Cheerful Money

by Tad Friend

  ONCE PIER and Timmie came along, four and six years after me, Mom began to get the hang of it, motherhood. After Pier was born, she told friends that he was “just marvelous” and “no trouble at all. The second baby is so much easier than the first.” It always amazed me — it continues to amaze me — that Pier so rarely got angry or flustered. Nor did he exhibit, as Timmie and I did, an anxious concern about establishing or preserving his identity. (Even now, at forty, Timmie worries that people look at her — a funny, outgoing woman with a great eye for detail — and see only Mom.) In his early twenties, Pier had a crush on a woman Timmie and I both knew, and we urged him to tell her how he felt. “But she has a boyfriend,” he said. “It wouldn’t be right to try to break them up.” Timmie and I stared at him in disbelief: somehow, we’d grown up in the same family but reading different chapters of its playbook.

  Perhaps Pier realized that the simplest and most cunning form of resistance to the program was complete acceptance. He looks like a man from an earlier era: six foot four, graying, a buttoned-down commuter coming home to a beer. I often wonder, as Pier gives me financial advice I pretend to understand — “The beta on the stock will keep you up nights, but you could hedge it with put options” — how he can be as even keeled as he seems. Did he sail through or just batten down?

  Though Mom became more confident in her maternal role, her house remained a private museum that she kept free of traffic by requiring us to take afternoon naps until we were twelve, thirteen, amazingly old. At last, slowly, she began to relax her admission policies. She would seek us out with birthday and Valentine’s Day cards that said only, “Guess who?” signed with a tiny rounded “M,” for “Mom,” like a gull’s wings — she wrote a surprisingly low, scurrying hand. But by then Timmie and I, especially, had taken to burrowing in the farthest corners to escape her, her absence as well as her enormous presence, her inability to enter a room and simply allow whatever was going on to continue. Very often, the first child she saw would be press-ganged into a chore presented as a delightful opportunity: “Who would like to empty the dishwasher?”

  When we were in Wainscott, and expected to be particularly winning, Mom would write up an elaborate chore list that encompassed shopping, cooking, table setting, flower arranging, etc., each chore detailed like engineering specifications: “House pick-up includes — Take out trash (garbage, paper, cans after supper for once a week pickup Tues 11:30). Tidy downstairs — games, newspapers, books, shoes, pillows, dust, whatever needs doing including sweeping up sand if excessive, puff up pillows, straighten chairs.” The chore list chafed at us all. She, a Wasp who’d grown up with “help,” expected help still; we, Wasps ourselves, expected the same. I shared my father’s sense of affront when reminded to take out the trash, having better things to do, surely. We all exuded sulkiness as squids squirt ink, trying to get away in the darkness.

  In 1974, to entice us into sunnier moods, Mom and Day provided an incentive: Cheerful Money. They set aside three glass jars in a kitchen drawer, and whenever one of us demonstrated good humor under duress or was spontaneously helpful, they would drop a quarter into the appropriate jar. Whoever accrued the most money by year’s end would have that sum doubled (and then we were to use our money to buy each other Christmas presents). Cash is a standard Wasp behavioral-management tool: some families have a “child of the week” bonus, and some use disincentives, such as levies on cursing or misbehavior that are dropped in the “spunk box.” Yet the whole idea made me even sulkier, if possible. In 1977, I received only three dollars in Cheerful Money, roughly equivalent to getting a 210 on your SATs. Whereas Timmie smiled more in response, and Pier was positively inspired; naturally even tempered, he became even more so, and reminded Mom and Day of his every outbreak of pep. He won each year running away, and now makes more money than the rest of the Friends and Piersons put together.

  Adult Wasps pride themselves on their affability, a quality that informs their admirable refusal to engage in public griping and whining: no matter how down in the dumps he may be, my father’s friend Ted Terry responds to “How are you?” with a reflexive “Tip-top!” But such cheer can also be coercive. Where the salesman wheedles you to reexamine the familiar (this vacuum cleaner will change your life), the Wasp hales you into looking elsewhere (forget vacuuming — let’s have a drink!). One seeks to lift the velvet rope, the other to click it into place. My mother’s close friend Sally Lilley recalls that when her father was breathing his last, her mother “put her head on his pillow as he died and then declared that that was the most beautiful experience in her whole life. Now, anyone in his right mind knows that couldn’t be true, but having declared it so, that was the way Mummy wanted it to be for all of us.”

