Cheerful Money

by Tad Friend

  She introduced bikinis to Georgica, ran her mouth, broke curfew, fumed. In her junior year at Miss Porter’s, a finishing school, she and Wilson didn’t speak; he wanted her to go to college and she wanted to paint. In her senior year, he said, “May I see you in my office?” and sat her down to discuss the perils of banking on a single talent, compared to the well-hedged path of liberal arts. “You could go to a place like Smith and study art history,” he said.

  “I am a doer, not a voyeur!” Norah replied. She had sand, an old-fashioned term for gumption. We approved of sand. My great-uncle Wassa Robinson was known as “the Sandy Kid” for his courage. When he was fighting the lung cancer that would kill him, he wrote a close friend to downplay having already lost forty pounds and his sight, concluding, “I’m going to make it even if I have to put sand in the lemon juice.” And Grandpa Tom told me once about a farmer he knew who’d found himself without a weapon when a bull got into the wrong field and began goring his cows. The farmer had advanced on the bull and pounded it between the eyes with his fists until he drove it away. “That man,” Tom said, “had sand.”

  Norah went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and at my parents’ wedding a year and a half later, the crinoline underskirt of her bridesmaid’s dress hid her three-month pregnancy. When she finally told her parents, their response was fury and dismay and then practicality: they urged her to marry the boy, a Harvard undergraduate, but she said she was not in love with him. They urged her to get an abortion, but she refused. Wilson telephoned the father-to-be and asked him to present himself to discuss the matter. He said he would love to, but he had a rehearsal at the student theatrical society, the Hasty Pudding. From then on he was known in the family as “Hasty Pudding,” a story Mom whispered to us early on, shaking her head at the lapse but smiling at the salty nickname.

  Wilson’s subsequent letters to Hasty Pudding commenced in some lingering expectation of a shared sense of duty. After the baby was born in July 1960, but before Norah relinquished him for adoption, Wilson wrote: “Michael is a dark-haired, strong-faced little character, and Norah naturally feels qualms about giving him up. But we all hope she can make it.” After itemizing various expenses, he observed, “You therefore owe me $249.64 and I will be obliged for reimbursement…. This has been a sad and painful time for all of us. I assume that your family knows the state of affairs hitherto, but have had no word from them. Yours very sincerely, G. W. Pierson.” Five months later, after three further dunning notes had gone unanswered, he wrote with a final tally, rage simmering beneath the starch: this “brings your indebtedness to me as of today from $827.50 to $1298.00 (beyond the $99.64 which is all I have ever received from you). Will you please notify me at once how and when you propose to meet your obligation.”

  Norah’s conduct continued to be a thumb in her father’s eye for some time. After a brief marriage, in 1963, she lived with various men, had two abortions, smoked pot and snorted coke. She opened a jewelry store in Laguna Beach and later brought it to Santa Fe, where she built a dwelling widely known as “the Flintstone House.” She wrapped an ordinary bungalow in ten thousand pounds of polyurethane foam, intending it to look like the surrounding sandstone cliffs, an experiment to prove nature’s dominion over man that Wilson ended up subsidizing. She practiced astral projection and reported that when she hooked up with a handsome dead Wainscotter from her youth, their sex in the ether produced mind-blowing orgasms.

  Tisha was also out west, experiencing the raptures of youth culture after her own short-lived marriage. When Letty wrote my parents a Christmas card in 1967, she made light of her children’s divergence from the expected path: “Whether either girl will marry their present bedmates who can say. Time will tell. In the meantime, back at the ranch old Square Uncle Wilson and Cube Aunt Letty live a rather unusual life of love.”

  In the early nineties, Norah tried to look for her son but ran into a bureaucratic wall. After Letty died of leukemia, in 1982, Norah and her father had grown close, and in his presence she mused, “Wouldn’t it be great if he just knocked on the door some day?” Wilson frowned — not really — and said, “What would you say to him?” “Come in!” she replied. When he drew up a Pierson family tree, Wilson had already written, beneath Norah and Tisha’s names, a melancholy but firm “end of the line.”

