by Tad Friend
AFTER ONE elegy, a childhood friend of Norah’s asked, “Where did Norah get her rebellious impulse?” Both Norah’s business partner and her daughter-in-law, Sharon, brought up the epiphany of the peritonsillar abscess. Then Day stood and questioned that story’s explanatory power. “I think the impulse was provoked by George Wilson Pierson, her father,” he said. “He had a way — while serving cocktails on this porch, looking out on this lawn — of adumbrating and asseverating and illuminating a topic that was fascinating and elegant, but that almost demanded rebuttal, even as it denied it.”
Wilson’s sangfroid could be infuriating. Like Spencer Tracy, he had an air of pending rebuke. There was that conversation about feminism over dinner in the summer of 1988, a conversation so vigorous I set it down in my journal. When Mom and Karen contended that women had been slighted in the annals of history, Wilson, ferrying the salt shaker about and fiddling with his bow tie, waited for them to finish. He mellowed, later in life, but he still treated discussions as duels: parry, slash, the piercing thrust. “Certainly women are important to society,” he said. “None of us would be here without them” — a head bob to the ladies. I could see Mom preparing to be vexed. “But that argument fails to consider that people at the time didn’t regard women as particularly important to history, and that what women have done by and large doesn’t leave a documented record. Each of us can go into the A&P of scholarship and buy the history he or she wants, but that doesn’t change the facts: that what the mass of men — and women — do is unimportant.” He pulled his nose reflectively, twice. “Americans are wedded to change in their historiography, as in all things, but preserving the good from the past is a far harder thing than to invent or popularize something different. The traditional view of history as the actions and beliefs of society’s leaders remains not only the best, but the only, way to make sense of social and political change — which is history’s very subject.”
“Yes, but isn’t that a self-perpetuating point of view?” my mother said. “As histories have tended to be written by men?”
He smiled indulgently. “That histories — the documents of the past — have tended to be written by men proves my point.”
Whenever Wilson sat on his porch, he was affronted by the changes emanating from directly across the pond. The offending property was owned by Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American Airways. Trippe had been the president of the Maidstone Club in East Hampton — in Wilson’s eyes a gaudy, footling place — and had single-handedly ushered in the age of mass air travel, which, Wilson believed, led to too many people flying to places they didn’t belong. More seriously, Trippe had tampered with the divine order. In the 1950s, to protect his beachfront, he convinced East Hampton to authorize the Army Corps of Engineers to build a stone jetty in front of his house, just beyond the sandbar over the way. The jetty stacked up sand on Trippe’s beach to the east by interrupting the longshore drift — thereby eroding Georgica’s beach and beaches to the west as far as Bridgehampton. Norah wrote her father in 1954 to ask what had suborned this original sin: “Mr. Trippe’s influence? (Or his money?)”
I never so much as caught sight of Trippe, but we were given to understand that he incarnated all that was modern, selfish, and dastardly. Wilson acidly referred to the stones not as a jetty but a “groin,” a word suggestive of unspeakable nether regions. During our cleanup, I came across a 1952 photo that showed Georgica Pond and the sandbar beyond. No one was visible, but the caption, in Letty’s hand, was “Pond out and Trippe works on the bar” — a sentence as ominous as “Man is in the forest” from Bambi.
The Wasp impulse to conservation is long-standing: members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony called themselves “the English” and feared novelty as an error, even a sin. As the historian David Hackett Fischer has observed, they viewed true reform not as innovation but as the recovery of ancestral ways. Likewise, in the summer of 1776, Thomas Jefferson suggested that the inspiration for the Declaration of Independence was the ideals of the Saxon chiefs Hengist and Horsa. “Has not every restitution of the ancient Saxon laws had happy effects?” Jefferson asked. “Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the eighth century?”
