Cheerful Money

by Tad Friend

  The university’s new admissions director, a Wasp named R. Inslee “Inky” Clark, who came to be loathed by a generation of Yale alums, suddenly increased the public-school share of the freshman class by 9 percent and cut the allotment of alumni sons from 20 percent to 12. “Dad expected me to go to Yale and be something between the president of Bankers Trust and president of the United States,” says Donny, a tall, handsome, gregarious man. Occasionally he’d play catch with me at Maplewood, limbering up easily and then grinning across the lawn — ready? — and really burning them in. After attending Rutgers instead, Donny never quite made it as an actor in Los Angeles — “My type was the blond surfer, the ultra-Wasp, and these Jewish casting directors didn’t get me”; started a boutique shortbread company with his wife that entailed his wearing a Scottish kilt to distribute samples; got divorced; struggled with depression; staved off financial embarrassment by selling the family’s letter from Abraham Lincoln to his friend John Franklin Trumbull (my great-great-great-grandfather); and moved to Maine, where he house-sits for old friends. When Donny lived in Manhattan he’d often walk by the Ralph Lauren store on Madison and glower at the windows’ horsey homages to the world the Robinsons once bestrode. “If Ralph really wants to get to the heart of Waspdom,” Donny says, “he should do a whole window full of beakers of lithium and patients in white gowns.”

  The prepossessing sanity of the old ruling class was everywhere in doubt. Nineteen sixty-five was the year Lyndon Johnson irreversibly escalated the war in Vietnam, deploying the first American combat troops in the South and dropping the first bombs on the North; and the year, too, of the first widespread protests against the conflict. It was the year when it first became clear that the Wasp elite running the war hadn’t a clue. As David Halberstam suggests in The Best and the Brightest, his devastating portrait of the president’s advisers, they were led astray both by their class-based fear of Communism and by their implacable certainty. Of national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, the Groton- and Yale-educated Skull and Bones man, Halberstam observes that he “was the finest example of a special elite, a certain breed of men whose continuity is amongst themselves…. In their minds they become responsible for the country but not to it.” Of Bundy’s identically credentialed older brother, William, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Halberstam writes, “He had such good manners and came from such a fine tradition…. [But] he was the classic civil servant really, who believes he has succeeded if he meets the demands on him from the top of the matrix, and does not represent the bottom to the top.” As for the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, who toured Vietnam but saw there only what he expected to see, Halberstam concludes, “He was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool.”

  And 1965 was the year that the country’s most famous and exclusive clubs stopped updating their look and feel and promise. If you go to these clubs for dinner on a Saturday night, you get scotch-plaid-upholstered furniture in the Vintage Cherry or English Tavern finish; accordion-folded napkins in the water glasses and sourdough rolls on the bread plates; Dover sole and oysters Rockefeller served up by an Irish waitress with dyed auburn hair; and, for company, an elderly gent in the corner in a striped three-piece suit with pocket square who eats his meal and drinks his three Manhattans, sips Sanka with Equal on the advice of his doctor, then lumbers into the night. His demeanor forbids you to notice, let alone trespass upon, his immense loneliness. In his will the club will receive a small provision for a larger umbrella stand.

  AND so my parents’ generation was the last to grow up with servants who took care of the meals and the children and the bother, and so the last to require laundry chutes and dumbwaiters and foot bells under the dining-room rug. It was the last that had Sunday lunch at Grandmama’s and cut the crusts off white-bread sandwiches and employed silent butlers (the silver clamshells into which you dumped cigarette butts from your wedding present silver ashtrays); the last to drink old-fashioneds and wear fox furs and consult the Social Register; the last to grow up with calling cards and the gentlemen separating from the ladies after dinner; the last to believe that the only colleges available to them were the Ivies or the little Ivies or, for women, the Seven Sisters and the junior colleges known as the Three B’s; the last that ran down to New York on the train to meet a certain someone under the clock at the Biltmore or by the birdcage at Lord & Taylor; and the last that took ship for Europe with stacks of monogrammed luggage as a reward for their gentleman’s C or to salve the memory of a fickle beau.

