Cheerful Money

by Tad Friend

  Grandpa John remained incommunicado for a year. It turned out that after a lifetime of counting stairs obsessively, he had suffered a nervous breakdown and had been seeing a Freudian analyst four days a week. He came home, but the marriage continued to founder. Grandma Tim went to the analyst’s office and pressed him for a prognosis. Annoyed at his reticence, she began to grimace and roll her eyes, and he said, “Stop making those faces.” “You ought to be analyzed!” she replied spiritedly. He explained that he had been, of course, during his training. Finally, in response to her pressing inquiries, he declared, “Your husband is incurable,” whereupon she stripped off one of her gloves and threw it in his face. Then she moved to Woodstock to be near her friends the McDills, where she stripped off her wedding ring and threw it under the porch of her rented house. She had a gift for gesture.

  The split led, awkwardly, to new unions. Timmy decided to marry Tom Bourne, who lived at Maplewood Farm, but she let her children know only the day before the wedding, and then only because Letty Pierson told her that she must. John remarried, too, and informed Mom and Paddy later by letter (“We think it would be fine if you could run down to New York and have lunch with us a week from today”). His new wife was Sherleigh Glad, a fierce slip of a woman who had a Virginia Slims perpetually drooping from her lip. I always liked her because she sent me arresting quotations from obscure books. But she hated sharing her husband, at least once trying to throw herself down the stairs before relatives arrived. At one point in the mid-1980s, Mom drew her father aside in his Greenwich apartment to suggest a visit to Pennsylvania. Sherleigh, ear cocked on the landing above, called down, “That would be impossible, John!” That line became another touchstone for us, invoked — in a rackety, cigarette-scorched voice — to rebuff Mom’s suggestions. Sherleigh was the kind of person you might marry in penance.

  In the years following, Mom and Paddy suffered under Tom Bourne’s hectoring impatience and looked longingly at an austere photo of their father they each kept in their rooms at Maplewood. But they saw him only infrequently. When asked in seventh grade to write her autobiography, my mother did it in rhyme: “For I was born within that month [October] / My father grew the haughter / When he found I was not his son / But only an inferior daughter.” Poetry tapped her well of loneliness. As a junior in high school, she wrote “The Damned,” about the poor; it was rejected by Seventeen magazine, and, given the magazine’s charter of practical pep, one can see why:

  Where do they go?

  Home to their flats with the tired paint

  And sagging walls and bad smells?

  No —

  They walk the streets forever,

  Sinking lower and lower into the ceaselessness

  Of their barren and

  Gray lives.

  Trying to get to know her father, Mom wrote him after college to ask whether she might stay with him and Sherleigh for a year in Bangkok, where he was chief economist at ECAFE, a UN commission intended to help Asian countries into prosperity. His reply was a wan rehearsal of the pros and cons that concluded: “The fact that it makes sense for me to accept the various risks involved in coming here is no indication that you should. For me it grew naturally out of a series of past events and just couldn’t be avoided, really. But each of us has his own unique track of experience; they’re non-negotiable and non-transferable. You have to look at it in your own private perspective. — Daddy.”

  She went ahead anyway, with her college friend Elsa Barr, buying a round-the-world ticket on Pan Am and planning to teach English to Thai businessmen. Their postcard from Japan confirming their flight never arrived and then their plane was late, and Grandpa John, vexed, greeted her at the Bangkok airport by saying, “You know, I’m not going to be able to spend much time with you this year.” A half century later, Elsa could still recall the look on Mom’s face.

  It was a hard year. Sherleigh was sometimes missing at dinner, but when John didn’t remark on her absences, neither Mom nor Elsa dared inquire. Their room had mosquito netting draped across an open doorway, and they’d sometimes wake in the night to see Sherleigh ghosting by in a white nightgown. Finally Mom asked Som, their head servant, about it, and she explained, “Liquor bottle full at night. Liquor bottle empty in morning.” Then there were lugubrious UN parties and lectures from John at dinner about development economics. “It was all very impersonal,” Elsa says. “The only really fun dinner was when a gecko fell from the ceiling onto John’s head and then fell into the soup, and I don’t even think he laughed at that.”

