by Tad Friend
In Buffalo, her accordion files were bulwarks against catastrophe, stuffed with articles and pamphlets on homemaking, child rearing, fire preparedness, disease, even preventing menopause. She preserved a series from the Buffalo Evening News on how to survive a nuclear bomb: when you sensed the explosion, the paper advised, avoid looking at the blinding flash. And “if you have a fireplace, you might try to fling yourself into or very near the hearth.” I can see her being amused by the idea of flinging herself into or very near the hearth, even as she made a mental note to do so. She even suggested building a bomb shelter in their first home, a second-floor apartment.
When we finally left Buffalo for good, Mom got a letter from her gynecologist, a Dr. Patterson, with whom she and her friends enjoyed a chaffing, slightly naughty relationship. He enclosed a flier for a body-familiarization class and wrote that “since you will no longer be able to come to me for your twice monthly pap smear and imaginary lumps in your breasts, I thought you might be interested in going to New York to take this course on your body…. Think of all the doctor’s bills you’d save if you could spot the pre-cancerous cysts and ruptured membranes early on.”
Her decision to go to the ball as Daphne was apt: Daphne spurned numerous suitors before she fled Apollo, and Mom had declined a half-dozen proposals from men drawn to her laughing distance. Her boyfriends’ letters, in college and after, are studies in perplexity. One said, “I wonder if you have any idea of the confused picture I have of your feelings toward me. I would draw a parallel between you and France relative to recent foreign policy.” Being compared to the Suez Crisis is usually a bad sign. A Yale valedictorian wrote, “Should I make a map of your personality, it would look on paper as Africa did fifty years ago — the edges filled with color and lines, and great white areas covering the interior.” Another, less scholarly, cried, “Not only am I perplexed by your polar personality, surprised by your sub-zero senselessness, but also I now realize I was fooled by your frigid heinousness…. My dear girl, either you are a schizophrenic, or mentally retarded!” After she broke it off with her fiancé, Richard, he wrote, “It is a good thing that I remained firm in the face of all your urging and did not acquire a new toilet seat. Had I followed your advice I would now be reminded of you so many times a day; fulfilling the most natural functions would be associated with great sorrowful reminiscences.”
In 1963, Mom wrote to the psychiatrist Dr. Marie Nyswander, who had published a popular book about frigidity entitled The Power of Sexual Surrender, to ask for a consultation. Nyswander’s book suggested that women were naturally suited to raising a family, and that feminism had led the modern woman into misplaced anger and neurosis, so that she “deeply resents her role [and] conceives of the male as fundamentally hostile to her, as an exploiter of her. She wishes in her deepest heart, and often without the slightest awareness of the fact, to supplant him, to exchange roles with him.”
Mom yearned for the power that Nyswander extolled, but had been unable to find it in herself. In her letter she explained that she’d already had an “arduous 2½ year psychoanalysis,” adding, “My problem, perhaps most simply described as an inability to fall in love, appeared to be resolved when, in early 1960, I was able both to conclude the analysis and to marry. Since then, I have come to realize that, while much had been accomplished, certain things still remained to be done…. I have reached a point in my thinking and in my marriage where I must talk to someone. And — something that has not occurred before — have someone talk to me. The birth of our son, and all the circumstances attending it, have brought matters to a head.”
I realize now that my family and their set equated sex with a loss of control and reputation, an expenditure rather than a dividend of spirit. The body was not an instrument of pleasure but an ungovernable rump state beset by rebellions — sneezes, farts, climaxes, and tumors. So sex, like sleep, ought to be practiced quietly and in the dark. (When I dated a Jewish coworker, years ago, she observed that I was fairly silent in bed. Yep.) The fifties were famously tortuous, of course: to get laid, my father’s fraternity brothers either had to go to Bennington College and seek out two women known as “Sally Screw” and “Sally Blow,” or get married. But among Wasps the fifties’ atmosphere lingered well beyond the decade’s end. A married friend of my mother’s wrote her, in the early seventies, “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to let oneself go and completely abandon responsibility and embroil oneself in one of those summer physical things. But it seems to me that only emotional dwarfs can really do it and enjoy it — at our age and with our experience, I mean. One would not be able to help noticing ridiculous things about the whole affair, such as your beau’s poor old sweater.”
