by Tad Friend
So the first clue I had to my heritage was my bassoon solo of an appellation: Theodore Porter Friend. On the 1971 trip to Pittsburgh, I began to puzzle over its pieces: Grandpa Ted was Theodore Wood Friend Jr., my father was Theodore Wood Friend III, so why wasn’t I Theodore Wood Friend IV? My father only recently told me that Ted and Eugenia had wondered the same thing. His explanation to them then, and to me later, underscored the lesson that my family’s names are not merely polysyllabic incantations repeated with subtle variations, like a skein of Gertrude Stein. Names invoke expectations of achievement, claims for inheritance, and seething resentments. Day told Ted and Eugenia that he and Mom had chosen Porter in homage to my great-great-great-grandfather Porter Ridenour Friend, who had outfitted a company, Friend’s Rifles, in the Union Army. He further explained that my nickname came from Abraham Lincoln’s son Tad. Both my middle name and nickname, then, were yanked from the previous century to stick it to Eugenia, an unreconstructed southerner. Fair enough.
I’m not wild about my full name, perhaps because it was only ever used, by my mother, as a last warning prior to a spanking: “Theodore Porter Friend! You get in that bathtub this minute!” Surely she, too, had been rebuked with the suggestion that her dawdling outraged the very graves of her ancestors: “Elizabeth Groesbeck Pierson! …” My middle name also leaves me cold: in a surviving portrait, Porter Ridenour Friend has an expression both pious and constipated.
I do like “Tad Friend,” though, its bang bang chime. It sounds to me as if it sprang from the same Hollywood brain trust responsible for Tab Hunter and Troy Donahue. But to most ears Tad sounds thoroughly Waspy. My wife’s brother, Dean, hearing about me early on as the new boyfriend, would ask Amanda, “How’s Tad?” giving my name the la-di-da pronunciation befitting a total twit. Even Amanda, long before we met, imagined from my byline in The New Yorker that I came from people who were rich and confident enough — and out of touch enough — to give their child a clubby nickname. She pictured me being tall and lanky with dark-framed glasses, having a slim wife with long brown hair and two children, and driving a Volvo station wagon. (We’ve pretty much achieved her vision, minus any car whatsoever.)
The usual point of Wasp nicknames is to propitiate the gods, to mitigate the Olympus-reaching thunder of Winthrop Cabot Lowell with a byname like Bootsy or Scrote. A recent article in the New York Times about a Newport decorator made me grin — Wasps, sure enough — when it developed that his most formidable clients were named Topsy, Oatsie, and Boop. Many such nicknames, like Baba or Daya or Wassa, come from baby talk. But the use or invention of an infantile nickname can also be a way of keeping the young in their place. In Wainscott a few summers back, Elliot Ogden, an older gent who has worn what appears to be the same seersucker jacket for the past forty years, shook my hand when I got off the tennis court, congratulated me effusively on my (mediocre) play, then sat me down, put his arm around my shoulders, and mused, preliminarily, “Taddy — Taddy baby!” No one else calls me “Taddy,” let alone “Taddy baby.” “You know, Taddy,” he confided, speaking about my magazine writing, “you’re showing real signs of turning into a promising young man.” I thanked him gravely — I like Elliot — thinking, I’m forty-four! If I get any more promising I’ll be dead.
IN 1889, Andrew Carnegie set down his famous “gospel of wealth,” the idea that those who made extraordinary sums — in an era when extraordinary sums were being made — should distribute their largesse. The rich man had a duty “to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which came to him simply as trust funds … for the community.”
That was one view. Another was expressed by William H. Vanderbilt, who cried, “The public be damned!” My great-great-grandfather James Wood Friend held with Vanderbilt. Rather than dispersing his surplus revenues around Pittsburgh, Big Jim, as he was known, preferred to relish those revenues aboard his yacht, the Rebemar. A fierce-looking man with blazing eyes and a thick mustache, he wore suits whose lapels flared like manta rays and kept a big pit bull on a short chain.