  Where Wilson had command presence, John believed himself deserving of command but was diffident about seizing it. He had a dry sense of humor; a friend of my mother’s remarked that John and Mom and I all had the same speech pattern: staccato blur, brief pause, staccato blur again, with the whimsical line buried in passing. But he was always touchy about his dignity. When he retired, in 1966, he wrote a “Note on My Decision to Leave the United Nations Secretariat” to inform his family and posterity what had gone amiss:

  I had maintained from the beginning that it was an essential condition for the success of the Advisory Committee on the Application of Science and Technology to Development that the Committee’s Secretary should have the so-called D-2 rank. That was the issue on which I resigned three years later…. [Also] it was, frankly, disconcerting to witness repeated promotions of other staff members … and yet be unable to obtain promotion oneself in spite of periodically receiving unusually high official evaluations of one’s work. This personal factor, coupled with the impersonal one, began to create in me an obsessive interest in the promotion question which I did not want to see develop farther.

  For decades, Grandpa John fought to keep alive the theory of full employment, which had made his name in the 1940s. His letters to publishing houses grew increasingly stiff-necked yet beseeching, and in the early nineties he threatened to sue Greenwich Time because it trimmed two lines from his op-ed piece on the topic. He finally asked me if I wanted to write his life up in a book titled Long Battle for an Idea. Guiltily, pleading my own restless youth, I declined.

  In retirement, he also began planting trees on land he and Paddy had bought on Syros, hoping to restore its mythic lushness. The project bewildered the locals, who whispered that he must be manning a CIA listening station. In 1973 he published Island in Greece about the effort. Its first 136 pages were a meticulous account of the search for suitable land, for translators, for the right fixer in the Greek bureaucracy, etc. Only on the last page did the first trees go into the ground. It was, perhaps, a depressive’s way of making manifest all the obstacles he had always had to face, as well as an economist’s way of forestalling the suspicion that he was, deep down, a hopeless romantic.

  I WAS elected to the Lampoon the fall of my sophomore year, largely because of my parody of one of those plucky–Little Leaguer tales. With nine other compers I was suddenly haled into Phools Week, a round-the-clock initiation period. We quickly bonded over the miseries of being hazed, which included, in my case, having to perform a striptease at Lamont Library as I sang “Another One Bites the Dust.” We often had to drop to our knees and recite our Phools Name, a filthy limerick, and I remember the delight with which the members made me chant mine to John Marquand:

  My name, Sir, is, Sir, Phool Friend.

  My head’s wedged up some fat man’s rear end.

  But I’m used to the smell

  And I eat awfully well.

  How I dig that intestinal blend.

  John laughed heartily. But the members were onto the hearty laugh; while most of them liked having him around as an authority-figure-cum-mascot, they also flaunted their knowledge of his need for acceptance. One of the skits we performed for John and the members on the final night was a Phools Week perennial called “The Gravitational ’Quand.” The burliest of the Phools, Steve Bernheim, played John, and the rest of us played compers at a Lampoon cocktail party, whom Bernheim greeted one by one in John’s fastidious mann
er: “I trust you’re having a good time?”

  “No,” we said in turn, “the party sucks!”

  Bernheim roared with belly-quaking laughter, the force of which sucked his interlocutor into Marquand’s body — and so forth, until all ten of us were one giant ’Quand. It wasn’t very funny, nor was it really intended to be; the Lampoon prided itself on meanness couched as fearless candor. Everyone was subject to it, but when I think of John’s game giggle, I still feel a prickle of shame.

