Edie by Jean Stein

windows and stared at him. He was so beautiful. “Swoon! swoon! faint ! faint!”
    Laguna was also different from Corral de Quati because life was as jolly as it had been at Goleta. It was raffish and violent, but it was very jolly. How funny my father was! He was hilarious. And he had enormous charm. He was a real Don Giovanni.
    My father had the feeling that, if he survived, it was by an act of will. He had Don Giovanni’s defiant attitude toward fate and consequences. In that sense he was heroic. He had the physical beauty of Don Giovanni, the seductiveness, the taunting quality of Don Giovanni, the
disprezzo
of Don Giovanni. Life was a feast for him and he really was going to drink its cup to the dregs. He bore himself as if all eyes were upon him and he was center stage all the time . . . which he was. He moved in the world and you felt him.
    RICHARD PARKER  Duke Sedgwick’s sculpture was like him—it had a kind of courage. Great huge statues of horses and generals and God knows what. Very conventional, very academic. But you felt he had no inhibitions, no lack of self-confidence about what he was doing. I don’t know why he became a sculptor. It seemed a strange profession for him to indulge in, but he liked studios, I guess.
    JONATHAN SEDGWICK  He looked tall, though he wasn’t very tall at all. He was only five-eleven. It’s your bearing. If you have your energy together, you can be gigantic. He always rode up above everyone else along the side of a hill. But even if he happened to be ridingbelow the others, he stI’ll looked bigger. The energy was heavy. My father was a peat blaster of energy.
    RICHARD RAND  Every year the Sedgwicks had a round-up. Marvelous occasion. Hundreds of people would come, and many of the men would go out with Duke Sedgwick to round up the cattle and bring them in. Real western scene, right? Lots of children and a great deal of activity. Every person you knew would sit along the fence and watch them rope the calves and tie them down and brand them and all the rest.
    After the round-up you had an enormous outside picnic, with picnic tables, and animals turning on spits—something out of an old painting. Everybody got cozy and sat at the tables with the working people. Duke went around with a quart of whiskey, which he would hold up to each of the men there, who would ceremoniously—a sort of nice Faulknerian touch—take a swig and pass it on.
    The new gentry out there were from New York and Boston. They came to Santa Barbara for various reasons, usually because they had become discontented with life in the East and its pressures. But in a sense it was a very Eastern scene—a certain cultural snobbishness, the feeling that if you came from the East you were more civilized than the yokels who grew up there. We wore Brooks Brothers clothing rather than sports shirts. We socialized with each other.
    So the social stratifying was fierce. If you came from the Middle West, you had damn better come from a meat-packing fortune, or forget it. If you didn’t, you had all the bad vibes and no redeeming features. The social lines were very tight. Of course, it was also promiscuous. You were allowed to sleep with just about anyone.
    SAUCIE SEDGWICK  At one of my parents’ parties I saw my father disappear into the bushes, right in front of my mother, with his arm around a woman—just traipsed off into the bushes in front of fifty people. I was horrified, but my mother never turned a hair. Our French cook, who adored my mother, once surprised my father kissing another woman just as my mother came in. My mother said to her in French, “That’s nothing, Monsieur is just teasing, that’s nothing.”
    JONATHAN SEDGWICK  She didn’t take her frustration and anger at my father’s affairs out on the children. She’d get allergies and needed special diets. She’d stay in bed a lot with what were said to be low-grade fevers,” and she began going to the hospital. Then myfather would get