Cheerful Money
Page 6
Into the garage, too, went items such as the spare handle to the 1930s GE refrigerator — a unit long gone from the house — with its attached note from the plumber, also long gone from the house and indeed from the earth: “It might be wise to save these old parts for another emergency.” The Piersons believed in using “materials at hand” for any arising need; in this manner driftwood would serve as pickets for the garden, and a splintered table, with a few ax strokes, for a compost bin. Gradually the magic attic was born: if you stashed a chair with broken caning under the eaves for a spell, in the crawl spaces where the plaster oozes through the laths, might not the seat heal itself? Well, perhaps a few more years …
Our delvings in this vast reliquary uncovered Wilson’s cocktail shakers; a brass coal bin; an antique Singer sewing machine; wooden tennis rackets in trapezoidal presses, their wing nuts screwed tight against the salt air; and a dozen golfing trophies won by my great-grandfather Charles Wheeler Pierson; as well as a pitted silver teaspoon that belonged to Robert Burnet, an ancestor who served on General Washington’s staff (in a surviving etching, he has the vigorous Pierson beak and a glint in his eye that suggests cantering horses and iced punch with the ladies). We put these talismans on display, our refurbishments seeming to make the house even more timeless. And then there were the poignant little envelopes containing milk teeth or curlicues of Wilson’s baby hair. Displaying them felt creepy, like ancestor worship; throwing them out felt remiss. So, after a melancholy look, back into the drawer they went.
One afternoon, I tried to bring order to the living room’s hundreds of leather-backed hardcovers and humid paperbacks. Churchill’s The Gathering Storm was next to In this Corner … Dennis the Menace and the thrillers Journey into Fear and Keep Cool, Mr. Jones! Curiosities such as The 1940 Book of Small Houses and 7000 Words Often Mispronounced were intermixed with jovial etiquette books like Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses and Gelett Burgess’s Goops and How to Be Them: A Manual of Manners for Polite Infants, which explained:
The proper time for you to show
Whatever little tricks you know
Is when grown people ask you to;
Then you may show what you can do!
But sometimes mother’s head will ache
With all the jolly noise you make,
And sometimes other people, too,
Can’t spend the time to play with you!
Taking up The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and The Lives of the Hunted by Ernest Thomson Seton brought to mind the rainy days when I first opened those briny pages and began reading not only into my own childhood but my parents’ and grandparents’ as well. So many of the house’s children’s books by Wasps and Brits featured dead or absent parents: they carved out a replacement world where fantasy stood in for loving care.
When I glanced up to see Walker and Addie taking tottering steps on the lawn, pushing their stroller toward the birdbath and singing with happiness, I suddenly felt that I was them, laboring in the grass, or that I was my father, looking at me. It was all fluid. Everything in view would have looked much the same on a summer’s day in 1965 — or even in 1915, when Charles Pierson and his wife, Elizabeth, bought the house. In a file cabinet deep in a closet, I found a photo from that year: the Pierson children, Wilson and John, stood side by side on the lawn in knicker suits. Wilson wore a suppressed grin, having just made a sly remark, and John, my future grandfather, was cracking up.
When we were young, the wall of photos on the landing was more disquieting than the mug shots at the post office: the Pierson men with their high-bridged noses a mighty armada gazing down on my weathercocking pinnace. As we framed those portraits now, many of which had curled onto their rusting thumbtacks, I mixed in some livelier photos from the cupboards. But Charles Pierson, vigilant of his dignity, resisted updating. His youthful photo with Elizabeth, not yet become “Goggy,” shows her demurely beautiful in a Gibson girl dress and a flat-brimmed picture hat, and him regal in a high-wing collar. His eyes dream a little above an unyielding mouth. In photos with his young sons, who sport pageboy haircuts and matching linen tunics or middy blouses, they resemble the czar’s children with an exacting tutor.
