by Tad Friend
It makes me sad that he never knew his granddaughter, Jessica, or knew me as a father and successful businessman….
Since we always lived so far apart, he never visited and neither did I. Time just slipped away and now it is too late. I can’t say anything more except I regret it all very much.
Though Joan Anderson Turnure and her second husband had been careful to keep Lili in Charles’s good graces — even suggesting that she ask Charles to give her away when she married — Charles’s will disinherited Lili, too. Joan finds this poignant, seeing how much of him is in them: “I call Lili and Juan real Friends,” their mother says. “Lili because she never discloses her feelings beneath her sweet exterior, and Juan because he keeps you at a distance by being blunt and prickly.” The influence was instinctive and reactive, as Charles told his children almost nothing of their ancestors. He never spoke of his childhood except in bleak vignettes, recalling the icy flowers formed by the frost on his window at St. Paul’s. Coming from an unhappy family, he left two more unhappy families behind, and all unhappy families are alike in their silences.
Karin wasn’t sure what to do with Charles’s cremated remains. “I had told Charles, ‘Why don’t we have you here, in Florida, where I can visit you?’ Because I come from a tradition where you visit. He came from the American tradition, so he said, ‘Just throw me on the heap. When it’s over, it’s over.’ ” Despite his family antipathy, however, he’d always worn a gold ring with the Friend crest, and there were still spots available in James Wood Friend’s Pittsburgh mausoleum. So Karin parked Charles’s urn there and asked my father if she could have her name cut into the final tomb beside him. She had promised Charles she wouldn’t leave him there alone.
Yet Karin now says that when she dies, she wants her ashes mingled with Charles’s and scattered in the Atlantic. They were always happiest just the two of them, without family to muddle things. “I went back to the cemetery two years after he died,” she says, “and there was a violet growing by the front door. I was so excited, because I’d put cut violets with Charles’s urn when I’d brought him there. It was fall, and the grass was cut low, and there was no way a violet should be there, but there it was. It was like Charles was saying ‘Hello!’ I do wonder, though, if Charles really wants to be in that place, where it’s so cold and dark. I think he wants to get out of there and travel freely.”
GRANDMA JESS not only never got over her father’s death, she never got over what happened after his horseshoe company was sold in the 1920s. Mrs. Holton gave the lion’s share of the proceeds to Jess’s older brother, Oliver, and her older sister, Kay. Forever after, Jess was watchful about money. She taught her sons how to balance a checkbook and track their investments, and when she gave the three of us a hundred shares each of General Motors, in 1993, she appended a lengthy explanation of the company’s vicissitudes and dividend history — lengthy because she had held the stock for sixty years.
In 1995, she wrote a memo to her heirs laying out her preferred disposition of her jewelry, clock, wineglasses, and silver; it began, sniffily, “First of all I would like to say that I am pretty sure that Eliz.” — my mother — “will not want anything I have, as she showed no interest in any of Kay’s things except linen napkins. However, I would like my grandchildren to have anything they need, or want.” She then phoned my father to say that as Charles had mistreated Juan and Lili in his will, she wanted to leave them an extra portion in hers. Day said, “It’s your money to do with as you like.”
“Yes, but is that all right with you?” she kept asking.
“Whatever you want to do is fine with me.”
“Don’t you want my money?” she finally asked, plaintively. Jess seemed to understand that expectations of inheritance ratchet impossibly high because Wasps tend to express love not as a flow of feeling but as a trickle of side tables — leading their children to look to recoup in dead money what they lost in live affection. As Muriel Rogers once told her son Dickie, “I give you money because I love you at that particular time.”
The day after the phone call, Day wrote Jess a letter that turned up in her desk with a small cache of treasures when she died. After beginning “Dearest Ma,” he reiterated that he’d be happy to receive whatever money she wanted to pass on.
Now I want to talk about your greatest gifts to me:
Your beauty…. I had the most beautiful mother of anybody.
Your passionate feeling….
Your prudence.
I’ve commented on this often and recently. Let me say it again and differently. What kept me from becoming a gambler (and a loser) like my father? Surely your example.
