Let Me Finish by Roger Angell Page B

pulled it off is killed in a homophobic murder. Years after this, a blond granddaughter acquires a coffee-colored sister, from Colombia. Much later, a niece writes a daring master's thesis about recent research into the terrible disease ALS, and its inexorable progress in one particular victim, her mother. Long before this, in the fall of 1944, a stepfather sits down in his West Eleventh Street apartment and resumes the abandoned draft of his first children's book, tentatively called
Stuart Little.
Back still farther, in 1918, a bluestocking aunt, now long gone, is wounded on the Western Front, where she'd ventured as a correspondent for
The New Republic.
More recently, a pair
of middle-aged half-brothers—this is me and Joel: "Joe," to me—smile as they agree that they have never found a way to express the love they have for each other; now the survivor, sailing over the bit of Jericho Bay where his brother's ashes were gently sunk, feels that they did close the gap after all.
    I also count in Aunt Olive—my father's second wife's aunt, Olive Higgins Prouty, the wife of a staid Massachusetts businessman and the redoubtable author of
Stella Dallas, Now Voyager,
and eight other weepy best-selling novels. One day around 1950, she approached me for professional help. "Now, Roger, you know New York," she began. She went on to explain that in the novel she was then writing—it was called
Fabia
—her heroine had moved out on her husband in Boston and come to New York to live with an artist. She had them sharing a little apartment on the West Side, maybe in West Seventy-seventh Street. It was early in the 1920s. Would that be right?
    "That sounds exactly right, Aunt Olive," I said. Needless to say, I waited impatiently for the book's arrival, and when I read it there they were, almost in sin in the West Seventies. He never laid a hand on her.
    This is my own family. Amazingly, I am its patriarch—though only one of us, a nephew, seems to see me that way, thank God. My attachments and affections within it run every which way, leaping from my children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews to my twin half-brother and half-sister to my divorced and deceased first wife's nearest sister, whom I've known for sixty-seven years ("Of course I live in denial," she says. "It's the perfect place for me"); to
a different ex-sister-in-law, who's a judge in California; to a niece, the single mother of two grown sons, who's an intensive-care nurse in Vermont and trains enormous jumping horses in her off time; and to all and each (well, just about) in between.
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    What comes back to me these days often begins with an insistent detail, a sunken branch sticking up from a stream which has snagged a mat of memory. When I was a kid I loved our once- or twice-a-year visits to my Aunt Rosie and Uncle John Newberry's house on steep, red-bricked Beacon Hill in Boston. The place had a living-room oddly stuffed down into the basement—you could peek in there through little sidewalk-level windows beside the front steps—and featured a waist-high Stromberg-Carlson phonograph that amazingly played both sides of a regular ten- or twelve-inch 78 rpm record in succession. When your Brunswick or Victor Red Label selection was done a shiny metal apparatus moved magisterially into place, gently plucked up the record, rotated it in midair, and lowered it back into place; almost bowing, it withdrew as the record spun round again and the arm lowered itself toward the new tune. (This was ten or fifteen years before jukeboxes developed the same capability, dealing more briskly with the biscuit-like 45s of the day.) None of my school friends in New York had anything as fancy, but what kept me riveted next to the Newberrys' machine wasn't just "Rosalie" coming after "Valencia," or the "Moonlight Sonata" in two full parts but the machine's delicious fallibility. Now and then—you'd have to wait while twenty or thirty faultless flips