Famous writers, scientists, explorers, musicians-people who fitted in the category of Lion of the Hourwere invited by Seaman to entertain his guests. The pianist Ethel Newcomb came and played. Rose O'Neill, who had invented the Kewpie doll, came and painted murals of the fat pink cherubs with tiny wings in one of the rooms, which became known as the Rose O'Neill Room. Even the Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore, who had won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, spent a few days at Yama Farms. He came walking down the snowy road to Southwick one morning with Baron Rosen, a former czarist Ambassador to the United States. "I'm really not responsible for bringing this Indian," Rosen said to Mopsy, who was drinking tea in the kitchen. "I was walking down the hill to see you, and he joined me." Mopsy and Uncle were fascinated by Tagore, and both asked if they might do his portrait. He agreed, took off his top hat, and sat in an armchair in the middle of the living room. As sister and brother sketched from different angles his dark, steady eyes and his flowing white beard, Tagore compared the human condition with that of an unhatched chick, pecking away at its shell and not knowing what is in store until the egg breaks and real life begins. At one point as the poet was pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket, a dime fell on the carpet. "Isn't it odd," he said, in excellent Oxford English. "An old gentleman gave me this as he was waiting for his car. Do I look like a tramp?" That evening, Seaman identified the donor as John D. Rockefeller, who had mentioned giving a dime to "an old Negro."

      Mopsy did a big likeness of Seaman for his reception room. She painted Rudolph Wurlitzer tuning a Stradivarius. In three years at Yama Farms, she painted about fifty portraits. By then, she was established. Without entirely breaking her connection with Yama Farms, she moved her studio to the Plaza Hotel, where she had more work than she could manage. From then on, it was always that way.

      A few years ago, driving through the heart of what is now the borscht belt, I stopped in Napanoch. Southwick had burned to the ground not long before, and on its foundation stood a cinder-block Elks' Club. Seaman's log house had met the same fate several decades earlier, and had been replaced by sprout hardwoods and a trailer park, run by a man from the Bronx who could tell me nothing about Yama Farms.
 
 

     IN 1925, the family moved to Merrick, on the South Shore of Long Island. Lyova had become a partner of Igor Sikorsky, who had started the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation and was trying to build a viable commercial plane. While the family still had the farm, Lyova had pitched in there; there is a snapshot of him, in his fedora, sitting at the wheel of a tractor, and another of him standing in overalls and looking convincingly like a hayseed: bald on top, five feet eight, almost two hundred poundshe put on weight in exile. In business situations, an old associate told me, he let you do the talking and didn't waste words, but in company he became an inspired raconteur. When they moved to Napanoch, Lyova had rented an apartment in New York, near Gramercy Park, and came out only on weekends. He had worked briefly for the Hershey Chocolate Company. Then he had been connected with the entrepreneurial side of radio, which was just taking off. He was an usher at the Russian Orthodox church on East Second Street, and drove a Studebaker. His children doted on him. He told them marvellous stories in installments. One, whose main characters were named Longfellow and Shortfellow, went on for several years. My father remembers visiting his office in the Flatiron Building; the company he was working for then made siphons for seltzer bottles. Lyova met Sikorsky at the Orthodox church in 1923. Sikorsky seemed more like a poet than like a manufacturer: he was a selfeffacing, deeply religious man, with mustaches that drooped over his lips, giving him a slightly Tatar appearance. His name was not yet synonymous with the helicopter, of course. After that remarkable breakthrough, whenever he had to introduce himself to people he would say, "I am Sikorsky," and sheepishly twirl a finger above his head. His second love, after flight, was music. At work, he hummed the symphonies of his friend Rachmaninoff. In Russia during the war, he had built seventy-five fourengine bombers of advanced design, but he was at heart a pacifist. He meant the helicopter to be an angel of mercy, not a gunship. After he came to America, he dreamed of building palatial passenger planes, with staterooms and grand pianos. He had no shortage of energy or ideas. The problem was money. He had got out of Russia with the equivalent of a few hundred dollars, and was supporting himself by giving lectures on astronomy. His first backer in this country was Rachmaninoff. The composer gave Sikorsky five thousand dollars, and that was enough to start a company. In the beginning, it was a strictly emigre operation. Rachmaninoff was the vice-president; Lyova managed the money end. Sikorsky wasn't a businessman-he just wanted to build planes-and agreed only reluctantly to be the president. The personnel manager was a dashing former officer in the White Army named George Mehrer, who had been wounded during the civil war while charging a hilltop installation of Bolsheviks. The hill was so steep that the bullet entered his shoulder and went out through his lower back, just missing his heart. "The reason it bypassed my heart," Mehrer told his wife, a beautiful woman named Tanya (from whom I heard the story), "is that I was so scared my heart was in my boots." Construction of the S-29, Sikorsky's all-metal, twin-engine passenger plane, began in a back yard in Old Westbury, then moved to a rented hangar at Roosevelt Field. There were twenty or twenty-five mechanics, "calling each other Baron, Count, or General, like inmates of an asylum, and making tools of anything handy," T he New Yorker reported in August of 1926, explaining, "Sikorsky recruited his workmen from unfortunate and educated fellow-countrymen. All wear overalls and speak several languages." My father remembers Sikorsky visiting N apanoch in 1925 and helping him build a toy airplane whose fuselage was a spool of thread. That weekend, Mopsy happened to be painting a man named Arnold C. Dickinson, a rich real-estate man from Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Dickinson got to talking with Sikorsky, and decided to invest a hundred thousand dollars in his company. Sikorsky was so grateful that he made Dickinson the president, and stepped down to the position of vice-president in charge of engineering. Now they could go full steam ahead on the S-35, Sikorsky's latest design, which he hoped would be the first plane to fly non-stop from N ew York to Paris. Lyova and Mopsy were among hundreds of spectators who lined Roosevelt Field, on Long Island, in their cars and watched the S-35 start down the runway at 5 A.M. on September 21, 1926. The pilot was the famous French ace Rene Fonck. The engine was British, and had cost fifteen thousand dollars. The plane was loaded with gas and supplies. Halfway down the runway, one of the auxiliary landing gears released and dragged on the ground, tearing off part of the rudder. The plane then plunged into the ravine at the end of the runway and burst into flame. F onck and the navigator escaped without injury, but the assistant navigator and the radio operator died in the wreck. The company was set back by the disaster, and lost the transatlantic race to Lindbergh, who reached Paris the following year. But in 1928 Sikorsky signed a lucrative contract with Juan Trippe, who had started Pan American Airways. Wall Street began to take an interest, and that year the company graduated from its makeshift, emigre phase.

