by Tad Friend
Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a member of Scott’s Antarctic team and of the search party that found the explorer’s frozen body, later contrasted the expeditions:
On the one hand, Amundsen going straight there, getting there first, and returning without the loss of a single man, and without having put any greater strain on himself and his men than was all in the day’s work of polar exploration. Nothing more business-like can be imagined. On the other hand, our expedition, running appalling risks, performing prodigies of superhuman endurance, achieving immortal renown, commemorated in august cathedral sermons and by public statues, yet reaching the Pole only to find our terrible journey superfluous, and leaving our best men dead on the ice.
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SPORTS WERE the Shipley boys’ vehicle for advancement. David Hunt, an intense and meticulous young man who rubbed his forehead wearily when problems arose, was our leader. I was only the first of several decent athletes who followed him over from Swarthmore, and by junior year we formed a doughty corps. We had a good soccer team, cocaptained by David and me, and an excellent tennis team. After we beat Episcopal in tennis, 3 to 2, we swarmed the courts like Visigoths, feeling that we ought now be permitted to carry off their women (their women being our women).
By midway through junior year, we were going to parties at Pam Borthwick’s. Her parents’ pool house embodied the Main Line as it was in 1978, rather than in Ralph Lauren’s ads: a party cocoon with kelly green shag carpeting, a teak bar, orange Naugahyde cushions, orange-and-rust-striped wallpaper, and picture windows that steamed up from everyone smoking and draining beer balls — round mini-kegs — and dancing to the Doobie Brothers and the Grateful Dead and Meat Loaf’s teen-sex anthem, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” or really just yelling along and believing that we, too, were glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife. (Somehow disco, the actually danceable music of the period, failed to penetrate the Main Line’s green hedges.) Later, we’d flop into the pool, using the empty beer balls as floaties to keep from drowning.
Pam, a funny, scornful girl just outside the inner circle, was doing exactly what we were: asserting her claim. Once she and I became coeditors of the school paper, she stopped calling me Grasshopper — a dig at my skinny frame — and began calling me Taddeus. Then she wrote in the Beacon that at the recent mixer, “most of the Haverford and Episcopal studs refused to dance, although they did do a good job of holding up the gym walls. If it hadn’t been for the Shipley guys, who were uninhibited enough to get out there and show up the other guys, things would never have started cooking.”
We finally had a stereotype: uninhibited. Of course, the only boy it really fit was Rob Nikpour, whose family had fled Iran with the fall of the shah. Rob was a nineteen-year-old rake with a sparse, pungent English vocabulary, his default expression being “Boy, how did you get so fucked up?” At his attic parties we’d down whiskey shots and put on Nick Gilder’s “Hot Child in the City” for some vital truths:
Danger, in the shape of something wild
Stranger, dressed in black, she’s a hungry child.
Leaving one of Rob’s parties to drive a Shipley boarder home, I backed my parents’ station wagon right through his hedge. Danger, in the shape of a Chevy Impala. Then she and I made out until we passed out. There was still the split between girls you could get somewhere with — the boarders and outliers — and the Main Line set, most of whom preserved their virginity for college. It was as if they had continued to heed the school’s rules from the 1940s: “Keep away from the windows when boys come singly or in groups…. This is for your own protection. Sooner or later it becomes known when boys are trying to get you to talk with them or laugh with them. It is much better for you to report it yourself.” After one classmate finally slept with her Episcopal boyfriend, he immediately bragged to everyone, “I banged her lights out.” The lesson was evident.
WHAT NAGS at me about the Main Line was how intensely I admired it, and how little thought I gave to where it might take me. It turned out that the Main Line led straight to the Main Line. After “having a ball” in college, many of my classmates turned for home. A Shipley friend who lives a few miles from the school laments: “I didn’t learn about Kmart until college, which was kind of an oversight. I am just now learning how to cook. And only this year did my dad give me the money from an account he’d been managing for me, money he’d gotten by suing a woman who hit me in a car accident in tenth grade. I was scared to ask why he hadn’t told me about it until I was forty-five.”
