Cheerful Money

by Tad Friend

  Most of all, I am a Wasp because I harbored a feeling of disconnection from my parents, as they had from their parents, and their parents had from their parents. And because, deep into my thirties, most of my relationships had the life span of a child’s balloon. I felt that I was carrying around a brimming bucket of walnut stain and that if anyone got too close it would spill all over both of us. So I ended up spending my inheritance and then some on psychoanalysis. I was in trouble, but it was nearly impossible for anyone who didn’t know me well to tell, and I made it nearly impossible for anyone to know me well.

  ______

  WHEN I was twelve, my father, looking around the dinner table meaningfully, repeated a biblical quotation a Swarthmore student had reminded him of earlier in the day: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.” “That lets me out,” I said, and my parents laughed. In Swarthmore, the dinner table was where we performed, auditioning for attention. We’d sit at the round butcher-block table Mom had commissioned in Buffalo, eating her quiche lorraine and waiting for my parents to stop discussing college business — and at last Mom would turn to us for brief accounts of our days. My younger brother, Pier, who in memory always wore a striped rugby shirt, would remark that his team had won its Little League game — he was the star pitcher — and beam at the resulting praise. Our sister, Timmie, the youngest, would excitedly announce that she’d had six hot dog halves at Oonie Ryan’s half-birthday party. “I can see that you did,” Mom would remark, smiling; in those days Timmie was a little chubby. Timmie would blink and crimson, then bolt from the table. Mom would exchange a chagrined glance with my father — she always hoped for a blithe, Noel Cowardish return of serve — and then stand in exasperated remorse and fold her napkin and go find Timmie.

  We were expected to appreciate what we’d been given and make conspicuous use of it. (Wasps are credentialists, but my father particularly so: he thumbnailed people by their résumés: “A very able guy with a PhD in microeconomics from Stanford … head of the Asia Society … served on the National Security Council.”) Yet my parents had also sought, in different ways, to escape the way of life that had sustained their own achievements. So we received a tricky set of imperatives: meet the unspoken standard without thinking about it too much. Brooding on ancestral benchmarks could suck you into a life on the couch, the long parenthesis; Wasps don’t rebel so much as drink, sink, and drop away.

  My parents would mention our parenthetical relatives (John Anthony Walker, Tisha Pierson, various Robinsons) in tones of sorrow and then change the subject. Only much later would I learn that John Anthony Walker, my father’s cousin, never held a job before dying in India of a kidney infection he’d treated with Ayurvedic medicine. And that Mom’s cousin Tisha Pierson disowned us all, changed her name to Molly Morgan Miller, and disappeared. And that Mom’s uncle John Trumbull Robinson Jr., known as Wassa, turned on his sons in a manic rage in the parking lot of a drive-in restaurant near their home in Wayne, Illinois, sending Donny fleeing into a cornfield and leaving David holding on for his life in the open back of the family station wagon as his father gunned off, pursued by demons that would hound him into the electroshock ward. And that Wassa’s oldest son, Johnny, went even further astray. (As children, all we knew was that if he rang up collect from an institution, we shouldn’t accept the call.) One night in the late 1970s, Johnny showed up at Donny’s apartment in Manhattan and belligerently demanded money for his cab fare. When Donny refused, Johnny darted for the knife rack in the kitchen. Donny tackled him, and Johnny clamped his teeth on Donny’s forearm and didn’t let go until Donny punched him repeatedly in the head, breaking his own finger. When the police arrived, Donny went to Lenox Hill for the bite, and the cops took Johnny to Bellevue and then to Ward’s Island, where he kept declaring, “I am John Trumbull Robinson the Third,” incredulous that the storied name didn’t precipitate his immediate release. He died in Baton Rouge, in 1996, broke, crazy, and alone.

  They were us, too. That you must carry everyone with you, swelling the ranks, is a hard-ridden Wasp hobbyhorse. My father remembers (with dismay) his prep school class at St. Paul’s being charged by the rector to have lots of children and go into politics, lest they be overwhelmed by the outsiders massing at the gate. Charles W. Eliot, Harvard’s president from 1869 to 1909, boiled that imperative down to “produce and reproduce,” observing that: “The family, rather than the individual, is the important social unit. If society as a whole is to gain by mobility and openness of structure, those who rise must stay up in successive generations, that the higher level of society may be constantly enlarged, and that the proportion of pure, gentle, magnanimous, and refined persons may be steadily increased.”

