Cheerful Money

by Tad Friend

  With more than $60,000 a year having gone to Timmy’s nurses, Tom didn’t have any money left, and the house was fast becoming an eyesore. Yet he began making secretive (though bellowed) plans to return the farm to its imagined glory. He got on the phone to buy, among other follies, a $600 Great Pyrenees sheepdog, a Jersey cow, and a spring lamb for his great-granddaughter. “When we all met with my father to talk about his care, he said, ‘If anyone in this room really cared about me, they’d put me up,’ ” Nicki Bourne recalls. “Turning to Nan, who was dying, he said, ‘Look at you; you’ve got a big empty house, and you’ve never invited me.’ Shame was always a big item for my father.” Once, long ago, he’d expressed his own to his first wife, telling her, “You don’t know what it’s like to look like an elephant and feel like a mouse.”

  Finally, in December of 1994, his children decided to install Tom in a nursing home. “At a Christmas party, Nan told me, ‘We’re going to put him in the Old Soldiers’ Home on Tuesday,’ ” Bill Stetson says. “He’d told me he had enough money, so I was shocked. I knew he’d be utterly devastated.” Bill and his wife, an IBM heiress, each volunteered to put up $10,000 a year for Tom’s care, and Bill asked Laurance and Mary Rockefeller to match them. The resulting trust of $40,000 per annum was enough to keep Tom at Maplewood for his last three years.

  Tom’s children felt beholden, grateful that their father could stay at home. Yet they still couldn’t stand to visit much. For his part, Tom seemed unaware of where the money was coming from. Or at least he never let on, as he adjusted his hearing aid to admit only good news, if he knew that he was being maintained by two legendary American fortunes. He may even have believed that the farm had become profitable at last. In mid-January 1998, Bill Stetson came over for lunch and found Tom slumped in his chair.

  “Gramps was a twentieth-century American who was born six weeks into the century and almost saw it out,” Brett Bourne says. “He was a full and accurate metaphor for the country, with his strong personality and passions and great charm, as well as his enormous blind spots and oppressive nastiness. By the nineties, his children were all somewhat looking forward to his death. But Nan and Nicki and Tom never got that he was in them and in the farm, all around and inside us. I totally understand that inclination to be a salesman, a yeller, an imposer of my will — I react against it, but it’s there, the unspoken stuff of who we are as a family. So I always thought, It’s not like we’re going to be free of him when he dies — we are him.”

  ELEVEN

  Trusts

  IN APRIL OF 1989, I spent ten days in a cheap bungalow on Thailand’s island of Samui. I was twenty-six and in the middle of my year circling the globe. The plan was that travel would resolve my suit-of-armor problem; that, far away, I’d stop caring what people might think. Instead, I’d lost ten pounds, exchanging them for the drawstring pants and moped-crash scars that signal “world traveler,” and for a tenuous self-sufficiency shaken by lonely yearnings for Giovanna or more immediately available women. At my farewell party in New York, a mystical friend named Lisa had told me three things to keep in mind as I went. It was loud, so I strained to catch her murmurings, and heard the last injunction as “You will see whores in trouble and you should help them!” to which I nodded thoughtfully. It turned out that, knowing I’d soon be on an Australian sheep station, Lisa had said, “You will see horses in trouble …”

  At every American Express office there were letters waiting from women back home, unexpectedly intimate letters. And a dark rumination on suicide from a woman I didn’t know very well, who said she was writing me “because I have no idea if you will ever receive it and also because you are so far off and the secret feelings of my wandering mind will be safe with you half the world away.” Travel makes you a screen for furtive wishes, and that was fine with me. I was willing to go away to be needed.

  Over lunch at my guesthouse on Samui, overlooking the Gulf of Thailand, I read Of Human Bondage and watched Juanita, the manager, flirt primly with the lodge’s other male guests. She was in her early thirties, a pretty, self-contained woman. I could envision settling down with her and helping to run the guesthouse: working the till and the bar, trawling for butterfish, going for evening runs on the white crescent beach.

  “Three girls in one week, Chris,” Juanita said, bringing him a Singha beer and his bill. “You are new number one stud. If you calculate by number.” Chris’s nocturnal activities were a running topic.

