Cheerful Money

by Tad Friend

  She dropped by one Saturday, Circe in a green sweater, and I wobbled and fell. Drinks led to dinner at Canal Bar with George and his latest girlfriend and our friend Michael, who leapfrogged parking meters on the walk home. A week before my flight out, Giovanna finally spent the night with me on Loli’s futon. “I’m glad it’s you,” she said. “I mean — well, you know what I mean.” Days and nights in the dimness. We stopped in on her parents on our way to my good-bye party, and Paola took hold of my arm and gave it a special squeeze. Federico narrowed his eyes and recounted how a doctor and his wife, touring New Guinea, had to suddenly fly out because local custom demanded that the police chief be granted a night with the wives of all visitors. The implicit threat only seemed testimony of Giovanna’s esteem.

  I flew to Hawaii carrying the compass she had given me to help me find my way home. The following day, Shaun returned to the States for good.

  JOHN MERRICK, now nursing his third cocktail at the Maurice, offered me one of his lamb chops, and I said, “No, thanks, I’m full.”

  “Never say ‘I’m full,’ dear,” Jess said. “Say ‘I’ve had plenty, thank you.’ ”

  Mom and I shared a smiling glance and she drew breath to speak, but Jess tossed her head and carried on: “I wish I hadn’t lived as long as I have. It’s not fun. I don’t have fun. Except staying in touch with your family,” she said more softly. “But that’s not fun, really. There’s nothing fun.”

  “Tad has been having fun!” Mom broke in. I had? “He’s been keeping company with a young girl named Giovanna Visconti, of the Visconti family. She’s very nice. Very pretty, and very nice, and young. Younger than Timmie.”

  “What do you think of her, Dorie?” Jess asked.

  “She has a strong sense of wonder,” my father said, smiling. He intended a compliment, but I frowned: “wonder,” in a family that prided itself on puzzle solving, seemed to me faint praise. It was true that I couldn’t imagine how Giovanna would fit in with my family, but that was the point.

  John asked: “Are you” — he made a mystifying fade-away gesture — “… period?” He repeated the question, and the gesture.

  “I think John is asking, ‘Are you in love?’ ” Day said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, yes and no.”

  Jess laughed and patted my hand approvingly. She had kissed the film star Ronald Colman in a taxi before she married Ted Friend, and other men, in other taxis, after. “We all love your mother, don’t we?” Ted would say to his sons while mixing drinks for his guests, and they would nod, shamefacedly. Day and his younger brother, Charlie, were determinedly incurious about the whispering at Pike Run; or their father’s nickname, “Tolerant Ted”; or their mother’s summer escorts at the Seabright Beach Club and Rumson Country Club on the New Jersey shore — a string of lanky charmers and soft-spoken “Uncle Mac,” who gave the boys choice postage stamps.

  During my father’s senior year at Williams, he and Charlie spent the Christmas break at the St. Anthony Club in Manhattan. They were wakened early on a Sunday morning, after a late night listening to jazz at Jimmy Ryan’s, by the unexpected arrival of their father. Ted had taken the night train up from Pittsburgh to announce that he was divorcing their mother. He began pulling slips of paper from his tweed jacket, evidence he had compiled, and reading them aloud: “October 18, 1952. On the birthday of her second son, Jessica leaves the house to go see Charlie Kenworthey.”

  Jess had fallen in love with Kenworthey, a gregarious corporate lawyer, and had asked Ted to let her go. Ted didn’t mention that. He said that as he had always kept his marriage vows, he was going to initiate the divorce, which would cast her as a scarlet woman. “Your mother is just like her mother,” he said. “Mrs. H brought her own man in that weekend at Pike Run, sleeping with him in the Lodge.” The idea that sexual incorrigibility ran in the Holton family seemed to comfort and absolve him.

  “And then,” my father told me years later, “he got back on the train to Pittsburgh. It was very sad. It still is very sad.”

  One evening when I was fourteen and we were visiting Jess and John Merrick in Rumson, my father happened to mention, over cocktails, an article he’d read about British students who worked out a method of tossing eggs into the air so that they would land on their smaller end and not break. “I have some eggs,” Jess said, brightening. “Let’s try them.” I ran to the refrigerator for the carton and met everyone in the backyard, which was soft underfoot after an afternoon of rain. Day took a large white egg, blew on it for luck, and tossed it into the sky. We watched it revolve up beyond the porch light’s corona and then reemerge out of the night to bounce and settle on the grass, intact. Laughter and delight. “Let me have one of those,” Jess said, stepping onto the lawn in her high-heeled sandals. She flung an egg up and waited, her blue eyes raised to the dark.

