report cards fell into a predictable pattern: high marks in English and one or two other subjects we liked, just getting by in the rest. The lowest marks were likely to be for “effort.” Jim was the only one who shared Mother’s facility for mathematics, which, along with his English skills, kept his grades above the family norm until his first year at Harvard, which he devoted to songwriting.
I was regarded as the difficult one in the family and invariably got myself into the most trouble, out of a spirit of undirected rebelliousness. Perhaps some of that was a defensive reaction to having brothers one and three years older. If I felt put upon, and I did, the forces that united, in kindergarten and at home, to correct my natural left-handedness by instructing me to write and eat right-handedly only compounded the problem. Undoubtedly, this explains the scrawl I’m left with instead of respectable handwriting. My junior position in the hierarchy probably also contributed to a stutter that plagued me intermittently until boarding school, when I deliberately went in for public speaking and whittled the problem down to a mere speech hesitation.
Jim and I, only fifteen months apart in age, were a sharp contrast physically. I grew to six feet and at one time over two hundred pounds. He was slight though remarkably strong. He played rugby and lacrosse in college and became a New England intercollegiate wrestling champion, incidentally mastering the technique of tearing a Manhattan phone book in half. His mental processes were superbly logical, and I never saw him, as boy or man, display anger or more than the mildest sort of enthusiasm for anyone or anything. Some observers have noted similar mental and emotional patterns in me, but they’re a pale imitation of his.
Despite our differences, Jim and I found ourselves in splendid accord most of the time We liked the same books, games, movies, radio programs, and people. We had an appreciation of, and sensitivity to, each other’s minds that enabled us to divine in most situations what the other was thinking. This paid off for us financially when we partnered at bridge.
None of the four of us was ever enrolled in a public institution of any kind. When we completed eighth grade, the local high school was not even seriously considered. I didn’t question this policy at the time, and I thoroughly enjoyed my four years of boarding school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the town where the Abbott family had settled in the seventeenth century. By the time my own children were ready for high school, however, I had developed a strong preference for public education. Happily, this evolution in my thinking coincided with a sharp drop in income as a result of the blacklist.
My educational biases sprang partly from the recollection of an American history class at our Great Neck grade school. My classmates, of whom there were never more than seven or eight, were the children of investment bankers, corporate presidents, and the like. Adapting herself splendidly to her audience, our teacher presented us with the heroic struggle of Theodore Roosevelt against the temptations of wealth and idleness. It was no big deal, she maintained, to work hard and make a name for yourself if you were born in a log cabin and you didn’t have any other choice. But when the heir to a proud name and a secure fortune dedicated himself to public service, it was sheer altruism all the way.
In 1928, our parents sold the house in Great Neck and moved to East Hampton on the other end of Long Island. In those days it was still a small town bordering the fishing village of Amagansett. A few socialite families and a smaller number of artists and writers had summer places there. My parents had joined with their closest friends, the sportswriter Grantland Rice and his wife Kate, in buying beach property and building adjoining houses on the dunes. Where the joint driveway separated, Dad had a sign made that said “Dixie Highway” and pointed toward the Rices, who came from Tennessee and Georgia respectively. The year of their move was also the year I joined John and Jim at Andover, so the beach house, where we spent our summers, was the only home we had from then on. During the shorter Christmas and spring vacations from school and college, we had temporary quarters in Manhattan, where our parents and David had lived eight months a year while he attended a private day school.
The main attractions of East Hampton for the four of us were the twenty-one grass tennis courts at the posh Maidstone Club and swimming in the breaking waves of the open Atlantic. We made a special point of going into those waves on the days the Coast Guard raised a red flag signaling that they were too rough for swimming.
In a poll of the two hundred boys in Andover’s class of 1932, I was not ranked in the categories Most Respected, Most Capable, Most Promising, Most Popular, or Best Student, but I took first place in Most Original, Wittiest, and Biggest Bluffer in Classroom; I came in second in Laziest, Windiest, and Hardest to Rattle. But my reputation among the classmates who knew me best rested on a series of entertaining campaigns against what I considered objectionable school practices and regulations.
There was a daily chapel service conducted by the headmaster, and on Sundays both a morning and evening service conducted by a guest clergyman. The morning ones tended to be quite lengthy and I chose to call attention to that fact one Sunday by putting an alarm clock in the drawer of the lectern, set to go off twenty minutes after the visiting preacher began to speak. By a happy accident, the drawer stuck closed, and the alarm continued to ring until it ran down.
Permission to smoke was granted to seniors only in one special designated area. I deliberately arranged to be seen with a pipe in my mouth by a particularly officious faculty member on a campus path that was not so privileged. It was a cold winter day, and the illusion that I was violating the rules was greatly enhanced by the fact that the air I exhaled resembled smoke. It was a pleasure to demonstrate to him that the pipe was empty and his was a false accusation.
There were Greek-letter clubs at Andover, imitations of college fraternities, and some of them made themselves especially sacrosanct by barring non-members from ever entering their premises.
