FRANCIS LANGDON, PIONEERING DEFENSE CONTRACTOR, DIES AT 74
Francis Howard Langdon, who was known among the group of secretive defense contractors who came of age during World War II for his willingness to explore ideas that some among his colleagues considered more in the realm of science fiction than of usable weaponry, died Tuesday in Ames, Iowa, where he had flown with a friend. Local officials say that he was struck by lightning while standing at the edge of the airfield.
Francis Langdon was a veteran of World War II, where he served in the European Theater as a sniper, a rare thing in those days. He fought in the North African Campaign in 1943, the Sicilian Campaign, and at the Battle of Anzio. He was a great admirer of General Jacob “Jake” Devers, Commander of the North African Theater of Operations, who, he sometimes said, “gave me my first experience of St.-Tropez.” After the war, Mr. Langdon, who was born in Iowa to an English-German farm family and was bilingual, spent time in Ohio translating captured German technical documents for the U.S. government, then worked for Courtyard Oil. But his great love was for unorthodox weaponry, and he spent many years trying to develop a weapon known as the supercavitating underwater missile, to be used against submarines. It had a concave nose, shaped to create a vacuum in the water just in front of the missile, allowing the missile to speed up rather than slow down. Forward Weaponry, from which he retired in 1986, was located in Secaucus, New Jersey.
Francis Langdon was married to Hildegarde Andrea Bergstrom Langdon, who was for many years a prominent figure on the Manhattan social scene, known for her elegant style and her ethereal beauty.
U.S. Congressman Richard Langdon, Democrat, of Brooklyn’s 9th district, is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Langdon. Francis Langdon is also survived by another son, Michael Langdon, a Wall Street entrepreneur known for innovations in computer trading, and by a daughter, Janet Langdon Nelson, of Palo Alto, California. Francis Langdon’s funeral was held in Denby, Iowa, where he grew up, and where he was interred.
Janet hadn’t known that her mother’s given name was “Hildegarde,” much less these generalities about her father’s career. When she showed the obituary to Jared, his eye fell immediately upon the underwater missile, which he said might have worked, might still work, but they would never know—probably it had been mothballed when the Soviet Union collapsed; it was fascinating. He gave her a hug. And of course the lightning strike was amazing, but, try as she might to generate some sort of grief for her father, she could not. He had been imposing, absent, frightening, threatening, every day of her childhood. There was no evidence in her memory that he had ever liked her, or that he was capable of love (though he seemed to have grown fond of her mother in the last couple of years). Nor did she, given her political views, admire his life work. But probably, she thought now that she’d read all those books about child care and the infant mind, he had simply never bothered to bond with her; she was forty-four and she didn’t care.
The envelope in her hand would be the payoff, her compensation for getting Frank as her father rather than, say, Uncle Arthur, whom she had adored when she was a child, or Papa Rudy, Jared’s dad, who was kind and told truly funny jokes. She slipped her fingernail under the flap and ripped the envelope open. Judging by everything Janet knew about her parents, her legacy could be sizable—she and Jared had already skirted the issue of paying off their house, or maybe looking for something on Kauai, or starting a trust fund for Emily and Jonah. She skimmed the letter, turned to the next page. Her father’s will, it turned out, had been a simple one—the house to Mom, the farmland in Denby to Cousin Jesse, a hundred thousand dollars each, more or less, after taxes and fees, to Janet, Richie, and Michael. Janet turned the letter over in confusion. A hundred thousand dollars? Even Jared, from Minnesota, would be surprised that this constituted Frank’s fortune. And nothing for her mom? What was she going to live on? She laid the letter on her desk, put the obituary back in the drawer, and looked at her watch. It was almost three, time to pick up Emily and take her to her dance class, which she was now taking twice a week to build her abdominal strength so that she could better sit the trot. Fiona considered this a good idea and wished she’d thought of the same thing years ago. The next step, said Fiona, was “a more competitive horse” (that was twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars right there), but Emily herself wasn’t saying that yet—she loved Pesky and she loved Sunlight, and she thought a successful equestrian career was about friendship.