  IN MY year away, in Bangkok and Kyoto and Goa, I read Giovanna’s occasional letters with a cryptographer’s care, trying to decipher the underlying message; she had evidently made a similar effort before mailing them, for she would often close with a P.S. in slightly different handwriting: “Buona notte” or “You are much missed.” As I neared home, she flew to London, where I was staying with George, to surprise me. She stayed with Alessandra, who had moved to London, too. Everyone was there. When Alessandra was on the phone, I pulled Giovanna into the vestibule: “Give me a kiss. No, a real kiss.”

  “Here?”

  “Come outside.”

  On the street, she asked, sadly, “Do you think we’ll keep doing this forever? Sometime you’re going to get fed up.” She was seeing not only Shaun but also now some Barry.

  “Yes.”

  “And we won’t be friends anymore.”

  “No.” She lit a Marlboro, and I took a drag, and we smiled. We kept doing it for seven more years, through a long relationship of mine and several of hers. When life was going a little too well for either of us, we’d meet at Delia’s, a supper club in the East Village where our being together seemed wholly plausible. Then, in the cab back to the world, we’d discuss how I was passive and touchy and resentful, and how she lied and blew hot and cold; how she drove by my apartment at night and thought of us living together in Vermont, but needed to be alone. I could never get to the root of it.

  We spent weekends upstate at her family’s refurbished hunting lodge on a hill above the Hudson. We picked strawberries with Alessandra and Paola, now separated from Federico; we read and smoked and biked down the immense swooping driveway. We took Ecstasy. We slept together after drinking at the Ale House, and three nights later she came to dinner and told me she was seeing two other people, new ones. We slept together after seeing the Lounge Lizards, then she went off to Italy to visit another boyfriend and, when she returned, left a message canceling our plans, concluding, “So call me.” Our youthful caprices had become a measure of adult limitations. With an angry devotion now, a mutual self-contempt bound up with fondness, we sought to prove otherwise. Over the years — and it was ten years, a Trojan War — our total hours together added up to at most three weeks. But there endured the hope that she might slip up and fall for me and then I could finally leave her.

  In late 1996, two days after Grandma Jess died, I took Giovanna to Travel + Leisure magazine’s black-tie twenty-fifth-anniversary party aboard the QE2, which was docked on the Hudson: Carly Simon and her son Ben playing the guitar and singing “Paper Moon,” dancing on decks high and low. Giovanna looked wonderful in a black-and-white gown and a butterfly brooch picked out in diamonds, and she said I looked grand in my dinner jacket. I was wary of this Britishism, a vogue word then to convey sumptuousness and satisfaction. Still, she was affectionate, willing to be pleased. The magazine had considerately booked staterooms for its guests, so we repaired to room 1039 and drank flutes of Perrier-Jouet. There was a moment, there, a grand moment. At four a.m. she fled by cab in the rain.

  That afternoon she called to blame me for sleeping with her: “You knew you’d feel vulnerable
afterward.” After a jet of fury, this made me laugh. When you can see yourself as ridiculous, you have a chance. And so I got sober like a drunk: I didn’t call her for a day, then two days, then three. Eventually it was years.

  Much later, married now and grown up, having survived breast cancer herself and quit drinking entirely, Giovanna told me she’d often thought about that night on the QE2, wondering if staying aboard would have meant leaving her family behind. A Wasp at heart after all, then. Giovanna had felt like a rebellion, but it was a flight to safety, renouncing nothing. The pursuit was as conservative as it was sensual as it was competitive as it was hopeless: the husky voice and yielding mouth, the sheer fizz of youth and money and glamour and desire, all just beyond reach. Her cardigan got lost, in one move or another, but I wore the blue overcoat until it fell apart.