Mom met with Dr. Nyswander in New York several times that July. Her notes from those sessions brim with dissatisfactions, bracketed under Mom’s “martyrdom” and Day’s “pampering himself when I can’t.” The latter list included:
breaking things (chair), T.V. set scraped on window sill
writing in books — plundering, destroying
not knowing geography
wanting ice cream
using lots of cream + sugar
Alka Seltzer
letting me make vacation arrangements, get the Xmas tree
= men are brutes.
Underneath, she wrote some conclusions: “I don’t believe in marriage and children: one must be sacrificed for the other. I was by Moth?” — her shorthand for her mother. “Didn’t want child, fearing what it would do to marriage. If a girl — jealous. If a boy — in love.” In smaller handwriting at the foot of the page, she added, “I’m even now trying to show Mother I am alone.” When she returned from New York, she told Day that Dr. Nyswander had said she couldn’t help her.
MY PARENTS weren’t draconian about manners and social behavior, but they kept after us, believing that if you appeared well brought up it eased the path. So I was urged not to mumble or be “a wet blanket”; Pier and Timmie, who were closer in age and fought over toys, were reminded, “No arguing!”; and if Timmie sounded curt or surly Mom would trill, “Mrs. Sweetvoice! Mrs. Sweetvoice!” (A hundred years earlier, Robinson children were reminded “GV, GV,” meaning “Gentle voice, gentle voice.”) Dissent, no matter how valid, was precluded.
There were soft promptings to keep elbows off the table and napkins on laps; to look grown-ups in the eye and use their name and remind them who you were, saying, “Hello, Mrs. Ardnambotham, I’m Tad Friend,” in a strong, clear voice as you firmly shook their hand. If you remembered only one thing, it should be the firm handshake, the vital first impression. (The male Wasps of my acquaintance who’ve made a fortune all grip your hand like a bench vise.) But you shouldn’t remember only one thing, of course, because you also had to remember to write the thank-you note — and without ever employing the words “thank you,” so as to suggest that the duck mug was such a delight that you were simply moved to correspond.
Our TV viewing was limited to two hours a week, so that we wouldn’t become stuporous. (In Swarthmore, we were allowed Little House on the Prairie, All in the Family, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which the family watched together in a pillow-filled window bay known as “the nest.”) Of course, we watched lots of other programs on the sly, trying to keep up; I learned considerably more about sex from James at Fifteen than I did from the drawings of labia in the manuals Mom eventually dropped off in my room. When Mom came home, she would feel the set for warmth and give an exasperated bleat audible wherever we had fled. Famously, she once caught Pier hiding behind the door, and he silently pointed to where Timmie was crouching behind the Japanese floor lamp. Fairness — equal punishments for all — generally trumped loyalty.
Day left most of the tutelage to Mom, but when I clutched my fork like a hammer he’d murmur a phrase he’d picked up in Stockholm, “Håll din gaffel ordentligt,” meaning “Hold your fork properly.” And when he was traveling, he’d write to inquire with humorous concern after my slacker habits: �
��Are you practicing your hand-writing? August is a good month for small muscle control.” Though he’d developed his own ideas on the topic, he’d been brought up in a family that viewed decorum as the means to placing yourself above reproach. His grandmother Lillian couldn’t write a thank-you note longer than three lines, but her notes were faultlessly prompt. She once assured my father, “The Friends were always known for their manners,” leaving him skeptical — How could you know? — and obscurely enraged.
For the Piersons, manners expressed deference and gratitude; their use acknowledged the net of obligations that constitutes polite society. Underpinning Wilson’s Clean Plate Club was the appreciation of others’ labor. And underlying both John’s and Wilson’s efforts to draw visitors out and put them at ease after a welcoming drink was the duty to privilege guests’ wishes. Generosity was relieved of its burden by the suggestion that its beneficiary was doing you a favor; Wilson, when we’d picked more zucchini and Kentucky wonder beans from his garden than we could eat, would leave the surplus at the beach in a shallow basket with a sign saying, “Help / Yourself / and Pierson.”