My senior year, a queen bee explained that a local low-income housing project was a terrible idea because “Water seeks its own level,” and another classmate joked: “What are the three things you can’t give a nigger? A fat lip, a black eye, and a job.” Most disenchanting of all was a realization that began to steal over me after David Hunt started dating Joy Carabasi, who was indisputably inner circle, making us a true class at last. I became privy to the whispers about the girl whose father beat and molested her; the girl whose parents were both alcoholics and who, for mysterious reasons, permitted her only half a glass of orange juice; the murmurs that so and so’s mother was Jewish and so and so’s father had married a Catholic, making them NOCD — “Not our class, dear” — mothers’ shorthand echoed by the daughters, first in irony and soon enough with a little shrug. There was the girl whose father wrote her, when she was date-raped in college, to say, This is what comes of living in the fast lane. There was the girl whose father killed himself then, and the girl whose mother killed herself later. It seemed to me a lot of trauma for our small class, but then privilege doesn’t exempt you from affliction; it just makes it less visible.
When I think of Shipley now, I think of Sally Cattone, a golden girl a grade ahead. She had entered Shipley in kindergarten and was a walking brochure for the place: a great field hockey player with a Dorothy Hamill haircut and a billboard grin who drove, too fast, an orange Volvo with signal flags on the door that spelled out her initials. Her parents had three or four houses all over the map, and her parties were legendary. Sally’s boyfriend, from ninth grade through college, was Gary Tanner, a tall, blond stiff from Episcopal who was headed for Greg Marmalard’s frat in Animal House, or so I imagined; her yearbook had a photo of them lounging on a greensward. Beneath it were listed her Pet Hates — “Myself, losing” — and her Destiny: “To be married to a very rich man.” Her quote was from Jackson Browne:
Sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder
Where my life will lead me
Waiting to pass under sleep’s dark and silent gate.
I wasn’t attracted to Sally, initially, so much as to the idea of her. I wanted to be her friend, or to think of myself as her friend — or, really, to be seen as someone who could be her friend. I wanted to escape the mass of “goobers” and “rejects” she floated above. So I’d say hello in the hall and kid around, and eventually we did become friends, probably because I took her so seriously and because I could make her laugh. She laughed full out with her head thrown back, and it felt like a reward. By the end of my junior year we were buying cheese steaks at Mallory’s and calling each other “Wife” and “Husband” in a jokey way. I was far too awed and awkward to even try for a meaningful silence, but I began to realize that I really liked her. She was warm and joyful and wildly energetic, crying, “You wussy” if you ducked a challenge and, after turning into traffic on a one-way street, mocking herself with a snorted “Adoy!” That her vivacity was just water lilies atop a pool of sorrow only drew me in deeper.
Sally was a star on the girls’ squash team, and we played a few times at the Merion Cricket Club, where she was admirably blasé about signing for a postgame sandwich. At first she beat me handily. But by the end of the year I had figured out that if I kept the ball in play, she’d eventually make an error trying for a kill. She said she let me win to salve my tender male ego, but no way. I remember sitting with her in her kitchen after we’d played squash and then a few sets of paddle
tennis on her family’s court, having an iced tea, and her father walking in and standing a moment, very still, at the sight. He was a manufacturing tycoon, and Sally referred to him, merrily, as “the King.” “Let’s get out of here,” she murmured. In her car, her grin was back in place: “C’mon, Husband, let’s go drive around and you tell me something intellectual.”
When Sally married some Jim, in 1987, I went to the wedding — Sally looking radiant and nervous, Jim and his groomsmen surprisingly mustachioed — then, recognizing no one at the reception, slipped out the side door and never saw her again. I heard that she became the first woman to make a hole in one at a famous course, and that she and Jim had moved down South, where she ran one of her father’s companies. And I heard that Gary Tanner had bought the Cattones’ house for his family, which made me feel for him, suddenly. Before they left, Sally later told me on the phone, she and her father taped copies of a photo of Gary and Sally at the prom on the underside of some of the kitchen drawers, where his children might find them.