  For generations — the three centuries when Wasps ran the country — my family rose and stayed aloft. After my various forebears came to America in the mid-seventeenth century as weavers or constables or tavern owners, it was their descendants who made good: signing the Declaration of Independence (the trembly penned John Morton) or leading the Union Army (the shilly-shallying George McClellan). The branches of my family tree were bowed with squires, judges, ministers, senators, and colonial dames. Yet no one grew really wealthy until the turn of the twentieth century, when the Friends made enough from steel, coal, and banking to become — briefly — smashingly rich: chauffeur rich, yacht rich, $350,000,000-in-today’s-money rich. On the whole, we were attendant lords, the seat-fillers in historical paintings who look on approvingly as those whose names are taught in school read a ringing speech or charge a well-garrisoned hill.

  My great-great-grandfather Henry Cornelius Robinson was in this way typical. An eloquent and energetic mayor of Hartford in the 1870s, a man who greeted male friends by gripping their shoulders and crying, “Comrade!” a passionate man moved to tears by stirring music, a burly man with a scimitar nose and sideburns that swept into a forked beard worthy of ZZ Top, he was also a man who liked to lie on his red sofa after a hard day and have his daughter rub his forehead with a sponge dipped in bay rum. He wrote Christmas carols — “Exult, ye sons of men, ’tis clearest morn! / Exult, ye sons of men, the child is born!” — and kept two Union flags from the Civil War draped over his piazza and a huge American flag above them. When Ulysses Grant died, Robinson consoled Hartford’s citizens with a speech recited from memory: “It is a great thing to have lost such a man; it is much greater to have had such a man to lose,” he declared. “He was a child of the people, he was a type of the people, and the hearts of the people are keeping sad time to the funeral march of twenty thousand soldiers. The nation pauses in its activities. The reaper and the loom are at rest, and even the money-changers have locked their vaults.” Yet when President Benjamin Harrison asked him to serve as minister to Spain — a step toward becoming such a man himself — he declined: “What, leave Hartford?”

  In latter years, as the money that had buoyed flotation leaked and then flooded away, my family, like many others, tried to caulk the seams. In a country built on growth and transformation, on the appetite for more, the ambition to preserve things as they were is peculiar to the modern Wasp. All we ask is to maintain. So success, while vital, came to be understood not as blazing a trail but as waging a culture- or comfort-preserving rearguard action. Prep school faculties teem with Wasps who majored in English or history, as brokerage houses do with Wasps who majored in finance. Wasps serve as the caretakers of tradition in publishing, foundations, university administration, lexicography, antiquarian societies, nature conservancies, and trusts and estates law. Nearly empty of Wasps, however, are electric-car manufactories, Internet start-ups, and the X Games.

  Figures like Henry Cornelius Robinson saw their duty as leading without fanfare. Wasps continued to see this as their role even as they began to follow, and even as, shortly after I was born, they fell so far behind they lost touch entirely. Their accelerating crack-up was like a sonic boom: you heard it only after the Concorde was gone.

  I NOW see that the
charged moments I prized, my earliest memories, were always linked to those distant family constellations. When I sat by our kitchen sink in Buffalo and my mother touched me lightly in passing, like the Holy Spirit, I felt the cool linoleum below and the ensuing solitude but couldn’t know then that my ancestors, and the amassed weight of their expectations, had crowded the room to keep Mom intent on her chores. What her parents thought and felt and did was alive in her, and so alive in me. Or mostly it was; not everything connects. Sifting through our overstuffed attics and well-guarded memory banks, I try to fit the pieces together in time, hopscotching among decades and mashing up friends and mentors, girlfriends and grandparents, in search of a larger design. Love enters into it, too, muddying everything.

  Life is a scavenger hunt run backward as well as forward, a race to comprehend. But with Wasps, the caretakers lock the explanatory sorrows away, then swallow the key.

