by Tad Friend
Blessed is the man
who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked
or stand in the way of sinners
or sit in the seat of mockers.
Day passed his subsequent orals and later in life shone at debate, rising at public forums to pose knotty tripartite questions prefaced by a précis of his qualifications: “I appreciate the rigor of your analysis, but as a retired academic and sometime executive, I cannot help but observe …” In his determination to escape, he overshot and indeed repudiated the cultural ideal of bluff, casual intelligence. Not for him the insouciance that made his friend Ted Terry a Williams hero as secretary-treasurer of both Phi Beta Kappa and Kappa Beta Phi, the drinking society he joined by consuming, in one hour, as many ounces of beer as he weighed in pounds — 160 ounces, or more than thirteen beers. Ted likes to say, “If I die at my desk, at least I will have had four good years of retirement at Williams College.”
When my father wrote the class report for his fiftieth reunion, he took the step of recalling two gang rapes at fraternities when he was there, events widely gossiped about but never reported. At the reunion, he says, “Nobody spoke to me about it — nobody. Possibly I’d offended by suggesting that our culture of alcoholism and lack of responsibility, of conformity, supported gang rape. Possibly people feared that I would hurt fund-raising. And possibly I’d struck home. But it’s very lonely to strike home.”
One of his friends later hit the proper fraternal note, saying, “Jesus, Dorie — we had a gang rape? Why wasn’t I invited?”
MY GREAT-GREAT-UNCLE Charles Wood Friend, Dorie Sr.’s older brother, was a negligent executive at the Farmers Bank who shut up shop at three. Uncle Charlie never married, choosing to take care of his mother, Didi, and frequent the north side bordellos. Once, he arrived home from such an outing very late for the formal-dress Sunday night dinner in the Big House. Putting his monocle hurriedly in place, he slipped into his chair after the meal had begun. Soon it became apparent that he had slipped from his chair to the floor. “I do believe,” Didi observed, “that Charles is indisposed.” Day and his brother, Charlie, loved to wake their great-uncle from his afternoon nap: blinking and yawning, he would take a silver brush in each hand and solemnly smooth his thin white hair. Then he would accompany them downstairs, full of jokes, ring the bell for Quinlan the butler, and order what Grandpa Ted liked to call “an umbrella stand” full of scotch.
There was a conspiratorial pleasure in the way Ted spoke of his uncle. In those days, everyone drank too much, so Ted’s humid eyes, his controlled movements and marathon runner’s pace, his amiable way of treating each shift in fortune or conversation as sufficient cause to signal for another round, disguising his solitary mission in the flurry of troop movements, was easier to overlook. And Jess liked a man who liked his cocktails. During the divorce, though, she told Day that she had been shocked, early in the marriage, when she and Ted and another couple were driving back from a vacation in Rumson one summer night. They had to pull off in Hershey, Pennsylvania, to look for a hospital because Ted was unconscious. The doctor in the emergency room examined him, then took Jess aside and asked, “How long has your husband been an alcoholic?”
As I began to realize when I started swiping Michelobs from the pantry of the Wainscott house and no one raised an alarm, boozing was permitted, even encouraged, in our world, as long as it conformed to protocols designed to avert that word “alcoholic.” There are, after all, only a few circumstances in which Wasps may properly drop their guard: charades or costume parties; roughhousing with dogs, who enact their owner’s feelings by proxy; and cocktail hour, the solvent of all care. To make clear that you are not losing control but manifesting it, no one takes more than one drink, or at least one drink that counts. So a host never asks, “Would you care for another drink?” but rather, “May I refresh your drink?” or “Would you like a repair?” or simply “A dividend?” If you don’t begin to drink before 5:30 or 6:00 p.m., when “the sun crosses the yardarm,” you aren’t an alcoholic. Or anyway not before noon. So the relative of mine who popped up to pour herself a “brownie” at 12:01 p.m. wasn’t an alcoholic. And binge drinking wasn’t alcoholism; it was just “letting off a little steam.” Drink occasions an exception to the rule against euphemism: nobody is ever drunk, just “tight” or “loose” or “squiffy” or romantically, nautically, “three sheets to the wind.”
