by Tad Friend
When our landlord told us we had to go, it forced the final reckoning. I went to Georgica that August, and Melanie went to Shelter Island, and we made slow-motion plans for movers to divide our furniture. She kept Lulu, naturally, but for years afterward when I saw them, Lulu would still give me a face lick, a touching washcloth swipe of remembrance.
For the first time, the house and the beach and the lawn in Georgica didn’t restore me. Mom came into my room one night and said, “I just realized that if you’re breaking up with Melanie, that means I have to break up with her, too.”
“That’s how it usually works,” I said wearily.
“But I don’t want to break up with Melanie,” she said.
YOU HEAR a lot about Catholic guilt and Jewish guilt, but very little on the topic among Wasps. In Exit Ghost, Philip Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, ponders the late George Plimpton, the founding editor of The Paris Review — an exuberant Wasp apparently unconstrained by second thoughts as he flung himself into participatory journalism, designing fireworks displays, birding, and partygoing.
George afforded my first glimpse of privilege and its vast rewards — he seemingly had nothing to escape, no flaw to hide or injustice to defy or defect to compensate for or weakness to overcome or obstacle to circumvent, appearing instead to have learned everything and to be open to everything altogether effortlessly….When people say to themselves “I want to be happy,” they could as well be saying “I want to be George Plimpton.”
Yet I felt nothing but guilt about Melanie. If Catholic guilt is “I’ve been bad” and Jewish guilt is “You’ve been bad,” then Wasp guilt is “You probably think I’ve been bad.” Wasp guilt derives from knowing your ancestors would say you’d let down the side. I felt that in shying from Melanie’s full-hearted if messy love I had not lived up to my inherited expectations of candor and decency and, well, menschiness. Later, I would begin to think that the guilt long pre-existed Melanie, and was not the result but the motive of the crime.
Wilson seemed to feel intermittent guilt toward our family; in the 1970s, he’d asked my parents if they wanted to buy his back three acres, and my father had offered him our entire savings, $55,000. Wilson instead took $75,000 from Donald Petrie, and then we all watched as the property’s value began doubling every three or four years. “I thought, Twenty thousand dollars, in family — Wilson, you should have sold to us,” Day says. “Petrie and I used to rag each other. He knew he’d gotten a good deal.”
In April of 1993, Wilson sent off a letter to Mom and Paddy and Norah that Mom passed on to us. It was a pained statement of reckoning; he announced that he’d been dipping into capital just to meet expenses, and that after he died, he feared it would be “imperative that my heirs or my estate sell Wainscott or rent it for some profitable part of each summer.” Melanie and I wrote him to ask if we might rent Century House for two weeks that August for $2,000, much less than market rates but a lot for us. He replied, “I feel greatly restored and cheered and strengthened! Wainscott has been a joint venture from which we have each of us drawn great pleasures but to which we have each also made sacrifices and personal contributions. May it long so continue.”
When we saw Wilson in Wainscott, he could only walk halfway across the living room behind his walker. He would be dead by October. One afternoon in the kitchen, Norah told Melanie and me that her father had confided that he kept seeing an entity: the head of a woman with cornrows, an alien countenance who hovered peacefully near the floor, smiling at him. “It’s like he’s open to a whole other set of possibilities, now, at the very end,” Norah said.
“It’s amazing!” Melanie agreed.
My father had come in for a cup of tea and heard the end of this, and he remarked, “He’s on a lot of medications, is he not, which could explain such an apparition?” I was irritated by this characteristic response, and irritated with Norah and Melanie for the credence that provoked this characteristic response — one I recognized, from seeing Melanie’s face close down, as my own.
Late that summer, Grandpa John and his third wife, Hanny Duell, visited Wilson for what everyone knew would be the final time. Without Hanny’s happy return to his life, I doubt Grandpa John would have returned to Wainscott then, the site of his ignominy in 1938 and of the consequent shift in authority to Wilson, who would essentially become our substitute grandfather. He’d only been back once since Tisha Pierson was married on the lawn in 1962.