The consequence of this mind-set is often a failure to catch the wave of genuine or necessary change. In his 1972 book The Moving American, published to acclaim by Knopf, Wilson began by describing the country’s demographic upheavals in neutral language. But soon the smoldering coals of his instinctive social Darwinism ignited:
Then the newer immigration (1881–1917) floated irresistibly toward the top. Remember Hollywood? Hollywood was (and is) hardly an Anglo-Saxon institution. In sports, always a sensitive barometer, the old English-style gentleman amateur had disappeared, and even the football juggernauts of once Congregational Yale — with stars by the name of Heffelfinger or Corbin, Hinkey or Coy — had given way to Notre Dame, whose “Fighting Irish,” under Knute Rockne, soon sprouted almost unpronounceable Polish and Czech names. Again in the great urban game of cops and robbers, the police forces and styles of civility might still be overwhelmingly from the “old sod,” but the new warlords of the underworld seemed to have names ending in “o” or “i” or “-one,” and to be playing the game by rules straight out of Sicily. Meanwhile, in quiet offices uptown, bearded doctors were beginning to prescribe therapies for the Yankee psyche that had been invented by and for Jews in Vienna. And after World War II, our Puritan sex code gives a helpless gasp as people of all ages, origins, and social positions begin indulging in a license that can only be called pagan, and in a premarital freedom reminiscent of the European working class.
Or, of course, of his own daughter. It is no great leap from this brand of conservation to the behavior of members of Boston’s Somerset Club during the Civil War, when Robert Gould Shaw marched his Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry regiment — the first black regiment in the Union Army — down the street to entrain for the South. The club closed its windows and drew its curtains.
FIVE
Bearings
MY EARLIEST MEMORIES of my mother don’t actually include her. I remember resting my head on mullioned blocks of morning light on the floor of the sunporch, tracing their outlines with my finger, square by square. The house felt … not empty, exactly, but cordoned off. Between Mom and me, almost always, were the palings of baby gates and playpens. I was the youngest criminal in America, banging my cup on the bars.
Visiting hours were at night, when she would arrange me in the bathtub — bar of soap, red washcloth, No More Tears shampoo — and glide off with instructions to “sing out every once in a while, so I know you haven’t drowned.” Busy piloting my imaginary friends around in my little red motorboat (Foogin, Dato, Geeshee, and Mr. and Mrs. Bawsbaw relied on my steady hand at the tiller), I would not sing out. There was the joy when she returned to check, her light, pattering step gaining speed in the hall. Often she was cross, but sometimes she would cry “Boop boop!” and gather me up in the big blue towel, kissing the crown of my head. Sometimes.
Though not unplanned, I was unexpected. In a letter to Jane Smith, Mom reported being “stunned, utterly stunned, by the news that I had borne a son! We had called him Sophie for so long! I am nursing him still + expect to continue until he’s in long pants so cosi + sweet is he.” Later, she wrote another friend who’d just had a boy that “most of my friends in Buffalo seem to have girls + even to slightly disdain the possibility of a boy — but I know, and now you do too, the wonderful pride that comes from bearing a son. One really does feel one’s fulfilling one’s destiny as far as the race goes, not to mention the family, and the joy of presenting one’s husband with a son. (Then too one shouldn’t minimize the pleasures of the Oedipus Complex: don’t struggle, give right in.)” After I was born, Grandma Tim wrote Mom, “I am proud of you for being such a good little mother and producer of sons!” (adding, “I may
not call for a while as we have just received a tel. bill for $100.02!”). Despite having been absolved of responsibility by modern genetics, Wasp women continued to labor under son-and-heir anxieties like those of Henry the VIII’s wives.
As I turned two, Mom wrote of my “acting the classic part. Passionate, suddenly verbal, desolate in separation, fierce in rage. He has marvelous Kabuki rages for no apparent reason: brief, formal, + highly stylized. He beats his stomach, rolls his eyes, + makes hoarse throwing-up sounds. Then it’s over.” Throughout this period, she meticulously charted my many fevers and illnesses, as well as what she diagnosed as a recurrent “nervous cough.” She noted that the doctor “prescribed cough medicine with sedative, which I didn’t administer, feeling problem was psychological.” She herself grew gloomy during Buffalo’s heavy winters, comparing herself to Persephone, who spent a third of the year in Hades.