Your independence.
Yes, as you put it on the phone last night, I “got a good start” in life. I not only got schooled, I got educated. I learned to love learning. Then, when you and Pop divorced, I made myself as financially independent as possible. I got small scholarships my first two years in graduate school. I earned money teaching the next two years. And I have never asked anyone for money since then…. My independence consists partly in choosing work and a way of life that none of my family have followed. In the course of that I’ve developed some values that Friends, and perhaps Holtons, don’t readily share. For instance, I cannot bear the phrase “time is money.” I know what that means in business terms, and I’ve proved I know it as an executive. But the phrase itself is philosophically atrocious. Time is much more important than money. Time is life itself….
What I am writing to thank you for, in the first place, and always, is for gifts of life — your beauty, passion, prudence, and independence. These, far more than any other influence, have formed my character. The flaws in that character are my own. Thank you for my strengths.
The following year, I asked my father if there was any money salted away that would enable me to join some friends in buying a building in Soho — a loan of $100,000 would secure me a large apartment. He said there wasn’t, and gave me a talk about stocks providing the foundation that eventually led to the “oasis” of real estate. Three days later, Grandma Jess died, leaving us each more than $100,000 in stocks. I felt guilty and spooked, brushed by the monkey’s paw. But by the time the will had been probated, the apartment was gone. I decided to spend the money on psychotherapy, having already put the $60,000 from my parents to that use. My birthright in wherewithal seemed to me almost perfectly balanced by my birthright in repression.
So the money Amanda and I have now is almost all money we have made. Still, she suggests that my real issue with ambition and money is my residual belief that I don’t have to do anything I don’t feel like doing in order to establish our family’s financial security, because there will eventually be some sort of inheritance to tide us along. This charge is one of the things we sometimes fight about, all the more bitterly because I worry that she might have a point.
TWELVE
Guilt
LATE IN MY sophomore year, I went to my first tea at the Signet Society. Having just been elected, I made a slow victory lap of the library, examining the framed letters of admission of such former members as T. S. Eliot and John P. Marquand; the tradition was to send your first book to the Signet along with your letter of election and the red rose you got at initiation. I was puzzling over the society’s motto, a Virgil tag that translates as “So do you bees make honey, not for yourselves,” when Paul Sax tapped my elbow. I followed his nod and saw a slight, dark-haired beauty in a black cardigan. Melanie Grayboden was smoking and bestowing upon her companion an extraordinarily wide-mouthed smile that seemed, apprehensively, to promise everything.
Paul was the Signet’s president. I’d gotten to know him on the Lampoon, and had the feeling that he’d supported my Signet candidacy at least in part to recruit a witness to his feelings for Melanie, the Signet’s secretary, who’d written my letter of election in back-slanting blue script. “She writes poetry,” he said now. “Good poetry. And she looks like that. And that’s her boyfriend, who’s th
is … great guy.” Her boyfriend was a quizzical Wasp, a promising writer who wound up in trusts and estates. Paul laughed, stewing: “Goddammit!”
She was one of those women — there are a few in every class — whose choices reverberate. Though I felt she was out of my league, I flirted with her at parties for years, sometimes eliciting that lingering smile. Afterward, I would find myself musing about her pretty feet, and her scent of jasmine and fresh-cut flowers — Beautiful, from Estée Lauder, a patient of Melanie’s doctor father who gave him gift packs. Melanie had a snobby, what-can-you-do-for-me air: pure Manhattan. She also surrendered to laughter and stood extra close, radiating warmth. And there was that amazingly hopeful smile. And I still believed that elusive women had a soft, secret, yielding side locked away just for me.
By the summer of 1990, there was a slow build and then a lovely dinner on Long Island at an inn near her family’s summerhouse on Shelter Island, so lovely I missed the last ferry home. After all the circling, there was an instant connection: the “It,” we called it. Waking in her West Side apartment, we’d call Elite Café and have them bring over bagels with lox and lattes and a Times. Sometimes I’d bring Melanie her latte in the shower, where she liked to muse in a cloud of steam. Following my family’s tannic ways, I’d never really drunk coffee before, but I took to it now as if it were LSD or Karl Marx.
