by Tad Friend
By then I was comping as well. Despite following Bruce’s dicta, I found college passing in an aimless blur. Shipley meant nothing at Harvard, so I wore my blue-and-white-checked L.L. Bean sweater around like everyone else, hoping in some muddy way both to fit in and to stand out. I would be thumpingly rejected by the final clubs I aspired to, including the Porcellian, and accepted only by one I was ambivalent about, the Fox — the one Bruce wound up in, as DOD had. After agreeing to join, I would turn in a panic and gracelessly back out. I wanted to leave a mark, and this — the shabby armchairs, the scuffed pool table, the boisterous leakingly sad mixers with Wellesley girls — was not it.
WHEN MY maternal grandfather graduated from college, in 1927, a headline in the New Haven Evening Register declared, “YALE RECORDS SHATTERED BY J. H. G. PIERSON.” The article noted that he had won nine academic prizes, been president of Phi Beta Kappa, and composed the class poem, while also being a member of the cross-country, rifle, and soccer teams, of the student council, and of the Whiffenpoofs — “prizes and recognitions for almost every form of worthy activity that Yale men admire.” Like his father, Charles, and his brother, Wilson, the year before, John Pierson was at the top of his class. What’s more, he had achieved the highest average — 96.1 — in the school’s 226-year history. “In the gigantic gathering sat the young man’s father,” the Evening Register reported, “and the envying eyes of hundreds of other fathers were turned on him, as the president made the announcement. The father’s eyes glistened as he heard the president’s words, and witnessed the glances directed at him by the assembled sons of Yale.”
Mentors and classmates predicted that John Pierson would become president. Long afterward, at the urging of a Norwegian mystic, he contemplated a dark horse run for the office to raise the tone of political discourse. But there were also, among his fellow Yale Phi Beta Kappas, those who referred to him as “Poor Johnny” Pierson and didn’t take him seriously, feeling he lacked some crucial admixture of grit or mettle: sand, perhaps. While he won the class vote for “most brilliant” and “most scholarly,” he ran a distant third in “most likely to succeed” and got no votes at all for “most popular.”
John Herman Groesbeck Pierson went on to get his PhD in economics at Yale and to dedicate himself to utopian ideas: a theory of government-sponsored full employment that attracted a number of powerful adherents — Hubert Humphrey, for one — and then, as the political tides shifted, no adherents at all; a project to restore the Greek island of Syros by planting eighteen thousand trees, which the local goats immediately began to veto. But he never quite realized the heroic promise of his youth. He was, as Fitzgerald describes Tom Buchanan’s career at Yale in The Great Gatsby, “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax.”
My mother, and her mother before her, liked to say that Grandpa John’s later frustrations flowed from a single headwaters: his rejection by Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society that “tapped” fifteen juniors each year. These were, in theory, the best and most promising men in the class (the society didn’t admit women until 1992), men who would go on to form the backbone of Brown Brothers Harriman, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and the CIA. They spent Thursday nights their senior year meeting in a windowless Tomb to discuss their lives and sexual histories, forming a lifelong bond. John, whose father had been a Bonesman, was considered a shoo-in, and he turned down another secret society, awaiting the slap on the shoulder that never came.
When Grandpa Ted was blackballed from the Pittsburgh Golf Club, which Ted’s parents and grandparents had belonged to, it shocked Ted and Jess and provoked stricken speculation about who could have done such a thing (Collie Burgwin, perhaps?). The rejection even shocked my father, at ten: what was wrong with his father? Bones was a considerably more charmed circle than the Pittsburgh Golf Club, its verdict utterly definitive. When my great-uncle Wassa Robinson called home to say he’d been tapped, his father, a Bonesman himself, burst into tears and cried throughout the conversation.