I increasingly provided anecdotes for her letters, in which she described me as “nearly a carbon copy of Dorie … he loves words (a non-stop talker, which is occasionally exhausting for his parents).” When we lived in Manila in 1967, the year began with my father in the hospital for weeks with amoebic dysentery, unable to commence his research. Disaster brought out Mom’s best, though she liked to suggest otherwise: writing her father-in-law, Grandpa Ted, and his second wife, Grandma Eugenia, about the tasks that faced her in that faraway city, she noted that one was “finding a kindergarten for Tad (no easy job: the child psychiatrist in charge of interviews at one school asked T. what was going on between two dolls in a dollhouse and he answered promptly, ‘The little girl has just killed her mother’).”
Feeling I had failed to delight her, I turned into a wary, watchful child. I began building the internal Wasp rheostat, the dimmer switch on desires. Yet my parents recognized my occasional tempests as their own. Day, from Amsterdam, wrote Mom about my “pride and tears” over having lost a vote for president of the first grade: “He is truly our son, is he not, with a foolish combustible mixture of ambition and sensitivity?” Many years later, in psychoanalysis, I longed for my analyst, Sylvia — who resembled my mother only in her wit — to reach inside me and rip out the rheostat. I told Sylvia about the passage in the Chronicles of Narnia in which Eustace, a lonely scrub of a boy who has been turned into a dragon, is restored to himself by the Lion God, Aslan, who gouges off the scaly exoskeleton with his claws, going deeper than Eustace believes he can bear. The pain seemed a small price for such deliverance.
Having my tonsils out, at three, was a rare happy memory. I awoke in the hospital early in the morning, my throat aching, and saw my mother in a shaft of light. She was asleep in a chair by the bed, her right hand stilled on my blanket in midcaress. I fought sleep to keep my eyes on her, arrested just so. Breaking my leg skiing at six was a similar blessing, as we were two and a half hours from the nearest hospital, over bumpy dirt roads. Mom sat in the back of the car with me, my head on her lap, stroking my hair and murmuring every Greek myth she knew.
Day, too, was good with physical wounds. When I scraped a knee, he’d pour on hydrogen peroxide and swab the wound clean, then announce whether it needed a Band-Aid or simply time “to breathe.” He was eager and engaged, a bright young man on the rise; he went to Washington to witness Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and was an early skeptic on the war in Vietnam.
I have a very early memory of watching him shave, considering himself in the bathroom mirror as he glided the safety razor across his Adam’s apple. Then he leaned over and swirled a little shaving cream on my cheeks, saying, “Someday.” It’s something a lot of dads do, I guess. Day tells me Grandpa Ted did the same to him, years before, blooding his cheeks with a badger brush.
Over Christmas in Woodstock Day presented me with gold medals cut from lined yellow legal paper for “Saucer catching and retrieving” on the snowy hill at Maplewood and, two years later, for making sixty downhill runs one day on the baby tow at Mount Tom. He helped coach my soccer team, the Panthers, and my favorite time was our outing for Saturday-morning practice: afterward, we’d stop at a coffee shop and have a cheeseburger and a Sprite. Sodas were forbidden at home, and the bubbles stinging my throat and nose felt like happiness.
Still. When I was four and we moved to Ithaca, where Day was doing research at Cornell for a year, I began to have a recurrent dream. I’d be standing in a field of tall grass that rose to a knoll, and I’d hear a banjo behind a door inset in the knoll and know that it was Day, who had gone there to play alone. After struggling through the meadow to the top of the hill, I’d put my hand on the doorknob — and the music would abruptly stop. I would run among the low rooms inside, seeking him, but find them all deserted. Eventually the music would take up again, only behind me now, and far away.
WHEN MOM and Day married in 1960, new minted with the decade, they seemed to have it all, except what underwrites it all: income. They began with a healthy combined inheritance of $49,000 in cash and securities, and by 1974 that cushion was down to $42,000 — an inflation-adjusted loss of nearly half their net worth. In the early seventies, Mom tried to save money by cutting our hair with a snaffle-edged curry comb whose use surely violated the Eighth Amendment, and when we came home for the holidays, later, she would circulate the subsequent phone bill and ask us to reimburse her for the relevant amounts — often a sum like $0.83. In the summer of 1969, Day wrote Mom, who had ensconced us at Line Farm in Woodstock for a few weeks, to report that “we stand lordly with $35.96 in the bank. I am enclosing checks as you asked, one for ‘baby-sitter,’ one for ‘car-fixed,’ but none for ‘et cetera.’ Can you pay for ‘et cetera’ out of cash in hand? If not, wait till I get there.”