  “Four,” he replied. A placid man with mermaid tattoos on both biceps, Chris kept his watch facing inward in the British fashion. “But I love only you, Juanita. When will you be my butterfly?”

  The Australian, Ross, remarked, “I was drunk as a tick last night.” He had the bleared eyes of the blackout drunk and was convalescing from a back infection he’d picked up in a New Guinea mine. His stitch-welted surgical scars looked like a shark’s bite.

  “You couldn’t see, mate,” Chris said. “I was worried I couldn’t trust you with my girl, that you were going to give me some competition, but then I saw the glaze steal over your eyes. Like fog over the hills.”

  “I was blind as a skunk. Lost my key, had to crawl into bed with Juanita.” Ross gave her a mild look. “Thanks for putting me up, butterfly.”

  Chris looked at Juanita to see whether there was anything to this, but she was clearing a nearby table. He pulled out his wallet and gazed into it: “Only five girls’ worth left. She put her foot onto my throat, by the way. Very limber. This morning she wanted five hundred baht, but I told her I was broke.”

  Without turning around, Juanita said, “Chris!”

  “I thought it would be wrong to pay her,” he said lazily, trying to catch Juanita’s eye. “That encourages prostitution.” She bent over the silverware, smiling, probably, and I bent back over my book.

  My parents and grandparents had once chased the same will-o’-the-wisp hopes abroad: our attics are stuffed with onionskin envelopes inscribed “Per Via Aerea” and “Mit Luftpost” by husbands and fathers at the Bay View, the International House, the Hotel des Masques; from Raffles, the White Palace, aboard Pan Am. Yet, like boomerangs, Wasps whistle off only to find themselves back home. In John P. Marquand’s 1937 novel The Late George Apley, Apley tells his son that their heritage travels with them: “You can leave Pequod Island for Bar Harbor but Pequod Island will nevertheless remain a part of you. You can go to the uttermost ends of the earth but, in a sense, you will still be in Boston.” Without quite being aware of it, I was searching, in all those hostels and stupas, for the contentment of Maplewood and Century House.

  In Kyoto, I sat through a long tea ceremony, made antsy by its formal simplicities; in the Golden Triangle, I smoked opium but woke up to myself. In the years to come, I would keep returning to the road, still hoping to take French leave in nostalgie de la boue. In Manila, covering the presidential election in 1992, I fell in with J.B., a white-haired adventurer from Kentucky who was living at the Mandarin Oriental and placing sizable bets on the outcome. I was fascinated by his monologues as he sat by the pool in a terry cloth robe, drinking Banana Yummies — fascinated, and alarmed, and a little envious. “I tell you,” he confided, “I don’t use no rubbers, but what I do soon as I pop my nuts, I get up quick and go to the bathroom and pour some rubbing alcohol in and around there good, stings like a red-hot iron but I never had no problems. And if I catch one of my baby dolls peddling her sweet pussy around, I just X her out. We go someplace out of town and I buy her a nightgown and an expensive pair of shoes and then I get her into bed and bare naked and then I dress again like I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes, and I tell her, ‘Turn over, baby.’ Then I take a red marker and I draw a big X on her ass, and when she says, ‘What are you doing?’ I say, ‘I’m crossing you out of my life, sweetheart,’ and I walk out the door with all her new clothes and never look back.”

  Just once did I escape, and briefly. On a horseback trip in Mongolia, in 1997, my companions and I were snowed in high
in the Sayan Mountains with a tribe of sixty Tsaatan, reindeer people. We spent our days dozing in their tepees, surrounded by huskies and reindeer and runny-nosed children, and I felt elated to be cut off so completely. Life was reduced to its simplest elements: tea, rice, dogs, a fire. And then the snow melted and we rode down.

  IN 1933, Fortune extolled the financial management of the leading Brahmin families: “The great family trusts stand between the Bostonians and the activities of contemporary life like the transparent but all too solid glass which separates the angel fish of an aquarium from the grubby little boys outside.”