Charles planted a red cedar in the yard and told the boys: “You must each jump over this sapling every year.” They strove to comply, but time wins in the end — the cedar is now forty feet tall. The competitive atmosphere drove Wilson to follow his father through Yale, where he, like Charles, was the valedictorian, and to join the faculty immediately after receiving his BA in 1926, eventually becoming chairman of the history department and Yale’s first director of the humanities. It drove John to surpass Wilson’s record the following year — and then to a breakdown.
At Yale, Charles was a gamecock known as “Cootie.” When the university received a frozen mastodon from Siberia, he snuck into the lab with some classmates from Skull and Bones, carved off a few mastodon fillets, then cooked and ate them. This escapade proved to be ideal preparation for his later life as a corporate lawyer in Manhattan. Charles represented the famous miser Hetty Green, argued and won a Supreme Court case on Goggy’s behalf over her having to pay New York taxes on Ohio rental properties, and wrote a book called Our Changing Constitution to demonstrate that it hadn’t changed a bit.
After his unexpected death from endocarditis, in 1934, the family was deluged with condolence letters. One correspondent, Charles Sherman Haight Jr., wrote Wilson that he had recently come before Charles Pierson as a member of the committee that vetted candidates for admission to the bar. Haight had heard of the committee’s searching inquiries into the candidates’ knowledge of American history, so he was quite nervous. “I was among the first to be called, and when I sat down at your father’s desk, he looked up with his most serious manner and asked — ‘Well, how is Charles Sherman Haight the Third?’ (The boy was only two months old then.) Then your dad beamed, and asked no more questions, except as to what men I knew on the list.” When not upholding the old-boy network, Charles exemplified, in his correspondence with the better newspapers, the Wasp “letter to the editor” mentality, which supposes that Americans can be led to understand what is right and fair. He would not have seen these roles as contradictory.
Charles had delighted in small economies — his transfer of Wilson to nonresident membership at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, for instance, saving fifty dollars — so he would have been pleased to read the letter one of his partners sent Goggy after her husband’s death:
Wilson dropped in the office Saturday morning and spoke of some cigars which Mr. Pierson had in care of the Bankers Club. I called up the Club and they told me that the cigars had been turned into cash and that Mr. Pierson had a credit of $43.50 on their books. I asked them for a check for this amount and have just received and enclose the same herewith.
Frugality, we came to understand, was a virtue, a way of honoring what you had been given. But the famous Wasp parsimony — counterpoint to, and often following a generation after, a notable example of Wasp profligacy — also derived from unspoken and rather discreditable anxieties. There was the fear that if the money went, we would be revealed as having no more culture or merit than anyone else — the fear that we’d retained power not through inherent superiority but through inherited funds. And, of course, the fear of being poor.
Years later, Goggy Pierson suddenly began to be very critical of her late husband. Wilson, who had loved his father, didn’t want to hear it. “But Goggy just couldn’t seem to keep it down,” Grandma Tim, who was for a time Goggy’s daughter-in-law, would say. “Victorian wife, I guess, couldn’t talk back while he was alive. But who can blame her, the way he worked? Every night, after supper, he’d go into that awful room and work till midnight, that awful brown room, like the inside of a cow’s stomach.”
Yet Charles also wrote poetry. The women on Mom’s side painted beachscapes and the men wrote poetry. His language was Tennysonian and exuberant, his outlook astonishingly bleak. There were
gloomy poems about goblins and blasted moors that ended in hope, and lyrical poems about nature that ended in despair. The latter were better. “Twilight,” evidently written in Georgica, concludes:
Ah hour so hushed, so steeped in reveries!
Not now on flaming dawn, or soaring lark,
Or throb of rushing wings, or opening bars
Of young life’s symphony, not now on these
Muses the shivering soul, but on the dark
And the lone road unlit by sun or stars.
He lived to see only one of his grandchildren, my mother. Looking down at her in her bassinet, he said, “I hope she’s a singer” — meaning he hoped she would sing around the house, filling it with the kind of cultivated beauty he feared was fading from the world.