When Wassa was dying, his Bones classmates, including Justice Potter Stewart, gathered from all over to toast him at a lunch at the Yale Club. One of those men, Harold Turner — a longtime Georgica Association member whose son, Harold Jr., was the tennis pro there after John Thornton — wrote Wassa beforehand to say how much their conversations over the years had meant to him. “There are very few people who are willing to give us a real listen, not strangers, certainly not acquaintances, not even good friends as a regular matter, not even family sometimes,” he said. “But a good clubmate by virtue of the original nature of the experience of the association will. He’s been bred to it by the experience. And what, Dingleman” — Wassa’s Bones nickname — “is more precious in this world than someone who will listen?”
As Ron Rosenbaum wrote in an Esquire article, “The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones”:
The Bones experience can be intense enough to work real transformations. Idle, preppie Prince Hals suddenly become serious students of society and themselves, as if acceptance into the tomb were a signal to leave the tavern and prepare to rule the land. Those embarrassed at introspection and afraid of trusting other men are given the mandate and the confidence to do so.
“Why,” said one source, “do old men — seventy and over — travel thousands of miles for Bones reunions? Why do they sing the songs with such gusto? Where else can you hear Archibald MacLeish take on Henry Luce in a soul-versus-capital debate with no holds barred? Bones survives because the old men who are successful need to convince themselves that not luck or wealth put them where they are, but raw talent, and a talent that was recognized in their youth.”
Deep in the Wasp grain is a longing for such transformative acceptance. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, which demanded letters of recommendation for doubtful immigrants and exiled misbehaving members to other colonies or back to England, was itself a kind of club, and many Wasps still believe, not always consciously, that one’s whole life is preparation for admission to a similar club — to the club, wherever it may be.
Hence the Wasp’s circumspection, his excessive civility. Sixty years ago, the social chronicler Cleveland Amory observed that to be club material at Harvard one must demonstrate “a healthy respect for the observation of Harvard’s social taboos. These taboos have always included, among other things, over-careful dress, undue athletic exertion, serious literary endeavor, rah-rah spirit, long hair, grades above C, and Radcliffe girls.” In other words, one should stifle all curiosity or enthusiasm; achievement itself, because distinctive, is threatening. The nail that stands up must be hammered down. This way of thinking turns all sins into sins of etiquette: an off-color joke and murder both suggest poor breeding.
I didn’t understand much of this when I was young. I just knew that Grandpa John never spoke of Yale, while his brother, Wilson, spoke of nothing but. When I was seventeen I spent a rainy afternoon with Wilson in his study — after we’d lunched on Welsh rarebit at Mory’s, Yale’s dining club — listening to his patient, cogent, urgent explanation of why I should come to New Haven: the superb teaching, of course, but also Yale’s rarefied, character-molding vigor. (When Wilson retired, in 1973, Letty composed a poem that began “Yale for breakfast. Yale for dinner. / Yale the loser. Yale the winner. / Yale’s my pain. Yale’s my joy. / Yale’s my man. Yale’s my boy.”) The Robinson family, too, was not rational on the topic, and Grandpa Ted, having twice been kicked out of Yale, was so loyal to it that he told my father he’d pay his way anywhere but Harvard. Such conviction partook of the sacramental. So I always admired Uncle Pad, who went his own way to Harvard — and, going my own way likewise, I followed him to Cambridge.
THE ONLY person who seemed to know what I should be doing at Harvard was my freshman adviser, John Marquand. John was a midlevel administrator who was multifariously involved in college life as secretary of the faculty and of the administrative board and senior tutor of an undergradu
ate house. A balding man with heavy black glasses and a high, quick voice, he didn’t hurry to straighten out any confusion with the late novelist John P. Marquand, his distant relative, and presented himself as if he’d been born standing in Harvard Yard, a telamon in its marble frieze. John’s arch, donnish air somehow suited his enormous frame: a ravenous gourmand, he weighed easily three hundred pounds, even in the thick of one of his futile diets. Perhaps as a consequence of his visibility — you could pick him out from a distance, motoring along in his old gray Chevy Impala or slue-footing slowly across the Yard, carrying two canvas tote bags filled with memos and minutes — he was unusually watchful, keeping his arms close to him even when he shook hands, curling the palm upward and giving a fractional nod of greeting and assessment.
