Except for the Victorian restraint and for the passage of the years during which Margaret’s children have grown up, Elizabeth has married and become mother of another little “Elizabeth”, etc., it remains a fair picture of the tribe. All the gracious comments are still true today. The Woods are indeed a gracious family — but that’s not the whole picture by a long shot. The Woods are also a fantastic family. This is not surprising, since the old New England stock from which they stem has brightened American history with many fantastic characters and families.
In truth the whole clan, when gathered together for family reunions or summer holidays, takes on some of the qualities of Sanger’s Circus, or of an imaginary play by Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward in collaboration. Robert, Jr., by the way, though extremely fond of beautiful young ladies, has remained a bachelor, is a business man in New York, and is generally to be found at the Harvard Club on his off evenings. A while back, he wrote a funny book entitled Hold 'em, Girls! It’s a Harvard man’s post-Emily-Post etiquette for young women invited to football games. The youngest imp in the household when it reunites is six-year-old Elizabeth Bogert, who has inherited more than her share of her grandfather’s prankishness and curiosity. When I first visited Dr. and Mrs. Wood in Baltimore, and while they were telling me about the second and third generation, none of whom I had yet met, Mrs. Wood said casually, “Elizabeth married a Dutchman”. I’d expected he’d be at least as Dutch as Hendrik Willem van Loon, but when I later met Ned Bogert, I discovered him to be Dutch — like the Kips and the Roosevelts. His people had been in New York ever since New Amsterdam was founded. The Woods are pure English stock — and pure New England stock — on both sides, since colonial times. They are fond of their son-in- law and treat him as a son, but “Elizabeth married a Dutchman”.
They are all full of violent opinions and prejudices, happily never the same ones, and if any opinion apart from family loyalty were ever shared by any two of them at the same time, the astonishment would be general. They engage frequently in debates which at times terrify the guest or stranger. Later he becomes even more bewildered. Robert, Jr., will denounce his father with the freedom and eloquence of an ex-artillery officer, or vice versa, and next morning they’ll be as affectionate as if they were “buddies” of the same generation. It’s the same with all the family. One night last summer at East Hampton, Mrs. Wood got into a hair-raising dispute with her son-in-law over the respective merits of certain Flemish and Italian paintings, and at the height of their difference exclaimed with outraged finality, “Well, that’s just what could be expected from a Dutchman!” Ned Bogert and I were tying some luggage on the back of a car next morning, when a heavy thundershower came up. I had on a leather coat, but Bogert had no raincoat or covering and was dressed for the city. Mrs. Wood rushed out, dragged him into the house, made him take off his wet jacket, felt his shirt to see whether he should take that off too, hung his jacket to dry before the morning log fire, and found him a raincoat. I stopped gratuitously worrying about the Woods’ family “quarrels”. The subjects on which they engage in Shavian denunciations and dialectics are seldom personal and never boring.
There is always, for instance, the tender subject of Dr. Wood and the piano. The legend is that after the age of sixty he learned to play the piano and executed the noisy Rachmaninoff Prelude in C sharp minor with such pyrotechnic brilliancy that all and sundry were astounded — and appalled.
“The story”, he said, “is grossly exaggerated — and all wrong anyway. I never played for guests, in Baltimore or here or anywhere”.
“What about your daughter’s version?” I asked.
“It’s utter and absolute nonsense, and the thing isn’t worth so much talk anyway. I don’t see what you want to put it in the biography for at all”.
I said, “What she told me is worth putting in anybody’s biography. If her version is apocryphal, suppose you give me the true version”. (Incidentally, he can’t whistle or hum “Yankee Doodle” to save his life without getting off the key.) He said:
Well, to begin with, I was given music lessons for a year or two when I was about twelve years old — and I hated ’em. The teacher was a maiden lady who came to the house. You know the sort. Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, and sugared tunes ad nauseam. Anyhow, I was taught to read music, in a way, but rarely spent any time at the piano until the end of my second college year. At Kennebunkport where we went in summer, there was a young Miss Banfield in the hotel, who was a wow at the piano. She played the Schumann Grand Sonata brilliantly and frequently (by request). I was captivated, and said to myself, “I’m going to play that." I had a piano in my room at college, mainly for the benefit of visitors, and on my return invested in the score of the sonata. I was taken aback by the price, as I’d never bought a “composition” before. Above the opening bar was printed “So rasch wie möglich" (As fast as possible) and on the third page, “Noch schneller” (Still faster). This was stimulating and quite different from songs without words. I went after it hammer and tongs, and after a year or two could play the whole of the first movement without notes. By the time our second child was born, I was through the second movement. Then my musical, long-suffering, devoted wife had a respite during our two years in Berlin where I could not get at a piano. But I played it through Chicago, Madison, and Baltimore until my children were old enough to join forces with their mother and persuade me to desist — from the Schumann sonata.
What I did in revenge was to buy the score of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude, with a red-seal record for a music teacher. This went even faster than the sonata, i.e., “faster than faster than possible”. It suited me exactly, but I was finally silenced for good and all by home influences.
Dr. Wood’s version, as above, is circumstantial and beguiling, but it doesn’t alter the fact that his daughter Elizabeth, Mrs. Bogert, “the Woodiest of all the Woods”, painted me a different picture of her papa’s ultimate atrocities on the pianoforte. Even if Dr. Wood is telling the partial truth and Elizabeth is embroidering the facts a little, it presents a pretty clear picture of how she felt about it. She says he came home one day in Baltimore with the Prelude under his arm, and began banging it out on the family piano. It was terrible for the family, she says, but in a month or so it rolled out with the inhuman perfection of a speeded-up electrical player piano. She says he became so inhumanly mechanically expert that it was really perfect — but that it was also “perfectly awful”, and that for a period thereafter he drove the family frantic by adopting the following tactics toward occasional guests or innocent strangers. When one would say, “Professor, do you play the piano?” he would smirk deprecatingly and reply, “Well, only a little. I can only play one or two tunes”. He would go to the piano, while the innocent victims would anticipate nothing worse than “Chopsticks” or “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree”. Then, while the family stopped its ears with mutual glances of commiseration, out would come crashing the whole Grand Sonata, or the Prelude, to its bitter end, while the chandeliers and ceilings trembled.