  But by the 1950s, Wasps had begun to whisper about “the fatal $10,000” — a trust fund that wasn’t sufficient to absolutely destroy ambition, but that provided just enough cushion to muffle it. In 1957, as Mom began a career in teaching and her course of psychoanalysis, she wrote Grandpa John to inquire if there was any money being held for her. He replied, aggrievedly:

  The point that does puzzle me is that you do not in your letter indicate any realization of the key financial facts. I have been paying (until you reached 21) a hundred dollars a month each for you and Paddy, plus 12.5 percent of any net income (after income taxes) above $5,000…. You will see, with a little pencil and paper work, that I have very definitely been sharing what I had with you and Paddy, and that there was not much chance of putting any additional sums aside in a savings fund.

  He added, in a footnote: “Aside from my salary, I had a small income, originally about $1,500, on investments left me by my father. In the course of working on full employment and Voices to America, with little or no pay in some years, I used up the major part of the capital. This, I am afraid, is sometimes the penalty for trying to do something in this world, in disregard of more practical considerations.” A few months later, however, Goggy Pierson died, and after her large apartment on Park Avenue was sold, John assigned $25,000 from her estate — about $185,000 today — to a trust for Mom (and the same to Paddy).

  Mom skirmished with Day about money for years, routinely spending more than he had anticipated on the assumption that funds would suddenly emerge, as they always had, to cover the balance. In 1962, they fought for days over her insistence that they spend twenty-one dollars for a Consumer Reports–approved top-of-the-line desk lamp for his study. Twenty years on, once the lamp had proved itself, he acknowledged that she had been right. But he never could convince her that keeping a list of expenditures was not the same thing as making or sticking to a budget. Nor could he forestall her occasional sprees. She knew the one store to go to for just the thing — T. Anthony, Bendel’s, Pierre Deux — and those things were always expensive. In 1969, she wrote a friend: “Guess what I’ve just acquired? A fur coat. It’s muskrat, which is I guess just one step above caterpillar, but anyway it’s fur. (It’s also just exactly one-half of the total year’s clothing allotment for all five of us (!!!) — so if you see me in it at the wedding don’t peek underneath — there won’t be anything there!)”

  Mom’s attitude was unusual; Grandpa John’s defensiveness about depleting family capital more characteristic. Money managers refer to Wasps as “Wealth Preservers” and put their money into fixed-income investments and cash, while the freewheeling “Wealth Enhancers’ ” money goes into riskier, and more profitable, hedge funds, venture capital, and private equity. Wealth Enhancers like to say that money is a form of energy, and that if you play around with that energy — treat it all as a game — it will multiply. Wasps know that money doesn’t multiply; it divides. We understand our ordained roles: the first generation earns the money, the second begins the dispersal by aiming (expensively) at social and civic position, and the third goes in for artistic self-expression and blowing what remains. So your job as a Wasp elder is to guard your dwindling hoard against all requests for food, clothing, and riding lessons, and then to expire at last, too late, clutching a Byzantine trust document as your children labor to uncurl your frozen fist. The word “trust,” so congenial in its associations, is an acute misnomer. To guard the capital from your feckless offspring, you vest control of it with a trustee, the affable lawyer who will take your feckless offspring to lunch once a year and charge the trust for the meal and his time.

  The truth is that Wasps fear money and its quicksilver abdications. That fear informs the rite of passage of the college summer spent “roughing it” on an oil rig, a tuna boat, a steel-mill floor. The explicit rationale is that working with your hands, however briefly, is bracing and broadening. My father, who spent his roustabout summer as a gandy dancer, or track-maintenance worker, on the Alaska Railroad, wrote me when I was doing my summer stint as a salad chef and housepainter on the New Jersey shore to urge that I stay the course despite my boredom: “You will, in future years, have a still more heightened sensitivity to the problems of the ordinary laborer: both your capacity to help him or her vis-à-vis that person’s boss; and your capacity as a boss to visualize needed reforms or decline suggested changes will be morally empowered by your own earlier stamina under laboring conditions.”