  A few summers later, Norah gathered the Friends and Piersons at Century House for a powwow about depression prompted by her happy introduction to Prozac. Out the window behind her a slop of storm waves pummeled the beach as she went through the long list of people in the family who had been depressed or crazy, or depressed and crazy. Her list ended with Tisha: “My own sister, who’s God knows where doing God knows what.” Not long before, Tisha, now calling herself “Reverend Tish” and furious that she was not going to inherit any share of Century House — Wilson feared that she would force a sale — began sending her father and other family members the bull’s-eyes of targets she’d peppered with her Colt Python. Later she changed her name to Molly Morgan Miller, wrote everyone to say she no longer considered herself part of the family, and offered her services to police departments as a psychic. Then she dropped from sight.

  “You’ve all got the gene,” Norah continued, “and you better get checked out. It’s a time bomb!” It was another of her diatribes against invading phragmites, Mexicans, or Jews — except that this time the enemy was us: the phone call came from inside the house! Those of us already on medication screwed up their faces at the airing of these private matters, and the rest just waited to be released. “Free sexual energy is part of the disorder, too, by the way. Oh, yes!” She glared around the room, daring us to dispute her.

  At Christmastime in 2001, Norah’s son wrote her. Michael Pierson had become a chatty, sports-obsessed, Pierson-nosed copy editor named Ross Palmer. He and his wife were about to have a child, and he had tracked Norah down to learn about potential genetic quirks. Additionally, he wrote, “I guess, ultimately, everyone wants to know their ‘real’ mother.” Norah and Ross began to visit back and forth, and when Norah met Ross’s wife, Sharon, she asked how Sharon planned to be delivered. “The normal way,” Sharon said, meaning with an epidural. “What?” Norah cried. “And miss the orgasm of childbirth?” Sharon and Ross named their son Pierson, and in 2003, Norah wrote to her forty-fifth reunion class at Miss Porter’s to say that the advent of her instant family had made her “think I’ve died and gone to heaven!”

  Norah never expected much from humanity as a whole: a few years ago she wrote me to ask, “Do you still have faith in the ‘human experiment’? I think I love geology because it reminds me that ‘we too will pass.’ ” But she began to express a grandmotherly softening toward the humans around her. It was the end phase of her arc, one traced by at least one relative in many families: the shooting-star streak from imp to hoyden to black sheep to family eccentric. The black sheep jeers at her relatives where the eccentric jeers only at the world; the vital distinction, in the family, is between anger and mere chagrin. Extraordinary oddities of conduct are tolerated among Wasps so long as you show up for Christmas.

  TWO WEEKS after Norah’s memorial service that September, Paddy e-mailed us all again about the house.

  Dear Honeysuckle Trustees,

  The passing of Cousin Norah gives us an opportunity to make changes in the Wainscott house. Surely every one of us has problems with some of the decorative and house-hold items that have come down to us.

  Nevertheless, Karen and I were horrified at the scope and the manner in which some of you have removed hundreds of items from the house and heaped them on the floor of the garage.

  These include an antique model of a sailing ship from Uncle Wilson’s desk, a typed manuscript of Grandpa John’s, two Steuben glass candlesticks, shells painted by Norah with stars and stripes after 9/11, Wilson’s pipes, books on the natural history of Long Island [….]

  Unworthy to some of you, these objects are dear to some of us. The discarded item
s contributed to the look and feel of a house we love. We are dismayed at what seems to us an assault on, a cleansing of, the Pierson family….

  As much of a cleansing as your idea to sell the house? I wanted to reply. And so began another round in the bruisingly polite battle over the family’s body and soul. There was history here. Some of the Friends felt that the Pierson family’s interests lay at least equally with their house in Greece and with Karen’s relatives’ houses in Ipswich and Saint John; some of the Piersons felt that the Friends were slow to pitch in and weed the garden. And there was a concern in both families, I think, that it was the Friends who during the formation of the Honeysuckle Trust had stepped in to pay the taxes — some $22,000 from each of us. From then on there was an unspoken sense of haves and have-nots, of those willing to suggest change and those who favored maintenance. And surely there were other trespasses felt by Paddy and unguessed by me, the resentments that rankle in any large family.