  My generation was the last to receive silver christening cups and to be taken shopping for the chain mail of adulthood — camel hair coats and Brooks Bros. suits and Lloyd & Haig shoes. And the first to abstain from church, to give God a rest.

  My twins, Walker and Addie, in addition to forgoing all of the above, will have to make do somehow without christenings, mint jelly slathered over every roast, and even the faint expectation that a maiden aunt or doting grandparent might bequeath them a few shares of Con Edison, bought in the 1824 IPO. All they’ll certainly have, of the old dispensations, is their Waspy names, which Amanda and I bestowed both casually (we just liked them) and as a half-ironic assertion. So Walker and Addie may not even think of themselves as Wasps. This seems to me at once sad, exhilarating, and inconceivable.

  Often, in New York, I’ve had people ask, “So, are you really a Wasp?” as if they had stumbled on a black truffle. At a time when fewer than one in five Americans have any British ancestors, Wasps increasingly doubt their wider currency. Once the most American of people, we failed at the American necessity: assimilation. So we gaze out from the old game preserves — Bar Harbor, Watch Hill, Jupiter Island — and wonder how it all came to this.

  Many younger Wasps deny their heritage, instancing a Catholic grandmother or insisting that they belong to the Union Club only for the athletic facilities and don’t drop in very often, anyway. The nation’s once-most-prominent Wasp, George W. Bush, learned that his past was a losing story when he first ran for Congress, in 1978; his opponent won by reminding the voters that when he was at Dimmit High School and Texas Tech, Bush was swanning about at Andover and Yale. So Bush recast himself as a brush-cutting, “ain’t”-spouting populist, leaving Skull and Bones off the résumé. In any ethnic group, some are proud of their background, some are embarrassed, and some just don’t care. Wasps, marinated in self-consciousness, lack the freedom of indifference.

  Firmness of character requires either a considered affirmation of my heritage or a determined repudiation of it, yet I find myself ambivalent. I am drawn to what we had in great part because it’s gone — drawn to the ruinous romance of loss.

  FOUR

  Sand

  AS WE WERE driving home from a dinner party in Sag Harbor one recent summer night, Amanda said, “So what was that with the house?”

  “What was what with what house?” I said.

  “That vague, mumbly thing you did when Glenn asked about our house.”

  Over drinks in the backyard, our friend and host, Glenn, had proudly itemized the improvements he and his wife had made to their second home: the new kitchen, the spacious back wing. Even the septic situation, the Achilles’ heel of old houses on the South Fork of Long Island, had been rectified. Then Glenn asked where we were staying. “In Wainscott,” I said.

  “It’s Tad’s family’s house,” Amanda said, shooting me a prompting glance.

  “North of the highway?” Glenn asked.

  “South,” I allowed. South is better.

  “So you come out every weekend?”

  “Usually just the two weeks before Labor Day.”

  “Because …” Amanda said.

  “We rent it out through mid-August to pay for all the upkeep,” I said. “Right now the roof leaks everywhere, so we have to reshingle the whole thing.”

  “Why not come in the fall and spring?” Glenn said. “It’s lovely then.”

  “Yes,” Amanda said, “we spent
our honeymoon there, in mid-September, and played golf in Montauk and had lobster rolls practically every night. It was amazing!”

  “The house isn’t winterized, so we just shut it down,” I said.

  Glenn and his guests might have gotten the idea — I might in a vague, mumbly way have intended that they get the idea — that the house was a pokey shithole, which it is not. But as Glenn is a rare-books dealer who can price any commodity, I avoided certain details: that the house is not just in Wainscott, but in the Georgica Association, an enclave of two dozen houses on the western shore of Georgica Pond that faces houses owned by Steven Spielberg, Martha Stewart, and Calvin Klein on the eastern. That the house has eight bedrooms and two walled gardens and a lawn that runs to the pond, with the Atlantic in view beyond. And that the property, known as Century House, was where my siblings and I grew up every summer, as my mother and her brother had before us, and their father and his brother before them.

