Cheerful Money

by Tad Friend

  Jane’s father, John McDill, was in my mother’s father’s class at Yale, and they became friends; John later became a father figure to my mother, and a grandfather figure to me. My mother received a proposal from Jane’s cousin, and Paddy Pierson dated Jane’s sister. When I was born, three months after Julia, John McDill wrote my parents: “Would you consent to a contract of marriage between the two infants? Maplewood and Line Farms must be united or the neighborhood will fall apart.” Instead, Mom became godmother to Julia, on whom I had a hapless schoolboy crush, and Julia—who weathered the crush calmly, returning a proper thank-you note for each wretched poem I sent her—later made me godfather to her son William.

  Such clannishness is comforting to Wasps, who strive to compact the world into the old-boy network it once was. I play golf and poker with a man named Adam Platt, a friendship we arrived at seemingly by chance. But if I meet a Wasp more or less my age and mention Adam’s name, odds are that he or she will reassure me, “Oh, God — I know Adam Platt.” My father, it turns out, went on a date with Adam’s mother in the 1950s, later briefed Adam’s father when Nicholas Platt became America’s ambassador to the Philippines, and still later became his occasional squash partner. And so it’s no great surprise that the architect of PineApple Hill, a Colonial Revival tour de force that sits its hill like a diadem, was Adam’s great-grandfather.

  Jane and her sister inherited the house and its nearly one hundred and fifty acres from her parents, who inherited it from Jane’s mother’s parents; it’s been in the family for a century. It is a high church of the old way of life, complete with speaking tubes for calling the servants, should any reappear to fetch a coddled egg; foodstuffs that can be carbon-dated, such as a box of Reagan-era raisins about which Jane remains optimistic (“A little chewy, but good for the jaws”); battalions of whiskey-colored furniture; a Short and Mason barometer in the front hall whose brass arrow is stuck on “Fair”; and bathrooms, floored in curling linoleum, that feature medicine cabinets with hexagonal glass knobs, all slightly loose, as well as comfortingly rickety toilet paper holders and plastic night-lights shaped like the Duchess’s headdress in Alice in Wonderland. The chains on the table lamps have been mended and rethreaded with window shade pulls; the desks are accessorized with dry pens from defunct banks, postage meters for sending first-class letters in 1971, and a classroom’s worth of wooden rulers. The guest rooms feature hand irons for doorstops, ladder-backed chairs with suspect caning, and change dishes inscribed with French sayings — “Ne parlez pas d’amour — faites le!” — and filled with safety pins and bobby pins and orphaned screws. There are Talbots catalogues here and there and the faint scent of Crabtree & Evelyn soap.

  When Jane moved back to Woodstock from Washington, D.C., some years after her parents’ deaths, a representative from Chubb came by to calculate her insurance premiums. He moved through the rooms, jotting in his notebook and whistling about the house’s sizable dimensions, to the growing annoyance of Jane, who was brooding about how the basement floods every spring. Finally, he looked around the front hall and muttered, “Designer wallpaper.”

  “Excuse me!” she said. “This wallpaper has been here at least fifty years. It probably came from Sears, Roebuck. I have more rolls in the attic and we patch the walls when necessary. It is not designer wallpaper.”

  I like Jane very much without having any real idea what’s going on in there. Naturally merry, even larksome, she keeps her high spirits under firm rein and never discusses her dreams or her health, believing, as many Wasps do, that imposing oneself is a form of trespass. I recognize her tactic of forestalling inquiry by initiating it, because I use it myself. I once arrived at PineApple Hill after having called to let Jane know I was en route, and was chatting with her daughters in the dining room when she came in, not having seen me in years, and said, “Why do you introduce yourself on the phone? — I know who you are!”

  “Why do you always start conversations with a complaint?”

