by Tad Friend
Though Bryn Mawr was only half an hour north of Swarthmore, on the Main Line, even the weather seemed better up there, the hyacinths budding early and fading late. The Main Line had arisen from the Pennsylvania Railroad’s sale of land alongside its line west from Philadelphia; beginning in 1880, the company required its executives to move to these new suburbs and offered lots to owners who would build “homes of more than ordinary architectural interest” and spend at least $8,000 along Montgomery Avenue, where Shipley lay, and $5,000 in the adjacent lanes.
By the late 1970s, the Main Line was a green and leafy land of churches and lacrosse fields and mansions of granite and schist. In Swarthmore, if you wanted to swim or play tennis, you went to the swim club or the public courts, and street hockey was rampant. On the Main Line, there was no street hockey, and many of my new classmates had their own tennis courts and pools — though I wouldn’t get to see them just yet. Conditions had improved for the Shipley boys since David had arrived in seventh grade to find his locker booby-trapped with tampons, but we were still viewed as interlopers. Sharing the bottom of the social ladder with us were the boarders, girls from such countries as Nicaragua and South Africa; my first year, tenth grade, we boys spent most of our time with them. A rung higher were late-arriving girls from outlying suburbs like Paoli, and above them were several layers of local girls of newer money or lesser athletic aptitude. At the top were six or eight girls from old Main Line families with legacy memberships in the Merion Cricket Club, girls who had cars that had nicknames (“Betsy,” “Thumper,” “Stormin’ ”), rode their own horses, and smoked pot. They dated boys like Bucky Buckley and Chad Chadwick from the all-male Haverford School and Episcopal Academy, and believed they could distinguish an Episcopal guy from a Haverford guy by his manners and tone — Haverfordians being more athletic but “a little rough around the edges.” We didn’t even merit a stereotype.
For me, though, being an interloper was a promotion from being a total pussy. I loved the way the in crowd looked, their chubby-faced lissomeness, the Fair Isle sweaters and creamy skin mandated by the Pennsylvania Railroad. I loved how they didn’t care or sometimes even know what their parents did, and the way they danced the pretzel — a jitterbug variant featuring lots of back-to-back twirling — to breezy songs like “Brown Eyed Girl.” Most of all I loved their casual certainty that they were on the primrose path. They were confident of a welcome from one of the right colleges — the Ivies, the little Ivies, UVA, Trinity, Bowdoin, Bucknell, Colgate, Hamilton — already seeing its stencil on the rear window of their parents’ Volvo.
I loved passing notes or flicking them into girls’ cubbies, then poring over the scribbled replies, relishing each foothold gained on the rock face of intimacy, from “Catch ya later,” to “Bye,” to “Party hearty,” to “Take care,” to “Luv ya,” to “Luv,” to “Love” with a smiley face, to “Love” unadorned. The promise Shipley held out, down to the handsome young teacher who invited his students to turn in their papers by Friday at midnight, at his apartment, was that the party would continue forever hearty. Spirit was the school’s keynote: everyone was always “super” and “getting psyched” and “having a blast.” Only a killjoy, noting that the yearbook signatures of graduating seniors so often began “It’s been real,” might wonder if it hadn’t.
I quickly adopted the prevailing look of ceremonial outdoorsiness: Shetland sweater draped over my shoulders, ski tickets dangling from my down vest year-round. We wore duck boots and boat shoes though there wasn’t a large body of water for a hundred miles. Docksiders were superior to Topsiders, and Blucher moccasins from L.L. Bean best of all. These facts were simply evident, incontrovertible.
As I was absorbing social distinctions that originated in Britain, I began, over the summer, to scrutinize the Country Life magazines scattered around Century House. The British weekly celebrated landed leisure with columns such as “A Causerie on Bridge” and hard-hitting features on “The Chiddingfold, Leconfield, and Cowdray Hunt.” Browsing the full-page real-estate ads, I began to dream of acquiring a Georgian estate with a sunroom, conservatory, staff cottages, fenced paddock, harness room, loose boxes, lily pond, double-bank fishing, timbered gardens, and a cow byre. I asked my parents for a subscription for Christmas and instead, thriftily, received a packet of old issues bundled up by Uncle Wilson and Aunt Letty. They all thought my nascent Anglophilia hilarious, overlooking where I had found the magazines in the first place.