  In response to Paddy’s note, Pier called him, and my father and my sister and I all e-mailed replies. We’re an epistolary bunch. My e-mail began with an apology for the appalling mess in the garage, tried to explain how it had gradually arisen, then further apologized for causing Paddy and Karen the distress of finding cherished items on the pile. I explained how mistakes were made, or why we believed that Wilson’s pipes (fuzzed with mold) and the books on natural history (duplicate copies or volumes long out of date) were ready to go. But I couldn’t forbear adding:

  Our intent was to illuminate the bones of the house, many of them interred in closets, among mothballs, or at the bottom of heaps of bric-a-brac. So the suggestion that we were perpetrating an assault on, or a cleansing of, the Pierson family strikes me as unfortunate. Most of us in genetic fact are Piersons, too; all of us are in spirit.

  Paddy did not reply, but shortly afterward he e-mailed me about this book. There was history here, too. Paddy had been helpful in supplying some details for my New Yorker piece about Mom, published the previous winter, and had written me an appreciative note afterward, wondering if there might not be a “curse on the Family Pierson” and “the Family Robinson.” But when I subsequently told him I was thinking about writing a kind of family memoir, he said that he, too, had been contemplating a book, a history of the Piersons and Robinsons. I tried Paddy again on the topic after Norah’s memorial service, saying I’d really value a chance to sit down with him. He screwed up his face but said he’d think about it. Then came his e-mail, a note that began with compliments and ended with avuncular affirmations, sandwiched around a rejection that had nothing to do, suddenly, with his own prospective book. He said he no longer had the generous feelings he had when he’d written me about my piece:

  What’s missing, for me, is a keener sense of right and wrong. You paint your mother and your grandfather blacker than I believe they were. Gray is harder to mix, but that is the color most of us live with. As I don’t care for your treatment of the family in the New Yorker piece, I fear your treatment of the Pierson branch in the book will be much the same; so I do not choose to help your current venture.

  Paddy’s note called to mind my last conversation with Norah, six weeks before her death. She had phoned from Santa Fe, as she had recently taken to doing, both to chat and to check in on Walker and Addie. She said that she had just caught up with the piece about Mom. “I know some people in the family feel it was too harsh,” she said, “but I certainly didn’t think so. We Piersons are complicated.”

  “Thanks, Norah,” I said, pleased to have support from an unexpected quarter. “You knew her pretty well.”

  “Oh, forever!” she said, and laughed. “And you know what?” she continued. “Even if you were wrong, which you absolutely weren’t, so what? Fuck ’em! You’re an artist; you have to do what you feel is right.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  A DECADE ago, John Thornton, whose family has summered in Georgica for nearly half a century, spent $7.2 million to buy five acres of Association scrubland that fronted both the pond and the ocean. Thornton, then a Goldman Sachs partner, was buying the land not to build on but to forestall development and change. Yet still it came. Three years ago a hedge fund manager built an $18 million shingle-style mansion just inside the Association gate. And two years ago a house on the pond that had been in the same family for generations sold for $31.5 million. For years, the look of the beach cottages was pure Wasp: shutters peeling paint, a beater car in a driveway whose gravel bled into the patchy surrounding grass. Now one new family inspired muttering because they had edged their drive with the small paving stones known as Belgian blocks. “It’s suburban and not in keeping,” the old-timers said. “If you want to be part of this community, how can you not look around and see what the style is?” But which style? The new style, of the past thirty years, mandates trophy architects and postmodern touches — towers shaped like lighthouses, wave crests on the siding — as well as sunken pools and sodded lawns.

  Norah was tortured by each erupting house: the band-sawing and nail-gunning seemed to burn inside her brain, overwriting her childhood. She hated that the soaring prices had forced out the teachers and painters she grew up with, hated the increasing pace of change. And she hated that we now had to rent our house just to pay the upkeep. Early on, our renter, Fred Iseman, registered several legitimate complaints — the phones didn’t always work; the dishwasher kept breaking; and the plumbing was extremely delicate, or, in the parlance of notes that Letty had long ago Scotch-taped by the upstairs toilets, “gronicky.” Then Fred apologized, saying, “I’m trying hard not to be a fussy Jew,” to which Norah replied, “Try harder!”

