George Plimpton was having dinner with Kurt Vonnegut and James Lipton at Elaine’s one night, and he departed first. Through the window, they could see my dad step onto his bicycle and pedal away into the night. “There goes the last gentleman,” Vonnegut said.
I was raised to be a little gentleman myself. At St. Bernard’s, the New York City private school that my dad had attended with Peter Matthiessen, I learned proper grammar, Latin, and how to shake someone’s hand and look them in the eye.