John had escorted Hanny to her debut in 1928, and she’d saved his letter to her afterward; when he came to Villanova for Christmas in 1990, she sent the letter back to him, care of my parents, in a gift stocking. Embarrassed by our curiosity, he slid the letter into his jacket and muttered, “No comment.” Hanny, on the other hand, was a marvel of forthrightness. She wrote to her grandchildren to say: “I have known John Pierson ever since my brother Charles brought him home from Yale over sixty years ago. He has always been my friend. It seems it was ordained for us to live our lives separately and fully, albeit along converging lines, until our turn came. That is now.” It was clear that she and Grandpa John should have been married all along — though then none of us would be here.
Melanie and I joined the three of them in the dining room for their last meal; John and Hanny were catching the ferry very early in the morning. I mentioned the trip Melanie and I had taken to Greece that summer, and how after we arrived on Syros we took a caique around the limestone cliffs to Grandpa John’s land and spent an evening in the cottage there. Melanie spoke feelingly of the walk up from the dock through the reforested tamarisks and Aleppo pines.
Grandpa John asked whether we’d heard or seen any goats.
“We did, I’m afraid,” I said. Hanny put her hand on John’s. “They had amazing food at the market,” I continued, with determined cheer. “We packed it in with us and ate on the porch, by candlelight, listening to the crickets. We had Kavarnis wine, tzatziki, Kefalotiri cheese, and about six amazingly sweet tomatoes.”
From the head of the mahogany table, a vast wooden raft carrying him out, Wilson roused himself: “Tomaytoes!”
After dinner, he went straight to bed. But he summoned the strength, when he’d arrived at the stairs in three slow tacks of his walker, to conclude his hostly duties. Turning to Hanny, he inclined his head and said, “Very nice getting to know you better.”
“Good night, then,” John said.
“Good night.”
THIRTEEN
Reconstruction
THE FIRST FEW times I edged into Dr. Sylvia Welsh’s office, a formidable room saved from austerity by a wooden dollhouse, I thought her censorious. In our second psychotherapy session I tried to recall how we’d ended the first time, and she said, “With the girl who was too young for you,” dispatching Giovanna in a phrase. So I decided that Sylvia lived alone with a Manx cat — even as I couldn’t help noticing that she was sexy, animated, and nearly fearless. In fact, she was married — her husband’s office was next door, which I somehow could help noticing — and had a daughter. I was gazing at the world through X-ray glasses that revealed every woman as an enchantress.
Sylvia was a slight woman in her early forties who looked great in Lanvin suits and Louboutin shoes whose brazen red soles reminded me where my money was going, a subject I kept bringing up. I knew I was being stingy and overparticular — a real Wasp — but I couldn’t help myself: the only way out was through. She’d observe that she was charging me half her usual rate and that I could see the transaction as a gift, not a theft. Finally, she’d say, “Oy vey, shut up, already.” She brought out the Wasp in me and I the Jew in her. Eventually, that would change.
Early on, I mentioned that I was a good dancer. “What?” Sylvia said, cackling. “I’m a good dancer — I’m a great dancer, in fact. You, not so much, I’m guessing.” The subject was fraught: an ability to waltz and foxtrot is the Wasp’s traditional ticket to inclusion. In 1888, Ward McAllister explained why he’d set the limits of society at four hundre
d people: “If you go outside four hundred,” he said, “you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.” Yet tutored ease was the opposite of what Sylvia and I were talking about: rhythm, attunement, a bluesy willingness to sweat and shake and throb. Namely, sex. That her barb stung only proved her point that, off the dance floor, at least, I seemed about as funkadelic as Richard Nixon.
After eighteen months she encouraged me to try psychoanalysis. I stopped sitting up and talking to her once a week and started lying down and talking to her bookshelf four times a week. I knew I must be making progress, because I felt so much worse. Across the months and years my anxieties came to seem intensely repetitive yet implacable. Why didn’t she call back? Why hasn’t my editor responded yet? Why am I so ashamed of anger, or any strong emotion? Why has this couch become the most important place in my life? I could buy an apartment, load up on Berkshire Hathaway stock, and travel the world if I weren’t bankrupting myself here. Sylvia finally brought me up short: “Do you really have a better use for the money?”