  TWO

  Mud

  SPRING, STRUGGLING NORTH, comes late to Vermont. As we returned from the funeral Mass for Baba, my grandmother’s cook for sixty years, our boots sank into ground soaked with snowmelt. We shucked our coats and mucky boots in the mudroom at PineApple Hill, the family seat of our friends the McDills. It was the end of April 2006 in Woodstock, a covered-bridge beauty of a town whose steeples house four of the surviving eighty-seven church bells cast by Paul Revere and his sons. PineApple Hill is a half mile down the road from Maplewood Farm, three hundred acres of alfalfa and clover long owned by my maternal grandmother and her second husband. Timmy and Tom Bourne had a four-story farmhouse, four tumbledown barns, and four spring-fed ponds, until their picturesque herd of Holsteins finished ruminating through all the money, and Timmy died, and Tom died, and the farm was sold to the CEO of Monster.com.

  The McDills’ mudroom is a handsome place, with large brown washtubs and coats slung neatly on hooks, its linoleum shining and expectant. As we passed into the house, I was thinking how Wasps love their mud. Grandma Tim’s family, the Robinsons, staged Thanksgiving dinners where everyone would play football barefoot in their dress shirts and trousers, then retire to a white tent, a hundred mud-footed relatives strong, to sing songs like “Daddy Is a Yale Man” (“When they reached the sticks / This brave mother of six / Took a drink and began to explain: ‘Your Daddy is a Yale Man; We may be married soon’ ”). Members of Yale’s legendary secret society, Skull and Bones, used to plunge naked into a mud pile during their initiations. (Sadly, they don’t anymore.) And members of the Porcellian, Harvard’s most exclusive “final” club, sing “The Hippopotamus Song” at club functions, booming the chorus:

  Mud, mud, glorious mud

  Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood

  So follow me follow, down to the hollow

  And there let me wallow in glorious mud.

  Wasps love mud because it — along with beach sand in the sheets — is their only sanctioned form of filth. You are allowed and even encouraged to get dirty on a birding ramble or in a game of touch football. Such stains are dueling scars, noble marks of privilege and leisure. It’s discretionary mud, clean mud. (Identical spatters from a job would be something else entirely.) And you can absolve yourself of it all in the mudroom, stripping off the soiled clothes knowing someone will slip in presently to clean them.

  That someone at Maplewood, my grandparents’ farm, was Baba, who had just died at ninety-two. Orphaned young in Naugatuck, Connecticut, Margaret Dunn had come to work for the family as my mother’s baby nurse in 1933 and was swiftly rechristened with Mom’s baby-talk name. She was just nineteen. After Mom’s brother, Paddy, was born, Baba gradually became the family’s cook and majordomo. She knew which cows had calved and what the milk tester had been worried about and where the checkbook was, and kept encyclopedic track of what my many cousins and stepcousins were up to. She held the family together.

  An exceedingly round, exceedingly short woman, Baba had abandoned learning to drive because her feet didn’t reach the pedals. She wore a blue apron over a white housedress and a necklace blessed by the pope, and kept her hair in a wreath fixed with bobby pins and a hairband. Her forte was comfort food, and her hugs smelled of starch and dough. There would be Baptist cakes for breakfast; chicken aspic, tarragon-sprinkled homemade bread, and fresh-picked lettuce for lunch; and roast beef, roasted potatoes, and corn for dinner, which was served to the children at the oilcloth-covered table in the kitchen and to the adults in the dining room around the corner. I still make a hearty tomato soup of hers that clearly originated in the rationing of World War II: the recipe calls for Uncle Ben’s rice, six stalks of celery — none of this fussy nonsense about inner stalks or discarding the leaves — and a can of evaporated milk.

  Though her cooking evoked groans of happiness, Baba so feared making noise when she ate that she’d nibble at toast like a mouse, having first sucked the edges to dampen their crispness. She was almost always cheerful, and she loved having the grandchildren underfoot, just as we loved watching her put date-and-nut bread into the oven or settle with a hop into her white rocker to watch General Hospital. At night, we’d vie for that rocker when we watched Star Trek reruns. She sent us Christmas cards with twenty-dollar checks inside, routing my grandmother’s money to us in a kind of low-stakes generation-skipping trust, and she gave me her old transistor radio so I could listen to the Red Sox in bed, as she did. I would fall asleep to Ken Harrelson describing the drowsy arc of another Carl Yastrzemski fly ball.

  Though Baba emanated abundance, her rooms atop the back stairs were spare as a nun’s. I would go in sometimes when she was at work downstairs and examine her possessions without touching anything, like a detective, looking for — what? She had only a low bed, a Naugahyde easy chair, two hooked rugs, a shelf of condensed novels from Reader’s Digest, and a crucifix on the wall between the windows that overlooked the Revolutionary War graveyard and Cloudland Road beyond. Her storeroom, under the eaves, was where we gathered in the evenings to watch her Super 8 footage of our previous visit.