      That year, too, the family became American citizens. Having boned up on American history, Uncle presented himself for the examination. He was asked to explain the third amendment. "I don't know," he stammered nervously. Then he smiled. "And, actually, I don't want to know, because I consider the Constitution of the United States such a perfect document that it needs no amendments." The maid Alika was also examined, and remembers the ordeal vividly. In ten years, she had learned almost no English. "I was reading a little book I had, and the Avinoffs, they help me. They ask questions like 'What flies over the courthouse?' Supposed to say 'Flag.' One Russian say 'Pigeons.' 'When the President dies, who takes his job?' One Russian say 'The undertaker.' Or 'How many stars in the flag, and what for those stars standing?' In those days, it was forty-eight."

      The family's social life in Merrick was lively. Lyova was a bon vivant, and entertained constantly. Grandmother took charge of the cooking. The family saw a lot of the Sikorskys. Uncle designed the company's Winged-S logotype and argued with Sikorsky over interpretations of the Scriptures. Sikorsky played the violin, Mopsy had a beautiful voice, and Uncle would sit at the piano and play Viennese waltzes and Ukrainian folk songs in cascading arpeggios allover the keyboard. Sometimes Rachmaninoff would join them. He and Uncle had become friends in St. Petersburg. My parents still have a fine sketch that Uncle made in red crayon of Rachmaninoff's head.

      The family moved in two circles: aviation people, who were mostly Russians, and Merrick people, who were Americans of long standing. In those days, Merrick was a summer resort for thirty-five families, all of whom had considerable property, and many of whom were related, at least by marriage. Henry and Albert Lanier, grandsons of the Georgia poet Sidney Lanier, stayed there often. They were in their late teens. "Like everyone in Merrick, we were interested in tennis," Henry Lanier has told me. He is now in his seventies and lives not far from me in Westchester County. "There were three clay courts at the
Merrick Club, which also had a creekside beach. If you were a man, you played in white flannels. Only sissies wore shorts. You shot ducks and dug clams in the Great South Bay. The causeway to Jones Beach had not yet been built, and there were miles of virgin seashore. Nature still predominated, and the hunting and fishing were still good. In the evening, you could drive to Lynbrook and dance to Meyer Davis's orchestra. Sometimes the music was so soft you'd be dancing and not even notice it but you'd still be keeping time. Afterward-it had been such a grand evening you didn't want it to end yet-you went for a joyride on the parkway. Six was about all the car would hold. If you got up to forty, that was fast."

      Every Fourth of July, the members of the Merrick Club hired a motor launch with a driver and went five miles across the Great South Bay to picnic in the wild dunes of Jones Beach. In 1928, there were about thirty-five in the party, including Lyova, Mopsy, Zoric, my father, and the Lanier boys. Everyone went for a swim when the boat landed, at eleven o'clock. The men were in dark trunks that went halfway to their knees, and, as modesty required, separate tops. The women had on knee-length bathing costumes, and bathing caps. After the swim, Henry and Albert Lanier and the other young men went off to gather driftwood for a clambake. Everyone ate and drank heartily, then went in for a second swim. The water deepened gradually. At two hundred and fifty feet out, you were still only up to your waist. The surf was gentle, but there was a terrific undertow. Lyova went out over his head, far from the others. Suddenly, he was calling for help. Henry Schwab, the president of the Merrick Club, swam out to him with a mountain-climbing rope. Being a great explorer, Schwab was also president of the American Alpine Club, and always carried a rope. My father swam out, too, but he was only ten and there was little he could do. Lyova was a heavy man. By the time he had been brought in and laid out on the sand, there were no signs of life. The official cause of death was given as drowning, but I have talked to five witnesses, and they all believe he had a heart attack. His insurance man was a friend of the family, and was instrumental in getting the ruling. Lyova was covered for accidental death but not for cardiac arrest. Mopsy was left with three children; their third child, Elizabeth (Baby), had been born in 1922. With Sikorsky's aircraft doing so well, Mopsy had been on the verge of taking an early retirement from professional portrait painting.

      There was a full Russian funeral for Lyova, with three hours of wailing over the open coffin, and when it was over Mopsy gave up the house in Merrick and sold all her Sikorsky stock. She wanted to make a clean start. After a period of mourning, she bought a new car and a big house on the North Shore (Hidden Hollow, it was called) and started to paint in earnest.
 

 
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