When Sally and Jim divorced, in 2002, she got custody of their four dogs: Cloey, Asti, Casey, and Bourbon. Her parents always named their dogs after alcohol — Gin, Chivas — so she did, too: Cloey for Clos du Boi, Asti for Asti Spumante, and Casey for case of beer. “Jim said, ‘If you get one more dog, I’m leaving,’ ” Sally said. “So I got two more.” She laughed. “I had liked Jim because he was from New Jersey, and he was humble, and he didn’t own a collared shirt, and his parents were like this nest of unconditional love for me. But my dad saw him as trailer trash. Jim ended up working for me, and when I wanted to give Jim a raise, Dad would always say, ‘No. Don’t take his ideas, don’t move him up, don’t give him a raise.’ So I tried to raise Jim up to my level, I guess, but he eventually, unfortunately, returned to his own.” She paused a moment. “Dad kept saying, ‘You can’t have kids — how are you going to run things if you’re pregnant?’ I tried to force Jimmy to have a baby with me before he left, but he said no way.”
When Sally was at Shipley, she told me, her father would hit the scotch and turn volatile. “It could be six o’clock, and if he came home, we’d run to our beds and pretend to be asleep,” she said. “My mom would hide in her dressing room. And when she was driving us to school the next morning, she’d say, ‘I’m going to kill everybody!’ Lots of fun, yeah!” She laughed. “Sometimes I wish I were still a spoiled brat back at Shipley. But when I come up to the Main Line now to play golf at Merion, which I’m proud to be a member of, that feeling of having to curb my language and behavior comes back over me, that feeling of being watched and … I don’t know.”
When I graduated, Sally was back for the parties from her college in the Midwest — where she set scoring records in field hockey — and late on class night, after I had surprised everyone except my teachers by taking home a raft of prizes, she wrote a long, sweet, tipsy entry in my yearbook about how I would go far.
Reading her inscription again recently made me sad. Some of Sally’s first words, in blotchy blue pen, are hard to read, and eventually she switches to a black felt-tip: “I swear you are one of the greatest guys I’ve ever met. Of course, you will have to work on your squash, ’cause you know I can’t win anymore, ’cause it makes you feel so bad…. Tad I really love to be with you and love to do things w/ you, take care and remember I’ll always remember you and be w/ you if you need me. Take care and may you enjoy life and what it has to offer. Love always, forever and ever, love forever, love, Sally.”
TO MY mortification, our class chose my father as our commencement speaker. His speech about clarity and kindness was thoughtful and well received, but I sank into my chair early on, after his preliminary joke about pop music fell flat because the name-check he used — Emmylou Harris — was all wrong. I had hoped to spare us both this sort of tone problem when I asked beforehand if he felt okay about the speech, which was my way of hinting that I’d like to vet it. “Yes!” he said cheerfully.
In 1994, for its hundredth anniversary, Shipley wanted an alumnus as its commencement speaker, and asked me. I had the odd experience of seeing Day beaming in the audience, where once he had seen me grimacing. My speech was basically like his: well-meaning advice about staying out of ruts, none of it positively poisonous, and though I was very nervous beforehand, it seemed to go well. I was feeling rather pleased until the president of the student body told me, in the nicest, most dutiful head-boy way — he just thought I, this Methuselan thirty-one year old, would be interested to know what the kids of today were up to — that the class had really wanted Kelsey Grammer.
After Day’s speech, that summer when I was working at the Jersey Shore, he began sending me lots of warm, thoughtful notes about courses to consider and ways of thinking about college. The first note included seventy-five photocopied pages from various biographies about the college years of Teddy Roosevelt, Bernard Berenson, and John Maynard Keynes, background material to help me “develop a personal ethic, and vision of the necessary and the ideal.” Day had hit his stride in the job at Swarthmore, learning the patience required to wait for consensus; in a compliment he treasured, one of the college’s trustees told him he’d helped the college absorb the period’s enormous social change. Yet he seemed to yearn for the simplicity of student life. One of his notes was written at six a.m., after he’d been roused from sleep by work anxieties: “If in dreams begin responsibilities, I’m of the momentary opinion that I’ve had too many dreams.”
