Knight Edwards: In Memoriam

This past September a memorial service was held at Central Congregational Church in Providence for my father-in-law, Knight Edwards. Four hundred twenty-six people signed the guest book. Most of those—including the mayor, a U.S. Senator, two university presidents, and many others whose significance was probably lost on me—stood in line for up to two hours to shake our hands. Days later, attendees were still telling me what a wonderful service it was. One neighbor raved about the eulogy given by Central's pastor, Rebecca Spencer: "I told my husband when I die, I want her—even though I'm Catholic!" But another neighbor voiced a small complaint: there should have been more stories about Knight.

I acknowledged he had a point, then reminded him that Knight himself was the real storyteller; nobody else in the family has his talent or inclination for keeping a live audience captive and delivering a punchline.

Many people who shook our hands in the receiving line, or wrote us condolence notes, told stories, of course: Knight as a young boy indignant at having his hat swiped and thrown around the school bus; Knight and his father, William H. Edwards, greeting each other with a hug each morning as they started their work day at Edwards & Angell; Knight accompanying a young relative to a school father-son weekend when the boy's own father was ill with polio; Knight walking out of a Department of State Library Services meeting in disgust when he disapproved of a policy decision.

But as I ponder the absence of this man I loved, I wonder if his essence can be captured as well—or better—by the stories he himself used to tell, rather than by the stories we now tell each other about him. Like the one about the old Yankee sailor he met who abandoned his outing on a very foggy day: "Couldn't see my first mahk." "What was your first mark?" asked Knight. "Bow of my boat." Or the joke about the man who stood up at a dinner party and gave a toast to his lovely wife, "who's given me thirty-six of the best years of my life." "Thirty-eight, dear!" the wife called out, to which the husband replied, "Thirty-six out of thirty eight isn't bad."

"Don't stop me if you've heard this one," he'd say; "it bears repeating."

An effective speaker also knows when to shut up. Once in the Eighties when Edwards & Angell sponsored an outing for all their staff—a free concert, I think it was—Knight confided in me that so many people thanked him on the way out, he'd given up trying to explain that despite his name, he was not really responsible, not the "owner," just one partner in a firm established decades earlier by his great uncle. "Now I just say, ‘You're welcome,'" he told me.

Good storyteller that he was, he knew how to draw stories out of other people, too. No one acquainted with him escaped hearing about his World War II experiences, when, according to him, the U.S. Navy misinterpreted all the "ENG" (for English) courses on his Brown transcript as Engineering and made him a gunnery officer on a battleship. There was many a dinner table rendition of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, complete with artillery sound effects (probable source of his advancing deafness in later years); and my favorite wartime story involved a superior officer taking Knight aside and admonishing him, as an engaged man, to stay away from the gambling table. But the night my future in-laws met my parents for the first time, Knight somehow got my father, a man of few words, to tell a long story I'd never heard, about his own wartime reunion with family members in the Old Country whom he'd never met before. My father got choked up near the end of his telling, and none of his listeners' eyes were quite dry.

There were stories Knight couldn't tell without crying, either, like the time he was summoned to Ravello to rescue his stepmother and father, who'd just suffered a heart attack; Knight would break up when recounting how the innkeeper, a large Italian woman, enclosed him in a bear hug with a hearty assurance in broken English: "He is going to be all right!"

Despite his strong personality and ability to dominate a room, there was a big component of humility in Knight Edwards. When my father explained, that same night of their first meeting, that he'd gone to college on the G.I. Bill, Knight allowed as how he'd gone to law school on the G.I. Bill—making it sound as if he wouldn't have been able to go otherwise. And Knight always depicted himself as a young lawyer having to apply for a job at Edwards & Angell just like everyone else. (At some point he was eligible to convert his "LL.B." degree from Harvard Law School into the more impressive-sounding "J.D.," but he thought it silly to bother.)