  But most Wasps learn to recoil to safety. That Jersey summer I had a flash of shamed recognition when I read Stover at Yale, Owen Johnson’s 1912 bildungsroman about a bully young man who defies the college’s social system yet is nonetheless finally tapped for Skull and Bones. After Dink spends a summer working with his roughneck classmate Tom Regan, he feels rather smug: “He had had a glimpse of what the struggle for existence meant in the stirring masses; and he had known the keenness of a little joy and the reality of sorrow to those for whom everything was real.” But later, when he falls for a working-class girl who nobly jilts him, leaving a note that says, “I’m not good enough for you,” he realizes how narrowly he has escaped:

  All the horror and the hopelessness of a life he could not better thronged over him, and he stood a long while looking down the great bleak ways, through the gates that it is better not to pry ajar. Then in a revulsion of feeling, terrified at what he had divined, he left and went, almost in an instinct for protection, hurriedly to the Story home, white and peaceful under the elms.

  EVERY FOUR or five years, growing up, we’d catch a glimpse — a lunch, an overnight — of my father’s younger brother, Charles. Charles was the first person I ever saw in espadrilles. He was always on the move in Latin America or Europe, always several thousand miles from Pittsburgh. Slim and elegant and remarkably handsome in a Jeremy Irons way, he arched his left eyebrow at sentiment. He preferred the mediated view through his Nikon, shooting closed faces and shadowed doorways in Java, Crete, Rangoon, Peru, Leningrad, and Senegal. Possessed of a light voice and strong opinions about food and wine, he was often droll and impulsive — and, like his mother, easily wounded. He spoke Spanish and Italian, though he sometimes conflated them, and signed his brief notes to my parents, “Tanti Saluti” or “Abrazos.” I admired his lack of interest in us and felt he might be onto something. A backgammon player, a gifted mimic, and a dab hand with an orange soufflé, Charles was Playboy’s ideal bachelor. Yet even his ex-wives would remember him fondly for his ardent longing to love.

  When an attractive Vassar student named Joan Anderson first saw Charles across the bar at Pike Run in 1953, she was smitten: “He was this darling guy, talking and laughing, and you couldn’t help wondering ‘Who’s that?’ ” Charles, a sophomore at Williams, was known there as Bugsy, because he’d somehow taken over a Pittsfield, Massachusetts–based football pool. But with Joan he was doe-eyed and vulnerable. “He hated Pittsburgh and he hated Pike Run, which was the kind of place where people went ‘Oooh!’ because I wore open-toed shoes,” Joan says. “And he felt very, very sensitive about the fact that Jess was considered the loose woman of the club. The whole reason he was attracted to me was that I’d grown up far away, in Mexico.” (Charles would arrive for my parents’ wedding in Woodstock — in February, in two feet of snow — sporting a white tropical suit.) Yet he also liked to talk about Big Jim Friend’s bygone yacht and to assure Joan, “If we
can just get through the first few years, I’m going to inherit a lot of money and we’ll never have to work again.”

  They dated for two years and, virgins still, were married a few weeks after graduation. Charles went to business school in Phoenix and was soon out every night as Joan stayed home with their daughter, Lili, and Lili’s younger brother — a child Charles felt Joan had foisted on him to keep him in the marriage. The boy was christened Carlos Holton Friend, then renamed, at Joan’s mother’s insistence, John Christopher Friend. After one fight, Charles told Joan, “I’m not interested in you either physically or mentally.” She made a final try at a rapprochement, visiting him in Puerto Rico, where he had started an import company. She had picked out an alluring polka-dotted bikini from Macy’s, but when Charles saw her in it, he said, “You look like a schoolteacher.” He could pierce your soft spot, a knack he shared with Jess and me.

  In the early 1960s, Charles refused to pay his mandated $133 a month in child support and only complied when Jess threatened to disinherit him. Jess told Joan that her son was like his namesake and great-uncle, Charles Wood Friend: someone who should never marry. But Jess would also apologize to Joan and Lili and John Christopher for Charles’s absences, explaining that he had been a small, sensitive boy who threw up a lot and cried when my father stole his comic books. Though Charles and Day grew up in the same room, trading stories about cowboys named for states — Tex, Cal, Mex, and Monty — it always surprised people that they were brothers; they looked and spoke and behaved so differently.