  When Pym, the family’s ailing thirteen-year-old Welsh terrier, died in Nigeria, where Tom Smith was the American ambassador, Tom and Jane didn’t discuss the matter with their children. “They just came back without a dog and never spoke of it,” Julia Smith recalls. “Once someone asked Daddy, ‘What happened to Pym?’ and he said, ‘He went to a better place.’ I don’t know if he died there, or was put down, or eaten by a lion, or what. None of us had the courage to ask.” When Tom was stricken with cancer in his mid-fifties, he chose not to burden anyone with that, either, so his death came as a shock not only to us, but also to Julia and her sisters.

  AFTER BABA’S funeral, Jane served roast chicken for dinner, with pineapple upside-down cake for dessert. We sat around her dining-room table chewing in silence until someone mentioned our exclusion from Communion, which seemed so un-Baba. Pier’s wife, Sara, who is Catholic, said, “At our church, everyone is invited to Communion.” There were nods around the table. We were united in this, though otherwise somewhat sundry: the Friends devoted to competitive games and propriety, my Pierson cousins gentler and more likely to shop for vintage clothes or dye their hair pink.

  From the end of the table, my father remarked, “Our disinclusion from the sacrament today is of a piece with the worldwide rise in religious intolerance.”

  “Oh, and when did that begin, Dorie?” Karen Pierson, Paddy’s wife, asked. A talented photographer, she likes to draw people out.

  “To give it an arbitrary date,” he said, “in 1979, when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson came to prominence, and Juhayman bin Seif al-Uteybi took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca, bringing with him a supposed Mahdi, or messianic deliverer of Islam, and about two hundred men.” He tipped back in his chair, a habit Mom could never break. “They held out for two weeks against the Saudis, until French commandos got them with nerve gas. Almost all the survivors, about eighty, were beheaded, but jihadism is the result. Fundamentalism is not merely a wave in religion worldwide; it is a tide.”

  “Why?” Karen asked, after a silence.

  “As a historian, I merely assert the fact of it, and that that tide is sweeping the world,” he said, his baritone reverberating like plainsong. He looked around the table, seeming to want to say more, to break through our polite attentiveness, but added only, “There will be a subsequent tide, but as to its nature, I cannot speak.”

  It was the kind of meal where I particularly missed Mom. She would have nudged my youngest cousin, Bella Pierson, to talk about her boat building, or reminded Jane that the house really needed — had always needed — a cozy little sitting room (and Jane would have replied, oh, yes, but she, Jane, could do without more easily than the house could withstand change). Then Mom would have suggested we sing one of those nonsensical Robinson songs that Baba liked to hear but refused to join in on, such as “Down in the Diving Bell” or “Clam Chowder” (“If you were like clam chowder, and I was like a spoon / And the band was playing louder and a little more in tune / I’d stir you ’til I spilled you; I’d kiss you till I killed you / If you were like clam chowder, and I was like a spoon”). She’d have gotten us going.

  Of course, it was always Paddy who started us on “Down in the Diving Bell,” rising in a cheerfully twitchy way to commence the sacred song:

  Come listen to my story

  Some truth to you I’ll tell

  About the pretty sights I saw

  Down in the diving bell …

  Even as a child, I sensed in Paddy a kindred spirit: a whimsically funny fellow who would purse his lips and sigh, seeming to hate to have to disagree with your remark — before launching into a spirited refutation. Mom and Grandma Tim were fiercely proud when his work as the White House correspondent for the Wall Street Journal landed him on Nixon’s “enemies list.” Paddy gave me one of my favorite novels, Bang the Drum Slowly, and later wrote me encouragingly about my magazine articles. After he left the Journal and moved to Maplewood to try farming with Grandpa Tom — he and Karen turned the old sugarhouse
up the hill into a warm and comfortable home — and after that move began, perhaps, to strike him as problematic, his letters grew more cautionary. In 1994, he observed that for my writing to achieve its potential:

  you need at least another decade of very hard work, preparation. The kind of hours of solitude that no wife and children ought to be made to put up with. And let’s not kid ourselves: a wife means children.

  Your dear mother says: “Tad just needs to work a few things out with his shrink, things about his mother and father. Then he’ll get married.” We all have such things to work out, and I admire your willingness to take on the task. But I trust there might be more to your unmarriedness than pesky things about your parents. A better reason is your career as a man of letters.