Mom gamely helped me shop to fit in, though her pride in me sometimes made the expeditions a trial: when I was seventeen, she took me to Jos. A. Bank and asked the salesman, “Do you have a pair of pants for a young man who’s going to Harvard?” As layering was also de rigueur, once I left home in the mornings I would slip one of my father’s way-too-large Lacoste shirts over an oxford-cloth button-down, flipping up the collar points to appear, in theory, studly.
This was the preppy look, regularly confused with the Wasp look. The confusion is understandable, as Wasps and preppies are often visually indistinguishable and can even interbreed, like horses and donkeys, though their offspring are usually sterile. The young of each species favor the preppy look: a vibrant effusion of pinks and yellows and greens blazoned with animal insignias such as the spouting whale. Older Wasps and preppies fade toward the Wasp look: dull, molting colors of khaki and battleship gray, and tweeds. (Though preppy men often have an Indian-summer flowering, in their sixties, into Nantucket-red pants topped by blazers in goldenrod or anise.)
One reason for the confusion is that as Wasps began to vanish as a ruling class, they disappeared not from but into the culture, which produced perfect (and therefore imperfect) reproductions of their clothes and furniture, as well as armies of preppies to use them. The Wasp tastemakers of the twentieth century were neither Anglo, nor Saxon, nor Protestant. They were Jews, and to a lesser extent Catholics. This effort began among the heads of the movie studios, who enshrined a vision of American family life that banned immigrant accents, noses, and names — Jacob Garfinkle becoming John Garfield, Issur Danielovitch becoming Kirk Douglas, Betty Joan Perske becoming Lauren Bacall.
The look and feel of an idealized Main Line or Nantucket was later mass-marketed by Martha Stewart, a Polish American Catholic, and, particularly, Ralph Lauren, born Ralph Lifshitz, the son of Jewish immigrants from Belarus. Lauren’s determination to obscure what, exactly, he’s drawing on is striking. In his book Ralph Lauren, he goes out of his way never to acknowledge the Wasp, though what he calls the “dream of America” that inspired him is manifestly that: “families in the country, weathered trucks and farmhouses; sailing off the coast of Maine; following dirt roads in an old wood-paneled station wagon …” as well as “images of collegians from Princeton, Harvard, and Yale.”
Mom bought Lauren’s pricey blue-and-white bedclothes one pillow sham at a time until she had the full set; she relished getting her heritage — or at least its linens — in implicit quotation marks. In jazzing it up, she was an escapee. Day could never understand her Lauren fixation and complained that she had turned their bedroom into a boudoir. He also felt, as many Wasps do, that Lauren was a parasite on a culture he hadn’t lived (though it is a little ridiculous for those who’ve inherited money to complain about Lauren’s profiting off their way of life — to carp about his unearned unearned wealth). If Ralph Lauren bought his first new car, he might conceivably buy a red BMW, as my father finally did not long ago, after two years of shopping. He might even choose the station wagon with stick shift, as my father did. But Ralph Lauren would never refuse on principle to get a single option: my father’s car is basically a shiny red go-kart.
The real difference between preppies and Wasps is not couture but outlook. Preppies are infantile and optimistic, forever stuck at age seventeen; Wasps emerge from the womb wrinkly and cautious, already vice presidents, already fifty-two.
AS I was trying to climb up and out, Mom was, too. Her childhood idol was Wonder Woman, the Amazon warrior
also known as Princess Diana — a name derived from Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt and the moon — and she caused a stir at a Swarthmore costume party by dressing as the scantily clad superheroine, complete with the indestructible bracelets and lasso of truth and a tiny Wonder Woman bathing suit (which Mom had bought for Timmie, who hated it). In the late seventies, determined to be more than just a wife and mother — even as she was devoted in her attendance at Shipley soccer games — Mom began to enroll in weekend career seminars. At one, when she was asked to write down her greatest accomplishments, she put “analysis.” She described her fixable weaknesses as “fear of flying (= fear of losing control),” “hyper-perfectionism,” and “procrastination.” Her unfixable weaknesses, she felt, were “Not a team player (not great at folding bandages for the war effort)” and “Don’t like 3’s — jealousy + competitiveness.” Then she listed her favorite activities:
Get presents for people
Improve the look of my surroundings
Wander around Bloomingdale’s
Buy attractive things
Arrange, organize, tidy
Paint
Hit a good forehand
Eat fruit
Watch things (projects) progress + get completed (e.g. I-95).
