By Stuart Mitchner

My family’s life in Princeton began on November 1, 1975, the day after Halloween. Fifty years ago this week my wife was “expecting,” a term that entered the language as a less clinical way of saying “pregnant.” In fact, expecting covers just about anything and everything life has to offer.

Expected in early May, Ben arrived in late April, a relatively easy, Lamaze-class delivery followed by a siege of challenges — low birth weight, a “failure to thrive” diagnosis, tense visits to Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, a rough ride through the school system, three years of “special schools” before mainstreaming and graduation from Princeton High School, followed by psychiatrists, medications, hospitalizations. Flash forward 50 years, we’re living in a house of our own on the other side of town and Ben’s still with us, downstairs in a makeshift home studio with guitars, amps, a keyboard, and a huge collection of records and CDs.

Stalin on Patton Avenue

We knew Princeton was a special place. Albert Einstein used to sail his dinghy on the lake a few blocks away and half a block from our neighborhood park is the rambling house Saul Bellow, John Berryman, and R.P. Blackmur all lived in at various points in their careers. On my way to a job at Firestone Library, I walked up Prospect Avenue, passing by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s eating club, in front of which Zelda turned cartwheels during their 1920 honeymoon revels.

We began our life in Princeton on Patton Avenue, which was named for the 13th president of Princeton University, Frances Landey Patton, who during the Sesquicentennial Celebration in 1896 declared that the College of New Jersey would “in all future time be known as Princeton University.’’

We occupied the top two floors of a half-stucco, half shingled house we were told dated from the 1920s. A gigantic Great-Dane Irish Wolfhound mix named Troika occupied the first floor, along with his master, a stage technician at McCarter Theatre. Our nearest neighbors Bill and Janis were musicians who performed as a duo called Smile. One warm and windy first day of April 1978 Bill invited me over because Janis was giving Stalin’s granddaughter a piano lesson.

Even though it was April 1, I knew he wasn’t putting me on. This was Princeton, a special place where unexpected things happened. Bill and Janis’s living room looked like a recording studio. Lots of high-tech equipment. Olga had finished her lesson and was trying to lure a beagle named Snoopy out from under the sofa. Olga was about six, with a Buster Brown haircut and a round face. A Warren Zevon album was on the stereo. Normally the most gregarious and irrepressible of dogs, Snoopy was cowed by the little girl’s energy. As soon as I sat down, she threw me a big Mickey Mouse ball and then a small yellow ball, both of which she kept in play while running around the room. Given what I knew about Stalin, it made sense that his grandchild was not a shy, unforthcoming little thing. When her mother Svetlana, arrived, Olga and I were having a conversation. She’d been told I was a writer and that I had a little boy named Ben, but she kept insisting his name must be Pen. She thought it was only to be expected that a writer would name his child Pen, which would be, as she kept insisting, short for Pencil.

Schubert on Hickory Court

The other day when I was cleaning up in the kitchen with WFMT’s “Exploring Music” on the Bose, Bill McGlaughlin played Schubert’s last string quartet, which brought back the time the composer arrived in our rented house on Hickory Court between the covers of M. B. Goffstein’s A Little Schubert (Harper and Row 1972). In 23 pages and 10 simple sentences, Goffstein shows us “a cold and snowy town called Vienna,” and “a short fat young man” with round eyeglasses in an overcoat walking through the snow looking twee enough to be a Peanuts character on his way to give piano lessons to Schroeder. We see him sitting at a table in his “bare little room without a fire” writing music “as fast as it came into his head.” His mouth is open as he writes, as if he were singing. Then we see him just smiling and listening and the text tells us that he heard music “when his friends heard nothing,” music “no one had ever heard before,” so much music “that he could not possibly remember it all.”

When you think about that deceptively simple word expecting, with all its positive/negative possibilities, sharing Schubert with my almost 4-year-old son rates as delightfully unexpected. Not that his joy in dancing to the lively piano waltzes on the enclosed plastic disc led to a career in classical music. What happened instead was that I became subject to fits of irrational behavior, like going to the Record Exchange one day and trading two Grateful Dead albums for three Schuberts. Before long, all but the absolute keepers in my rock collection had been sacrificed to my quest for the music made in cold snowy Vienna by Goffstein’s adorable, bespectacled little fatty, who I would soon discover was one of the most fearsomely gifted creative beings ever to walk the earth, the demigod who wrote the music Toscanini said he wanted to hear as he died — that being the adagio of the String Quintet in C major, written mere months before Schubert’s own death at 31.

