Cheerful Money

by Tad Friend

  “But you had the dreams.”

  The intimacy of analysis is uneven: Sylvia came to know nearly everything about me, but while I came to know aspects of her very well — the tenderness, the feistiness, the disdain for hypocrites and Republicans — her biography was a near-blank. I knew only that she’d been married before, that she’d once had a job driving a Thomas’s bread truck, and that she was a blocked novelist (which we both knew informed her eagerness to help me find myself as a writer). One gray day she seemed low — much later, I would learn that her father had just died — and I remarked on her mood, and we got to talking in a quieter vein than usual, and suddenly she told me how her parents had come to Cleveland from Poland after the Nazis wiped out most of her family, including her grandmother and her mother’s five siblings. The Holocaust was still alive for her, having loomed over her childhood as a recurrent summons to despair. I felt an awed pride that she was confiding these details to me, that being attentive really did elicit confession. And I felt guilt at having been so comparatively favored: fortune’s child.

  Recognizing this — recognizing she’d made a textbook error — Sylvia began our next session by apologizing. “I feel much closer to you because you trusted me,” I said. “How can that be bad?”

  “Trust me,” she said. “It can.” And then she told me that even when I was just lying there, listening, my vigilance was seductive. I took this as a great compliment. Later, I began to see it as a warning.

  FOLLOWING MOM everywhere as she renovated was Sam, her Tibetan spaniel. When she shopped for pile rugs or a bellows, he perched in the passenger seat of her Honda with an expectant look whose acuity was not increased by one of his eyes being brown and the other blue. I was jealous of Sam, of their mutual adoration: he barked rapturously whenever she returned. After he was hit by a car and clumped timidly around the house with a splint on his left hind leg, a one-dog conga line, Mom dropped everything to ply him with treats. Nothing knits a fracture like crème brûlée. In a profile of her in Swarthmore College’s magazine, in the late seventies, Mom had said, of our Newfoundland, “I always wanted to have a lion, and Molly is what I have instead. She has a small brain but a large heart, and gives us lots of love. She seems to be more expensive, more time-consuming, and to require more medical attention than any of the children, but I adore her because she is totally uncritical.” After Molly died, Day said, “I want to be your dog for a while.” “Oh, Dorie,” she said lightly. “Who would train you?”

  Molly would search your face with myopic benevolence, then lick it as much as she felt you needed. The Official Preppy Handbook observed that “massive size and saliva output make this breed almost uncontrollable and nearly impossible to keep indoors — no one outside the serious Prep Family even considers this dog for a pet.” Wasps prefer outdoor dogs, both as an emblem of our pastoral and sporting roots, and because they help us get muddy. They are transitional objects, allowing the otherwise unseemly romp and snuggle. Another, darker view of the preference for such dogs was expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in conversation with James Boswell:

  ROUSSEAU: Do you like cats?

  BOSWELL: No.

  ROUSSEAU: I was sure of that. It is my test of character. There you have the despotic instinct of men. They do not like cats because the cat is free, and will never consent to become a slave. He will do nothing to your order, as the other animals do.

  Like Mom herself, Sam was a cat in dog’s clothing. His wicker basket in the Villanova mudroom was a perfect replica of her Christmas bassinet for the Christ child, only at 100X. When Mom first showed Sam the new basket, thoughtfully positioned near his water and food bowls, he made two anxious circles inside it and then threw up. He preferred to sleep in my parents’ bedroom, because the eccentric heating system blew gusts of hot air toward their bed while leaving the upstairs rooms, where we slept, meat-locker cold. Sam would lie by the vent with his front paws formally arrayed, like the stone lions guarding the New York Public Library, the mistral fanning his fur. In the middle of the night he would bound onto my parents’ bed, wriggle over Mom’s back, and sleep cradled between them.

  Sam’s waywardness echoed Mom’s inability to follow her own dispositions. Though she had designed a phone-booth-size study for herself off the master bedroom, she preferred to answer mail and tackle problems from one of at least six other places in the house. Each of these areas overflowed with catalogues and Architectural Digests, from which she’d grab ideas for cabinets and cubbies, which were no sooner built than they, too, overflowed with catalogues and Architectural Digests. After she died, Timmie and Pier and I went through the epic scatter of her files, trying to decipher her system. Her system turned out to be stacking or bundling all the stray paper within reach on a given day. In her computer, I found a poem that she’d written recently on the sly, her first real poem in nearly fifty years, a time she described to friends as a prolonged writer’s block. It began, “My husband is watching me iron. / Steam reassures him. The hiss of starch / The probing slide around each button of his shirt / Speaks to him of Solway Street in Pittsburgh.” And among its lines were the following:

  My house specializes in these challenges.

  Bags of mail I did not ask to receive

  Choke the floor of the linen closet.