Janet rummaged around on the kitchen counter for her car keys and went into Jonah’s room. Jonah was sitting cross-legged on the floor, doing his sixty-piece fish puzzle, which he preferred to the dinosaur puzzle. He didn’t look up. He picked up a piece, touched it gently to his lower lip, positioned it, tapped it with his fingertip, and picked up another one. There was no mystery to the puzzle any longer, just some sort of pleasure that Janet didn’t quite understand. He also liked to lay out playing cards, plain old playing cards, in patterns. Jared remembered doing the same thing. She said, “Ready, Jonie-boy? Time to go in the car and pick up Emmy.”
He sighed, stood up. Although she had raised him perfectly and he was always cooperative, he was a strange boy. It was as though every solved set of parental difficulties revealed a whole landscape of unimagined difficulties beyond, a set of syndromes or conditions that could be active or could be incipient, or might not even exist. It was easier, Janet thought, just to think that they were bad or good, obedient or disobedient. She gave Jonah a hug when she lifted him into his car seat, and all the way to Emily’s school she could not help glancing in the rearview mirror at red lights, just so that she could wonder why he was so quiet.
—
RICHIE KNEW what was in the letter before the letter arrived, because Michael had called him in a rage to tell him that the hoped-for millions were not going to materialize—they had probably been left to that little shit, Jesse.
“What did the letter say?” said Richie.
“A hundred fucking grand,” said Michael.
“What do you care?”
Richie expected him to say something about losses—there had been a rash of losses in the big banks, including Michael’s bank, articles in the WSJ, the FT, and the Times, and discussions in the Financial Services Committee—but Michael said, “It’s the principle of the thing. Loretta is spitting mad.”
Richie set the phone down on his desk and laughed for a second. When he picked it back up, Michael was still talking, hadn’t even realized that he had lost Richie’s absolute attention. “Her folks spent a pile refurbing the kitchen at the ranch, and they had to install ground-fault-indicator receptacles, and when they got into the walls to fix some of the wiring, they saw that rats had eaten the insulation every fucking where, it was all just bare wires waiting to burn the place down….” Richie put the phone down again, and picked it up again as Michael was saying, “Five hundred grand, and she said she would cover it because she…” He put the phone down again, then disconnected.
When he called Michael back after looking in the mail (nothing at that point), he said, “Sorry. Don’t know what happened. Anyway, Dad didn’t have all the money. Mom did.”
Michael said, “What?”
“Dad had his salary and his pension. That’s all he ever had. Mom is worth, like, four million, maybe more.”
“Because?” said Michael.
“Because she got an inheritance after the war sometime, from a dead relative who hated everyone in his family, and he said that his money would be kept in a trust until everyone then alive died, including the babies. I don’t know how much she got, maybe ten grand or something like that. She did the investing. Well, Dad advised her. But I think when he bought out Uncle Henry’s and Aunt Claire’s shares of the farm, in ’76, that was the last time he had lots of money to invest. I think so. How should I really know? I’m telling you what Mom told me three or four years ago.” Then, “So—a hundred grand?”
He and Ivy could get themselves a bigger co-op, still in the d
istrict, but maybe facing the park. A hundred grand was a nice sum. And Ivy would appreciate it. Ivy hadn’t been terribly appreciative lately—brusque and busy. She was an executive vice-president now, and constant reading and editing had been replaced, she said, by constant meetings about other people’s books. She was getting a good paycheck, and there was no one in publishing who didn’t want to succeed, but authors were, in their idiosyncratic (she put it politely but affectionately) way, more fun than colleagues, and especially more fun than publishers, who worried all the time. Was she in line to become a publisher? If so, was that good? Was that bad? And if so, more important, how could she refuse? When she started talking like this, she would stare at Leo, Richie saw, wondering if she could betray him by leaving him an only child. About this, Richie, himself out of town from Monday morning to Friday evening, said nothing. The geography of their success seemed to be stretching the threads that connected them to spiderweb thinness. Almost always, while he was eating his crab bisque in the bar at the Hay-Adams, he thought of Ivy reaching for a stuffed mushroom at a fund-raiser at the Met or in Astor Hall at the New York Public Library, and Leo in Brooklyn, eating macaroni and cheese with Allie, and he wondered, how could you be related if you didn’t relate? He comforted himself with the idea of Michael and Loretta and their many kids, screaming at each other on the Upper East Side, but the idea wasn’t all that comforting. Ivy, who still said she would never go there, thought that they were officially crazy and that they were driving their kids officially crazy, and that it was a good thing that Loretta sent Chance and Binky and Tia to California every summer vacation and every Christmas vacation to hone their cattle-roping skills.
