by Tad Friend
THREE
Chimes
IN THE LATE summer of 2005, Timmie, Pier, and I staged a kind of intervention with my father. We were concerned that with Mom gone he was becoming isolated: he’d forgotten my birthday the prior two years and neglected to tell us for five months that a family friend had died. Sleepless at three a.m., grieving still, he would search the Oxford Book of Prayer for redemption. Though he had a new girlfriend, as well as hundreds of deep acquaintances and dozens of people around the world he exchanged letters and e-mails with, he had few truly close friends, and his invitations to dinner from Mom’s friends had begun to drop away. The three of us had extensive discussions beforehand about how to broach the matter, both because he was not at his best — none of us were — and because we knew his sensitivity to criticism, which we share. Any suggestion of blame or delinquency rankles. Grievances in my family are like underground coal fires: hard to detect and nearly impossible to extinguish.
Having told my father we wanted to talk, we gathered one afternoon over iced tea on the porch of the family’s summerhouse in Wainscott, on the south fork of Long Island. The wind was up, stirring the chimes in our cousin Norah’s flower garden across the way. I began by saying that there were many things we had relied on Mom for, and among them was being the family’s hub, the one who made the phone calls and asked about that interesting dinner party and kept every milestone and deadline in her head. “There’s a hole there, Day,” I said — when I was young, I couldn’t pronounce “Daddy” and called him Daya or Day, which stuck. “And we need you to do some of the imaginative thinking and coordinating that Mom used to do so we start filling it. We all have to be better about, well, being a family.”
Timmie went next, thanking my father for all the time he’d spent with her in San Francisco earlier that year when she underwent a liver transplant precipitated by an autoimmune disease. We’d all gone out for a week, rotating our visits to the hospital to spell Timmie’s husband, Scott, as she came out of intensive care. Bracing herself, she went on, “But sometimes I felt that you were present but absent, Daya — that there were places you’d rather be. I sometimes felt that I, in my hospital bed, just out of intensive care, had to take care of you. That I had to make sure you knew what time the cafeteria closed and what to take for your cold.”
Pier spoke last. He’d been the least inclined to have the meeting, disliking conflict and the possibility of giving pain. The most prudent of us, a Goldman Sachs vice president, he was also the most like my father. Quietly, looking out to sea, Pier observed that his children, Wil and Eve, wanted more time with their grandfather, and that their childhood was an opportunity that was already passing and wouldn’t come again.
Day breathed in deeply through his nose, his habit when beset, but seemed surprisingly gratified. “Well, if I’m hearing you correctly — and it is a pleasure to hear you all express yourselves so articulately — you feel as if you haven’t been kept up to date on what’s going on with me, the kind of news that Mom used to convey. You want to hear more about my life with Mary French.” Mary was his girlfriend, a lively widow. We glanced at each other: No, we want you to pay closer attention to us. We were also secretly amused: Day always used her full name, Mary French, preemptively distinguishing her from any other Marys who might fight their way into the conversation.
None of us had the heart, or the nerve, to correct him. It occurred to me that what we wanted might not be something he’d been raised to do. As I wondered if that meant we hadn’t been raised to do it, either, he went on to mention a conversation he and I had had the year before, when I’d told him I thought he might benefit from psychotherapy. He had done a fair amount of Jungian analysis, but I had meant something that was less about myths and archetypes and more about personal examination. “At this stage of my life, I am not interested in delving further inwards,” he said now. “I am interested in growing outwards, connecting with the wider world through the filaments of religion and philosophy. Therapy may work for you,” he said to me, “as a sophisticated resident of Manhattan, the capital of therapy. But I’m unsophisticated, a provincial man — ”
“Oh, come on!” I said. “You’re an extremely sophisticated man with a PhD in history who’s run large organizations and traveled the world. Don’t be ridiculous.” Startled to be challenged in his favorite rustic pose, he clammed up, sheepishly. And I did, too, annoyed at myself for challenging him only on the less vital point.
Afterward, in the kitchen, Pier and I shrugged and exchanged a look; it was not an easy house for private conversation. Timmie came in and murmured, “Well, it could have been worse. He didn’t get that consternated face that makes me shut down completely.”