The differences in the Pierson and Friend outlooks expressed an abiding tension: are manners about making others feel cared for and at ease, or about perpetuating a comforting kind of order? In colonial Massachusetts, child rearing entailed “breaking the will,” subduing sass and spirit beneath God’s law, as the hot iron extinguishes every wrinkle. In 1648, the colony established the death penalty for children over age sixteen who disobeyed their parents. That law is no longer in force, probably, but Wasp parental love continues to feel conditional upon conduct — namely biddable behavior that brings credit to the family and that requires no undue head-scratching to figure out what’s going on with little Johnny. The resulting veneer of acquiescence may be thin — many’s the aging Wasp who turns crusty with resentment — but then Wasps believe in behavior, not motivations. Much of what I’d grown up with cohered when I later read Henry Dwight Sedgwick’s elegant 1935 treatise In Praise of Gentlemen, in which he argued that facades are all we can — or need — trust:
I walk through a village: I see proper gardens, fresh-painted houses, shining windowpanes, polished knockers and door handles — what to me is untidiness and frowziness within? […] I care little for the private lives of my companions, if only their talk is good and the ladies’ dresses display the charm of color, propriety, and elegance, and the men’s clothes betray that their tailors recognize that the tailor’s craft is an art.
Such a credo esteems the right to be left alone. And if this condemned us each to be an island of seeming cheer in an archipelago of sorrow, so be it.
TO OTHERS, Wasp ways often feel like a sanctum door snicking shut. More daunting than mastering the corn scrapers or the proper form for the requested “honour of a reply” is the exclusionary parlance. My tenth-grade English teacher at Shipley, Marianne Gateson Riely, was legendary for her punctilio in small and possibly even imaginary matters: one should say “quotation marks” rather than “quotes,” “examinations” rather than “exams,” and pronounce both in “pear-shaped tones.” For several days running, a new student named Lisa, who was Jewish and unpreppy (and who left the following year), explained that she hadn’t done the homework because her mother had recently “passed.”
“Look here,” Mrs. Riely said, endeavoring to be kind. “Why do you keep saying ‘passed’? She died, did she not?”
“Yes,” Lisa said, in a small voice.
“Well then, say so, so you can be understood.” Her correction was as much social as semantic; euphemisms were middle class. Though most serious topics were best avoided, if you had to speak of something like death, you learned to use the earliest Anglo-Saxon word available: “coffin” not “casket”; “undertaker” not “mortician.”
But it isn’t simply that Wasps cling to prescriptive certainties about usage and grammar (an obsession reflecting the Wasp belief that mastery of language is a precondition for governance). It’s the whole breathless, hieratic shorthand. My mother and her friends managed to weave into a worldview such seemingly disparate threads as words like “flibbertigibbet” and “hobbledehoy”; the concierge’s habit of presenting information as strictly entre nous — “it’s the most darling little snowed-in town”; exclamations of secularized but still fizzy epiphany: “Heaven!” “Wonderful!” “Perfectly marvelous!” “How divine!”; outré slang (“threads” for clothes, “pad” for apartment, “beau” for lover); and a salting of “tout a faits” and “en retards.” While British colloquialisms sound pretentious — even Wasps can’t say “sod all” or “rumpy pumpy” with a straight face — morsels of French suggest private school and being comme il faut.
The other tic is the use of abbreviations, ampersands, and plus signs to speed a letter for writer and reader alike. This elisiveness climaxes in the use of “and so forth” or “etc.” to conclude a brief list, particularly a list of pressing complications: “We’re sick about missing your key party, but that’s the weekend H.’s mother comes in to review the troops & of Forbes’s horse show, etc., etc.” Its deployment suggests the management of untold complexities unbearably tedious to relate. This image — limpid surface, measureless depths — is the one Wasps always strive to present. Sometimes it’s even true.