We heard about him, through Day, as a rumor of vanished potency, acumen, decisiveness, and greed. On the strength of a handshake, Big Jim and his business partner, Frank Hoffstot, agreed to fund each other’s ventures unhesitatingly and to split all profits. In this way, they came to control the Clinton Iron and Steel Company, the People’s Coal Company, the Monongahela Dredging Company, and four banks, among other concerns. The contemporary Encyclopedia of Biography piously attested that Big Jim’s life “was a record of undaunted, persistent effort and stainless, unimpeachable conduct,” and that, “realizing that he would not pass this way again, he made wise use of his opportunities and his wealth, conforming his life to the loftiest standards of rectitude.” Uh-huh. When workers struck for better wages at their Pressed Steel Car Company, in 1909, Hoffstot and Friend evicted the strikers from their houses, brought in scabs from New York, and deployed their own “Coal and Iron Police” to smash any resistance — tactics that killed a dozen people. James Wood Friend also carried on with the celebrated actress and operetta singer Lillian Russell — the longtime companion of Diamond Jim Brady, whose Pressed Steel Car Company Big Jim bought out from under Diamond Jim while the boulevardier was off enjoying Paris.
At home, Big Jim’s life was a series of propitiations of his wife, Martha McClellan Friend, known as Didi. Their grandson John Walker described some of these efforts in his sharp-eyed memoir, Self-Portrait with Donors, beginning with the remediation of the mess that spewed from Big Jim’s blast furnace:
In this dirt-filled city cleanliness was an obsession. Maids toiled away, continually dusting and scrubbing, and rooms were repainted and redecorated almost annually. Money was easy to make but a large percentage went to the war against grime.
Floods from the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers were endemic. The resultant damp caused my grandmother Friend to become totally deaf, or so her deafness was diagnosed. Grandfather, who seems to have felt some unexplained guilt for her loss of hearing, spent his life, as did one of her sons who never married, trying to make her happy. Each Sunday evening the entire family dined together, and we were never allowed an animated conversation for fear my grandmother would think we were quarreling.
Didi, who carried an ear trumpet and wore a pince-nez, was so fearful of drowning that she permitted her husband to cruise his oceangoing yacht only on the Saint Lawrence River. She was even more terrified of fire. So when Big Jim began building a three-house family compound on Solway Street on the city’s Squirrel Hill, at the turn of the century, he made “the Big House” for the two of them completely fireproof — a twilit pile of steel, tile, and brick. The decor was proper to the point of funereal: walnut and mahogany paneling, velvet curtains, and any number of urns.
Having moved into his dream house at last, and given it the name convicts give prisons, James Wood Friend soon thereafter died. Alongside the mausoleum he built for the Friend dynasty at the Allegheny Cemetery stands a tiny, matching Greco-Roman tomb occupied by Lillian Russell.
THE FAMOUS Wasp traits — remoteness, heartiness, lack of interest in food or adornment, and boozing — seem traditionally male. Yet in many families the supposed patriarch potters about while the matriarch sets the tone. Uxoriousness was particularly marked among the male Friends. Big Jim’s younger son, Theodore Wood Friend, known as Dorie — my father would be both named and nicknamed after him — showed none of his father’s dash. Dorie Sr., who ran his father’s grandly named Bank of North America (a single-branch savings and loan), had skinny legs and a careworn appearance that made him look old when he wasn’t, and ancient when he was. His one surviving letter to his wife, Lillian, written when she was on vacation in 1902, is touchingly winsome: “It is only since we have been married that I know how much you are to me and how much I need you to take care of me…. I dreamt
of you and wakened in the night finding myself reaching over on your side of the bed to see where you were.”
His one surviving letter to his son Ted, a decade later, is a stilted series of admonitions. “You must remember that everyone has not the opportunities that you have, and you must try and take advantage of them,” Dorie wrote. “There are lots of boys of your age that never get a chance to go away for the summer, or get any vacation at all.” He mentioned a nicely phrased letter that Ted had written to another relative: “I was very much pleased to hear that of you, and I am also very proud of my son, and hope that I will always be and that you will never do anything to change my opinion of you in any way.” I can’t help wishing he’d ended the thought with “very proud of my son.”