Most freshmen were advised by their entryway proctors, but each year John selected a dozen young men to mentor (he had no interest in women at all). He took them to restaurants like Locke-Ober and Durgin Park, where he urged them to try the Indian pudding, and told them where to buy sport coats and how to circumvent the foreign-language requirement. He wasn’t overly concerned with making sure you studied, believing that the cream of college life — what would afterward rise in memory — wasn’t academic. John’s good friend Peter Gomes, the minister at Harvard’s Memorial Church, says, “His advisees turned out to be Marquandites. They had a nose for wine, learned to like shad roe, understood the essential differences between gossip and conversation — John approved of both, but he understood the difference — and were, in the best sense, obsessed with people. You could never tell John too much about anybody.”
I found out later that John came from Berwick, Pennsylvania, the son of a small-town doctor who drank and a housewife who was often too depressed to make dinner. John would spend his days at the cemetery with a store of books, lying stretched out on a stone marker, then take his younger sister, Ellen, to Bennett’s restaurant and advise her on the menu. He attended Wesleyan, and then never quite secured his PhD in medieval history at Harvard. John seemed to view these details as irrelevant, as perhaps they were.
After we got to know each other, John told me that my admissions interview the year before had almost sunk me. “I looked at your file,” he said. “The phrase I recall is ‘Applicant seems to have lockjaw.’ ” He giggled. “What on earth did you say?”
I felt myself flushing. “I was trying to explain why I went to Shipley, when it had only begun taking boys a few years earlier, and I think I quoted Frost: ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood … ’ and so on.” I had been rather pleased with myself about that.
“Oh, dear,” he said. “Frost? Oh, dear.”
Underneath the gossip and the teasing he was a well-wisher. When I came across Cardinal Newman’s definition of a gentleman, it called John to mind:
His benefits may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy-chair or a good fire, which do their part in expelling cold and fatigue … [the true gentleman] carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast; all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling; all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make everyone at their ease and at home.
John would pick out two or three of his advisees and coach them so that they made a mark in the precincts of undergraduate life he valued, particularly the clubs. (He even gave a friend of mine Debrett’s Etiquette and Modern Manners to assist with the final smoothing.) He had pondered the realms of concentric exclusion, and one night at Locke-Ober he dryly recited for me the doggerel “A Boston Toast”:
And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God.
The summer after my freshman year, John wrote to urge that I comp for the Lampoon: “I think you would find its atmosphere not insalubrious, and it might help you get rid of that lockjaw that you don’t have.” And so, in the fall, I did. There was a cocktail party to mark the first cut of the candidates, and I was surprised to see John at the castle in black tie, clasping a bottle of Rebel Yell. He wasn’t much of a drinker, but he always arrived with a gift, then when the dancing began upstairs, took his solitary leave. Later, when I was elected to the Signet, a literary and arts society wryly known as “the final club for women and Jews,” I saw him regularly there, too, lunching with Peter Gomes and Dean of Students Archie Epps. Gomes and Epps, who were black, were sometimes referred to as “Afro-Saxons” because of their bow ties and mysteriously British accents, and all three stepped in as spare men at dinner parties. “We were young fogeys,” Peter Gomes says, “three from away who each wrested a certain kind of power, the power of knowledge of the place and its rules, when nobody else from our generation gave a fig. We saw ourselves as defenders of the faith: in favor of civility, manners, a slower pace. We (too uncritically) believed in the Harvard aristocracy, the thin crimson line, and we upheld the Yankee code of rectitude better than the dissolute Yankees who remained.”