WILSON, who inherited the place, dominated the photo wall: his deep-socketed eyes glinted down from every angle. He was the author of a definitive work, Tocqueville in America, and several histories of Yale itself, which led his colleagues to call him Father Yale. Though he often reminded us that our ancestor Abraham Pierson had been the college’s first rector, in 1701 (another ancestor, Jacob Hemingway, was the college’s first student), he had a pawky sense of humor about his own donnishness. When he heard a historian named Gaddis Smith ask the department secretary for paper clips, he poked his head out and said, “Young man, when I was your age we used to buy the wire and bend it ourselves.”
Humor was the main marital link. There was the morning Letty replaced Wilson’s hard-boiled egg with a plaster of paris replica, and he kept banging at it with his knife in increasing consternation as we looked on joyfully, until he finally knocked off a dusty chunk and broke into laughter. And the morning, a few years later, when she replaced his fried egg with a plastic replica that he sawed away at for some time before catching on and, unexpectedly, giggling.
Still, coming across their wedding photo from 1936 was a surprise, because they looked so sprightly: Wilson in a morning suit and spats, with a baby’s breath corsage, and Letty, her face a perfect oval of pleasure, in a Norwegian peasant’s wedding dress with a fluted lace collar and a lace cap — the Sonja Henie look so popular that year. She began the marriage loving to paint and dance and dress up, but over the decades Pierson rigor tamped some of that down. Letty was the first who had to make do without the three Irish domestics — referred to by Goggy Pierson as “the majestics” — and by the time we came along she had sturdy arms and wore dowdy hats and canned beach plum jam nonstop. She was brisk and amiable except about the weather, whose vagaries obsessed and depressed her. Over lunch she would crane to peer out the window to the south and then the window to the north, and then remark, “Rain coming” or “Nor’easter blowing in, looks like.” When our au pair, Janine, began to snicker at these Eeyoreish forecasts, we all looked at her, mystified.
As a child, I was at ease around Letty and alarmed by Wilson, by the way he immersed himself in nearly impossible jigsaw puzzles — white eggs on a white backdrop, for instance — his fingertips palpating the tiny pieces like a blind man’s. And by how he sat on the porch at night with his pipe flaring, impervious to the mosquitoes, a Conrad hero brooding on the crooked timber of humanity. He never raised his voice, but when he led me down the long lawn to consider the birdbath that I had only half-filled before hurrying to the beach, his silence was terrible. His blue gaze bored into me like a gimlet, pinning my writhing fecklessness down for his extended contemplation.
I recalled that piercing look the other afternoon, when Walker and Addie kept climbing out of their Pack ’n Plays in the room that had been Wilson’s study. They had begun to hate naps. They strobed the light on and off, bowled beach stones, and — the fourth time I went in to settle them — industriously smeared Vaseline across Wilson’s desk. I said “No!” very loudly, and they began to sob. “Daddy shouldn’t have gotten so mad,” I said, stricken with remorse. I was astonished by how furious they could make me; they had entered the stage, or I had, where I finally empathized with my parents. “But that’s naughty, okay? Naughty means no, don’t do it: naughty. You should know better” — Why? — “Vaseline stays in its jar and you stay in your cribs, okay? Because Mommy and Daddy have to do some work this afternoon, so we can make some money and buy you more Vaseline.”
They stared at me, trying to figure it all out. Then Walker skillfully changed the subject. He dropped beneath the rim of his crib and cried, from its depths, “I playing hide-in-seeks, Daddy!” Standing, in order to be found, he repeated “Hide-in-seeks!” with a confiding smile. And I thought of Mom, cheek to cheek with a Sikh.
Near the end of his life, Wilson and I had dinner at a Greek pub down the road, and over a porterhouse steak and several martinis he told me that he judged himself too rigidly, that he had never been able to truly relax. I have his tambour desk in my office at home; the brass handles are incised with blooming flowers and a pollinating beehive and, in small caps, the adjuration “Nothing Without Labor.”