Not that she wanted me to change, yet: she liked my timeworn clothes — that oatmeal-colored Shetland sweater — and the sense of tradition I gave off, which she felt meant I’d know how to raise children. She said she saw me as a lion, lazy but innately strong. That fall she was in Mississippi a lot, working on a documentary, but she wrote regularly, at one point recalling the final time we met as friends and wound up, in irony, at Tavern on the Green:
So foreign for New Yorkers because it is a destination for foreigners…. But there was something very powerful in feeling foreign with you. It’s an image I’ve retained strongly from The Great Gatsby — you can be far more intimate with another person at a big party than you can at a small one.
The world to me today seems like an enormous party.
I liked how she found people and paradoxical ideas “delicious” or “scrumptious.” She seemed to swallow life, savoring it all. But it was my first real relationship, and I was faking my way along. Relationships were a net of restrictions and obligations, and, finding myself caught much faster than I expected, I thrashed about resentfully. So I’d greet her with a “What should we do for dinner?” not, as she kept hoping, “I was thinking of you at lunch because …” She’d never met anyone with as many barriers, which worried her, but also intrigued her, which further worried her.
I recoiled from her lack of self-control, the thing I’d been drawn to: if she was feeling neglected at a party, she’d have an extra glass of wine and swing from cool to mushy, noisily confiding the problems with shooting a documentary in “Bumfuck, Nowhere.” I’d tighten up — and she’d notice and frown and have another glass. And I was troubled by the tenderness I felt, dimly aware that tenderness was a precautious feeling I had toward someone I was going to hurt. In the time we saw each other — four years all told, with some time off for bad behavior — I would sleep with four other women. Each time it seemed like the answer, until it obviously wasn’t.
On her birthday, six months in, she said, “Can I ask you something? Do you want to break up with me about half the time?”
“No,” I said. “About a third. What’s your fraction?”
“About a quarter.”
Two weeks later, after we’d been together three nights in a row, I told her I needed a night off. We were due at her parents’ for Passover, and Melanie’s face took on the wounded look I’d begun to dread. I knew I’d be in trouble with her mother: Laurie liked her parties to go just so, and already seemed to doubt my intentions. And her husband, Eric, reminded me of a nineteenth-century policeman, down to the disapproving mustache.
I really liked Melanie’s younger brothers, the family’s joyful way with barbecuing and visitors, and how her great-aunt Esther and grandmother Sharon jumped to instant, full-throated dispute: “If your stomach hurts, take Alka-Seltzer!” “Mylanta!” “Alka-Seltzer!” I had expected more of that from Laurie and Eric, the clamorous unconditional Jewish love my friends were always feeling smothered by. But Melanie’s parents were surprisingly Waspy. Finally, to have something we could all do together, I took up golf. Melanie and I had a wonderful time fooling around at her parents’ club on Shelter Island until the four of us played a round. On the first hole, Eric, a low-handicapper with a flowing swing, hit a 250-yard bomb that kicked behind a tree. I hit a low quacker that fluttered mournfully left and then zipped forty yards right, into the middle of the fairway. “Oh, sweet pea,” Melanie said, “that’s beautiful!”
“That’s a banana ball,” her father muttered from the cart. “A slice.”
“Give him some advice, Eric,” Laurie said.
“Don’t slice,” he said, tromping the gas.
A few months later, Melanie told me that her father had taken her aside to say, “It’s time you got married. To someone wealthy enough to support you. And to a Jew.” The religious qualification was a surprise to both of us. Yet if we’d paid attention, we’d have noticed that her mother kept setting her up on dates with Jewish men. Years later, when I called their house in Shelter Island to wish Melanie a happy wedding that weekend, Laurie picked up and said Melanie was out. “Could you give her a message?” I asked. “Depends what it is,” she replied.
NO ONE in my family or its circle ever spoke to me about Jews as a topic, except Uncle Wilson. But Jews were always there in counterpoint. Grandpa Ted was hardly alone, among the Wasps on Squirrel Hill, in fretting that it was turning into “Kike’s Peak.”