  The determination to garland rawer feelings with brio explains Wasps’ reliance on smiley faces and emoticons. When I taught at a tennis camp for a few summers in college, the ever-smiling termagant who ran the camp decorated the letter containing her lowball salary offer with five smiley faces. A depressed prep school classmate once sent me a postcard with seven smileys, each surrounded by handwritten “Ha ha ha ha has.” Savingly, both Mom and Grandma Tim tweaked the format and speckled their letters with grouchy faces, frowny faces, teary faces, and Peter Arno–like blotto faces, with crosses for eyes.

  Though cheerful, Wasps are not optimistic. Mom was particularly suspicious of happiness, believing it not only unseemly to express it, but foredooming even to feel it, or at least to feel it without reservation. And who could be entirely happy when the new carpet was the wrong shade of cream, closer to ivory or even — eek! — magnolia? In 1958, when her friend Elsa Barr asked Mom to be maid of honor at her wedding, Mom’s telegram of reply was characteristic: “Can hardly express my happiness at your wonderful wonderful news. Am tremulous and honored. Of course will come somehow. Congratulations to Terry and enormous love to you. Lib. P.S. Hope bridesmaids’ dresses won’t be yellow.” They were green, thank God.

  One night, Mom divided up a cheesecake for dessert, and Pier said, “I’m not going to complain, but I got the smallest piece.” She repeated this, teasingly, showing us how it was funny. Over the years, that non-complaint complaint became a family watchword, usually directed toward Mom, who maintained no barrier between thought — That’s not the way I would have done it — and declaration. She would come into the kitchen after I’d finished cooking a summer dinner of chicken, corn on the cob, and rice, and remark, “Hmm. Two starches.” She just thought I would want to know. The correct, almost formal reply: “I’m not going to complain, but …”

  Wasp children often keep that sort of remark or gesture at the ready — phrased not as an objection (which would draw censure) but as a note for the files, a boundary stake. Whenever my friend Rachel’s mother begins to gush about something bucolic, her children make a rolling-pin motion. Once, visiting her son in upstate New York, she had remarked of the hard, plain country homes, “I picture everyone inside sitting around the fire and baking bread,” making the rolling-pin motion to underscore her pastoral image. “They’re all alcoholics,” he said, “and they have the worst incest rate in the country.”

  Such semaphores themselves became heirlooms. When taking on an onerous task, Grandma Tim would cry, “Adrian would love to blow up the air mattress.” She had overheard her aunt say that on a camping trip, volunteering her son Adrian Lambert for duty — which seemed funny to Grandma Tim then, and to us as we repeated it over the years.

  My mother would wryly say, “Smiling the boy fell dead” to call attention to how she was bearing up (a phrase her mother and grandmother and great-grandfather had invoked in the same way). In Browning’s “Incident of the French Camp,” a young boy, though badly injured, reports to Napoleon that his troops have taken Ratisbon. “You’re wounded!” the emperor observes:

  “Nay,” the soldier’s pride

  Touched to quick, he said:

  “I’m killed, Sire!” And his chief beside,

  Smiling the boy
fell dead.

  Years later, when I was in my thirties, I broached the question of perimeters with Mom one afternoon on the beach in Wainscott, trying to get at the banked ferocity between us. There was so much we shared: the tone — playful, sometimes acid — the Pierson jaw, the gab at parties, the inconsolability. And yet. I found myself resisting how much fun Mom could be, not wanting to give her that victory. And I worried that I was too much her son, that I now saw the world through her eyes, which were acutely sensitive to grace and melancholy and whimsy but blind to the power of sex or jazz or fury or true absurdity. That having been groomed as an insider, I was excluded from originality and the deepest pleasures and discoveries — that I would never be able to rip off my armor and free any underlying talents or passions.

  I didn’t put it exactly like that, though.