______
MY PARENTS’ Villanova house was in some ways a compromise. Mom had wanted a sun-filled modern home, but Day urged heritage, which was cheaper. They wound up, in 1989, with a two-hundred-year-old gardener’s cottage on the corner of an old estate. The two-acre plot came with a brook and a pond and more than a hundred trees, including, looming over the roof, a sugar maple that Mom gazed at fearfully in high winds. As for the house itself, with its hulking front-door hood and its ragbag of additions … her kinder friends merely murmured, “Oh, Libby!” If it had been up to Day, the decor might have remained as it was, the drab walls and defiant shabbiness of reflexive Wasp style. But over the next decade Mom corralled all the talents and energies that she had poured into painting and needlepoint and being a college president’s wife, and hitched them to the house, dragging it where she foresaw.
Three sets of architects were called in to realize her ideas, eleven major projects in all, each of which she had drawn up without allowing for such blemishing inconveniences as ventilation equipment or smoke alarms. When she was reminded of these necessities, her lips would set, and then, switching on her twin high beams — one of charm, one of acute distress — she would bulldoze the architects into making it all work. Three small bedrooms became the master suite, the old kitchen became a mudroom, a passageway became a bar. Above the bar she carved a pass-through so you could relay glasses to the new kitchen, a festive command center with ribbons of shelves and a blue-and-white Portuguese-tile backsplash. Between the kitchen and the dining room she hung sliding barn doors on iron braces, so that you could close off the kitchen when you had catered dinners and no one would be the wiser. There weren’t any catered dinners, of course, and the sliding doors slid only for illustration; the whole idea was a revenant wish from a bygone way of life.
Day, aside from frowningly monitoring the cost and halting construction when the bills grew too preposterous — delays she chafed at, hating parsimony — ended up leaving most of the details to her. His taste was earthier; by surrendering on any number of other points, he was finally able to persuade her to preserve the rough stone of two internal walls that she had intended to plaster over. One of my mother’s friends, observing her tenacity in these struggles and seeing her as a chatelaine on a par with E. M. Forster’s Mrs. Wilcox, took to calling the house “Dorie’s End.”
Day liked to walk the grounds, to supervise the koi in the pond and return with an armload of wood, but Mom preferred her nature domesticated. When she created a garden behind her bedroom, she bounded it with locust posts topped by copper caps like upside-down pie tins and filled it with dwarf cherry and tiny cypress and a miniature pine that popped out of a blue-and-white pot. The centerpiece was a stone bull that she hoped future grandchildren would ride. This secret garden turned the out-of-doors into a drawing room. At the same time, by some alchemy, the house was opened up to the out-of-doors, made into the sunny villa she had always wanted. She detested darkness and confining spaces — the womb, Buick 8s in a storm, the grave.
______
WHENEVER ANYONE rang the bell, Mom would shanghai him or her, be it beloved son or bewildered Girl Scout, into a house tour. These lasted almost forever: like Russian dolls, her rooms held stories nested within larger stories. En route to her handmade sink from Albuquerque, for instance, she’d see the ironwood chest she’d found in Seoul and be reminded that when she’d received her MasterCard bill for it she’d become convinced that she had made a killing on the exchange rate at the dealer’s expense. Later, when she couldn’t make the dealer see how he’d shortchanged himself — “I placed an international call, but, nonetheless …” — she had made a compensatory donation to a Korean eye hospital. The logic was characteristic, as was the punctilio, as was the guilt, as was the belief that she could have taken advantage of an antiques dealer.
In the living room, she placed her mother’s silver gravy boat and travel alarm clock on a table alongside a maple burl and a bowl of marble eggs and shells. She was ravenous for choice objects, telling more than one friend that she wanted their embroidered sofa pillows after they died. Looking down on the table were an oil painting by Guy Pène du Bois that showed Grandma Tim in her glamorous twenties and, on an adjoining wall, ten of Grandma Tim’s own ink drawings. Each room was intended as a Joseph Cornell box, and the living room was a wonder cabinet dedicated to the Hartford Butterfly.