Ted would change his father’s opinion soon enough. When the story of Ted’s elopement came up, my parents would exchange a look: Mom amused and Day perturbed. And then Day would bat the matter away before we could learn what had really happened. As a result, elopement always seemed to me a romantic gesture rather than a fatal impulse.
Late at night on April 22, 1930, Ted and Jessica Holton left a dinner at the Pittsburgh Golf Club and drove to Wheeling, West Virginia, where they were married by a justice of the peace — in defiance of her mother and his parents, all of whom strongly disapproved of the match, begun as a shipboard romance. He was twenty-seven, she just twenty-one. Ted and Jess then returned to his parents’ house for their honeymoon, Dorie and Lillian Friend being on an American Express tour of Shanghai (where, that same day, they dutifully acquired a pair of oversize ginger jars that now rest in my father’s living room).
Two weeks later, Ted wrote letters in racy green ink to each of his parents, who were still in Asia, justifying this precipitate step. “I know I promised you I would never elope,” he told his mother. “I know you will forgive that when you get to know just what a wonderful girl she is. And you never did want me to be an old bachelor.” With his father, he adopted a bluffer tone, cataloguing the people they’d been seeing and giving an update on the markets — before ending, abruptly, with “Am I a very bad boy? Ted.”
Another letter went off to Dorie and Lillian from Ted’s aunt Rebekah, who strove to put the best face on the scandal, remarking, “I love it when she calls Ted ‘Theo.,’ which is rather nice.” But she concluded firmly, “Please never go away again for such a long stretch + now mark heathen China off your list.”
WHEN MY father was twenty-three, he happened to play golf with an elderly man named Harmer Denny Denny, a former candidate for mayor of Pittsburgh. After a few holes, Denny said, “I knew your grandfather, and he was a fine man. I always respected him. But he didn’t have confidence in his golf game.” Day realized the same was true of his father: Ted stabbed his putts; he couldn’t seem to settle over them and roll the ball. In this way Ted resembled Robert Lowell’s father, memorialized in the poem “Commander Lowell,” who “took four shots with his putter to sink his putt” and quickly “squandered sixty thousand dollars. / Smiling on all …”
Early in their marriage, Ted promised to buy Jess a yacht. And he’d surprise her with notes at Christmas: “The second year was better than the first / If I love you any more I’m sure to burst / Jessica, Dorie, and Theodore Friend / Seems to me like a perfect blend — Teddo loves Byrd.” Then the notes, and all mention of yachts, came to an end.
One explanation is that Ted was no longer well-to-do. For years the family overspent and underworked, and then they got blindsided by the Depression. When Day was born, in 1931, Didi and her four children and their eighteen servants were still in the compound, coasting along, with Ted and Jess just down the street. Coasting was common in Pittsburgh. John Walker wrote that “it was customary for the top executives, most of whom had inherited their wealth, to leave their offices between half past three and four; and Father, having spent the morning reading the newspapers, would join them for backgammon, bridge, billiards, and alcohol.” The Protestant work ethic, a self-gratifying reading of John Calvin that held that success demonstrated God’s plan for your salvation, had for centuries banished Wasp guilt and buttressed the status quo. But the less-advertised corollary to the ethic, which held that if you were born to success nothing further was required, proved a tidy recipe for despair.
When Day was eleven or so, he found a newspaper clipping in his grandparents’ library headlined “Friend Will Divides $15,000,000 Among Kin / Widow of Business Man Gets One-Third of Estate and the Rest Is Shared Alike by Four Children.” He showed the report of this astounding sum — which now, with inflation, would be some twenty-three times greater — to his grandmother Lillian. “It wasn’t that much!” she said, snatching the clipping away. (When Lillian died, in 1976, it came to light in her desk, alongside her Republican Party card, on which she had written in a determined hand, “If you know or hear of a narcotic Pusher call this No., it is free — 800 368 5363.”)