  We had been told, early in the week, that there was a second election held by the graduate members and that only those of us who demonstrated a grasp of the organization’s deeper purpose would become members and be admitted to the secret rooms upstairs. Not all of us would make it. Graduate members began drifting in and eyeing us coolly, and on Wednesday night they held Inquisitions. We were taken one at a time into a small room lit by a single candle, and told to kneel before it. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that I was surrounded by some twenty graduate and undergraduate members on couches and chairs. They began asking rapid-fire questions such as “Where does laughter come from?” and “Why is the tragedy of life a comedy?” After about half an hour, my chief inquisitor announced that I could go — but only after giving the name of the Phool, excluding myself, who was least worthy of election.

  Later, when I was a member, I watched Phools refuse to sell anyone out even after they were assured that no one cared how they came up with the name — it could be random, it could be alphabetical, we just need a name. During the wait you would hear people smoking, sighing theatrically, pissing in beer bottles. Eventually, though sometimes not for an hour or two, every Phool would cave and then stand, painfully, and go collect his things, avoiding eye contact with the remaining Phools as he left.

  It took me no more than ten seconds to say, “Phool Bernheim.” Steve Bernheim had been a pain all week. He was surly and aggressive and he bridled when asked to perform humiliating skits — defiance that only made the members mad at the rest of us. Worst of all, he kept telling us that the second election was obviously a hoax, a big joke, and that we ought to just walk out of the Castle and go have lunch somewhere and see what they’d do. So it was clear to me that Doubting Steve didn’t belong.

  I’d like to report that I went up to Steve later, after we’d both made it on, and told him I’d given his name at my Inquisition, and apologized, and he’d grinned and said, “You know what? I gave your name!” and then we’d cracked up and become great friends. In truth, I avoided him. It wasn’t so much that I had betrayed him, because I felt then that he was betraying the rest of us. It was that he reminded me how eager I was to be of service, to be accepted whatever the cost.

  Bruce was not among the new members. He’d sold $1,000 worth of ads, but the magazine hadn’t tallied his sales correctly, so he was rejected by mistake. At least, that was the official story I got when I asked about it later. But I wondered, after I got to know how the place operated, whether Bruce’s desire had disqualified him. It worked out better at the Lampoon — as at any club — if you didn’t need it, if you didn’t seem to care.

  By then Bruce and I had begun to grow apart, and I was increasingly at the magazine, where people hung out for hours with their legs flung over the arm of a chair, asking ostentatiously mannered questions like “Anybody got a serrated knife?” One party that spring, the Sexual Depravity Dinner, featured hash and coke and a stripper who arrived, surveyed the shattered plates and lobster carcasses, and walked out. The son of a Wall Street financier brought as his date a camel on a leash, its leathery mouth pinked with lipstick. I didn’t know then about such Gilded Age parties as Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish’s Monkey Dinner or Mrs. C. K. G. Billings’s Horseback Dinner, but I dimly sensed that the camel was a harbinger of what could lie ahead — that we were anticipating, with our wit and wealth and decadence, a certain kind of adult misery.

  The Lampoon left me quicker, funnier, and more defensive, perhaps not the qualities I needed to sharpen, much as I loved the place, and much as I valued the sense it gave me of having potential. (Whenever I hear a song from our party tape — “ABC” or “The Love You Save” or “Crimson and Clover” — I feel suddenly springy.) I later read a remark by Kenneth Tynan that seemed apt: Oxford, he said, “removed something from me, something connected with my origins — and replaced it with a Rolls-Royce spare part. I gained speed and sophistication. I doubt if I shall ever know what I lost.”

  AFTER DAY proposed, in 1959, he sought the approval of his prospective father-in-law as the two men walked on the stony beach at the foot of Grandpa John’s house in Riverside, Connecticut. Approval was forthcoming, but Grandpa John believed it his duty to mention that my mother had been rather indulged and might prove a disappointment. My father, who had some experience with disenchantment, said that that was all right.