  My birth had meant that Mom had had to relinquish work and worldly achievement, that she would now be known only for taste and wit and self-possession, beloved by friends but not, as budding artists hope, by strangers — but she didn’t mention any of that. She did acknowledge, working her fingers through the sand, that she hadn’t been quite ready for me. “Some mothers like to get down on the floor and fingerpaint with their children and so forth,” she said, “but I was more interested in you when you started talking and becoming a person. I’m afraid I left you alone a good deal when you were small.” Brightening, she added, “But the result is that you learned to read very early — and now you’re a writer!” I laughed, and, after a startled moment, so did she. Her determination to quell my objections with her pride in me was both masterly and oddly endearing.

  SIX

  Smoke

  WHEN I WAS twenty-four, I lived in a Tribeca loft near the lights of Wall Street with my former college roommates George and Pablo. One evening that February of 1987, Pablo brought home for dinner the three Visconti sisters, commencing what promised to be the most hopeful chapter of my life. He knew them from summers at a beach resort in Tuscany. Their name adorned the family’s luxury-goods business in shops around the world, so the sisters were free to dress in linen and stay out late, but they were also warm and tactile, linking their arms in yours as they walked, or gravely adjusting your necktie. Alessandra was an affectionate referee between her siblings, who called her “Switzerland”; Tessa was brassy, often at the center of a storm; and Giovanna, the youngest, was a brunette with plum-colored lips that, when she spoke Italian — “Non parliamone piu, lasciamo andare!” — seemed to brush my inner ear. She walked in slow motion, bewildered by our local gravity, but her gestures were quick and sure: the glide of thumb over fingertips for a velvety texture; the little finger waggled for something untoward; the sideways chop of finality. She was only eighteen.

  Our crush on them was immediate and collective, so after coursing in a larger group of a dozen friends to Area, Palladium, the World, the 1980s dance clubs of boundless possibility, we’d drive the Viscontis home to their parents’ apartment on Park Avenue, piled on laps with the top down in George’s VW Cabriolet, seeming to fly not through but above midtown’s gleaming canyons. On the straightaway up Park, the twin sets of lights were runway lamps guiding us in. We’d stay over and wake late for espresso and the Times, the sisters smoking in white robes with their hair damp, the air thick with unsorted radiance.

  At a bar called Stephanie’s, over sambucas, Alessandra and Giovanna murmured in Italian, discussing Giovanna’s boyfriend. What little I had gleaned about this Shaun from Pablo’s well-meant warnings was discouraging: a horse had kicked some of his teeth out, yet he had knit her a cable sweater, so he was sensitive, too. Alessandra came over and clasped my hand. “Hey, softie,” she said. “Soft hands.”

  “I know, Ali, doesn’t he?” Tess said. Turning to me, she said, “You should let your hair grow out, be less of a spiky porcospino.” They liked to anatomize us, a game Giovanna didn’t enter into.

  “Don’t you find us interesting, Tadeus?” Alessandra said, half teasing. “You should write about us: the three faces of womanhood.”

  “Chekhov got there first,” I said.

  “You probably think we’re slobby American girls,” Giovanna said.

  I shook my head, blushing: wrong and wrong.

  I was earning $18,000 a year working long hours at Spy magazine — a satirical monthly that became an immediate hit, at which point the editors cut my pay. So I could already see the gap opening with my investment banker roommates. One reason I liked being around George and Pablo was that they took for granted a way of life my ancestors had led — first-class tickets, cases of wine, the tearing high spirits of youth. And there were always beautiful women on our sofa, smoking and jangling their bracelets.

  If I wasn’t careful I was going to become the shirty, sarcastic one, the envious observer. But for now the gap was small, and I cloudily imagined that Giovanna would close it entirely — her youth and wealth and European vibe would maintain me: a Henry James plot in reverse. She would cut my tethers and we’d soar together somewhere prosperous and carefree.

  After months of nerving myself up, I finally asked her to Spy’s black-tie first-anniversary party, hoping to shine in the reflected glow of champagne and Malcolm Forbes. The party was such an undeniable smash — paparazzi, swing dancing, gusts of self-congratulation — that it was impossible not to have a good time, whether we were or not. But when I drove her home, she backed out her door with an enigmatic smile.

