Coachman’s Granddaughter

And now, as the year draws to a close, I think it’s only fair that I give my father, whose birthday, December 29, is today, the same consideration that I did for my mother on her birthday back in August of this year.

Unlike hers, her one hundredth, it is not a milestone birthday – born in 1907, my father would have been one hundred and fifteen years old today – but it does point toward the vast gap in culture and time between the New York he knew growing up, and the one I did.

“Coachman’s granddaughter” is the playful moniker, to use an old-timey word, bestowed upon me by a friend when I told him my grandfather drove a horse and carriage for a wealthy liquor importer in turn of the twentieth century Brooklyn.

Yes, I said horse and carriage. One of the things I most loved about having older parents was the sense of connection to an older time, to different ways of living. I used to love to hear my father tell me stories about the horses, King and Kaiser. First of all, I should say that a horse and carriage may sound glamorous to modern ears, but in fact it was a hard life for those who had to do the actual work – whether horse or human – in New York’s supposedly Gilded Age. My father told me that his was the only family in the neighborhood who had a telephone. He used to tell me how his classmates at school would boggle in disbelief if he should ever happen to mention that fact – “You have a telephone – a telephone?!” Well, the only reason my father’s house had a telephone was that his father’s employer, the liquor importer, who lived in nearby Brooklyn Heights, had it installed and paid for, and the only reason he paid for it was – as my grandmother tartly put it in my father’s overhearing – so that he could wake up my grandfather at all hours of the night and tell him to go hitch up the horses and bring the carriage over.

One of the stories my father most often told me was about the time he accompanied his father to the vet, when one of the horses had come down with colic, a potentially life-threatening buildup of intestinal gas. My father then went on to relate what the veterinarian did when they arrived: He first took a pin and inserted it into the horses’ abdomen at just the right spot, letting out a steady stream of gas and relieving the abdominal pressure. This always astounded me – I would have thought such an action would have been rewarded with a potentially fatal kick, though I suppose the vet knew his business and could do it safely – but as if that wasn’t enough, it was what came next that was the real jaw-dropper: the vet turned and winked at my father, lit a match and, holding it to the gassy stream, set the entire effluence briefly ablaze.

I used to wonder that the veterinarian didn’t succeed in setting the three of them, the horse, and the entire veterinary clinic on fire. Or perhaps it was done outside. Either way, my father said, he supposed that the vet thought it was the just sort of thing that would amuse a young boy. My father always had a smile on his face when he told me this story, so I suppose it did. Such was the entertainment to be had, for a working class lad in turn of the twentieth century New York.

Then there was the time, when my father was ten or eleven years old, that my grandfather’s employer told him to pick one of his young sons to accompany a young nephew of his, who was visiting, to give him some company while my grandfather drove them around to see the sights of Brooklyn. My father, being closest in age, was the one selected for this honor. I wish I could remember all the details, but I do know that my father said they were driven to Coney Island, a part of the entertainment complex that he had never seen before. Apparently there was a high-end area that catered to the wealthy, with huge glamorous hotels and elegant entertainments. At some point they were dropped off for lunch in one of these establishments. Which always made me wonder – even in his Sunday best my father surely would have looked out of place in his working-class clothes. My father always said that he had tried to talk to the other boy but that he wouldn’t respond and mostly seemed to prefer running around by himself.

At the end of the day my grandfather dropped off the young guest at the liquor importer’s house, then drove the carriage back to the stables, and he and my father walked back home. At the end of a long day, my father sleepily overheard his parent’s conversation – apparently, my grandfather’s assessment of the young guest was none too flattering – and my grandmother’s disapproving comment: “these society women, they only want to go out dancing and they leave their children to run wild and be cared for by strangers!”

After the end of the first world war, my grandfather’s employer bought a car, and my grandfather became a chauffeur. I don’t know what became of the horses; sent to the knackers, I suspect, in a city that no longer needed more than 100,000 horses to run its daily activities. My father never did say. I guess in his usual, grounded wisdom he would have judged it a little harsh to tell a tender-hearted young girl brought up in gentler circumstances than he had ever known in his youth.

Thinking through these stories again, it strikes me that what’s missing is any real description of my grandfather. Even little glimpses of personality can be gleaned for my grandmother, but I can scarcely remember a word in these stories to describe him. I know he was an immigrant from Alsace, that he worked, probably until he couldn’t anymore, and then passed some time before the second world war. His steady, silent presence in these stories is the only real impression I have ever had of him. It gives me pause, to think what a different world my father grew up in, and what a different life from his own he was able to give to his own Coachman’s Granddaughter.