Talk + think about houses — being built, being fixed
Be near the sea
Check things off lists
Taking that list as itself check-offable, she began to paint more seriously. She started with acrylics, in which she could endlessly rework the plumb lines, adding depth to her eggplants and cantaloupes and her Spode blue-and-white Gloucester tea service, glossing her still-lifes with shafts of afternoon sun. As her confidence grew, she graduated to watercolors, where all plotting must be hazarded on an irreversible act. She was devoted to Matisse, and her titles delineated a bright domestic world he would have recognized: Blue and White, The Blue Cow, The Blue Colander, The Red Dining Room. She treated blue and white (and, as an accent, red) the way that Bach treated melody: later, in Villanova, she wove her favorite colors through every set of dishes, every coverlet, every room, so that her house became a spatial partita, a walk-around fugue.
My favorite of her paintings — it hangs just off our kitchen in Brooklyn — is called Big Lemons. The title suggests deadpan intent: four lemons bulk like boulders in white ramekins, stunned by their own surpassing tartness. A devotee of color and line, she had more difficulty conveying movement. When she painted people — my brother; my father; the dog, Sam — they were shown asleep. The living, too, suited her best in repose.
IN THE summer of 1978, following my first year at Shipley, Uncle Wilson taught me bridge in the evenings. Bridge is really a game for four, pairs of partners who aren’t allowed to consult, so two-handed bridge requires you, when picking up your “partner’s” hand, to act as if you had no knowledge of your own. I sucked at this. If I led a spade to myself when a heart was the textbook play, Wilson would look grave as a turnip and say, “Very interesting,” leaving me stewing. But I needed to win. In fourth grade, I had made a chart grading myself and my twenty-four classmates from 0 to 10 in categories suggested by Mom: Nice, Smart, Good-Looking, Good Sport, Good Athlete, and Cooperative. I was, it turned out, the smartest and nicest, tied for most cooperative, the second handsomest, and the fourth most athletic — in short, the all-around best.
That tenth-grade summer, Uncle Wilson wrote us of triumphing in the Sunday regatta: “Then we demolished the brash Petrie in his cat.” Wilson had been keenly affected by having recently had to sell his back three acres to Donald Petrie, a banker at Lazard Frères. This comedown, and the further affront of Petrie’s money and vigor and braggadocio, explained my great-uncle’s glee. Games and sports are where Wasps permit themselves aggression, as we take for granted that skill on the court or field forecasts, or at least stands in for, success in the larger world. As the Duke of Wellington was supposed to have said, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” (which weren’t yet in existence when he attended the school, but never mind).
My cousins John Walker and his son John Anthony played 140 straight chess games across John Anthony’s late adolescence, commencing the next game straightaway because neither could stand to lose. (When Mom found more eggs than John did at an Easter egg hunt, he became visibly upset.) The series ended when John Anthony heaved the set into the fire. Before he dropped out and moved to India, however, he often spoke of the burden of those struggles. “The undercurrent of competition in my family was very, very strong,” his sister Gillian, who is now a family therapist, says. “I remember going after my brother with a butcher knife in a croquet game when I was about eighteen because he’d cheated, or something. I went to the kitchen and grabbed this knife, really intending to stab him. Then I suddenly realized that perhaps I had gone too far.”
For five or six years, beginning in the late 1970s, almost all the letters between Day, Pier, and me were about squash matches we had played or would play, often with each other. Hardball squash was a prep school game played in icebox-like courts with a ball that left a lingering bull’s-eye welt on your leg when it hit you, which it regularly did. Like the other Wasp sports — crew, polo, sailing, court tennis, paddle tennis, golf, and skiing — it required a large or intricately carpentered space unusable for any other purpose, expensive equipment, and a willingness to endure cold and/or discomfort. But squash’s crisp geometries, the poised pursuit in a cool white box, struck me as particularly Waspy. (Nowadays, squash mostly transpires on more temperate International courts, with a ball of greatly reduced lethality, and so is played by a much broader mix of people, Pakistanis and Egyptians and Australians — who, it turns out, were always better at the game than the American Wasp.)