I never knew Knight's father, William H. Edwards (known as "Bill"), but I see the same unpretentiousness in a photocopy we have of a letter he wrote to his infant namesake, my husband's older brother, in 1954. After devoting many words to the baby's illustrious maternal ancestors, he says, "Your forebears on that side are, I am sure, much more distinguished than those on your father's side. Not that your father's ancestors weren't good people. But they were mostly farmers without fame." The letter also states, "I think myself that preoccupation with one's ancestors means too much looking backward; but there is interest, if the interest is kept in the right proportions, in knowing the facts, and there is also inspiration (and sometimes warning) to be derived from studies of this sort." The accompanying handwritten genealogy chart, covering eight generations, details not just Edwardses but also Potters; Palmers; Gurneys; Shaws; people of Dutch extraction with names preceded by "Van"; some eighteenth century Fondas whose descendants supposedly include the famous actors; and others too numerous to list here. The earliest known Providence residents on the chart were born before the American Revolution. One couple is noted to have lived at the corner of John and Thayer Streets around the beginning of the 1800's.

When I peruse this chart and think of all the lives represented on it, indicated only by names like "Mehitabel Albro" and "Elisha Palmer"—plus a few dates and footnotes Bill made to the chart, containing such information as "buried at Swan Point," or "Storekeeper, South Berwick, Maine"—I wonder if any of these people, besides Knight and his father Bill, could laugh heartily at their own expense, recite long passages of Shakespeare from memory, and cry unabashedly at weddings. I wonder what stories people told about them, and how long the stories got passed around before they—the stories—died out. (Of the parents of the Edwards & Angell co-founder, Bill writes, "John Edwards. A farmer. It is said he could neither read nor write, but his wife Ann Van Schaik (pronounced Van SKOIK) kept his accounts, read to him, brought him up to the mark.")

When Knight's grandfather, Seeber Edwards (brother of the law firm's co-founder), died in 1914 at the age of 45, his family published a memorial volume about him. I remember coming across a copy of it years ago. It told all about the schools he went to and the jobs he held and the work he did for his community. Just as at Knight's funeral, it was all about him, and yet the man himself was missing.

The part of Rebecca Spencer's eulogy that sticks most in my mind is about Knight gripping her arm to tell her something important. What he actually said to her is lost on me—I can't remember that part of the story Rebecca told—but her description of him leaning close to her and holding on to the crook of her arm, such a typical gesture to anyone who knew him, brought him to life.

This was supposed to be a piece about Knight Edwards and his Providence heritage. And it is, but more than that, it has turned into a piece about life and death, about memory and storytelling; about how to tell a story, "how to save a life," as the writer Tim O'Brien has said.

Way on the opposite end of my children's family tree is my ninety-three-year-old Great-Aunt Jo. She's the last surviving member of her generation, from a family of six children, including my grandfather, whose parents emigrated from Naples around the turn of the twentieth century. The last time I saw Aunt Jo, prompted in part by the recent death of her ninety-five-year-old sister, I pestered her for stories of their childhood. Their schooling had largely ended by eighth grade, and they were never much given to writing things down, or having things written about them—there's no hand-annotated genealogy on this side of the family, no long discursive letter upon the birth of a namesake, no front-page newspaper article reporting someone's retirement from a distinguished career, as in the case of William H. Edwards. But I had my laptop with me that day, and as Aunt Jo talked, I typed as fast as I could: about how they washed sheets in a stovetop cauldron, and all six children used the same bathwater, and their mother (who later died of a cerebral hemorrhage while frying veal cutlets for dinner) sent them running down to the street with a loaf of still-warm bread to give to the soldiers returning from World War I … Aunt Jo is throwing a party at her house in New Jersey next month. I'm tempted to bring my laptop again—but on second thought, I think I won't. I think that, this time, I'll just sit there and be with her.

One Saunderstown neighbor told my husband and me that a few decades ago, his own father had been impressed, maybe even a little envious, at the boat Knight owned then, a Sabre 28 named Chibouk (that's another story). It became a sort of inside joke within their family: every time they gazed off the porch of their summer cottage at a pretty little sloop sailing down the Bay, they'd say to one another, "Look, there goes Knight Edwards!"

Knight Edwards died on August 21st, 2005. On September 9th, in accordance with his wishes, his ashes were scattered over Narragansett Bay, south of the Jamestown Bridge, on an outgoing tide.

[This article appears in the November 2005 issue of East Side Monthly.]