I said, “But how he could have gotten the idea that we just want more updates about Mary — ”
“Mary French,” Timmie said, and we all grinned.
“It is what it is,” Pier concluded after a moment. This is what he often says after a market reverse: his way of suggesting that further postmortems would be fruitless. All we can do is bear up.
FORTY YEARS after my father first caught sight of my mother outside Sterling Library at Yale, where she was getting a master’s in English, he wrote her a poem recalling the moment:
… As if defense were required
To giant unseen forces.
Your hand was on
A broad-brimmed hat,
And your eyes cast down
For pitfalls in the sidewalk.
In those days, Mom wore Peter Pan collars and walked leaning forward with her head tucked, as if breasting a gale. Day’s poem went on to suggest that he had “waved away the tornado,” so “you might raise your eyes to others’, smiling.” Mom never acknowledged the poem, but she kept it in her desk. She was a saver.
In the spring of 1957, they had a few modestly promising dates. Then, after he returned from a long research trip to Southeast Asia (where he got engaged, briefly, to a Filipina), they reconnected. One Sunday afternoon in January of 1959, she gave him some Coricidin for his cold and they settled down in her apartment with cups of tea and the photo book The Family of Man — and suddenly the link was forged. She heard an internal chime and he felt a kind of decisive purr.
That July, he wrote her from his family’s summer-weekend retreat east of Pittsburgh, the Pike Run Country Club. “I wish you had been with me,” he confided, about having left a party to walk the golf course. “Far out of their sight and far from the sound of them I would have taken you, until, under a great tree in the open we could have disrobed, and on the wet grass walked, in our innocence, with only the moon and God to see us.” In September, he invited her to Pike Run for a weekend, feeling it only fair to show her the cocktail souls whence he came.
To keep everyone straight, Mom drew up a family tree of Friends, Holtons, and Walkers — my father’s paternal cousins — and took notes on the club members she met: “She is plump, jollyish, wears Bermuda Liberty dresses; he drinks”; “Playboy, 50, puts head on women’s bosoms, gin”; “Monotone voice, discouraging”; “70 but doesn’t look it, white jacket with signal flags, vociferous kisses”; “She has a horse; his proposal accepted because horse liked him”; “Dark, plays croquet, difficulty about job which he’s quit + Sheila whom he hasn’t married.” “I dismissed that world as of no importance,” Mom told us years later. “Now I know better.”
At dusk on their last day, my father drew my mother outside and proposed. After spending a weekend with the couple in November, Uncle Pad wrote Grandma Tim that “Lib is wonderful, happy and smiling. She and Dorie constantly embracing.” My mother reported by letter to Jane Smith: “Being utterly unable to express it to him (never have I felt the poverty of language so acutely) I suppose I will fail miserably in telling you how lovely he is. For the first time in my life I am met — confronted by, responded to — in all the ways that are important. For the first time everything, not just part of me, is exercised. I’ve never known what it was like to feel so WHOLE.”
My father wrote her often from Buffalo, where he’d begun work as an assistant professor, expressing joy in their love but also loneliness and the occasional hangover from Benedictine on the rocks. He was troubled by the abstraction inherent in his work of the mind and bewildered by the sort of debilitating wrangles he got into when someone swerved into his lane. He would remain mistrustful of the world’s impinging malice, of its oversupply of low-hanging eaves and claw-footed desks, treacherous objects that waited till he was deep in thought to inch into his path and leave him thumped and aggrieved. He had difficulty expressing his underlying boyishness and humor, fearing a loss of dignity; one of Day’s colleagues wrote of him, in his journals, “There is much sweetness in him, but the sap doesn’t flow.” In a letter to Mom from Buffalo, Day observed, “I think that I should like to become an Hasidic Jew, for to such, a rustic’s cry of joy is as valuable to God as the ten-volume Talmudic commentaries of the learned legalist. But it is so difficult to become a Jew from a standing start, so to speak.”