  SEVEN

  Loaded

  ONE AFTERNOON TWO summers back, Amanda and I were running very late to get Walker and Addie, then a year old, to a birthday party. Addie was hiding under our dining table, and Walker crawled in to join her. He began nuzzling his huge blond head, as outsize as my father’s, against Addie’s, which set off a fit of giggles. Amanda, somehow seeing this as a teachable moment, crouched to inform them, “Your great-grandparents used to eat breakfast at this table every morning.” They seemed unmoved.

  “And breakfast was far from your great-grandfather’s best time of day,” I remarked. Still nothing. Well, perhaps they needn’t know everything up front….

  Grandpa Ted’s table — it was his and Grandma Jess’s and then, after the divorce, his and Grandma Eugenia’s — is a mahogany affair in the Georgian style, a twentieth-century reproduction of the type often found in hotels and banks because it embodies starchy authority. Walker and Addie like to play among its sprawling sabre legs because it’s cozy in there — the snug, spandrelly recesses — and also complex: all those brass fittings and casters, the innumerable screw holes, the telescoping undercarriage enabling expansion to accommodate the four leaves nesting in the closet, so that, if we had a bigger room to lodge the table in and many more chairs, we could seat twenty for a dinner that our kitchen is far too small to produce. In my previous, one-bedroom apartment, the table’s shining expanse posed an issue: it was too handsome a thing not to keep and display, but you had to edge around it sideways to get to the sofa or the kitchen.

  When you hail from families that have lived for generations in houses with dumbwaiters and coal scuttles, your birthright includes a staggering heritage of bric-a-brac that has no bearing on modern life — the junk DNA that gets handed down alongside the useful genes. Wasp tableware is anything that abhors the dishwasher: gold-rimmed chargers, etched-crystal wineglasses, pedestaled fruit plates, egg spoons of translucent horn. My parents’ inherited silver alone included mint-julep spoons, bouillon spoons, demitasse spoons, a stuffing spoon, a berry spoon, a pea spoon, sugar tongs, a butter pick, a pickle fork, a lettuce fork, a cocoa pot, salt tubs, and an egg warmer. Most of these antic materials were eventually stored or sold, but a few with strong associations became part of my mother’s decorative mix.

  Anything that didn’t conform to her aesthetic but still seemed useful, she passed on. The table is one of three heirlooms I have from Grandpa Ted, along with a ratty Persian carpet and an unreadable set of books. (That’s if you don’t count the family’s abiding sense of embarrassment.) It was at that table, which rested on that carpet, that I had my last real exchange with my stepgrandmother Eugenia — an exchange that led, in a roundabout way, to the gift of those books.

  Eugenia Arnold Friend was an aging belle from Georgia who called people “Sugar” and wore a fixed smile sealed with ruby lipstick; time and the labor of hairdressers had brought her curls to a state of matronly perfection. At Christmas she sent us physically huge checks, so elephantine they evoked the grand prize from Publishers Clearing House, for five dollars. Grandpa Ted privately referred to her as “the War Department” but seemed oddly contented living with her on Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill in a large house shrouded by velvet curtains. The drawing room, where the Aubusson carpet and Remington bronze were displayed, had a velvet rope across the doorway.

  Eugenia and Ted could be relaxed and funny if their companions were drinkers, but children made her eyes narrow. When my cousin Lili was two, her mother, Joan Anderson Friend, then married to my father’s younger brother, Charles, brought her to Pittsburgh. Lili dashed around the house patting all the vases and cocktail shakers, and Eugenia upbraided Joan, declaring, “You should tie her hands behind her back!” Joan packed and left, but she later regretted the rupture when her stepmother-in-law cut Lili and Lili’s younger brother out of her will. Eugenia didn’t fuck around.

  My parents took elaborate precautions to avoid this sort of scene. They would stay at a nearby hotel, with Mom writing Ted and Eugenia beforehand each time to remind them that this arrangement would enable her and Dorie to “feed Tad and Pier at no inconvenience to your kitchen and bring them around, scrubbed and happy, at a time of day when they are at their best and you would most enjoy them.”