You need to establish a pattern — a standard, really — and stick to it. Uncle Wilson, for instance, would have a Michelob at lunch, and several glasses of pinot grigio at dinner, but focus his ingenuity on the intervening cocktail hour, when he would serve up turbid creations with names such as Raising Cane or Ceiling Zero. In the butler’s pantry he’d tacked up a typed page of mixological reminders, such as “Martinis: gayety in minimum time and at minimum expense,” and after filling a canvas bag with ice cubes from the aluminum trays in the freezer, he’d sliver the ice by smacking the bag with a wooden mallet — instructing our au pair, Janine, to yell, “No, Uncle Wilson, no!” after each smack. The cocktail hour was a full hour, with Wilson and Letty and my parents in blazers and ties and Pappagallo dresses, eating Wheat Thins arrayed with cheese in a slim walnut salver. The dogs, Penny and Charlie, had to do tricks to get a nibble. “Way back, way back!” Wilson would cry, and Penny would inch back on her hind legs, like an outfielder tracking a fly ball, then leap to nip the falling cheese. The ceremony, the pleasing rigmarole, almost disguised the fact that if you had more than one of Wilson’s concoctions, it was good night, nurse.
Likewise, Grandpa Ted made cracking the beers that preceded his bourbons into a ritual, teaching my father, at eight, to pour them out, tilting the glass just so. At Williams, Day began drinking bourbon straight, in loyalty. Over lunch at home during my father’s fourth year of graduate school, Ted said he would continue to shoulder Yale’s fees. After lunch, Ted took his son aside. “Am I a good provider?” he asked.
“Yes,” Day said, and thanked him.
“You think I drink too much, don’t you?”
Day reddened and, in a low voice, answered, “Yes.”
Ted had his answer ready: “I like the taste.” My father nodded, and they never spoke of it again.
In the years after my last visit to Pittsburgh, when Ted was falling apart from arterial stenosis, cerebral arteriosclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease, he kept drinking. His nurses’ notes about his variable temper and acuity suggest that drink was his only constant: “4 highballs, good dinner,” was a typical evening’s account, terse gestures toward a largely unwritten epic of drinking, not for the taste, but for the oblivion.
When Ted died, in 1976, I remember Day taking the call and sitting abruptly on the stool by the phone, massaging his forehead with his thumb and forefinger as he wrote down the details, Mom’s hands on his shoulders. He asked if I’d like to send anything with him to the funeral. I had been writing to my grandfather, trying to help him get well via baseball trivia — “Quicky quiz: What four players have hit 30 homers and stolen 30 bases in the same year?” — so I stuck to that theme. Not without a pang, I gave Day my two most cherished Pirates baseball cards: the manager, Danny Murtaugh, and Roberto Clemente, who himself had recently died in a plane crash while on a humanitarian mission. During Eugenia’s open-coffin viewing of Ted in her front hall, my father slipped the cards under his father’s pillow. Theodore Wood Friend Jr. and his companions were then chauffeured to Allegheny Cemetery and loaded into the mausoleum James Wood Friend had built for himself and all the family heroes to follow.
EIGHT
Appearances
SOON AFTER MY father’s inauguration as president of Swarthmore, in 1973, he and my mother privately agreed that the job — for all its prestige and prerogatives, including Ulverstone, the colossus of a house with its glum, Tolkienish name — was a gilded cage. Six weeks in, Day arrived at his office to discover it smeared with ketchup and cat shit by students protesting the Vietnam War (which he had alway
s opposed). Two weeks later, Mom wrote her college roommate Chrissie about a blowup she and Day had had over attending college events on a Saturday; he wanted to make an appearance at six, she at just five. “So, because this is the one and only hour he can go with the children to get me something for my birthday tomorrow, he’s gone stamping out in a rage on that tender errand. That’s the thing about this job: there’s not even time for a proper argument + its resolution.”