When we wondered why we could see the road through the rusted floor of our station wagon, Day would always say that we were upper middle class and better off than 99 percent of the people in the world. But it was hard to get specifics. It is acceptable for Wasps to discuss necessary expenses ($18,000 for a new roof, the shocking price of heating oil) but not elective expenses and never income. The sense that debtors’ prison lurked fell hardest on Pier, who was drawn to numbers the way I was to words and Timmie was to colors and textures. Mom would pay him to balance her checkbook, and he’d occasionally discover that she’d run as much as five hundred dollars into the red. When we took our one summer trip to Europe, he was always mentally converting kroner and francs to dollars, and frowning if I ordered dessert.
In Buffalo, once known as “the Gateway to the Future,” downward mobility was protective coloration. The city had been fading since Millard Fillmore returned from the presidency to help found the Buffalo Club (from whose ranks Grover Cleveland followed Fillmore to the White House). But it remained a Wasp stronghold, and my parents and their friends worked to keep that world going. They learned to cook quiche lorraine from James Beard, took waltz and fox-trot lessons and dropped by the Palace Burlesque afterward on a lark, joined the Saturn Club and Buffalo Tennis & Squash, threw raucous parties where a local investor swallowed spiders, ran for office, seized the reins.
Mom was soon presiding over the Junior Group at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, a kind of culturally ambitious Junior League, and in 1965 she organized a costume ball at the gallery that merited an extended article in the Buffalo Courier-Express:
Mrs. Theodore W. Friend III, ball chairman, gowned in a flowing white dress, represented Daphne, the wood nymph transformed into a laurel tree by her father to save her from Apollo, the Greek sun god. Sprigs of laurel leaves adorned her hair and bodice and circled her arms. Mr. Friend, portraying Apollo, wore a Greek styled tunic of gold.
Mom wrote a friend that her ball duties demanded that
within a frighteningly short span of hours I must: (a) galvanize caterer, lighting expert, gallery staff, 2 bands (b) rush home + spray D. with gold paint (c) rush downtown and have laurel leaves attached to my head (d) rush home + graciously welcome my 20 dinner guests (the number changes hourly, which doesn’t precisely add to my pea
ce of mind) (e) dexterously — and despite laurel leaves sprouting from fingers — serve the food (f) seat myself upon shocking pink loveseat (which arrives tomorrow after months of working up courage to get it) for photographs for the morning paper (g) rush to the ball to instruct judges (h) soothe guests who don’t like position of their reserved table and (i) blow trumpet at midnight to announce grand march.
The impression she gave of an overtaxed but omnicompetent impresario directing masses of stagehands was true, as far as it went. Her voice, with its vibrant stresses and schwas, commanded attention like Katharine Hepburn’s; Grandma Tim had been a childhood friend of Hepburn’s in Hartford, where she attended the same elocution classes, and later in life was often mistaken for her. But Mom always worried that the performance wasn’t going over. Her eighth-grade report card at Prospect Hill School observed that “her posture needs continued attention as she has the habit of flexing her knees in standing position, causing mal-posture. This should improve with consistent exercising, and consciousness of this habit.” The following year, with no apparent irony, the school observed, “She often seems preoccupied with her faults, and repeats her efforts without a very clear idea of exactly how she is trying to change.” Wasps live on the narrow margin between consciousness of their bad habits and preoccupation with their faults.
Early in their marriage, my father observed, “Elizabeth, perfectionism is a sin.” She didn’t reply, determined to be her own severest critic. At Smith, she wrote in her diary, “God, is everything I do to be mechanized? I am just snatching at life, taking crisp, brief little bites around the edge of a great perfection which I have not time to approach.” A few months later, she observed, “Life is futile when one cannot rise above the common mediocracy of every day’s existence — but how to attain greatness?”