BEFORE SHE had the Villanova place, my mother’s nesting fever broke every Christmas in a flurry of wreath hanging and Norway spruce trundling and crèche building — the Christ child’s tiny wicker bassinet would, on Christmas morning, be found to have given birth to a carved chunk of walnut swaddled in cotton batting. She orchestrated feasts of turkey tetrazzini and crème caramel or ginger duck with potato gratin and almond cake, made ahead so that the kitchen appeared pristine. (When asked the menu, she would reply, as her mother and grandmother had, “Piffle pudding with wait-and-see sauce.”) These exquisite brown meals seemed chosen to be visually neutral, the better to set off the table’s gleaming silver and its red Dutch-oven centerpiece, filled for the season with huge pinecones. Though her presentation was not at all Waspy, her birdlike portions were: there was never quite enough.
On Christmas morning, when we came downstairs to “Hayfoot, Strawfoot,” Mom’s pile of presents was always double everyone else’s. She was at pains to find the perfect gift for her friends, and they repaid her in kind. It makes me strangely sad, now, to remember how excited she would get about giving you just the thing, like one of those nifty four-color pens. She believed in gifts, just as she believed in redemption. She almost never spoke ill of anyone and would excuse the worst conduct — embezzlement, philandering, Pearl Harbor — by saying, “He was probably having a bad day.”
Yet Christmas was for her a kind of exam, a test of the state of her relationships. When an old friend named Jean didn’t show up for a planned visit to Swarthmore, for the third time, Mom wrote her, “Am I so adamant a hostess that my friends choose pretense rather than risk incurring my disfavor with the truth?” Well, yes. She went on to take the ultimate step, excommunication: “I think I could comprehend + accept nearly anything you choose to tell me. Meanwhile, however, I have a proposal to make, which is this: that you not send me any Christmas presents this year.” Happily, though, Mom wrote me a week later to report, “Got a nice letter from Jean in reply to my stern one, so called her at once + all is forgiven.”
Giving my mother anything was a tense business: though she depended on social fibs, when it came to aesthetics she had an artist’s ruthlessness. A mahogany wall sconce I made for her in eighth grade vanished into the attic lickety-split. It was a handsome thing as sconces go, but in Mom’s house sconces went. Many of my father’s Christmas presents to her didn’t measure up, either — I recall her unwrapping a large crystal unicorn in distressed silence. Even Day’s engagement gift to her, a Rouault lithograph of a mother and child, wound up in the attic.
And so Christmas Eve, that moment of pure anticipation, was my favorite part of the holiday. We concluded our rituals
by reading Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester aloud, passing the book, a 1931 edition from my mother’s childhood, hand to hand. We pretty much had it memorized, though. The tailor, “a little old man in spectacles, with a pinched face, old crooked fingers, and a suit of thread-bare clothes,” is making a silk coat for the mayor of Gloucester, who is to be married shortly, on Christmas Day. After laying out the pieces of the coat on his worktable one evening, the tailor goes home, where he hears rapping sounds from a set of teacups overturned on the sideboard: “Tip tap, tip tap, tip tap tip!” When he rights the cups, he discovers that each hides a mouse trapped by the tailor’s cat, Simpkin. We always chimed the best bits aloud, and our favorite was these distress signals. It must have been Potter’s favorite, too, for she repeated it four times: “Tip tap, tip tap, tip tap tip!”
Once the mice scamper off, the tailor takes to his bed with a fever and is delirious for several days. On Christmas morning, he creeps through the snow to his shop and is amazed to find the coat fully assembled. The mice have sewn it for him. My mother could never read this passage — “oh joy! the tailor gave a shout” — without tears springing to her eyes, so we would tacitly arrange the reading order to give her the tip taps. Or we could carry her through by chorusing the ending, where Potter discloses that thereafter the tailor becomes famous for his stitchery: “The stitches of those button-holes were so small — so small — they looked as if they had been made by little mice!”