They found themselves becalmed in the horse latitudes of Wasp life, the middle passage when duty is all that drives the ship. Day worked from 7:30 in the morning to 10:30 at night, occasionally stripping off his jacket to hit fungoes to me in the late afternoon, now and then taking us to the movies, but mostly absent or preoccupied. At one point, away on a fund-raising trip, he wrote Mom to acknowledge his “grumpiness and over-responsibility,” promising to mend his ways if she, too, would criticize less and be more optimistic, so that “sunshine can fall abundant upon the children.” He was often on the road, wooing potential donors or reassuring alumni groups, accompanied by Malta, the small red bear Mom had given me as a child: she’d hide it in the suitcase of any of us embarking on a long trip. He would send Mom thick, newsy letters, sometimes to complain about not getting letters in return. From Hong Kong, he wrote, “I do my airport exercises freely, i.e. you are not here to be embarrassed by a middle-aged man performing odd stretches in public.” (I myself now stretch out my hamstrings in airports, trying not to care if I look peculiar.) Even when home, he wrote notes and dispatched them upstairs or across the bed at two a.m.: “I see you, and in your silences hear you thinking about something you do not seem to share with me. That makes me sad. I feel helpless before that.”
The family compass had shifted, the polarities of absence. Mom was at home more, though she was often planning or hosting college events and then — with a faint air of martyrdom — updating her dinner party book, to ensure that no guest ever had to sit beside the same person or eat the same meal twice. Pier and I played lots of Nerf soccer with friends in our end of the house, conscripting Timmie as steady goalie, running up and down the hall — staying out of the way. The phone was always ringing, and no one wanted to answer it, so Mom had buzzers attached to the six extensions so that whoever finally picked up no longer had to shout through the house: one buzz meant the call was for Day, two was Mom, and so on. Ringing and buzzing was continual, as if the house had tinnitus.
In her bread-and-butter letter to Letty and Wilson about our 1977 visit to Wainscott, Mom wrote of returning home to a profusion of problems, among them the lethargy of Timmie’s hamster, Sparky: “A few days ago I brought him into our bedroom + turned on the air conditioner; that has perked him up a bit + D. + I can now hear him in the night running endlessly in his little toy wheel in the darkness. Not too different from the rest of us.”
In 1994, Pier and I were home for Thanksgiving and we all got into a discussion of those years. Mom said that they had been crazy to try for the president’s job, not being nearly ready. Pier, loyally, said that Day was right to take it, and that they couldn’t have known what lay ahead. I agreed but added that I thought that period had been tough on all of us.
Day breathed in and said, “I hear your feelings, and pay careful attention because you’re very good at articulating your feelings, and I think it’s beneficial to till the soil. But it sounds like everyone’s saying ‘Dad threw us into the cauldron.’ ”
“Not on purpose, obviously,” I said. “Pier and I just said we’d have taken the job, too. But in retrospect I think we would all have been better off somewhere else.”
“Yes, well, one thing I’ve learned as a historian is to beware of fantasies of flight from the past.”
I was suddenly so angry that, bewildered, I clamped up and we let the topic die. His dismissal of “fantasies of flight” had reminded me how for four years I had longed to flee Swarthmore’s public schools. Some of Baba’s unloveliest footage shows my seventh-grade camouflage: a heavy flannel shirt, clunky horn-rims, and a tan fishing hat atop a Doug Henning–style cascade of hair. Newly aware of my scoliosis, I am trying to tilt my right shoulder up to look even, longing for puberty to kick in and unconsoled by Mom’s reassurance that it’s better to be a late bloomer, that the kids who were shaving and partying and swaggering through the halls would all end up pumping gas.
My bookish timidity would have made me a mark anyway, but being the son of the president in a college town multiplied my visibility. I lacked the guts to tell my parents about the noogies and Indian burns, but there also wasn’t much opportunity: they discussed college matters so extensively over dinner — the professor suing for tenure, drunken assaults at a frat with powerful alumni — that, for a period, we had to raise a hand before speaking. I took out my misery on Pier and Timmie, passing it down.
Each weekday at 6:40 a.m., I awoke in foreboding to Mom’s step on a loose hall floorboard. Years later, Timmie would tell me that she, too, awoke to that creak dreading school. On snowy mornings I’d put my ear to my clock radio as the newscaster read off the closed schools by number. If 403 was on the list, I’d fall back on my pillow, washed with relief. I sicked out as much as I dared, claiming to have thrown up in the night. Day would bring the thermometer and sit at the foot of my bed in a three-piece suit, lost in thought as, five feet away, I pressed its bulb to my reading light to kick the mercury to 101 or 102. Once I overdid it, in my zeal, and he frowned, focusing: 109 degrees. “Someone’s been goosing this thermometer!” he declared.
