Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (12 page)

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

George Baekeland was completely intolerant of everything. I remember when I met Sterling Hayden and he heard that my name was Baekeland, he said, “Any relation to George Baekeland?” I said, “He was my father-in-law.” He said he had crewed on George Baekeland’s yacht one summer. This was when Sterling was a young man, before he was a movie star. “George Baekeland,” he said. “Right-wing bastard.”

Céline Roll Karraker

We kids were terrified of Uncle George, but he also taught us to be super sailors, marvelous people in the water and in the woods. He was very demanding—you had to do everything exactly right. And it was frightening, because if you did it wrong you really got it. But we stuck with it, because he knew and he taught us and it was wonderful to learn from him.

He used to take us to the Adirondacks in the wintertime when nobody else in the family would and put up with all these kids. He taught us to iceboat, and later we built our own iceboat and sailed it on the lake.

Uncle George apparently once put a canoe in the Hudson River at Yonkers with his brother-in-law, and they decided to go to the headwaters of the river, just paddle as far as they could. And they ended up right near what became our family camp in the Adirondacks.

Grandmother bought the camp in 1923, but I read somewhere that Grandpapa had sent her and Uncle George and my mother off to the Adirondacks as early as 1907, 1908—to the Adirondack League Club for a holiday. So they knew that region quite early.

Grandmother named the camp Utowana Lodge. Later it was called just Baekeland Camp. She loved the place. Even after she’d had many strokes she continued to come up.

Brooks Baekeland

Until her strokes, my grandmother had always run our camp in the Adirondacks, served by a motley of people, some of whom did not even speak English—a Polish chef, for instance, who wore a chef’s hat. But the last and most massive of her strokes left her partially paralyzed and speechless.

It was her doctor’s opinion that, along with her speech function, her higher thought functions had also been destroyed. Gradually, as it was deemed that her death was imminent, her daughter and her grandchildren fell into the habit of talking around her, in ways that they would never have dreamed of doing had they thought she could understand—going even so far once as to speculate upon her will and her fortune. To tell the truth, I also believed that she was unable to understand. Almost. But in a sort of private romantic tribute to her somewhere spirit, even if it resided no longer behind those lifeless eyes, I would sit for an hour or two at a time when I went to see her, which was as often as my busy life allowed, and talk to her as if she understood, or read to her—I had always read to her while she had her breakfast on a tray when we were at The Anchorage. Believe me, it was a difficult charade—to talk easily, convincingly, and naturally to a person with a clawlike hand and drooling, twisted mouth, a face unrecognizable, a grotesque Swiss woodcarver’s mask; to talk, without ever receiving the smallest sign of understanding, as though to the once so civilized, gifted, humorous woman that she was, and then to kiss that cold, necrotic face again in parting, with a promise each time to come back soon.

The poor bored nurses, who treated her as they would a two-mont-hold baby, used to rejoice on seeing me, for it gave them time off—often most of the day if I could stay that long. They soon gave up trying to get me to talk to
them,
which they craved, for they had long run out of anything to say to each other. I do not know what they thought of my charade but I can guess.

My father paid regular visits, too, but they were to see that his mother was being properly cared for. Her state embarrassed him. Frankly, no one could wish—for her sake—that she would live on, but there was nothing that anyone could, or would, do to abbreviate her shame. I say her shame, for that was what we all felt: how she would hate it if she knew.

One day, after she had been in this condition already for several years, and I was up there studying my graduate physics and mathematics after our usual “talking” and “reading” session, I saw her eyes seeming to look at an open magazine. I said to her: “On this page there is the word ‘state’ in large letters. Can you point to it?” She slowly extended the hand over which she still had partial control and with her index finger indicated the word. I tried others. Slowly and painfully she identified them all correctly. In a few minutes, using a large and heavy cardboard, I had constructed an alphabet matrix with large letters. I put it in front of her and, taking a pad and pencil, asked her to “dictate” to me. Slowly she pointed out: “Thank you, dear Brooks. Thank you for existing.” The same words she had said to me many years before.

I then asked her if she wanted to “dictate” a letter to me.

“A telegram,” she indicated.

I took it down. It was to David Fairchild’s wife, Marian. “My son Brooks”—she didn’t say “grandson”—“has given me back my speech. Greetings from Céline Baekeland.”

From that moment on, that imperious old lady began to take over some control of her own life again. Her nurses no longer treated her like a driveling baby and her family no longer spoke in front of her as if she no longer existed. She lived on for quite a few more years.

Céline Roll Karraker

For a few summers grandmother hired a little plane to get up to the Adirondacks—her doctor, who would come along, was terrified of flying in such a little plane but
she
thought it was great sport. She always thought everything was an adventure. The plane would land in the lake right up by the dock and she’d be lifted out. We built a boardwalk for her wheelchair, and she’d be in her wheelchair and fish.

Later on in the family there were some incidents up in the Adirondacks that were very odd and violent. Tony was a disturbed person, I think, very young. His cousins always felt that he was odd. The kids all played together, you know, and they were in the woods once and something caught fire. We had a fire.

The kids and Tony grew apart. They were uncomfortable with him. And you know, for years we didn’t see him because Brooks and Barbara went to live in Europe.

Barbara and I were great, dear friends. She was just a delightful, warm-spirited person. And absolutely fearless. A very exciting person! We spent a lot of time at the camp together, especially during the war when Brooks was away.

Sylvie Baekeland Skira

Barbara, I’m told, hated camp. Because there was no glamour. She thought it was all very boring. All that sand in your shoes, and canoeing and so on. It had no dash. This was the “old world” that she had wanted to marry into, but this was the part that she
didn’t
want.

Nina Daly

The Baekeland family had a place up in the Adirondacks. A big place. Members of the family still own it, and every summer usually they go to camp. One family is there, another will come. It’s a lovely place to be. You get up there in the hot summer and it’s a joy, it’s always so cool up there. You always sleep with blankets over you.

Brooks Baekeland

Camp Baekeland has quite a number of buildings and resembles a Russian village of 1905. The whole spirit of the place is true and is coextensive with my soul.

Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

Each member of the family had his own cabin, a wonderful old log cabin—Bonbon, the old lady, had had them built so they fit right into the woods—and each cabin had three or four bedrooms. Fred, when I was married to him, used his father’s cabin.

Dr. Frederick Baekeland

Over the long haul, except from sort of a novelistic point of view, the life-as-fiction point of view, the only person in my opinion in this family of any real fame is my grandfather. Not that there haven’t been other people, some of whom have been hardworking and achieved a certain amount and so on, but—and I’m including myself—they’re rather insignificant.

My father? Oh, my father went to Cornell for two years, then he went off to the Air Force in the First World War, then he graduated from the Colorado School of Mines. Then he worked as a petroleum geologist in Tunisia and French Morocco. And after that he went into the family business. No one in the family besides my father was ever asked to go into the business. You had to be asked.

From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, February 8, 1908

Letter from Leo Hendrik Baekeland to George Baekeland, May 5, 1928

Letter from George Baekeland to Leo Hendrik Baekeland, May 16, 1928

From the Private Diaries of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, March 18, 1908