Entering his late forties, Day was taking stock, a process spurred when he and Mom read the bestselling Official Preppy Handbook. The book, assembled and edited by a Jew, was particularly popular with Wasps, who, never having been the target of ethnic humor, didn’t feel stigmatized by it. I not only didn’t feel stigmatized by the satire, I didn’t even recognize it, reading the book for tips on consolidating my place. My father wrote me about it when I was at Harvard, in a way that felt newly candid:
I can’t quite tell if [Mom] sees it as a Guidebook on What to Do and Be, or a Catechism on What to Avoid at All Costs. In any event she seems pleased to realize that we have track lighting in our living room (non-preppy) and that we don’t have a single duck as motif or emblem on anything (ducks apparently qualifying as ultra-prep).
I find, to my amusement and chagrin, that I have been at a lot of “preppy” places — St. Paul’s, Williams, Yale; a member of a hyper-cool prep fraternity (St. Anthony Hall); and am a practitioner of one of the quintessentially prep racquet games (squash, of course).
What rescues me, I wonder, from being a sclerotic example of the prep stereotype (if indeed I have escaped that)? Proceeding with serious study of what interested me most may have been the best decision of my youth — and doing so despite the fact that I didn’t know where it would lead … and then letting it lead me where still fewer Americans have gone unless required to do so — to Southeast Asia (where prep is so far from being relevant as not even to be a non-category).
The other major decision, of course, was to marry Momma. Her way of being, and being-with-me, is continuously redemptive.
I read the letter and smiled and tossed it in a drawer, maintaining him precisely where he was trying not to be: in the prep-stereotype role of the distant dad.
NINE
Clubs
MY FRESHMAN YEAR at Harvard I was inseparable from Bruce Monrad, an affable St. Paul’s grad who waltzed into our six-man room late the first night in a seersucker suit, carrying a jug of sherried lemonade. The rest of us — a Catholic from Rhode Island, an African American from Maryland, a football player from Vermont, a gay debater from Wyoming — stared in wonder. Bruce was tall and sleek, and he raised his chin and swiveled it as he spoke, like a seal balancing a ball. His father and brother had gone to Harvard, so he knew what was what: he decanted Cointreau as a digestif, called New York “Gotham,” stealthily pointed out the Porcellian Club, shepherded us to football games with a flask in his pocket, and saluted the library on the way to breakfast by chant
ing the inscription above its lintel: “Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, MCMXIV!” His preppy comportment effectively cloaked his intelligence — he took graduate-level economics classes — just as his cast-iron graciousness precluded real intimacy. So I felt comfortable with him. When I heard his voice on my answering machine recently, after twenty years, it gave me a start: the crisp yet agreeable manner, the breathy cheer, were eerily familiar. He sounded like me.
Bruce joined the freshman squash team, so I joined the freshman squash team. He believed no year complete without a beer-drenched visit to the Dartmouth Winter Carnival, so off we went, staying with Paddy and Karen. He made it clear that after college, one went either to business or law school, so I began to consider law. I skipped only his time-maximization scheme: he started going to bed a little later every night, planning to eventually eliminate sleep entirely. Groggily insisting over breakfast that his plan was working perfectly, he would then nod off at Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, MCMXIV.
Bruce’s chief goal freshman year was to join the humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon, as his dear old dad had done (the phrase “Dear old Dad” came to his lips so often that the roommies shortened it to “DOD”). You had to compete, or “comp,” to get on the Lampoon, which was known not only for its distinguished alumni — including Robert Benchley, George Plimpton, John Updike, Doug Kenney, and, in my own time, Conan O’Brien — but also for its fortnightly black-tie parties in its Flemish-style castle, parties that featured dancing on the banquet table and the gleeful smashing of plates. It was a select meritocracy with the perquisites of a club. Each semester a hundred or so would-be writers and artists wrote or drew six pieces that aspired to humor, and five to ten would be elected. Some of those slots went to business board compers: if you sold $1,000 in ads for the magazine, and weren’t totally repellent, you made it on. (Formerly an all-male Wasp bastion, the place was by then a coed mix of New York sophisticates and talented sociopaths; of Jews, Catholics, and Wasps — the Wasps, usually less funny, being concentrated on the business side.) Bruce’s freshman comp for the business board didn’t work out — “DOD was not pleased” — but he tried again sophomore year.