  He’d written on this same theme a few months earlier, concluding, “Greatness seldom cohabits with nippers — they take so much time and energy to bring up right.” It began to feel as if he were writing to a younger version of himself.

  I HAD last seen Baba a few years earlier, on a cold Saturday afternoon late in winter. I went to the nursing home with Amanda, then my fiancée, and we found Baba, a lifelong teetotaler, drinking a Dixie cup of red wine with slightly anxious pride. She explained that she’d been diagnosed with a lazy esophagus, and the wine was medicinal; the word “esophagus,” which she took a while to come out with, struck us all as very funny. Baba was smaller than ever, if possible, and her eyes swam behind giant glasses as she searched my face in growing apprehension, pleased to see me but unsure exactly who I was. As night fell she was prone to sundowning: growing anxious about Baby Bella, my youngest Pierson cousin (then in her mid-twenties), she would venture outside to find and protect her. When I showed Baba a recent photo of myself with Pier and Timmie, she clutched my arm, remembering her news: “And Tad is finally getting married!”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, isn’t that wonderful?”

  Mom and Paddy had sold Maplewood not long before, so after we said good-bye to Baba I drove Amanda to the farm to show her what once was. The Monster.coms were gut-renovating the farmhouse, the core of which dated to 1780; the house had been jacked up on its foundations but still looked much the same from the road, white clapboards and dark green shutters out of Currier and Ives. We entered through the porch door, lifting a blue tarp that flapped in the wind, and walked into what had been the dining room. Turning toward the pantry, where we’d inked in our heights twice a year on the door frame, I stopped, stricken. Nothing familiar remained.

  There had been such smells: maple logs burning in the small and long living rooms, Baba’s bread in the oven, milk whirling in the kitchen pasteurizer, napping dogs. And sounds: the chorus of creaks as someone descended the steep, crooked back stairs; the snick of a door’s hand-forged thumb latch; enameled tin cups clinking in the sink following afternoon lemonade; the brown plastic cuckoo clock in the kitchen exploding on the hour with idiot glee; the smash of icicles from the gutters; the hiss of the radiators; tractors coughing to life; my cousins tapping the walls, searching for the hidden room where runaway slaves were secreted when Maplewood was a stop on the Underground Railroad. During cocktail hour we’d lie on the floor upstairs and tickle open the black iron louvers on the old stovepipe dampers to eavesdrop on the gossip below.

  The dampers were caulked over, the interior walls gone. A barn from elsewhere had been appended to the back of the house as a “great room.” And the only smell was cold sawdust. You no longer had to bow your head to honor the sagging dining-room ceiling, which Tom had stabilized when the center beam broke by stripping a steel hoop from his silo, straightening it with his blowtorch and a sledgehammer, threading it through the beam, and anchoring it to the clapboards with a steel plate that graced the house’s exterior like a wart.

  I tried to explain to Amanda that across from the front staircase, here, was the long living room, and the Christmas tree stood in that corner. We would come down the stairs in a train, youngest to oldest, chanting the Robinson marching song from the Revolutionary War:

  Hayfoot, strawfoot

  Belly full of bean soup

  January, February, March!

  The procession would break apart when we saw all the presents by the tree. After a few rounds of gift-opening, Grandpa Tom would drop himself into the chair by the telephone like a chunk of granite dynamited from Mount Rushmore. A charismatic figure to everyone but his relatives, he would prop his thick canes against his knee and nibble on ribbon candy as he began a series of bellowed phone calls: “How’s that cow? I know it’s Christmas morning — what’s the matter with you? How’s about you bring her on by?” Grandma Tim would be jabbing me with the butt of one of the flyswatters that lay around and saying, “That’s the way Tom’s phone conversations start: ‘How’s that cow?’ It could be Jaysus Christ on the line, or Ronald Reagan. ‘Ronnie, how’s that cow?’ ” And then she’d be off, singing, “Butlers were suspected of going wee-wee in the sink / Or so the rich used to think …”

  But soon I stopped even believing myself and had to get us out.