  Her area was the opposite of the room belonging to Harold Ricker, the genial hired man who worked for the Bournes for thirty years. He had a saggy bed and a wastebasket overflowing with empty Bud cans, and one afternoon when I was about twelve I glided his door open and was wonderstruck by the centerfolds on the wall. Barely breathing, I moved in only to be confounded by a caption that mentioned “muff diving.” The muff part was clear, the diving a great mystery, and there was no one I could consult. In some intuitive way, Baba caught wind of all this and chewed Harold out (her dressing-downs happened often enough about neglected calls to the vet that I can picture it: Baba puffed like a pouter pigeon, Harold bent dolefully over his soup). When next I tiptoed into his room, the walls were bare.

  She was superb in a crisis. When my cousin Johnny Robinson would call and say, “I’m coming up to kill everyone with my sixteen-gauge shotgun,” Baba would reply, “Everyone’s out right now, Johnny, but I’ll give them the message!” When my stepcousin Lizz Greene, Tom Bourne’s granddaughter, was struggling with how to leave her volatile husband, Baba listened to her for hours. She listened to Lizz’s husband, too, when he’d call to give his side. But when he showed up at the farm to demand that Lizz come with him, it was Baba who stepped out, her hands working a dishcloth: “It’s time for you to leave, now!” And when my mother telephoned, in 1958, to announce her (soon to be dissolved) engagement to Richard, a diffident grad student in philosophy, it was Baba, on the extension in the kitchen, who cried, “Oh, no!”

  Baba’s funeral Mass was a surprise; the eighteen of us Protestant Bournes and Greenes and Piersons and Friends were a little blizzard-bound at Our Lady of the Snows. Mom’s brother, Paddy Pierson, heraldic with his blazer and bird’s nest of white hair, had carried the urn holding Baba’s ashes up the aisle, and the rest of us followed to the front pews. There we were bracketed by a few ancient parishioners known only to Baba, and not even to her at the end, as Alzheimer’s carried her out. When the priest took u
p the ewers of wine and water, he told us the Communion sacrament was for Catholics only. We sat in silence, denied the memorial service we were accustomed to and therefore the family specialty: the droll recitation of recollections that probably should have been shared with the deceased while she was alive.

  Timmy Bourne had loved Baba dearly and was in most respects a passionate liberal — she was a leading fund-raiser for the Vermont ACLU — but, like many Yankees of her generation, she viewed Catholics as Jesuitical schemers. The Protestant Reformation, as refined by the Puritans in the seventeenth century and the Transcendentalists in the nineteenth, had surely settled the proper approach to religious observance: hymns and chiming bells. “Going with Catholics in my day was a dirty job; they weren’t quite the thing,” Grandma Tim would say over morning tea on the porch. “Uncle Billy married one. He told the priest he wasn’t going to sign any papers, and they said no, that was all right, and just as they were about to begin the ceremony the priest handed him some papers to sign. The bride fainted dead away, as well she might. He signed them, and they raised the children Catholic, but it was a dirty business.”

  JANE MCDILL Smith, who put us Friends and Piersons up at PineApple Hill that weekend, is a brisk, handsome woman in her seventies, with cornflower blue eyes and a scratchy voice. Jane wears down vests and cardigan sweaters over turtlenecks, layering herself like an old-time skier to compensate for setting her thermostat at sixty degrees. Chilblains aside, she is a consummate hostess, making visitors feel not merely welcome but lordly as she shoos them from the stove and sink.

  Jane is part of the family, too, or close enough. She was one of my mother’s closest friends; Mom and the three of us children often spent lazy summer weeks with Jane and her three daughters at Line Farm, a McDill house on the back side of their property, while my father and Jane’s husband, Tom, worked away down south. What lingers in memory from those summers is the evening Jane’s eldest daughter, Julia, and I — both of us about six — decided to hide from our mothers. In our version of running away to join the circus, we lay in the high alfalfa thirty yards up the hill from Line and waited, gleefully, for the search. They came out and called a few times, then Mom tossed her head and murmured something and they laughed and went back inside. The grass felt itchy on my neck, suddenly, and the crickets tuned up mockingly under the dimming sky. After waiting until it was truly night, we went in.