NORAH’S MEMORIAL service took place the Saturday after Labor Day at Wainscott Cemetery, presided over by a former classmate and minister named J. J. Lee Wolfe (who proved to be Jane Smith’s first cousin). There was a big turnout, including even several of the neighbors Norah had erupted at over the years. The now-white-haired Georgica lifeguard who had dated Norah when she was fifteen was the last to tip a spadeful of earth on her grave. Aunt Karen declared, “First boyfriend!” and Paddy added, “Stone him!” which drew a laugh.
Afterward, everyone came back to the house and drank wine and ate ham and reminisced. The impromptu eulogies continued for hours. We learned that Norah had made earrings for Elizabeth Taylor that were featured on the cover of Life, that when male diamond dealers asked for coffee she would serve it to them in a breast-shaped mug that you could only drink from by sucking on the nipple, and that she liked to pee standing up.
I hadn’t planned to, but I told the story about the sea bass, toning it down for the occasion. As I was leaving Georgica after Labor Day in 1997, I reluctantly asked Norah for the seventy dollars she owed me for some sea bass. No one wanted to shop for her because she never paid you back.
“I thought I paid you,” she said.
“Um, no.”
My girlfriends always liked Norah because she’d sit them down to confide that my parents were troubled by the way I lied and stole, which had been somewhat true when I was thirteen. I didn’t always like her, but I loved her, mostly. She’d recently told me, “We’re the only people in this family who are making a living on the street, by our wits,” and there were times when I felt we had a lot in common. This was not one of those times. Or maybe it was: we were standing at either end of the kitchen table, tensed on the balls of our feet, and it seemed suddenly, absurdly likely that we’d end up chasing each other around the table.
“Well, you still owe me for the sitting-room window you hit a golf ball through last summer!” she said. I had skulled a golf ball through the window, fooling around with a sand wedge on the lawn. I’d then given Norah a blank check for it and followed up a month later with a call to remind her to cash the check, precisely so that she wouldn’t hold the incident over me forever. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she had said. “We were getting a bunch of things fixed anyway.” “Are you sure?” I said. “Really sure?”
I reminded her of this extended back-and-forth, trying to keep my temper. “I don’t remember any of that,” she said. “I’ve been waiting all this time for my money.”
“This is why no one wants to deal with you, Norah,” I said. “Because you’re completely impossible. Keep the money, fine. But you’re on your own with me from here on out.”
I went to say good-bye to Mom and Day, getting a lot of raised eyebrows as we hugged. It had been an increasingly audible conversation. Norah came and sat on the front stairs, under the photo wall. “All right,” I said, going over to her.
“We can’t fight,” she said. “There are few enough people I like in the world.”
“Who knew you were such a fireball?” she said. We hugged once, and then again.
The next day Mom called and worked her way around to suggesting I phone Norah and apologize more thoroughly: “I think she felt bruised.”
“Well, she should have,” I said. “She was totally wrong, and exactly in that reality-denying way that you often complain about.”
Mom sighed. “Yes, I know. But we’re all the family she has.”
______
WHEN NORAH was born, in 1940, Wilson, who had hoped for a boy to continue the Yale tradition, posted a memo at the university’s Davenport College that said, “Our maid is much excited and pleased” and circulated a birth announcement noting that “the newest representative of the Pierson and associated families is more interesting than beautiful.” Both he and Letty were distraught when the birth of their second daughter, Tisha, entailed complications that necessitated Letty’s having a hysterectomy.
When Letty was pregnant with Tisha, Norah, aged two and a half, was diagnosed with a peritonsillar abscess, or quinsy, and Wilson took her to the hospital. In Norah’s recounting of the family romance, her case was so grave she was quarantined and written off. “The doctors figured they had nothing to lose, so they operated on me experimentally, without anesthesia and without antibiotics, which were all being saved for the war,” she would say. “I somehow survived. But my parents never visited — they left me there to die.” The baby book that Letty kept covers the entire affair with the note: “Abscess lanced, also used sulfathiozole” (an antibiotic). But to Norah the event made it clear “that I was alone in the world and had to make my own way.”