So it happened that on January 31, 1980, we celebrated Schubert’s birthday with a cake that my son and I picked up at the Village Bakery in Lawrenceville. The woman in charge seemed to be aware of the theme of the day, as if people had been in all morning asking for birthday cakes for Schubert. We talked about what to put on the cake. “How about a little bird on a branch?” my son suggested. After we agreed on the decoration, she took an ordinary white cake to the back room; when she returned, it said “Happy Birthday Franz Schubert” in Gothic letters of chocolate icing, plus a yellow bird on a branch and some bars of music complete with quarter-notes. That evening after dinner we three sang “Happy Birthday” and from that moment until we moved the following summer, the house at Hickory Court would be filled with music, most of it by Schubert.

Kennan on Hodge Road

When we moved into a Hodge Road garage apartment behind the renowned historian and statesman George Kennan, I recalled that April Fool’s day on Patton Avenue, our new landlord being the man who had guided Svetlana Alliluyeva through her transition to the United States after she defected in 1967. In fact it was Kennan who had convinced her to come to America in the first place. As for the peculiar poetics of “expecting,” who could foresee our transition from Stalin’s granddaughter to the former ambassador to the Soviet Union. And who could foresee a neighborhood where Ben and his mother regularly went trick or treating at the homes of a bestselling novelist (Peter Benchley), a former attorney general (Nicholas Katzenbach), and a former undersecretary of state (George Ball).

In the second volume of his Memoirs (1950-1963), Kennan describes his home as “a comfortable, reliable, and pleasant shelter … devoid of ghosts and sinister corners” but also “slightly detached … as though it did not expect us to stay forever.” The term “garage apartment” doesn’t do justice to the cozy home we moved into behind the stately Italianate house George and Annelise Kennan had been living in for 30 years. I can still see the tall, rangy figure of our landlord riding off to the Institute of Advanced Studies on his bicycle, and I have a wintry image of rosy-cheeked Annelise striding toward snow laden Hodge Road on a pair of skis. Although I’ll always remember helping Kennan shovel the driveway as he discoursed on Reagan’s Star Wars initiative and bemoaned the influence of Edward Teller, I prefer back door glimpses of a man in his bathrobe tossing stones to scare off squirrels raiding the bird feeder. My favorite image, however, is of the steadfast writer woodsman chopping the logs that provided fuel for the wood-burning stove in the tower study where he worked. I never got to see that room, but just now when I asked my son for his thoughts about the time, he remembered Mr. Kennan showing him “a very special room at the top.” It was up there that The Nuclear Delusion, The Fateful Alliance, the beginning of Sketches for a Life, plus numerous op-ed pieces for the New York Times, were written, all during the six years we lived behind the Kennans.

I was in Dublin on March 2005 when the news of George Kennan’s death made the front pages of newspapers in Ireland and England. In addition to the obituaries, there were essays about his life and work but no back door glimpses of the man we knew as a more-than-neighbor.

Although Hodge Road was named for Charles D. Hodge, president of the Princeton Theological Seminary, for our family it will always be George Kennan’s street.

Deer On Princeton Ridge

Next August it will be 40 years since we moved into this house on a cul-de-sac near the Princeton Shopping Center. On Patton Avenue, we knew Princeton was a special place, but could we have foreseen living on a street that was visited recently by two stags with full racks of antlers? The photo on this page was taken by my wife Leslie, as was the one of the fox that stopped by our back yard a few months ago. Looking ahead to our 60th wedding anniversary next October, of all the themes and variations on expecting that I can imagine, the most memorable was provided by Leslie when I playfully broached the idea of marriage four years before the event actually took place, at which she laughed out loud and said, “That would be a disaster!”

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Note: Some of the material in this article appeared in different form in previous reviews, dating back to November 18, 2004 (“Happy Birthday George F. Kennan: A Hodge Road Reminiscence”), which featured a sketch of George Kennan provided by Mary Acheson Bundy, whose obituary in the October 29 issue refers to her “burgeoning two-pronged career as a landscape artist, working in pastel, and as a portrait artist.”