  When I was eight, the danger thought to be past, Day brought me to Pittsburgh to take in a ball game — my first — with his father. It was late in the 1971 season, a year the Pirates would go on to win the World Series. We sat in a box at Three Rivers Stadium, and Grandpa Ted bought me a program and kept supplying me with hot dogs. He was a very genial man. As a youth, when he was the center fielder on the St. Paul’s team, he had been handsome, jovial, and rich; he retained none of those qualities but was still faultlessly dressed in a gray suit with a collar pin and tie clasp, his wingtips gleaming. Looking now at photos of him in later life at Pike Run, at his harried, almost fearful countenance, brings to mind Sargent’s definition of the portrait: “a painting with something wrong about the mouth.” I took to him, though, to his kindness, and his knowing praise of my favorite player, Roberto Clemente, and his long-standing love of baseball. He and Jess had had box seats at Forbes Field, and he had known the Hall of Fame shortstop Honus Wagner well enough to sit him down for a gossip. The Pirates won 7–6 in extra innings, and Day recognized Sandy Koufax in the elevator and got him to sign my program, and I almost caught a foul ball.

  That night, at the mahogany table, after finishing my two grudging scoops of Sealtest vanilla, I tongued the last of it off my spoon. Eugenia instantly addressed my father: “I cannot believe that you would raise a grandson of mine to lick his spoon!” Day stiffened, visibly trying to master his temper. Eugenia believed that manners expressed not your character — who cared about that? — but your grasp of decorum and, therefore, your fitness for society. She once reproved my cousin Daisy for spooning her vichyssoise toward herself rather than away, and would have keeled right over had anyone squeezed a grapefruit half so its juice fell into the spoon. The less actual eating you did with your spoon, the better.

  I fled the table in tears, running into the study and wedging myself up against a consoling wall of books. That was where Ted found me. He stood by the floor lamp, his hands twitching in his sleeves, and seemed to consider crouching down. Instead, he reached into the shelves and pulled out a set of red volumes, spilling them into my lap. “Here,” he said, “take these, take these with you — you’ll feel better, you’ll see.” When I examined the books in bed, after Day took me upstairs, they proved to be a set of James Fenimore Cooper: The Spy and the five Leatherstocking Tales about Natty Bumppo, the quintessential American hunter who was both paleface and redskin. As a boy, Day had penciled his initials in the flyleaf of The Pathfinder; his grandfather, Ted’s father, had originally given the set to him.

  We had planned to stay longer, but my father decided to leave in the morning. As we were about to go, the black butler, Bert, who drank as much as Una the Scottish cook and Eugenia herself, but not quite as much as my grandfather, came downstairs and murmured, “Miz Friend is indisposed.” Expert at nursing a snit into a breach, Eugenia would not see us off.

&nbs
p; And so Pittsburgh was closed to me. From then on my parents visited the city without us: a series of clenched, best-behavior arrivals and hasty, never-again departures. A few years after Ted died, in 1976, my parents were having breakfast one morning as Eugenia’s “guests” — she always underlined the word — when she suddenly asked Mom, “Is it true your father is a pinko?”

  Seeing Mom at a rare loss, Day replied, “It is true that John Pierson was a liberal economist who favored full employment in the thirties.”

  “So is he a pinko or not?”

  My father wrote a bildungsroman about his childhood, Family Laundry, which was published to strong reviews in 1986. On his subsequent visit, Eugenia immediately launched into an attack on “your dirty, disgraceful, disgusting novel,” which she felt defamed Ted as a drinker and the complaisant husband of an adulteress. When she called Day later at our house to continue her harangue, insinuating that she would disinherit him, he jerked the receiver from his ear and glared at it, then waved it in front of his crotch as Mom made frantic placatory gestures from the stove. Finally, red faced, he returned the receiver to his ear.

  MY PARENTS never told me what Wasps were, or that we were they, but I gradually worked out that if you have a fancy name and you go to a fancy school, you’re one. Wasps name their dogs after liquor and their cars after dogs and their children after their ancestors. In continuing thrall to the Puritan conviction that God covenanted not with individuals but with a family, we cream off family names as given names. This accounts for my brother’s name, Pierson Friend, which Day proposed to Mom using the rationale that two names had sufficed for George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln. Ancestral creaming also explains such given names as Ogden, Minot, Mortimer, Deering, Courtlandt, Whitney, Manning, Norborne, Hobson, Prescott, Payson, Baxter, Brewster, DeLancey, Howland, Grafton, Hardwick, Boylston, and Enders — to select just from the list of former governors of one New York club. In this process, names become a marker of status as well as identity — if the two can even be separated.