  ______

  BACK HOME in Brooklyn, I dug out the videotapes my stepcousin Lizz had had made from Baba’s home movies. The video service had stitched the clips together as the film had tumbled from the boxes, so the tapes were as ruptured as a Tarantino film, cutting at random between summer and winter, between the mid-1970s and the late 1950s, in brief silent vignettes.

  There was Mom, playfully holding a silver baby spoon above my head as I tried to rise off a red towel to grab it. This was the period when Mom wrote to Jane Smith, “Tad is large (I look at him asleep and think, too large), vocal, + suddenly (after 2 years of aloofness), affectionate.” As I watched the tape I seemed to remember this sequence: the sun dappling through the overhanging elm, the grass tickling my feet as I lunged off the towel. I was surely remembering some subsequent afternoon, but now that afternoon becomes this, a late deposit of capital in the bank of memory.

  Paddy dances in winter with me on his shoulders in a gray jacket and hood; he is slim and dark haired, twirling jauntily as Grandma Tim, seated on the bench outside the kitchen window, encourages him. He tightens his grip on my calves and jumps up and shoots a leg sideways, clicking his heels like a Cossack. Timmy plants seeds in the garden as Tom hoes around her, both wearing mucky boots and smiling. A one-horse sleigh coasts down the driveway, the black pony wreathed in bells, with Timmy striding alongside in a raccoon coat like an emissary from Turgenev. My father sports a white Lacoste shirt with the collar up, in the mid-sixties now, looking as if he might suddenly invent the frug. Baba’s face peers down at the lens from the sky like God — is this thing on? (I suddenly recall the heft of her camera and its machining purr, the sound-track of memory.)

  Lizz Greene and her older sister, Anne, do cartwheels down the front lawn and I fake one — I never could do a cartwheel — and fall, and all of us roll sideways down to the white rail fence. Mom and I dance around each other in the driveway when I am three, she sporting a Jackie-style bouffant and a green sweater with white daisies. Baba again, frowning down at her lens. I am five, sitting on the blue tractor, glowing with pleasure as I turn the iron steering wheel and pat the tires’ dusty tread bars; my father stands behind on the tow hitch, smiling.

  My parents pose near my mother’s Volkswagen Bug in February 1960, inward young lovers made shy by company. They are just days from being married: my father, with a short haircut, grins bashfully; my mother has an air of noli mi tangere. The hopeless nostalgia for the life before. A slow pan establishes winter: a lap robe of snow unfolding over the meadow below the dirt road, across the pond and the brook and the island beyond, down to the frozen Ottauquechee River. I always imagined, when I was a boy, that I would grow up to live in a cabin on Woodstock bottomland.

  All of us are on the front porch, about 1971, my stepcousins Anne and Lizz and Brett, too. Mom, her hair frosted blond, urges two-year-old Timmie down the hill toward Baba; Timmie, short and round in a corduroy su
ndress, picks up speed, a smiling bowling ball, and the camera flares up and cuts off. Pier and I lie on the lawn in blue pajamas, wearing baseball mitts; Timmie stands in a long yellow dress nearby. I rise and fling a ball aloft to myself, stagger around and catch it, then throw my arms up. Pier, left out, raises his arms too, smiling sweetly. We all lie in a heap on the ground, wiggling.

  We Friend and Smith children are dancing on the porch, hopping around Grandma Tim, who cradles the fireplace broom to her cheek and begins to do the Charleston. Later, years later, she leads me and Pier and Timmie and the Smith girls up the hill, all of us in rubber boots: the seven of us composed “the Muskrat Club.” She’d tap our shoulders with the long stalk of a witch’s candle and declare, “Arise and take survey of your domain!” And when we went over the top of the hill to the Secret Valley beyond, there was a brook couched in fern and mint and hemlock: our domain.

  I always thought of Maplewood as where our family was at its best, but on film it seemed an Eden. If only Baba’s camera had always been on. As I fell asleep that night, I saw myself again through her lens: I am three, in a bulky blue snowsuit, stepping off the porch into the cataract of winter sun and sinking into a drift where I wave my arms in comic distress.