  I told Amanda that mentioning all this would have given everyone the wrong idea, and that I’d rather be judged not for what I came from but simply for how I am. She snickered. It’s true that the Wasp gold-star mentality — the notion that you should never mention your heritage or shining qualities, which in due course will be recognized by the relevant authorities — is hilariously unsuited to the modern world. It’s also true that by ducking behind my privet hedge to avoid being perceived as a Wasp, I had ensured that perception.

  Talking about the house just then was complicated by its uncertain status. My cousin Norah Pierson, who had presided over the place for thirteen years, had died suddenly that spring of a brain aneurysm at sixty-six. Norah was the older daughter of Wilson Pierson, my mother’s uncle and the house’s previous owner. She was tall and imperious, with rose-framed reading glasses dangling on a lanyard, and only her soft blue eyes kept her from exactly resembling Sacagawea. Norah had been an outsized presence: a jeweler who made chunky gold rings; an artist who scoured the beach for perfect knobbed whelks and surf clams, painted them with moons and stars or Mondrian-style rectangles, then returned them to the dunes; a contentious ex-hippie who rolled her own blunts on the porch, pot smoke wreathing her gray topknot. She stayed not in the house but in the artist’s studio across the way, flying out like a mob of crows to harass anyone who wandered by with a dog, particularly if they were our invited friends. She dominated dinner table conversation by demanding agreement with her dark beliefs about international banking, the estrogen that leaches from Saran Wrap, and our neighbors’ criminal reliance on leaf blowers and “the three-footers” — the slight Mexican immigrants who do most of the local gardening. One night we were all discussing why some of the men in the family feared some of the women, and Norah barked, “It’s because we have a cunt!”

  Her death changed the flow. Norah and her stepmother, Lou — Wilson’s second wife — had generously passed the house on to the younger generation, but to minimize tax consequences they had shotgunned their ownership out through a trust, “Honeysuckle,” named for the climbing shrubs that bracket the front steps. Family schisms had already appeared. Two weeks after Norah’s death, we all got an e-mail from Uncle Pad that began, “We live in a time of post-Norah,” and went on to say that a real-estate agent we knew had a buyer lined up: “He said that Honeysuckle should sell for between $25 million and $35 million.”

  Pier, who had been made the property’s manager by Norah and has sole discretion over matters such as a potential sale, fired off a reply: “Thank you for passing on this tidbit. However, my view is unequivocally NOT to sell for reasons too numerous to list here. Love to all.” Then, being Pier, he called Paddy and listened to his arguments in favor of a sale: the Association was awash with the superrich; a hurricane could wipe us out tomorrow; and, of course, the money.

  Strong arguments. And yet Timmie and I were firmly with Pier on the side of hell, no. With Maplewood gone, Georgica was the last family base, a treasure-house of memories. Henry James was in Lenox, Massachusetts, when he told Edith Wharton that the most beautiful words in English were “summer afternoon,” but he should have been here, where the days were all afternoons. We’d sleep deep and late in the low-ceilinged rooms on the third floor, the “Crow’s Nest,” then run off to the tennis courts and the beach, home for lunch, back to the beach, tennis again, back for dinner, and then play flashlight tag until puberty. In later years there were bonfires on the beach and sandy pairings-off set to the rout of the surf beneath the distant stars.

  In recollection, Georgica is always gin-clear. But there were also the low, close days when the wind licked you like a dog’s tongue, and the nights of surprising cold, a nor’easter coming in, when you pulled on another sweater and looked about for improving activities. There was no television for the longest time, and when Wilson and his first wife, Letty, finally gave in, their set crackled snow on every channel but PBS. Our way of life there resembled the one advocated by Sylvester Graham, the abstemious Presbyterian minister who invented graham crackers: “hard mattresses, open bedroom windows, chastity, cold showers, loose clothing, pure water and vigorous exercise.”