The length and breadth of Wasp anti-Semitism remains astonishing. When the Social Register began, in 1887, it numbered no Jews among its nearly two thousand families; noting the volume’s success, Ward McAllister — the arbiter who had established the “four hundred” people who constituted New York Society — suggested that “our good Jews might wish to put out a little book of their own, called something else of course.” A few years later, Dr. Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal Classification system and the hanging vertical file, founded the Lake Placid Club with the goal of a membership that would be “the country’s best.” Toward that end, signs on the club lawn warned: “No Dogs. No Tuberculars. No Hebrews.”
In the 1920s, the elite eastern universities instituted an unpublicized quota system, capping Jews at 10 to 15 percent of each class. At Harvard, admissions officers would look at an applicant’s birthplace, family names, and parental occupations to determine whether he could be classified J1, conclusively Jewish, or J2, preponderantly likely to be so. These maneuverings were ostensibly intended to manage what the Yale admissions chair, in a 1922 document entitled “The Jewish Problem,” referred to as “the alien and unwashed element.” The real Wasp fear, which also inspired the reactionary Immigration Act of 1924, was that the two million Jews who had arrived from Eastern Europe since 1870 were beginning to surpass them. The Wasps’ underhanded response made clear that they’d lost confidence in being the chosen people.
In his incisive book Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America, Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. suggests that Wasp anti-Semitism
is qualitatively different from their anti-Catholicism or anti-black racism. It is more like a deadly rivalry — not over which set of values captures the soul of America, but over which ethnic group wins custody of Old Money values. If Jews are an obsession with the Wasp Old Rich, and they are, it is not because they spell the destruction of the things Old Money holds dear but because the Wasp Old Rich half-suspect that Jews take better care, can afford to take better care, of the patrimony than they can.
THAT FIRST Christmas, Melanie came to Villanova and was bowled over by my mother’s standard greeting: Mom raced to the door, crying, “Darling!” and “Melanie
!” After a hug that left an imprint of Chanel No. 5, and a bit of hostessing — “Would you like some milk? Tea? Some lovely, cool grapes?” — Mom displayed her latest coup: the hand-painted three-quarter-scale powder room sink she’d carried on her lap on the plane from Albuquerque! Ta-da! She did a Charleston step or two in triumph, and led Melanie to the crèche, to which she’d just added a tiny sheep on wheels. Mom had grown a little weary of the Christmas production, but visitors always brought out her razzle-dazzle, as if she were auditioning the house for the pageant at Radio City.
Melanie joined right in with odd family rituals like decorating the tree to the tune of the New Christy Minstrels’ “Sing Along with Santa,” reading The Tailor of Gloucester, and marching downstairs to “Hayfoot, Strawfoot.” The number of gifts in her pile by the fireplace moved her to tears. Mom, who liked advising Melanie about her career and about home decoration, had gone all out. This was us at our best: bountiful, traditional, swishing the wadded-up wrapping into the garbage bin. Melanie loved it all. “In my family,” she told me, “there is no yesterday, there is only today.”
That summer, she and I went in on a summerhouse in Sagaponack, ten minutes from Georgica, a charming saltbox that sparrows circled at sunset. But soon enough I spoiled it. First Alessandra Visconti came for a weekend, and on Sunday night Melanie cried into the bedspread: Alessandra had only talked to me, and therefore didn’t take our relationship seriously, and therefore must know I still cared for Giovanna.
“That is an amazing series of inferential leaps,” I said.
“I feel lonesome,” she said. “More when I’m with you.”
In August, I fooled around at the saltbox with Francesca. Bookish and wry, she was me in a frock. Her father had waltzed with my mother in dancing school, a fact I stupidly mentioned to Francesca, who, in a flourish of independence, promptly canceled our next date. I left messages on her machine every day for a week, certain that she would reschedule once she realized how rude she was being. (A few years later, she sent me a postcard suggesting we get together. Then she didn’t return my phone calls. Yes, I made more than one.)