Marquand was more taken than Gomes and Epps by the clubs and the Lampoon, and used his friendships with undergraduates to maintain his invitations. Though he didn’t emerge from the closet until later, he was gay, of course, and intrigued by the clubs’ sublimated homoeroticism, that male bond (though he never, as far as I know, behaved inappropriately with an undergraduate). His longing for a world barred to him by age, weight, and position contributed to my sense that Harvard never requited the love he gave it.
DURING A postgraduate Wanderjahr circling the globe, Grandpa John always climbed the local peaks and monuments, a steeplejack in quest of the definitive vantage that had eluded him. He summitted the Matterhorn, as Charles Pierson had done, and wrote his father afterward to describe how he and some friends began the climb before dawn, “rocks sheer and unbelievably high above you; yourself hanging to the brink of space with hobnails and finger-nails and eyelashes.” He noted that the guide had “decided that because we were Americans we were probably in pretty good shape and could make it all right. He says that he never would have taken a couple of young Germans or Frenchmen up under similar circumstances.”
In Uttar Pradesh, John killed a tiger with a single bullet. Then he returned home to pursue Timmy Robinson, a gorgeous, large-hearted, headstrong debutante known to some in the Pierson family as “the Hartford Butterfly.” She wore her pearls flung down her back, marcelled her hair and tied it in a bun at the nape of her neck — thereby achieving the modern “bobbed” look without having to cut her wonderful tresses — and once, after her mother bought her several ball dresses for a deb party, came downstairs to meet her two escorts dressed, instead, in the lining of an old coat. Mom loved that story.
Timmy had rejected John’s first proposal, before he left, but he pressed his suit — already balding, smitten, determined — and she yielded at last. Their wedding in 1930, attended by four hundred of the great from Biarritz, Paris, and Park Avenue, was an event: the union of brains with a beauty whose foamy velvet train made her appear like Aphrodite rising from the sea.
When Grandma Tim gave birth to my mother at New Haven Hospital, in 1933, Grandpa John stayed at the curb with the chauffeur, smoking a cigar. And that, essentially, is where he remained. His signature bit of fatherly business was crawling beneath the rug made from the skin of his tiger and growling at Mom and Paddy. He called her Weenie, sometimes rhyming it “Weenie, weenie, little wahine.” He had been to Hawaii and seen the wahines, the women surfers, and would later live in Oahu. There was always a restlessness. After Pier was born, Grandma Tim told Mom, “It’s too bad John couldn’t really enjoy the babies and the nursing and all that, give over to it. Oh, he thought you children were great, but there was something about it — something he couldn’t let himself feel. Whatever else, you’ve got to see that your children love each other. John and Wilson certainly didn’t.”
IN SEPTEMBER of 1938, when my mother was not quite five, her father vanished. She was vacationing with her parents at Century House when John left a note for Timmy saying merely that he did not love her. I would learn about this only in my late twenties, one summer weekend in Georgica, when Mom mentioned it with a toss of her head and a little shiver.
Days after John left the beach house without warning, the hurricane of ’38 hit it, also without warning. Known as “the Storm of the Century,” the hurricane killed six hundred people and destroyed ten thousand houses across Long Island and New England. My mother watched from an upstairs window as the sea surged over Georgica Pond and battered the front porch. There was a violent crash: a shutter outside the middle guest room had banged free and smashed its window, and the suck of inrushing air thrust the guest room door through its own frame and into the hall. (Afterward, Wilson removed all the shutters, which are still stacked in the back of the garage.) Taking this as a signal to depart, Wilson shepherded Letty and Goggy and Timmy and Mom and Paddy and Baba and the three majestics — ten people in all — out the side door and into a Buick 8. Goggy Pierson carefully slipped on her rubber-tipped shoes and then stepped off the side entrance into water up to her shins. (Over the years, as Mom told the story, the water rose to Goggy’s hip.) As Grandma Tim ducked into the car, a whipping rosebush raked her face, drawing blood. The road out was swamped, so they drove two hundred yards to the marginally higher ground of the softball field and waited. Only after the floodwaters had lapped above the running boards did the wind finally relent.