And then people would come by, because they saw his bike outside the door of the hotel, which meant he was inside, and they chatted with him, and he chatted with them—yes, the Republicans had taken over both houses of Congress, but Richie had beaten Kevin Moore’s successor candidate by eight percentage points. Fewer Democrats in Congress meant that those who were left had more gravity; Richie was no longer a hydrogen atom, more like an oxygen atom, someone to be sought out and won over. A life alongside Michael had given him a trustworthy quality—he looked like a guy who had survived many beatings. Anyway, he would sit and smile and chat. A colleague or two would wander in, offer, ask, confer, complain, shake heads, nod, pat him on the shoulder, smile again, and he would feel the pleasure of forgetting, just for the moment, Ivy and Leo.
—
JESSE MISSED Uncle Frank, and not because of the money, at least not this year. And he loved Uncle Frank, and not because of the bequest. Jesse had decided years before not to worry about who owned the farm. Chances were, in farm country, that the guy who farmed the farm did not own it, might never own it—the bank owned it in all but name. It might be that Jesse “owned” the farm now, but he thought of it as something he and his dad shared. Jesse missed Uncle Frank because Uncle Frank had been the most informative person Jesse had ever met, and Jesse loved information. When Aunt Minnie got the fax of Uncle Frank’s New York Times obituary right after the funeral in the summer, everyone had read it, everyone had said, “Oh, I didn’t know…” But Jesse did know, and he had a stack of letters to prove it. In that stack was the one about the supercavitating torpedo, not “missile.” Uncle Frank had come very close to not renewing its funding—it was expensive and going nowhere. But, as he had said in the letter, you could not decide what, in the end, might win a war, so you had to hedge your bets and put money into everything. The Russians in World War II had been a never-ending, apparently invulnerable stream, each one dying only to be replaced by two more. It might be that everyone back in the States saw victory as inevitable, a sure bet, and that if, in England, they were not so sure, they remained quiet about their doubts, but Uncle Frank had always seen it as a close thing—atom bomb versus V-2 rocket, Russian army versus German technology, Mountbatten sacrificing a battalion at Dieppe in order to see whether Normandy might work better. Why had the Germans focused their defenses on Calais rather than Dunkirk? That was a mystery Uncle Frank had always thought significant, but that no one talked about. How many other letters did Jesse have? A hundred? All of them were handwritten, all of them informative, all of them friendly. When he wrote Uncle Frank that he was going to marry Jennifer Guthrie, he got the whole story of the mousetrap by return mail—how those bullies at school made life a living hell not only for Uncle Frank, who was six, but even for Jennifer’s grandpa Donald, who’d been nine—once, they’d ambushed him on the way home and stolen his shoes, then thrown them in a ditch filled with rainwater. He’d had to wear them anyway, since in those days you ordered shoes by catalogue and only got one pair per year. And it wasn’t a mousetrap, it was a rat trap; Uncle Frank had noticed the blood both on Bobby Dugan’s fingers and on his lips, because he’d put his fingers in his mouth. Always bullies, those Dugans. “My first and possibly greatest achievement,” he’d written.