In the years before Big Jim’s widow, Didi, died, in 1935, she fretted about the looming abyss. “Debt, debt, debt,” she would croak, like Poe’s Raven. The Depression was at its nadir, and Ted, at his brokerage firm, was giving fresh meaning to the economist Joseph Schumpeter’s observation that stocks and bonds are “evaporated property.” The properties Ted talked up were themselves evaporating, his plunges bearing the sweaty stamp of the boiler room: Nerlip Mines, which would sweep Canada clean of cobalt; Red Rock Cola, which would bring Coke to its knees; and an extraordinary, self-explanatory breakthrough called Hygienic Telephone. Even the stocks he bought as a hedge were bogbound dinosaurs like Pennsylvania Railroad. In his early forties Ted was fired from his firm, and by his forty-seventh birthday he had essentially retired to playing backgammon, rather well, at the Pittsburgh Club.
It turned out that when he and Jess bought their house together, in 1935, he put nothing down. “There are people in Pittsburgh who said I married your father for his money,” Jess told my father years later. “I bought the house with my money.” It seems exceedingly strange that Dorie and Lillian didn’t bankroll their son’s independence. Perhaps they were worried that he’d fritter the money away — he was always on the phone, sotto voce, to his bookie, Nat — or perhaps they were content to let someone else stake their wastrel. When Ted moved into his next house, with Eugenia, she, too, wrote the check. He had an eye for a shapely bankbook.
MY FATHER and his younger brother, Charles, were raised in significant part by the servants, who called them Master Dorie and Master Charlie. Following the theory of the time, Ted and Jess thwarted thumb sucking by encasing their sons’ hands in aluminum mittens. Following the theory of their class, they skipped hugs, bathing their children, reading before bed, security blankets, and saying “I love you.” My father longed to play the guitar, but his parents discouraged the impulse as unwholesome. The most up-to-date source of information in the house was The Book of Knowledge from Ted’s childhood, published in 1908. When the boys returned from Sunday school, Ted, barely disentangled from his bedsheets, would inquire what they had learned and then sometimes rattle off from memory the books of the Old Testament, ending in triumph with the thunderous mouthful, “Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi!” Years later, my father would write in his novel, about the narrator’s father:
When I was old enough I sorted out his values. “Success” was praised but never defined or achieved; “congeniality” was expressed constantly but diluted by resentment and belittlement of the successful; “tolerance” was much spoken of with regard to Jews, Catholics, and Negroes, but its selective nature and condescending tone tipped it more nearly toward vice than virtue.
Ted and Jess never fought in front of their sons. Wasps, living so much in public, have a keen sense of privacy. (When Timmie joined Facebook recently, she was appalled to discover that it invited everyone in her address book to be her friend — as appalled as if the site had rifled through her purse.) The phrase “pas devant,” short for “pas devant les domestiques,” was a reminder to table certain topics i
n front of the servants. Isabella Stewart Gardner kept the maxim “Think much, speak little, write nothing” above her bathtub, and J. P. Morgan kept it, in French, over his mantel. The Friends adopted the adage, too, or at least the last two-thirds of it (unlike the Piersons, they were not much for letters). Meals were taciturn affairs, the events of the day often summarized with a terse “Nothing to report.” Day’s grandmother Lillian was the only conversationalist at the Sunday lunch table, with its inviolable meal of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, creamed onions, and ice cream, and she prattled or dropped deadly adjurations like “Curiosity killed the cat.”
Day, alone much of the time, invented a baseball game involving five dice and played out whole schedules with eight National League teams, writing up box scores and maintaining running season averages in a set of blue spiral notebooks. When he was eleven he shared the game with three summer friends at the Seabright Beach Club; they’d play two real softball games on the sand during the day and dice baseball at home at night. This monastic spasm ended at thirteen, when Day came up with a better diversion: the Seabright Beach Club Female Rating Society.
When Day was pursuing his PhD at Yale, specializing in Indonesian and Philippine history — countries as far as possible from Pittsburgh, both geographically and culturally — he flunked his oral exams. Part of the problem, he began to realize, was that the absence of family discussion had left him unable to converse, let alone declaim. So he got out his Sunday school Bible, went into the woods behind the house that his mother shared with Charlie Kenworthey, and began reciting Psalm No. 1 to the open air, like Demosthenes overcoming his stutter by discoursing with a mouth full of pebbles: