Cheerful Money

by Tad Friend

  All these await, patient, for you to find.

  And he made me feel that I had something when I was a lump of a boy, fourteen and lonely. That was when he began to invite me over for tea. I would knock on the front door, and Julia McDill would utter a tart yelp of greeting before remarking, with a private sort of irony, “John is in the library.” (John was always in the library.)

  I would hear him before I saw him, calling, “Come in, come in!” in his custardy voice. He would be sitting on the couch — or, in later years, lying on the couch under a blanket with his hands pressed atop a book, posed like Wilfred Owen. His circulation was poor. The sun would have lit the wall above him and tea would be steeping under a plum-colored cozy. He’d ask me to pour us each a cup, and he might have a little scotch with his. And then, in a flow of talk that sometimes began with a paean to the doughty men buried in the Revolutionary War graveyard at Maplewood, he would ask what I was reading, thinking about, hoping to do. As I fumbled out my thoughts, the pendulum swings of the banjo clock in the hall, echoing in the high-ceilinged house — tock, tock, tock — made our time together seem strangely urgent.

  When I was fifteen, John taught me to drive in an old gray Jeep, the same Jeep in which he’d taught my mother. He was a patient instructor, murmuring, “Slow, slow, no rush,” as I learned how to ease out the choke and clutch simultaneously while puttering along his farm’s winding paths. Ann Smith remembers driving him into the village once at about fifteen miles an hour, and his alarm: “Too fast, too fast!”

  Woodstock was becoming a tourist spot, and John lamented more than once that tins of gourmet maple syrup had appeared in Gillingham’s. Gourmet maple syrup! He was a wicked mimic, sticking his chin out and swinging his arms determinedly with his eyes closed to ape the out-of-towners who jogged by below. And he was fond of the yarn about the banker from New York who arrived in the village in the off-season, prepared to buy land and profit from the boom but surprised at the lack of other visitors. He remarked to a local, “Gee, this town is dead.” “Yep,” the local replied. “And you’d be surprised by how many vultures we see coming in.”

  This was the age-old anxiety about new money (there are Brahmin families that insist that any money made during or after the War of 1812 is new). The problem Wasps have with the nouveau riche isn’t so much the nouveau as the riche. It’s envy, felt as disapproval, of what all that unfettered money allows them to do. Old money, having received its money, treats it with custodial anxiety; new money, having earned it, believes it should be used. One of the Smiths, passing Maplewood recently, noticed that Timmy’s and Tom’s successors, the Monster.coms, had left a discarded Christmas wreath below the road. She retrieved it and put it up on the door of her mother’s shed: “It was perfectly good!” And it would serve, in its new setting, to rebuke the neighbors about thrift.

  An older Wasp friend remarks, “The new rich behave as if they don’t have to deserve spending their money. Whereas when I took my family to Nevis recently, I had to tell myself, ‘I’m going to die soon.’ ” The prospect of a swift and retributive death makes giving yourself pleasure just tolerable. Otherwise it’s too close to masturbation.

  TOM BOURNE was a salesman above all; he never stopped closing the deal on his own legend, and it explained something when you learned that though he spoke of himself as a Yale grad, class of ’22, he’d actually been kicked out his junior year. His biggest sale — his Plan B for greatness — was inspired by the river at the farm’s foot. For years, Maplewood’s manure ran off into the Ottauquechee like everyone else’s, and the river evoked not trout but pigs. Then, in 1967, Tom started the Ottauquechee River Monitoring and Restoration Project. He went door to door to persuade almost one hundred landowners to stop dumping their sewage into the river and hook up to a sewer system. He convinced them, that is, to pay for something they were getting free.

  A confirmed atheist, Tom saved the river by promoting its stewardship as an almost religious duty. I could see that Grandma Tim admired Tom’s environmental work — motive enough — and in 1977, when the Ottauquechee was recognized as Vermont’s first pollution-free large river, he began to win awards. He also had a gruff knack for turning young men with notions about water filtration into protégés. “Tom was like my father or grandfather praising me, except that I’d heard that kind of thing only about four times in my own family,” says Bill Stetson, a Harvard student who worked on the river project and took to dropping by Maplewood for tea. “I could never understand why his family had such a different view — young Tom would express such utter distaste for his father, as if he had been tortured or placed in a concentration camp.”

  This impulse to conserve, which prompted Tom to deed part of Maplewood to the Vermont Land Trust, was his Waspiest aspect. Though he was Waspily finicky about pronunciation, checking his grandchildren when they said “buff-ay” instead of “boo-fay,” the smiley faces in his letters weren’t minimalist hieroglyphs but bulb-headed self-portraits. More significantly, he had none of the Wasp’s horror of debt. He often told his son, “Don’t ever worry about borrowing from the bank, or about paying them, either — just pay the interest.” He was MasterCard’s dream client.

  Yet in the environmental world, he became a burly, shaggy emblem of a nobler time. Tom and Bill Stetson and a third man founded River Watch, with financing from Laurance Rockefeller, and expanded their cleanup efforts to the Hudson, the Mississippi, and even the Danube. “We had a meeting at Tom’s house,” Stetson recalls, “and we had to shout for an hour because he wouldn’t wear his hearing aids.” Tom used his deafness strategically, tuning out unwelcome subjects. “We’d planned to continue up at my cabin with the minutiae later, and finally I said, ‘Tom, I’m going to excuse myself to light the stove in my cabin and then we’ll go over a few final points up there.’ Tom sat silent a moment, then burst out, ‘For the love of God, you would leave at this point, when we’re discussing the future of the planet, to go light a stove?’ I sat right back down.”

  ONE DAY in the early 1980s, Grandma Tim said to Anne Greene, “I don’t know what’s going on, but I can’t balance my checkbook.” Soon the words were a little funny, too. When I graduated from college, her note remarked, “Your ma says you are off job looking for!” and was decorated with a smiley face out of Edvard Munch. Only her sign-off reassured: “Toujours love.” That same year she told Day, “I can’t remember numbers anymore, but lines of poetry keep coming back: ‘I have a rendezvous with death / At some disputed barricade / When something something something something … ’ ”

  When Mom and I drove up for a visit in late 1986, we arrived to find Grandma Tim sunning herself in her Saab in the driveway with her coat on backward. She got cold in the house, as Tom insisted they could get through the winter without fixing the broken furnace. Mom and Day had just gotten them a new mattress to replace the one whose mouse holes were plugged with back issues of Country Life and The Dairyman’s Journal, but everything else was falling apart. As we unloaded our luggage, the Saab began inching toward us, gathering speed. We shouted, but her expression remained fixed and vague. I ran up and reached over her to yank the parking brake. Then we gave Baba the keys. “Now no one in this house can drive!” Baba said with a laugh, or a sort of laugh.

  In the afternoon, Mom made them tea as Timmy used to do, scalding the pot. She tried singing “Call John the Boatman,” the old round, but her mother just flapped her arms and made strange galloping sounds. Tom turned to Timmy and said in an intended whisper, “You won’t ever leave me, will you, dear?” Worried that Mom and Paddy would want to intercede as caretakers and put her in an assisted-living facility, he was increasingly mulish about visitors.

  “Of course not,” she said, suddenly herself.

  “I love you so much,” he said. He clasped her hand, his eyes wet.

  That night, we couldn’t find Grandma Tim anywhere, and finally discovered her in the Saab, half frozen. She had remembered it being warm.

  They all
flew to Saint John Island and Puerto Rico for their annual winter trip, with Anne Greene going along as their driver. After a few weeks in Mayagüez and San Juan, they ran out of money. When Anne asked, “Why don’t you just wire for more?” Tom replied, “No, no, no! I’m going to walk into a bank and say, ‘I’m Tom Bourne from Los Estados Unidos, and my brother Jim Bourne worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to start social services here in Puerto Rico — and I need some money!’ ”

  As Tom stumped out of the car and into the bank on canes seemingly hewn from petrified wood, Anne began muttering to Baba about how he made these scenes. Grandma Tim suddenly surfaced and said, “You may not like how rash he is, but in the end he’s often right.” And then Tom walked out with a big grin and five hundred dollars.

  Mom and I had lunch in New York that winter, and she told me Grandma Tim had packed for the trip without including a nightgown, shoes, or sunscreen. When Paddy noted this last omission, she said she’d use Eucerin — the family’s balm for dry skin.

  “You have to expect nothing, and be delighted by small signs of life,” I said.

  Mom began to cry, and my scalp prickled hotly; I had wanted to sound adult, and it had come out as unfeeling. “Now that Molly’s dead,” she said, referring to our family Newfoundland, “I feel that in a way it’s time for them all to die — except for Baba. I sometimes think it would be better if the plane returning from Saint John just went down.” After a moment, she went on, “That’s perverse, of course. But my identity is so tied up with her that sometimes it feels like I’m the confused one, like I’m going down.”

  “Your grandchildren are going to see you in perfect fettle,” I said. She gave me a teary, doubtful smile.

  As her Alzheimer’s tided in, Timmy still insisted on pulling the rope to peal the church’s bell on Sunday mornings, an increasingly syncopated, and eventually Dada, summons to service. Grandpa John came to Woodstock to see the woman who’d divorced him half a century earlier. With Tom discreetly making himself scarce, Timmy led John around the house to see her paintings, now stacked on every chair, pointing urgently at unguessable details as John murmured, “Yes, of course,” and “It is quite beautiful.” When Paddy drove his father up the road to see Julia McDill, Timmy came along for the ride; as John got out of the car, he leaned over and kissed his old love’s hand. When he’d gone home, she asked Baba, “Who was that nice man?”

  IN 1975, Grandpa Tom kept a journal of a year’s farming at Maplewood, hoping to make it into a book. I was touched, reading the manuscript recently, by the pleasure he took in planting peas and his euphoria at an emerging parsnip. He doesn’t mention people much, but sheep inspire a surprising fund of contemplation. The animals epitomized both the scope of his dominion and the limits of his powers: “When I first brought sheep up here in 1940, I undertook to shear them myself, using old-fashioned scotch hand shears. Those poor sheep! They ended up with what newspapers call ‘multiple cuts and abrasions’ … if I’d been treated that way, I would never recover from the trauma.”

  This savoring, self-amused narrator was an aspect of his appealing side. “He told us we were going to inherit the farm,” Lizz Greene says, “and it was like a rainbow went through my body. Because although we hated his guts some days, he was really our surrogate father. So when he said, ‘You, Anne, and Brett: this is your home, and you’re going to inherit it all,’ it felt like this amazing promise and act of love.” Tom wanted someone in the family to keep it all going — to demonstrate sufficient love for him that he could give the farm in return, as King Lear gave his kingdom. Or rather, he wanted everyone to demonstrate that love, and then he’d give (or sell) the farm to each in turn, even if there was no farm left to give.

  Tom Jr.’s son, Brett, helped his grandfather run Maplewood for five years, beginning in 1987 and ending when they sold the last thirty cows in the herd. Brett has Tom’s fire — he would match his grandfather up the volume knob — but also a saving sweetness and humor. Though he loved trying to wring a living out of the farm’s Elysian fields, and saw it as “a shining realm upon the hill,” he was skeptical about the inheritance. He’d worked for Tom before, plowing the fields one summer, and Tom had rewarded him with his old Citroën — but after Brett returned from a break in Hawaii, he discovered that Tom had sold the car.

  In the waning years of Grandma Tim’s life, though it had become evident that the farm would pass to her children, Brett and Lizz and Anne still tried to convince Mom and Paddy to let them keep working the place, saying they could turn a profit with small enterprises like mushroom farming, container nurseries, and the “MapleGreen WoodOven Bake Dome.” Brett, an admirer of Buckminster Fuller and a sometime stonemason, would build a greenhouse dome around a bread oven, making a combination outdoor kitchen and season-extending greenhouse — a very Tom Bourne sort of innovation. But the Piersons had lost faith in innovations.

  ALL JOHN McDill’s grandchildren were girls, and he may have seen in me a surrogate grandson. I remember the pleasure I felt when Mom sent him one of my college essays and he wrote me invoking Emerson’s famous letter to Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” His note made me feel I had a chance as a writer. Wasps are often better at nurturing their children’s and grandchildren’s friends — at being mentors and friends and houseguests — than their own flesh and blood. There’s less at stake. John’s daughter Jane, who called him “Grandbother” for his habit of fussing in other people’s affairs, says, “There wasn’t enough — what’s the word … camaraderie with my parents,” adding, of my chats with him, “He never did that with me.”

  In our final teas, John began giving me specific advice. He suggested I take vocal lessons so I would command more attention. He was proud of his own reverberant voice, and when he fell ill, he remarked with distress that he sounded “like an old crow croaking from inside a bag of feathers.” Distressed that our family now spent less time in Woodstock than in Wainscott, which he saw as a sybarites’ playground, he urged the values of the local gentry: circumspection, forbearance, irony, and distrust of change, change being invariably for the worse.

  In our last conversation he recalled the debutante parties when he was young and slim and would leap over walls as a party trick. He would always dance with the wallflowers, making himself indispensable — which was perhaps how he had made the acquaintance of the quiet, rather plain Julia Lee, a student at Yale’s forestry school (they never told their children how they’d met). The secret, John said, was this: “At coming-out parties, talk with the mothers of the pretty girls. They keep the lists and send the invitations. And you never know which ball will be the truly marvelous one.” I remarked that there weren’t so many coming-out parties, nowadays, but he smiled knowingly. “The final thing, of course,” he continued, “is the clothes. You must be handsomely attired. Do you possess a morning coat?”

  “No,” I said, smiling a little in return.

  “Ah!” He asked me to go to the attic and bring down, from the array of hanging wardrobes, his old morning coat, formal shirt, and white gloves. I did, and after he’d touched the shirt’s placket, once — it was still soft as a lamb’s ear — he pushed it toward me with a little gesture of surrender: “All yours.” He wouldn’t hear of a refusal.

  It hadn’t occurred to either of us that I was four inches taller than he — when I tried the suit on later, it was much too small. Yet it remains in my closet even now, in readiness.

  THE MORNING of Grandma Tim’s funeral, in August of 1992, we gathered in her bedroom. Tom wouldn’t let anyone take her body from him the night before, so she lay in her bed still. Overcome by mouth and breast cancer at last, she had essentially starved to death. Her mouth was open, and Day told Mom, who was weeping silently and stroking Grandma Tim’s hair, that it looked as if she were singing. When Paddy felt his mother’s forehead, he said, “She feels cold.” “Not cold,” Mom said. “Cool.”

  In the long living room, my cousin Kate Pierson was hesitantly picking
out “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the piano: “Mine eyes — have — have — have seen the glory of the co-coming of the Lord …” We laid Timmy in the pine coffin. Then eleven of us carried it out the front door and across the lawn toward the graveyard beyond, in time to a fife and drum, as Anne and Lizz’s girls ran alongside, catching butterflies under their shirts. We labored across the slanting hill behind Tom, who shuffled so slowly on his canes in the killing heat I kept expecting him to fall.

  At the grave we were forty strong. The minister, a hale man with a shock of white hair, boomed out a liturgy at once new and familiar. We come into the world with nothing, and take nothing with us; Timmy has gone where the sun and the moon cannot smite her; grief gropes after love. We sang “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” those piercing words:

  Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

  Bears all its sons away;

  They fly, forgotten, as a dream

  Dies at the opening day.

  Irving, the local idler, rode past on his three-wheeled bike, then stopped and tiptoed over, taking off his cap with an abashed look. The grave-digger sat on the stone wall opposite, kicking the wall with his boot heel. We lowered the coffin down on ropes, and Tom let a lily fall from his hand onto it, weakly. Then we all tossed down shovelfuls of dirt. The thunk of earth and skitter of pebbles beading down the coffin sides, the finality of it.

  Afterward, we ate white lasagna on the porch, and I watched Lizz’s seven-year-old daughter, Meghan, splash in a pink wading pool, looking so much like Lizz that time slipped a gear and I felt dizzy. For us, this was an end to Maplewood, or nearly. At the memorial service that October, Grandpa John would surprise everyone by standing, briefly and touchingly, to say, “I’m John Pierson and I loved Timmy, too.”

  TIM, THE carpenter, already had another coffin ready for Tom in his barn. Yet Tom would live on for more than five years, surrounded, unexpectedly, by his children. Nan and Tom Jr. built houses on their small sections of the farm — their father had given each of the children sixty acres as their inheritance — and Nicki, who had sold her land to Paddy, lived in a trailer across the road. In the late nineties, Paddy wrote me and remarked that as Tom had so determinedly sought to break his children’s spirit young, “The wonder is all three have come home to live within a few hundred yards of their father. (To a lesser extent, one must have the same wonder about me.)” The Bourne children’s mix of reasons for moving back was complex: a part of it was that Nan had cancer, and her brother and sister wanted to be near her; a part was sheer love of the place. And a part, perhaps, was the natural longing for their father, or their father as he might have been.