The City & the Country – no 45 – 10/31/14 – for Peter Capell

This year’s superb World Series was being written off, after the first two games, by commentators all across the media, as the most poorly watched in baseball history. So what? What fools! It was a thrilling contest. I feel sorry for anyone who missed the Forester (my version of Baumgartner, Madison Bumgarner’s Ur-Name) and his unprecedented achievement. I dedicate this update to my ever-beloved Peter Capell, an actor whom I first saw on our little 86th Street television screen, playing the unshaven master-scientist villain in an episode of Captain Video (anyone remembering this is probably at least 70, like me), an early TV Scifi effort with deliciously cardboard sets. He had a long and honorable acting career, as imdb.com attests; my parents, actors themselves, knew him – I’m not sure how – and his wife Annie later became an important figure in helping to guide my mother’s literary career. Both Peter and Annie were gay, and shared what my mother always called the happiest marriage she knew. Peter adored baseball, and would take me for long walks – one in Munich that I’ll never forget – describing the World Series that year. Our walk was unforgettable because of Peter’s sheer glorious enthusiasm. I was still a child; the dear fellow never put a hand on me, and I say this because he well could have, although I doubt if I’d have received it gladly, and maybe he knew this, and/or was afraid of jeopardizing his and Annie’s relationship with my parents. This is all so long ago – and all parties long dead, and I the only offspring – that perhaps such things can be mentioned without disguising names. There’s nothing here to anyone’s discredit. My mother, I realized later, had been a little anxious. She needn’t have worried. Dear Peter – I loved you fondly then, and still do.

Last night a dinner at Landau’s, a Woodstock eatery in which all of us are regulars: Peter Wilson, Robert and Charlotte Kelly, Claire and I. Distinguished company. Claire and I received a sweetly-dedicated copy of Robert’s newly-published collected essays, a huge volume (appropriately so). [Dear reader, if such there be (sometimes I fancy this is just a diary – and in any case such fun to write – only to discover that there actually are people reading it): note, in the preceding paragraph, the incorrect, outdated locution, ‘whom I first saw.’ This The New York Times has officially proscribed. The newly correct usage is ‘who I first saw,’ although according to the Times we may still write ‘to whom I spoke.’ The dear old accusative case survives, clinging by its fingernails to the parapet of history, but only when preceded by a preposition.]