But he relished accusation as little as I did; we were careful not to really get into it. So I went off to school hunched with anxiety — sick now, as I hadn’t been before. Only near the end of eighth grade did I finally work up the courage to say, “I want to go somewhere else.” And Day said, “If you get your grades up, we’ll respect your seriousness and take the matter forward.” It was Cheerful Money all over again, but this time I snapped at the bait.
PREP SCHOOL is the place where Wasps recognize themselves as such, where they learn their trademark self-deprecation, becoming confident enough of their status to poor-mouth. There they learn what Kipling called “the Law,” emerging deeply loyal to school and family, believing that the religion observed in daily chapel knits a class together, and convinced that character is comportment — “Manners Makyth Man,” as the motto of Britain’s Winchester School has it. Harry Sedgwick, the nephew of Uncle Wilson’s Groton classmate and friend Francis “Duke” Sedgwick, described the initiation another way, observing, “Childhood for Sedgwick boys ended when we were sent to Groton.”
Groton’s motto was Cui servire est regnare: “To serve Him is to rule.” My father’s St. Paul’s roommate, Ted Terry, still recalls the telegram the school sent his mother when she requested their application: “We only accept superior boys.” “It was a very strict, cold-blooded place, with no nurturing concept,” Ted says, “which somehow became part of this strange notion we had that we were better than other people. We made life miserable for anyone thought to be gay or Jewish, and I recall making a lot of fun of a kid with a harelip. The only thing that saved him was when he was joined by a Chinese kid named Kin Tsu.” He recounts this with mild remorse but also with bemusement; that’s just how things were. New boys had it the worst, because anything new was not old: they were dismissed with a lip-curling “Newboyh!” (Even when Timmie went to St. Paul’s, forty years later, “cocky newbs” routinely got “ponded,” or tossed in the pond.)
The schools forged their students not in fire but in ice: at Groton boys slept in unheated rooms and washed up in cold water at communal sinks; at St. Paul’s the boys poured water across the windowsills in the aptly named Old Upper dorm to caulk them with ice against the drafts. Sports were paramount, the more obscure and self-invented, the better. The craze of St. Paul’s in my father’s day was a kind of handball or jai alai using a tennis ball and a dorm’s gabled roof, a game known as “nigger baby.” The ruling idea was to mint citizens rath
er than intellects; Endicott Peabody, Groton’s founder and longtime head, once said, “I am not sure I like boys to think too much.” When Grandma Tim attended Ethel Walker, one of the first prep schools for girls, there was one commencement prize for scholarship and a dozen for such qualities as “character and influence,” “courage and fortitude,” “efforts and development,” and “faithfulness and dependability,” with four prizes alone for “neatness and order.”
This distrust of ideas was particularly pronounced at finishing schools such as Miss Porter’s, attended by both Jacqueline Bouvier and my cousin Norah, who emerged from it somewhat less finished. At Miss Porter’s, “Young ladies were expected, if they did not know how to do so already, to learn to play tennis, to curtsy, to pour tea, to remove the finger bowl with the doily and place these at eleven o’clock before separating the dessert spoon and fork,” Stephen Birmingham wrote in America’s Secret Aristocracy. “Girls were not permitted to wear high heels because of Miss Porter’s arcane belief that high heels damaged a woman’s childbearing ability.”
I knew so little about the famed “St. Grottlesex” boarding schools that I thought St. Paul’s was in Pittsburgh, rather than New Hampshire. They held no allure. Mom enthusiastically threw herself into “finding Tad a school,” driving me all over the area to visit campuses, but I knew I wanted to go to the Shipley School, in Bryn Mawr, where my friend from around the corner, David Hunt, had gone. Shipley’s faint hope for immortality was a passing mention in The Catcher in the Rye: Holden Caulfield, surprised to hear that a girl he liked goes to a school near his own, says, “I could’ve sworn she went to Shipley.” Jane Smith and my great-aunt Diddy and my cousin Lili were all Shipley graduates, but I didn’t know that then; I just knew that it seemed a congenial place where I could find my way socially. It had been an all-girls school until a few years before, and I would graduate with merely a dozen other boys in a class of sixty-three.