After Indian Summer

ROUGHLY SPEAKING -- Louise Randall Pierson--Simon and Schuster ($2.50).

The house where Louise Randall lived as a child stood above the bridge in Quincy, Mass. H. H. Richardson, great American architect, built it. In the warm haze of New England's Indian summer, life there was magical.

When Louise looked out of her bedroom window, she could see the Adamses walking around their box-bordered garden next door. Early each morning Father Randall, with his brilliantined beard and his hearty manner, took Louise to the stables to feed sugar to the horses while they were being curried. He brought her boxes of Page & Shaw chocolates, got front seats for the Admiral Dewey Parade, took her to see Joe Jefferson in Rip Van Winkle. He told her that all their magnificent house needed was a moat and a drawbridge, and he was going to put them in.

The house also needed him. The life that had been compounded of good things for little girls while he was alive crashed to its tearless ruin with his death. Louise, who was twelve when he died, could remember the diamonds in the eyes of his bulldog stickpin, and how she hid her dolls under the covers and made Father sit on a chair, so he would not sit on the dolls when he came to say goodnight. He took everything to the grave with him--money (he had signed too many notes), friends, family standing, a way of life and a certain knowledge of how to meet it.

Forty Years' Record. Louise Randall Pierson's autobiography covers the years from 1902, when Father died, to the present. Roughly Speaking is as uneven as the years it spans. The 332 pages of neat, small print, marred by an affected breeziness and by curiously false conversational passages, nevertheless make up a lively, candid, sometimes exasperatingly interesting book. Its record is bitter, if the facts of the family's struggle alone are considered. But Mrs. Pierson is so persistently cheerful in keeping the record that she seems optimistic by will power alone. Sometimes, like sunlight filtering through the shutters of a darkened room, paragraphs of emotion cut through the desperate happiness and warm the pages with a gentle, subjective glow.

Louise graduated from Simmons College in Boston, a tidy, short, shirtwaisted feminist bundle of aggressive restlessness. She did research on constructive juvenile activities for a neurasthenic Yale professor until the professor's wife, objecting, among other things, to the openwork yoke of Louise's shirtwaist, fired her. New Haven's lights "were bright and made a glow in the sky. The engines in its factories throbbed and hummed. ... It was breath-catching. Home was a million miles away. This was the maelstrom of life."

In 1911 Louise was a stenographer in the socially unacceptable Fore River Shipyard in Quincy. (The episode is so elusively treated that a naive reader might conclude that she had been in naval intelligence ever since.) Then she moved to New York, married--a Yale man of good family working in a bank--lived in uptown Manhattan in a weird apartment, began to write magazine articles, and found a brief breathing space in life.

With the Times. By 1921 her husband was making $10,000 a year. The Vanderlips were neighbors; the children went to the Vanderlips' progressive school. From the porch of the house in Scarborough Louise "could look off across the Hudson deep into orange hills." Honeysuckle smothered the rickety porch railing. There were white birches in the yard, a ginkgo tree by the windows. But misfortune followed so relentlessly it might have been planned. Once the Japanese butler at the Vanderlips' swimming pool asked her: "Why your little boy, he lie at bottom of pool so long for?" Rodney was two hours getting the water pumped out.

One day Louise, the younger daughter, could not get out of bed. The doctor said first that it was just a swollen ankle, then, as her mother was relaxing in relief: "Suddenly a thought stabbed me. . . . There was no more laughing. Just low voices, talking, talking. . . . My husband stood looking out of the window. I felt queer. As if a burden had been lifted from me. . . . Dr. George Draper . . . said infantile paralysis was a strange disease. ... 'At present she has only the use of her left arm,' he said. 'Prognosis for life is fair.' "

By the time the three older children had recovered completely from infantile paralysis, and Louise enough to be able to use crutches, the '20s were in full swing and the hectic community life boiled over. Mrs. Pierson was in all of it. Most of it rubbed the social nerves raw -- provocative speeches by liberals to Tories; provocative shows by the amateur theater; acrobatic dancing; folk singing. One day her husband came home from the National City Bank and said, "It's Charlie Mitchell. ... I got the ax along with 33 others. We got two hours to clear out." He sat with his head in his hands. Louise's insistent bravery in the face of trouble jarred him. " 'If I died,' he said, 'you'd just regard it as another way to develop your character.' That hit home."

With the Brakes Off. The remainder of Roughly Speaking, covering Louise's divorce and second marriage, poverty, bankruptcy, psychoanalysis, racketeering, operating a nightclub, campaigning for Roosevelt, races through the depression with the speed of a runaway train. Her second husband, an easygoing Canadian cavalry officer, operated a greenhouse outside New York City. When the impending depression closed down, the children sold flowers and food at a roadside stand and temporarily saved the family. Imperceptibly the roadside stand grew into a business, where the children waited on tables, the parents cooked, and the daily cash intake disguised their poverty. Counting the money on Sunday night, Louise planned to enlarge the restaurant to support the greenhouse. The greenhouse failed, with liabilities of $72,000. The Piersons bought a soda fountain on Cape Cod, built it into a nightclub. One Saturday night at one minute past 12, it was raided.

"Do you know what day this is?" the sergeant asked Louise.

"No."

"It's the Lord's Day."

"I lived in New York so long I didn't know the Lord had a day," said Louise.

"In Massachusetts," said the sergeant, "He not only has a day, He has a department."

When Boston racketeers tried to force them into selling policy slips, the Piersons left the Cape.

Selling vacuum cleaners, reading the want ads, living for five days on onion sandwiches, watching crises come so fast they did not know they were crises, the Piersons proved in their own careers that the enrolling avalanche of ill-fate was only part of the story. When they were almost starving, the boys, coming out of steel mills and preparatory schools, won scholarships at Yale.

By 1936 Mrs. Pierson and Louise were intense Roosevelt idolators. "You and I are the only people for Roosevelt. Everybody else is just Democrats."

Roughly Speaking ends with the beginning of the Third Term. Once Mrs. Pierson returned to Quincy to see her father's house: "It was just the same! I couldn't believe my eyes. . . . The widow's walk on the roof where we used to go to watch fires . . . the opaque glass in the windows of the servants' dining room . . . the summerhouse with the well in it ... the drooping cut-leaf maple. It was all just as I remembered it. Nothing was changed. ... In the library, a light flashed on. ... I knew my mother was standing at the top of the stairs in her kitten's-ear broadcloth with the long train, the diamond butterfly from Tiffany's sparkling at the black-velvet ribbon around her throat. . . . But I couldn't see her for the mist in my eyes."

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