I was running up Hobcaw’s great sweep of stairway when Bernie stopped me. “Let me show you how to do it,” he said. “I know you’re not sixteen any longer. Do what I do. Go up to the first landing, take five deep breaths. Then go up to the next landing and take five more, and so on until you’re at the top.”
I’d arrived bone-weary from a lecture tour. Jimmy Byrnes, former Secretary of State to Harry Truman, was there with his wife to dinner. I’m a sort of middle-class Republican, while Bernie’s an intellectual Democrat. He’s fond of conducting his own private polls of politics, and I’m counted on to give him an opposition point of view. So while Baruch, Byrnes, and other guests stood in a group in front of the fireplace debating the affairs of the nation, Hopper sat on a sofa, ears tuned in until my head began to nod. The next thing I knew was Bernie’s tap on my shoulder. “Come now, it’s time for you to retire.”
“But you haven’t finished your discussion,” I protested.
“No, but you have.”
I fell asleep hours later in a huge bedroom with four picture windows in two of its walls. Through each of them I could see and hear the breeze ruffling through the moss on the live oak in the moonlight so that it danced like a corps de ballet. Bernie believes in plenty of rest, including a nap between the sheets every afternoon. The next morning I had breakfast in bed, served by Bernie. He’d been up long enough to have read all the newspapers, so I got bulletins along with my coffee.
With a chauffeur and one other servant, the three of us went off on a fishing expedition in a station wagon loaded to the hubcaps with equipment. At the selected spot at the mouth of a narrow river lined with oyster beds, the two helpers set out folding chairs and steamer rugs for Bernie and me and wrapped us up like mummies. Then they baited our hooks and left us to it, while the chauffeur took himself with his line off to his own favorite fishing spot.
Bernie and I waited and waited for a nibble. At last he snagged a hard-shell crab. I followed suit. “Do you want to go on?” he asked.
“Sure, I love it,” said I. Only crabs were biting that day. I went on hauling them out like sixty, but Bernie turned his back on the whole undertaking, got up, shook himself, and sat in the sun. “FDR came out to this same spot,” he noted dryly, “but he managed to catch fish.” So did the chauffeur perched out on the pier.
If he’s in town, Bernie is the first man I call when I visit New York. I took myself one day to his house on East Sixty-sixth Street, and there hanging over the mantelpiece in his drawing room was a new portrait of him. I gave it one good, hard look, then asked: “Have you a stepladder, please? I want to take that down.”
“Ah, it’s not that bad,” he protested.