Mom was a Democrat who came from Democrats; Day a Republican son of Republicans. Mom was airy and anxious; Day earthbound and embarrassed. Mom had at one point thought of becoming a Congregationalist minister; the Filipina Day had been engaged to later became a nun. Neither of my parents was naturally ebullient.
Together, however, they struck people as a golden couple. Everyone was charmed by the elegant way they served tea to each other, and by their vibrant, intuitive connection, so noticeable in games of charades. If Mom received an impossible phrase to act out, such as Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s observation that “marriage is the result of the longing for the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue,” she’d think a moment, then windmill her arms furiously with a sly look — and my father would shout the answer, leaving everyone else to cry, “What? What?!”
At their rehearsal dinner at the Woodstock Inn in February 1960, Grandpa Tom stood to toast Mom, his stepdaughter, and maundered tipsily toward his point: “I never met anyone who was perfect before, but Lib is perfect.” Tom’s daughter Nicki, a bridesmaid, remembers that “I was so embarrassed for her, and for him, but I wasn’t jealous. I thought she was perfect, too.” My father had been dreading his own father’s toast: at Day’s younger brother’s wedding, in 1955, Grandpa Ted, still handsome then in his big-shouldered jacket and spectator shoes, had risen to muster a few benevolent but fuddled remarks before sliding into his chair. But in Woodstock, Ted got plastered early. My mother’s uncle — a classmate of Ted’s at Yale until Ted got kicked out for gambling (he would return the following year, then get kicked out again) — shepherded Ted back to his motel before the end of dinner.
In the morning, when my mother arrived at the Woodstock Episcopal Church, teary and radiant, my father turned to his best man, Ted Terry, to say, “This is going to be for a lifetime.” As the reception at Maplewood wound down, my parents stepped from the porch into two feet of fresh snow. The driveway had been shoveled enough to allow them to slip away in Mom’s Volkswagen. But two of my father’s Williams College fraternity brothers had planted a wrought-iron table in front of the getaway car, and sat with their feet up on it, swigging champagne like lords. Life was going to be like that, a long wassail. Everyone was so young.
A HALF century earlier, in an Edith Wharton novel, there’d have been trouble with the proposed match: my mother’s Hartford and New York mandarins would have sniffed at my father’s Scotch-Irish Pittsburgh steel family. But by 1960, postindustrial cities such as Pittsburgh and Buffalo, and even the palmier outposts of California and Florida, fell within the cartography of acceptability. (Indeed, my father’s great-aunt Rebekah was the only relative who looked into the question of suitability — “Who is this Libby Pierson? Who are her people?” — and after canvassing her sources in Hartford, she reassured my father that “the young lady came out well.”)
My parents were both members of a class that believed that its right to govern had been proved by history, by America’s crashing success as an experiment in freedom, free enterprise, and power. Members of the class tended not to trumpet that power, but their occasional fanfares now sound both smug and antique. The president of the Philadelphia & Reading Coal Company, George F. Baer, believed his authority derived from a covenant: the world would be “protected and cared for by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of this country.” In the prior century, Robert Walker, secretary of the treasury under President James Polk, declared that the Bible foretold that “a time shall come when the human race shall become as one family, and that the predominance of our Anglo-Celt-Sax-Norman stock shall guide the nations to that result.” When my mother graduated as the eighth-grade valedictorian of the Putnam Avenue School, she gave a speech entitled “The Spirit of America” that likewise yoked duty to belief: “It was this same faith that sailed the tiny Mayflower to our Eastern shore — which saw the hardy patriot through the grueling Revolutionary War — this courage that led the pioneer ever westward when his heart cried out for rest…. Are we to let them down?” No, apparently. On to the ninth grade!