  When it was formed, in 1892, the 137-acre Association was intended as a rustic alternative to the overpopular Hamptons. The common areas haven’t been spruced up much since: there is a beat-up road and a few unbumpy speed bumps and a dowdy bathhouse by the private beach that was only recently (and controversially) rebuilt and brought up to code. Thickets of swamp mallow and shadblow, of groundsel and pitch pine, still surround a central field and the lawns of the old houses. Our odd sodality sits at the end of an unmarked street, defended by faded “Private” and “Dead End” signs and, in the summer, by a guard plopped on a beach chair who scrutinizes cars for their green “G” sticker and allows them — or really anyone who’s white and who waves — to pass.

  Much remains immemorial. On Monday nights everyone carries blankets to the beach and spreads out with wine and chicken for a picnic. As the men’s tennis final is played on the first of four clay courts, toddlers and spaniels run on the grass beneath the wooden windmill, and the elders Elliot Ogden, in a fedora, and Edna Thornton, in a broad straw hat, lead the applause. The trophies are handed out to the men in their sweaty whites — often to Pier, who has won the singles six times and carried me along in the doubles seven times — and gracious remarks made by the tournament organizer in his natty shorts, who invokes the theme of generations, the rising power of the young and continued skill of the old. It could be any year, really. There is the joy of the game itself, of play, and the power of this way of life: apparently untroubled afternoons, space, air, light, order, and someone else minding the children; a plenitude that would seem to inoculate parents forever against their children’s complaints.

  White tennis balls from the seventies still turn up now and then in the underbrush surrounding the wire backstops, a scratchy cordon of dwarf sumac, blackberries, and poison ivy where rabbits scooted to and fro but we feared to seek. In the Sunday-afternoon softball games, the tanned, sloe-eyed children of privilege all round the bases and score; Day, as one of two steady pitchers, has become expert at fumbling slow rollers. Crabbers wade in the shallows of the brackish pond, which is fed by five creeks and replenished by the sea, tiding in periodically across the sandbar. Piping plovers pose like decoys, then flutter up and wheel off against the sun, framed in the wet light local artists love. The beach is administered from a high white chair by the lifeguards, a series of lolling, zinc-nosed sentinels whose names are writ on water going back to Carl Yastrzemski, who grew up down the road in Bridgehampton and spent a summer preserving us a half century ago.

  As Labor Day nears, a chill grows in the shadows. Canada geese skim overhead and the whistle of the Montauk train grows insistent. The scrunch of bike tires on gravel is like ripped parchment, a contract torn asunder. A few jellyfish pulse their bells alongside us, bodysurfers awaiting one last wave to take us in. The sea surges and closes over.

  IN AUGUST of 2007, after N
orah died, we began pruning the touches she had added to the house since Wilson died, in 1993: plastic flowers, plastic porch chairs, plastic rolling carts piled with plastic place mats. (For someone who hated plastic, Norah couldn’t resist it on sale at Kmart.) Gradually the culling became a full-on spring cleaning, led by Amanda, who deplored the grease-caked kitchen and general clutter and grime.

  Amanda’s family are Wasps, too — they’ve been in eastern Pennsylvania since the nineteenth century — but in comparison to my family they are a practical, roll-up-your-sleeves group, not only willing to mow the lawn but capable of tuning the mower. When the kids asked what was for dinner, her parents would say, “Poop soup,” and at Christmastime her father would tote his gun outside to shoot Santa Claus in the ass. Amanda’s mother is famous for vacuuming her way out of the house, and without Amanda’s naval sense of cleanliness and order as a spur, we’d never have gotten started on Century House, or felt much guilt about stopping.

  Into the trash went the slack window shades and gelled cleaning fluids in rusty tins and petrified rubber plugs from the claw-footed tubs and the nearly empty bottle of Dr. Bronner’s almond soap left by Janine, our au pair in the late 1970s. Anything merely ugly or useless or otherwise doubtful went into the garage, a limbo from which Paddy and Karen, when they arrived after Labor Day, could rescue items they cherished. Soon the garage was stuffed with a sloppy mountain of mothball-soaked blankets; faded curtains; unmatched dishes; New Yorkers from the 1970s; ghost casters; and dozens and dozens and dozens of keys to bygone locks, some labeled with droopy tags — “French hat box,” “Old trunk,” “New trunk,” “Forrestal and Essex” — but most as orphaned as a lost mitten.