Edie Read Free Page B

apparently because it had cinnamon in it. Eugene, the Canadian who worked for the Sedgwicks, would launch these two Old Town canoes. I always imagined they had been hewn out of the trees by the Indians. Babbo would somehow get himself down the hI’ll with his two sticks and get into one of them. He wore stockings that came up to his knickerbockers and folded over once, and what he always called his Cinderella slippers. He had a special seat for himself, and the women sat in some sort of raffia wicker seats placed in the bottom of the canoe. The men paddled like mad. I always remember they
feathered
their paddles—Minturn and Harry, my husband—after all, they had been Harvard crew men. Eugene would go ahead of us in the little rowboat to clear the ground where we were to picnic. He was always dressed in a striped waistcoat, a white shirt, a black tie over a celluloid collar.
    When we got to the island we’d spread blankets—lap-robes from cars, big plaid blankets from the football games—and the things would be brought off the canoes: the supplies, the thermoses, the syllabub. The food was really marvelous . . . thin sandwiches with cucumbersin them, and watercress, and almost no mayonnaise and a lot of butter and no crusts. They were cut in half, and each half was carefully and perfectly wrapped in wax paper. Everything was just so. Even the Sedgwick lemonade had to be made in a certain way. But it was all taken for granted. It was that way because it always had been. Always Minturn would make scrambled eggs. It was the tradition—scrambled eggs
Minturn.
He would say: “I am going to make some scrambled eggs . . . I don’t hear many huzzahs.” This was supposed to produce a great cheer.
    After the picnic Babbo would always read aloud—usually whatever was interesting him at the moment. P. G. Wodehouse was his absolute favorite, but if he found something in the
Letters of Marcus Aureltus
that really turned him on, he would read
that
to us, and he would say, “This is superbly couched, and you must listen, and you must remember it.” One was never allowed to say “memorize.” I used to say “memorize” and Babbo would correct me. “Commit to memory” was how it was supposed to be said. He would read for about half an hour, and of course it was dark by then and everyone took turns holding the
torch,
my dear, not a flashlight, so that Babbo could see the pages. And that was quite a privilege, right?
    Tradition, that was all the Sedgwicks thought about. They were so involved with the past that the present was not realseeming. If you could couch some phrase in a way that harked back to Herodotus, then they loved you . . . because they loved history. They would spend hours talking about Cromwell, but as if he were their uncle! The best, dearest relative!
    SAUCIE SEDGWICK  Babbo, being a gentle scholarly person and a widower without a bean, was totally dependent upon his sons to support him—a most undignified position for a heavenly old gentleman. When he wasn’t with the children he lived terribly frugally. A friend of the family described staying with him when he was a widower in Cambridge and getting nothing to eat but boiled eggs. Obviously he preferred to stay with his sons, and it was while he was staying with our family on the ranch near Santa Barbara that he fell in love with Gabriella Ladd. My parents introduced them. She was staying nearby with friends of theirs and they invited her to come riding. Later she told me mat my father made a pass at her that first day, and she was horrified.
    Gabriella was in her early forties then, never married, and Babbo was almost ninety. Her father was quite a well-known Boston pediatrician;her mother was a sculptress. Gabriella had been a champion high jumper at Vassar. At one point she decided to be a nun, and she might even have embarked on this course but when she met Babbo, they fell in love that first night. In the middle of dinner, Babbo was quoting some Greek