1. My Papa

My papa had a clean-shaven upper lip but the rest of his face was bearded and his beard was long and white. I once asked my Aunt Nancy, Papa’s much younger sister, how old he was when he began to let it grow, and she couldn’t remember having seen him without it.

Apparently it ran in his family to turn gray prematurely. Papa had a great shock of white hair which he kept until his death at seventy-eight. Two of my four handsome half-brothers (all of them gone now) were noticeably gray in their thirties. I envied them their distinguished appearance and hoped that I might share in this inheritance; but, unfortunately, most of my hair had fallen out by the time I was thirty-five, thanks to the influence of my grandfather Samuel Cassel who, according to usually reliable sources (I never met the good old man personally) was bald as an egg, a report partially substantiated by the fact that in the only daguerreotype we have of him he wore a hat. Incidentally, this hat was dilapidated, hinting that Samuel had consented to an impromptu picture-taking by some journeyman photographer met at the village tavern. Though my grandfather was dead long before the organization of Alcoholics Anonymous, he could have qualified for membership as he had quite a capacity for alcohol, and nobody could have been more anonymous.

But to return to my papa: he was five feet, eight and a half inches in height and carried an average weight of two hundred pounds, some of it worn around the middle. He never owned a leather belt; but, had he used one, it would probably have measured about forty-four inches. Papa liked good food and took very little physical exercise; and, as has been remarked earlier, he had spent several years in the Indiana State Senate, an ideal place to acquire rotundity.

Papa was a good mixer and made friends quickly. He had quite a talent for remembering names. His rather florid face was easily lighted with an infectious smile. He had a winning voice and people listened when he talked. He was a gifted storyteller with an inexhaustible repertory of yarns appropriate to any occasion. Even as a little boy I was one of his most appreciative fans. No matter how often he repeated a well-remembered tale, I sat spellbound, for it was never told the same way twice. Papa had an active imagination and could have been a successful novelist.

Among the most cherished memories of my childhood is the recollection of our small family clustered close around Papa’s favorite rocking chair, of a winter’s evening, listening intently to the current installment of an adventure story serialized in The Youth’s Companion. This enchanted weekly arrived on Friday. By common consent, nobody tore off its wrapper until supper was over and the dishes had been put away. Then, in an ecstasy of anticipation, we waited while Papa deliberately opened the magazine and prepared to read. But there was always a torturing delay, for Papa would make a big thing of polishing his spectacles.

At the time, so urgent was my eagerness to get on with the story, I felt that Papa, having had no responsibility for helping with the dishes, might at least have wiped his glasses. Many years later it dawned on me that his maddening tardiness to come to our relief was a calculated ruse to whet our appetite for the feast in store. Papa must have had an instinct for precision timing. He knew intuitively the priceless value of suspense in any form of dramatic entertainment.

In passing, let me record my belief that this capacity for creating suspense in a story or play is a gift rather than an achievement. You either have it or you don’t. To secure and hold the reader’s or auditor’s attention it is necessary to worry him about the outcome. He must be required to wait. But suspense, like garlic, can be overdone. As in the inflation of a rubber balloon, there is a certain split-second when the blower, however ambitious to build up his balloon to a prodigious size, had better stop blowing. The art of divining exactly when to quit elaborating a joke or a crisis cannot be learned or taught unless the minstrel has been endowed by nature with this peculiar faculty for determining how much may prudently be spent on stage-setting. It is a special bequest like the gift of absolute pitch or the uncanny ability of a deported cat to find her way home.