Jesse had seen Uncle Frank maybe a dozen times over the years, and they never talked much. And he had listened to the gossip about Uncle Frank, especially since the funeral—a naughty boy and a harum-scarum kid; Aunt Andy was crazy; and what about those twins? He knew that his own dad had forgiven Uncle Frank over and over, but those letters sat in a tin box in the glass-front cabinet beside the fireplace in the house, and they said something that Jesse would never deny—that Uncle Frank was the smartest guy he’d ever known. He said nothing to his dad about it, and nothing to his mom, who regretted that Uncle Frank hadn’t been saved before he died, but maybe there was hope for Aunt Andy. As for Minnie, he caught her crying in the barn a week after the funeral, her face all puffy, and she’d said, “Oh, heavens me, I thought I’d cried all the tears I was ever going to cry over Frank Langdon, and here I am!”
Jesse sat next to her and then put his arm around her, and she leaned against him and sobbed again (this was something he hadn’t told anyone). He said, “I always wanted to be like him.”
“I can’t imagine in what way,” said Minnie, maybe to herself, but he couldn’t explain without showing her the letters, and he couldn’t show her the letters without worrying that talk would begin about them and then someone would want to read them, and then they wouldn’t be his any longer.
Jesse sometimes drove past the graveyard; it was small, around to the side of the abandoned church, all grassed over. Most of the graves were old and the inscriptions on the headstones were flaking away—even Grandma Rosanna’s was hardly legible anymore. Uncle Frank’s looked almost mirrorlike in its brilliance by comparison (Jesse had overseen the installation). What flowers there were, were artificial, lying here and there. But Jesse appreciated that, too, that Uncle Frank had come back to them, that in death he wasn’t too good for them, that his uncle was, in some way, his possession now, rather than Richie’s or Michael’s. All of this he kept to himself as he tested the moisture in the soil and the moisture in the seed, as he planned his rotation, as he went to the bank and the seed company, when they went to church, when he ate a pancake or two with the guys in the Denby Café, listening to his dad and Russ Pinckard recall that fertilizer salesman coming through town—was that right after the war?—and before anyone said a word about it, the salesman jumped out ahead of them and went on about how sorry the company was that that ship carrying ammonium nitrate, the very thing he wanted them to put on their fields, had blown up in the harbor—where was that, Houston? Some hundred people were killed, and the ocean literally boiled. How could anyone be surprised by a fertilizer bomb? said his dad. It was an accident waiting to happen. No accident, said some of the others.
There was something about the letters organized by date in the box that gave him faith, not in Jesus, of course—that was a separate thing—but in thinking, organizing, staying rational, finding out. The world was full of terror and insanity, as this bombing in Oklahoma showed, but didn’t those letters he had prove that sense could be made of the senseless, that the cause and effect of things would eventually
be found? That was Uncle Frank’s real legacy, not six hundred thousand dollars’ worth of farmland.
—
TO LOOK AT Carl Leroy, you could not tell he was fifty-nine, nor, thought Claire cattily, could you tell that he had been married to Ruth, once her best friend, then her worst enemy, after that an item of her past that she never thought of. Now that Carl was her boyfriend, she thought of Ruth fairly often, because Ruth wrote Carl letters demanding that he insist that their twenty-year-old daughter, Angie, call her or write her or visit her. Angie went to Beloit, which was a hundred miles from where Carl lived in Winnetka, but Ruth seemed to imagine that it was down the street, and that Angie’s relative distance from Winnetka compared with her distance from Des Moines was a calculated slap in the face, a choice of the parent who had left her over the parent who had raised her. Carl had moved from Des Moines to Winnetka when Angie was six, about a year after Ruth and he separated and divorced—fourteen years ago. The result was that Claire and Carl seemed, even to themselves, to have just met, just gotten to know one another, just fallen in love. Those younger selves they vaguely remembered might have been anyone.
Angie was admitted to Beloit (not St. Olaf, not Grinnell, not Carleton, and so, therefore, she had gone to Beloit). It seemed simple to Carl, and simple to Claire, and simple to Angie, but it was not simple to Ruth. Even though Angie was a junior, and therefore had been attending Beloit for two years, the first letter of the semester had already arrived, informing Carl that Angie had been in school for four weeks, and Ruth had heard nothing from her. Carl wrote back, “Dear Ruth, Hope you are well. Neither have I. I’m sure she is busy, Yours truly, Carl.”