  A FEW days after the party, Giovanna sat beside me at a table her parents had taken at a benefit for cancer research and quietly disclosed that her mother, Paola, had recently had breast cancer. And that she had few memories before age five. And that Paola had suffered such postpartum depression that Giovanna was sent to her grandmother for a year. And that her father, Federico, had affairs and was jealous of his daughters’ boyfriends. She considered me after each revelation, assessing. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear more or less. At three a.m. we finished a pack of Camel Lights at the Odeon — I didn’t smoke, otherwise, or drink nearly as much — and she interrupted me to remark that she always had a good time with me and it wasn’t just the buzz talking. She was an interrupter, blurting, “But, Taddles — ” out of a sudden fear that if she didn’t voice her mood then, she never would. She was often silent, secretly amused, a pitcher-inner at dinner parties, a dog lover, a gallant depressive. These qualities shone for me as a dazzle of facets, but I could never get the whole gleaming stone of her in view.

  The next night she was off to Italy to see Shaun. Alessandra chided me for keeping her out so late, saying Giovanna had coughed blood before boarding: “She’s only barely nineteen.” Taking all these advisories as encouraging — opposition means you’re at least being taken seriously — I went out and purchased a midnight blue Italian overcoat, very like the roomy coat Matisse wears in those late photographs of him by Cartier-Bresson. I would be an artist in love.

  Late that winter she came to Maplewood. Paddy and Karen were in the Caribbean, so I brought Giovanna and George and his Belgian girlfriend and our friend Loli up to their house for a ski weekend. Giovanna and I were in bunk beds in my cousin Bella’s room, awkwardly, but the first night, everyone left us alone together downstairs, and we finally kissed, a soft tobacco sweetness. Then she disclosed what I and my advisers had been discussing for months: that she had a boyfriend.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “I’m happy for you.”

  “What?” Her laugh spread her Roman nose and gave her an inviting, almost chummy look. I killed myself trying to make her laugh.

  “Well, anything that makes you happy — ”

  “He is pretty terrific, though.”

  “…”

  “I’m sorry. I told myself I wasn’t going to say that.”

  She gave me a blue cardigan of hers, and I would bury my nose in it when we were apart: cigarettes, Keri lotion, a peaty scent that reminded me of the geraniums on our sunporch in Buffalo. The slow underwater pursuit, the march of the starfish.


  One sultry night that summer, I stayed for dinner at her parents’ and Federico Visconti made an asparagus risotto. He was intense and volatile, a collector of classic station wagons and sedans, cars that embodied his love for America. Sweating a little, drinking white wine, he began lecturing me about his countrymen’s mania for consumption. He grabbed a stack of glossy Italian magazines to show me the sensual car ads, the blatant sex and chrome: “Disgusting, no?” Paola, a sweet, unhappy woman who looked like Giovanna, took my arm and tried to speak about Sri Lanka, which they’d been to recently, but Federico interrupted, “No, no! You know nothing!” She wiped away a tear and shakily kept on. When young, Giovanna had told me, they had been very much in love.

  Alessandra, fresh from the shower in a white robe, snapped at Tessa for leaving a ring with her wineglass. “Don’t yell at me about that,” Tessa said. “Yell about what’s really going on — but no, no one in this family ever does.”

  Federico laughed theatrically and squeezed Giovanna’s nose. Ignoring him, Giovanna continued telling me about an older woman she’d met at a party: “She was so pillowy. I felt I could put her on the floor and knead her like bread.” Now I was sweating. Afterward, Giovanna shrugged: “We’re these merchants, Taddles. Your family is choosy about words and waits till the other person is done speaking, but we have no tradition except rudeness and upsetting conversations.”

  “We were merchants, too.”

  “Dai!”

  Desultory phone calls, plays and premieres, languorous embraces abruptly broken off — “I always end up with you when I drink too much” — keyed-up midnights in a rocketing cab. I had a phrase I consoled myself with riding home alone: “Face the arithmetic.” After the carnage at Fredericksburg, when Lincoln realized that the Union armies were larger and that even devastating defeats worked in his favor, he observed, “No general yet found can face the arithmetic, but the end of the war will be at hand when he shall be discovered.” There was something addictive about the pursuit, about abandoning myself to a romantic cause. I had been ashamed, previously, to show (or even feel) passion; now I could because the glove thrown down was in no danger of being picked up.