I learned the game in occasional lessons from Day, who’d sometimes hit with Pier and me after he’d played one of the mustachioed sluggers on Swarthmore’s team. I found the game enthralling, a perfect mix of violence (you can whack the ball as hard as you like and it will probably stay in play) and precision (if you don’t keep your shots tight to the side walls, you open up the court for your opponent). At its higher levels, it becomes a kind of fast-twitch speed chess.
By the time Pier was eighteen or so, the three of us were evenly matched: Day had briefly been number one in Buffalo in the mid-1960s and had a nifty hard serve; Pier would play number five for a strong Williams team and was rangy and graceful; and I would later win the Harvard Club championship in New York with a combination of touch and focus. A competition-intensifying facet of the game is that both players are moving quickly in the same small space, which provides considerable opportunity for discussion about who got in whose way and whether the point should be replayed, matters known as “lets.” So there was a good deal of epistolary chatter about victories and defeats and conduct. In 1985, my father wrote me of a long match with Pier, and how in the deciding game:
I drew a nick of blood on his knuckle with my racquet, and he raised a welt on my forearm with his — all unintentional, the slash of fatigue and effort. I was leading 12–3 when he zoomed in under my radar and tied it at 14-all. What do I call? No set? I chose set three. Pier thinks a bit and grins. “Don’t you just want to let it go? As it is? Just finish in a tie?” I say “Sure!” What a nice idea. I am as proud of his diplomacy as of his comeback.
Offering a tie to my father wouldn’t have occurred to me; at squash, particularly, I was so zealous I’d throw an occasional racquet in self-disgust. And Day, while notably fair-minded off the court, was worse than I was on it. Even warming up, he’d knock the ball to himself six or seven times before flicking it cross-court to you. After a tight match with him in the mid-1980s, I wondered aloud in the locker room about some of his lets. He began replaying the points in question in his mind and finally, grinning sheepishly, acknowledged that two of his calls had been “overcompetitive.”
In squash, the confined space and absence of a net — the tight-shot close-up of it — brings out
emotions often undetectable in tennis’s panorama. At the Georgica tennis clinic, beginning at age five or six, Timmie and Pier and I had been schooled in playing hard, making no excuses, giving opponents the benefit of line calls, and complimenting their play. This was the Association’s codified wisdom, its Deuteronomy. John Thornton, who grew up in Georgica and taught me the game as the resident pro in his summers off from Harvard, where he was captain of the team, says, “Virginia Turner, who taught me to play in Georgica, felt strongly that you were debasing the game if you crossed behind a court while a ball was in play, or served without having two balls. It was a Ten Commandments kind of thing.” It’s no coincidence that doubles, which is comparatively social and sublimated, is Georgica’s preferred game; in ladies’ doubles, Mom would apologize as often to her opponents for her booming forehand winners as she would to her partner for her flinching volleys into the net. The linchpin of top-flight doubles is poaching — cutting over to volley balls aimed at your partner — but in Georgica too much poaching is seen as aggressive and unsporting. I have a vivid childhood memory of watching Mom and her partner and their two opponents all racing toward their respective baselines when a lob went up.
Sportsmanship makes sports enjoyable; indeed, it makes them worth playing. And it is certainly more attractive than the aggression it is intended to counterweight. But sportsmanship, taken to its logical end, is a concomitant of the romance of loss. It is preparation for defeat. I always found it telling that the Wasp hero Robert Falcon Scott, in his race to the South Pole, decided not to use the dogsleds employed by Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian party, because Scott deplored the ruthlessness of shooting the dogs one by one and using their meat as food (the Norwegians set out with sixty-five dogs and returned with only eleven). Instead, Scott relied on motorized sledges, which broke, and Siberian ponies, which died. When Scott’s party of five, laboriously pulling their sleds themselves, arrived at the Pole in January 1912 to find that Amundsen had beaten them by a month, Henry “Birdie” Bowers wrote in his diary, “It is sad that we have been forestalled by the Norwegians, but I am glad that we have done it by good British man-haulage.” The Scott party perished of exhaustion and malnutrition on its return journey.