The house began to resemble one of the virtual-memory palaces imagined by the Greeks as an aid to recollection. Mom was now terrified of Alzheimer’s, so memory-laden talismans were a source of tremendous comfort. Her idea was to both acknowledge and subdue the past — her past, particularly — by giving it a cameo role among her present pleasures. Goggy Coxe’s desk was gathered along with Goggy Pierson’s desk and Goggy Robinson’s poudreuse; all the Goggies were given one chance to shine.
If you lingered by the silver menagerie, she would hand you the small elephant that she had acquired in 1968 through her acquaintance with Connie Mangskau, a Bangkok antiques dealer. Connie Mangskau had asked Mom to carry a letter to a dealer across the border in Siem Reap: “Just an innocent little old letter, she said.” When my mother handed the Cambodian dealer the padded envelope, he sliced it open and tipped out a pile of diamonds. In appreciation, he invited her to take a memento from his shop, and, while she was furious at Connie Mangskau, she had finally picked out this elephant, but later she was furious at herself for not picking out the much larger one nearby, an elephant the size of a basketball! She would mention, in passing, that she had first met Connie Mangskau in 1955, when she was in Bangkok teaching English. She would not mention that she’d gone there for Grandpa John.
Driven to whisk everything unsightly away, she also sought to coax applause by demonstrating how the trick was done. A rolltop panel in the kitchen, an “appliance garage,” would be raised to display the huddled coffeemaker, Cuisinart, and blender. And Day grumbled about how she herded visitors into his bathroom to show off the louvered cabinet that hid — ta-da! — his drying jockstraps.
Timmie suggested that Mom start a business designing tiny spaces and call it Martha Store-It. But Mom couldn’t have endured anyone else’s inexactitude. Before laying out her kitchen drawers, she took a tape measure to a variety of bread loaves and determined that three of them would fit snugly in a drawer that was five inches high, seventeen inches wide, and eighteen inches deep. And she had a group of architects sit in a circle while she measured the mean length of their shins to determine the proper depth of a Japanese tea well for Day’s study (sixteen and a half inches). She designed as if she were on a ship, where space is scant and items may have to be battened down in a storm. Some of her nooks and cubbies were so small — so small — they looked as if they had been made by little mice.
SYLVIA POINTED out how strong my incest taboo was, and as we discussed my “type” — Mediterranean-Jewish, short, mysterious, built �
� she suggested that I might eventually see my mother, who was none of those things, as attractive. “Maybe someday you won’t even have a type,” she said.
“Of course you’d say that, because you’re just my type.”
“But you don’t have sexual feelings for me, either,” she pointed out.
“Not that I want to talk about with you.”
In the first month after I broke up with Melanie, I slept with two women. “You feel guilty about sleeping with women you don’t have feelings for,” Sylvia observed.
“Yes, but maybe it would be better if I could just sleep with people and not feel guilty.”
“Maybe it would be better if you could just murder people and not feel guilty. Trust your guilt.”
“Veh is mir,” I said — “I am pain itself” — and she laughed.
We got into my dreams, naturally. So many came clamoring then: an occasional flight over a crescent beach, or a bike ride on Highland Avenue in Buffalo under a canopy long since felled by Dutch elm disease, sunlight powdering through phantom limbs. But more usually slogs along wintry roads where I couldn’t see my own reflection in the black ice, dreams almost too schematic to repeat that afternoon and often erased on waking anyway, leaving only a seam of unease. Recurrently, I was playing soccer on my usual left wing and ran down my line to find myself thwarted by a stand of mangroves. Or, on the squash court, a thicket in midcourt hid both the ball and my opponent. “It’s interesting to me,” Sylvia said one day, “as we’ve been talking about how you equate intimacy with submission, a loss of self rather than an increase, that your sports in these dreams are soccer — ‘sock her’ — and squash, a verb of violent suppression.”
“Oh, come on!” I said. “I didn’t name the sports; I just played them.”