As the twentieth century sped up, the old order absorbed heavy blows. First came the Depression and the perfidy of Franklin Roosevelt, who in his inaugural address declared that the elite had been poor stewards of the country’s interests, giving “to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing.” Then the Second World War conscripted the servant class. Only by long habit did the aristocracy maintain its assurance. In his memoirs, Thacher Longstreth, a lanky, bow tie–wearing Philadelphia councilman who spent an enthusiastic afternoon when I was fifteen teaching me an abstruse baseball board game he’d invented, wrote that one day in the mid-1930s, his grandmother Gah, first cousin to Herbert Hoover and president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, marched out of Thacher’s parents’ house over a fancied slight. They assumed she would return shortly, as she’d left her car keys behind — as well as her chauffeur. Some time later, however, Gah called from her house and in a chilly tone asked that his parents send her car and driver along. How did you get there? Thacher’s father asked, dumbfounded. “Well, I went out and stood in front of a car, and the driver stopped, and I told him I was Mrs. William F. Thacher and to take me to Locust Street. And he did.”
Gah and her set knew who they were, and so did everyone else. All they lacked was a descriptive name. If pressed, my fathers’ fraternity brothers at Williams College would have said that those who didn’t fit in weren’t “shoe,” shorthand for the white bucks they all wore. Then, in 1964, two years after I was born, the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell popularized the acronym “Wasp” in his book The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy & Caste in America. But as with many historical forces and periods — the Ages of Iron, Steam, and Reason, say — Wasps received their enduring name only as they were about to pass from relevance.
That long good-bye began the following year. Nineteen sixty-five marked the beginning of the social upheaval that would sweep away so many certainties and batter so many Wasp redoubts. It was the year that the Immigration and Nationality Act abolished the national-origin quotas in place since 1924, which had confined immigration, in great part, to those from Western Europe, thereby keeping out most of the sorts of people (Eastern European Jews, Hispanics, and Asians, among others) likely to be ignorant of — or to challenge — the traditional order. It was the year Buck Henry wrote his screenplay for The Graduate, the movie that deflated the Wasp culture of Southern California with one word — “plastics” — and that foresaw how the emerging generation gap would leave everyone stranded. (The script noted that the characters’ clothes should suggest “California Contemporary Sport Style: the adults in styles infinitely too young for them, the children in styles infinitely too old for them.”)
Nineteen sixty-five was the year my parents’ friend Franny Taliaferro stopped wearing white gloves to lunch, and that my father, The
odore Wood Friend III, truncated his name on his first book to Theodore Friend (after his cousin John Hay Walker III, who as the director of the National Gallery of Art went by “John Walker,” told him only yachts and racehorses should carry numerals). And it was the year my father’s best man, Ted Terry, a welcome, rather acerbic presence in our lives, realized he’d bet wrong on the future. “I wanted very much to be a partner at a prestigious law firm, and the day I became a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, January 1, 1965, was the day the Wasp establishment began to collapse,” Ted, who went on to head the firm’s trusts and estates practice, says. “I had my hand on the brass ring, and then the ring began to melt away. There had been a time when if you’re John Foster Dulles, because you’ve been head of Sullivan & Cromwell, you’re going to be secretary of state. You were tapped, like Skull and Bones.” (Dulles’s grandfather John W. Foster and his uncle Robert Lansing had been secretary of state before him.)
Nineteen sixty-five was the year of the Watts riots — the first significant racially fueled rebellion of the modern era — and the year that Lyndon Johnson both coined and instituted a new mode of national redress, issuing an executive order requiring government contractors to take “affirmative action” with respect to minority employees. And it was the year that two computers first communicated with each other over the phone, as well as the year that the “mouse” was conceived and the first minicomputer was built, all of which laid the foundation upon which the information economy would rise. That economy, now led by Microsoft and Google, would enable a technologically savvy elite gradually to replace the technologically unsavvy Wasp aristocracy.
Nineteen sixty-five was the year my maternal great-uncle Wassa Robinson, who’d captained the hockey team at Yale and been in Skull and Bones, got divorced from his wife, Diddy — a series of breakdowns having removed him, off and on, to the Institute of Living, Hartford’s retreat for the scions of privilege. It was the year Wassa’s oldest son, Johnny, second in his class at Yale, had his first manic episode; the year Wassa’s youngest son, David, began planning his escape from Hartford and his family’s “elitist mentality”; and the year Wassa’s middle son, Donny, another hockey-playing golden boy and a shoo-in legacy to Yale, was shockingly denied admission.