  As we sought to keep our footing, the tide was ripping out. Chronicling the place, preservation of a sort, was one possible recourse. That was the path taken by Richard Pendleton Rogers, a documentary filmmaker known as Dick to his friends and Dickie to his friends in Georgica. Dickie was an anxious, balding redhead whose rueful smile immediately put you at ease. Though he was eighteen years older than I am, we played tennis regularly. He looked rumpled and comical in a white bucket hat and had a herky-jerky, silent-movie serve, but his murderous forehand hurtled past you like a skipping stone. Dickie’s 1973 film, Elephants, featured his divorced parents, Pen and Muriel Rogers. After we learn that Dickie’s grandparents had a footman behind every chair, his mother — who disapproved of her son’s low-paying career and kept threatening to sell her Wainscott house from under him — speaks to him in voiceover:

  I think it is the most sad thing in the world, what has happened to the Rogers family. We have Kitty, who is locked up. We have May, taking care of an old companion. We have John, who shot himself. We have Freddy, who jumped out of a window. And we have Pen, who is very sad, and with nothing…. I never should have married your father, unfortunately, but I did.

  Later, drinking scotch on her lawn in a mink coat, Muriel adds, with quarrelsome insincerity, “I’m not disappointed in you, as long as you’re happy.”

  The film ends with Dickie’s father philosophizing:

  PEN: The old maxim of Nothing ventured, nothing lost is a pretty sound old maxim.

  DICK: That’s not the maxim.

  PEN: Nothing ventured [uncertainly] … nothing gained.

  The only way to preserve the past intact is to walk away, but Georgica was too lovely to leave. And so Norah’s rebelliousness brought her, in the end, to strident and embarrassing guerrilla warfare against change. One afternoon, when she saw a couple alighting from a Range Rover they’d parked on the softball field for a wedding — she hated the lavish parties that increasingly turned the field into a parking lot — she ran over and said, “You fucking nouveaux riches! Why are you parking here? Where did you come from?”

  Norah saw herself fulfilling a time-honored role: the patrolling matron. For years, Muriel Rogers, Esther Bromley, and Bebba Hayes would slow their cars as they drove by the tennis courts, making sure all was in order. They were the kind of wome
n who in nearby Southampton used to be called the “dreadnaughts,” the absolute arbiters of decorum and guardians of a way of life; even as you got on a first-name basis with their husbands, they never invited you to call them anything other than “Mrs. Rogers” or “Mrs. Bromley.” When I was young, one local dreadnaught brought the beach picnic to a frozen halt after she slapped her eleven-year-old grandson for having dared to go for a ride on a passing dune buggy.

  My father remembers arriving in Georgica in the early 1960s, his third or fourth summer there, and starting up the stairs to the beach, only to feel a looming shadow. Bebba Hayes was barring the path: “Who are you?” A formidable woman with piercing eyes and a sharp though underutilized sense of humor, she would greet me annually with a “Come up here where I can see you!” And then, after criticizing the firmness of my handshake, she’d say, “All right, then, run along.”

  Like the French and the Chinese, Wasps accommodate and even admire these figures of majestic conviction and bone structure; they call them grandes dames. One afternoon in the late summer of 1994, I left the beach and walked up to the bathhouse, where Bebba and two other elderly women in large sun hats were peering in silence at a young woman who was playing Kadima, the paddle-and-rubber-ball game. “Who is that glorious creature?” Bebba asked. “She’s quite spectacular!” The woman, who had grown up in Georgica as an unnoticed baby sister, the tagalong kid, was now lithe and long legged in a black bathing suit.

  I gave her name. “She doesn’t know it yet,” one of the others said. “With most of them, you can tell they know it.” She turned to me and said, “You were drooling.”

  “No,” I said, smiling.

  “Oh, yes,” the third one said, and they stared at me, unblinking. They were like the Graiae, the three sea deities of Greek myth who pass around a common eye. Life in Georgica, an association founded in a desire for privacy, was in fact always social, always being discussed and censured. The lazy freedom of those afternoons — even the feeling of being neglected, at times; the sense that within this larger colony you were a colony of one — was an illusion. Someone was always at the window.