  Mom never felt indulged, of course; on the contrary. For the rest of her life, the hurricane of ’38 — and the entwined fear of abandonment — kept whirling through her thoughts. It was her primary organizing event. As a child she had frequent thrashing nightmares; as an adult, when she had a headache or felt bruised by a frank conversation, she dragged around in her nightgown looking wounded. She squirreled away leftovers of her favorite desserts — almond cake, lace cookies; anything Pier or I might otherwise scavenge — in a tin beneath her bed. All her life she lamented that she had never seen a full moon; when my father pointed one out, she would glance up and say, “No, not quite full.” And she couldn’t simply pass on a compliment: she insisted the exchange be a “TL,” or “Trade-Last”; first, you had to dredge up a compliment someone had given you about her. She understood, intellectually, that people rarely vouchsafe a parental compliment to children — certainly we explained the point to her — but she remained hopeful nonetheless.

  When Grandpa John was coming for a visit, Mom would bake for days and polish the silver until it reflected our scrubbed faces. On arrival, he’d hug us children gingerly, as if embraces were a foreign custom that had in all decency to be observed, and he and my father, each in his tweed jacket, would grip each other by the upper arms in a sort of Greco-Roman standoff. Then they would sit and talk politely, knowledgeably, about Zen. When Mom would say, “Do you remember how you used to walk into the surf on your hands?” Grandpa John would look downcast. He’d forsworn hunting and become an enthusiastic conservationist, but when Day would mention the ibex horns nailed up in the Wainscott garage, one of John’s youthful trophies, he would smile, hitch up his pants, and declare, “The three antelopes with trophy horns are the kudu, the ibex, and the Indian black buck.” Then, just when you thought the spigot might open, he’d fall silent. His generation seemed to believe that intimacies, if any, should travel from young to old.

  Mom always had a starched napkin ready for when the small talk really died. One of her happiest memories of childhood was how Grandpa John would fold a linen napkin into the shape of a mouse and, by flexing his forearm, make it scamper up his sleeve. “Now, Daddy,” she would ask, as we looked on eagerly, “can you remember the mouse?” “I don’t think so,” he’d say, frowning as he bent the napkin this way and that and finally, doubtfully, placed the would-be rodent on his jacket sleeve. There it would sit until he twitched it aside with a cough.

  Mom’s dressing room in the Villanova house contained eleven photographs of Grandpa John. The hallway bureau upstairs showcased a photo of him in tropical khakis and a topee, crouched over his tiger with a rifle in his hands. Years later, Grandpa John would recall that on safari in India he had smelled a black bear before his guide, and that when their party got lost the following day, it was he who led them back to camp. “Those were two of the highest points in my life,” he said. Perhaps because his face in the hunting photo was in shadow, you were encouraged to try to pick out prophetic marks of character. You could imagine that if the photographer had asked him to step into the light, everything would have fallen out differently. A few Christmases ago, my father said that if
anyone wanted to take the Grandpa John photos away he’d be relieved.

  IN 1992, John Marquand was diagnosed with colon cancer. The disease galloped through him in seven months, thinning him out in a way whose irony he appreciated, even as he hated, at only fifty-one, to go. He destroyed the letters advisees and friends had written him seeking help with their problems, and then he planned his funeral, discussing where everyone should sit and ordering the wine as if for a particularly festive dinner party: “I think we’ll have about three hundred people, so six cases should do, no?” Then he secretly stopped taking his anticoagulant medication, to hasten the end.

  On John’s last outing, Peter Gomes took him to where he would rest: the elite Harvard Corporation plot in Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. Peter had been able to secure John a place there only with great difficulty; finally, he says, Dean Henry Rosovsky told him, “John can have my spot. I’m not going in there with all those goyim.” At his gravesite on Harvard Hill, John leaned on Peter’s arm and observed with satisfaction that you could see straight through to the Lowell House steeple, and that he would be surrounded by the graves of such university luminaries as Christopher Columbus Langdell and George Alfred Leon Sarton. He was in the club at last.