  A photograph of me, holding a baby on a beach.

  But which beach and, for that matter, which baby?

  A Japanese chest whose bottom drawer has irresponsibly locked itself,

  And who can remember where I put the key?

  WASPS SHOULD love therapy, as it stops you behaving in uncontrolled ways, and makes you responsible for your actions — that stock phrase of parental admonition. Yet many Wasps, my family being a partial exception, distrust the talking cure because it also reorients you from collective adherence to individual need, from loyalty to inquiry. Two months after beginning analysis, I had lunch with Day at a pasta place near my apartment. After we’d eaten our salads, I nervously launched into what had long been troubling me, saying that I thought our relationship could be more emotionally candid. I said that while love was all around in our family, he and I talked only about sports and books and money. I faltered and trailed off, having hoped to say something more, something like “The fact that love wasn’t voiced much was supposed to illustrate the richness of our attachments, but it seemed to just save everyone the risk of expression.” But first I needed to feel that he was with me so far.

  “I’m glad you’re getting a chance to work on some of these difficult matters with your doctor,” Day said. After he delivered a few observations on the benefits of self-examination, bright spots flushed his cheeks, and he said, “But I do love you.” He told me how when I was eighteen months old, he was babysitting me in my stroller outside — Babysitting? You can’t babysit your own child — and dribbling a stone between his feet, soccer player that he was, and he gave it a kick, and it skimmed off at an unexpected angle and just missed my head. “I was almost knocked down by the force of my love and mortification — what had I done?”

  You kicked a stone at my head? But I was touched that he was trying. A few days later, he wrote me:

  I hope the conversation was as useful to you as it was illuminating to me. I do not imagine you found much wisdom (unlike those coffeehouse conversationalists who enjoyed “dipping in the honey pot of Oliver Goldsmith’s mind”). Or that you uncovered illuminating secrets (as did the FBI, rummaging in Aldrich Ames’s trash bin to discover his true mentality). But I am ready for any such exercise any time that may serve your need, and the joy of family discourse.

  It was hard to tell whether he wanted to open up the discussion or close it down. Both, maybe.

  IN THE summer of 1995, my mother finally asked her father, then nearly ninety and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, why he’d kept leaving. She placed Grandpa John on her built-in sofa at the center of a house designed, in a sense, to facilitate his return: here was lovingly gathered all the best that she
and Grandma Tim had had to offer. She spoke in her determined way, with a premonitory toss of her head that indicated both her wish not to offend and her intention to carry on regardless. She began with the hurricane and worked up to the airport in Bangkok, the years of feeling that she was a disappointment. “Oh, Weenie,” he said at last. “I’m sorry I was such a skunk.”

  Two days later, still elated by the exchange, she discovered a lump in her left breast. On the operating table, she felt an entity beside her, a big dog she decided must be Molly. The mastectomy revealed that the cancer had metastasized into thirteen of her lymph nodes. She underwent radiation and chemotherapy and weathered it all very well, palliating her claustrophobia during her CAT scan by clutching Malta in her right hand. Then her oncologist recommended an experimental regimen of stem cell replacement and high-dose chemotherapy as a further firewall.

  When she checked into the hospital for it, I sent her a Care Bear with a gauze bandage attached to its paw and a card that said, “It’s going to be all right.” She sobbed when she opened it, and kept the bear with her in the hospital, and later on her desk at home. I liked being reassuring; it reassured me. But the high-dose chemo almost killed her. After years of freezing out her body’s needs, she suddenly found her body responding in kind. Three years later she recalled the experience to her fellow parishioners at the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church:

  You stop eating, you are nauseated, your bladder is unreliable, you have uncontrollable diarrhea, you develop terrific diaper rash, you vomit, you’re dizzy, you bleed from the sores in your mouth, which, for one week, are so bad you can’t speak — just make gurgling sounds — you have terrifying Dante-esque nightmares — and all of this goes on relentlessly, spiraling down for days and days and days…. Suddenly death, which had always been fearsome, seemed like a wonderful resource.

  When she came home, wretched and weak, my father unexpectedly arose from his books. He had been thriving as president of the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships Foundation, in Philadelphia, expanding its programs and increasing its endowment from zero to $24 million in just a dozen years, but now, at sixty-five, he stepped down to be with her.

  As they were brushing their teeth one night, Mom studied her bald head in the mirror and said, “I look like a Martian.”

  “A dramatically intelligent-looking Martian,” Day said. “Really you look more like an actor made up for Noh drama.”

  Mom gave a soft scream and shook her head in the Japanese tremolo. “Do you love me?” she asked.

  “Yes, I love you.”

  “Why?”

  “Only three reasons. Because you are courageous, tender, and amusing.”

  She thought it over. “That’s enough, I guess.”

  Later, she would paint a self-portrait of this new way of being, My Beasts and I: In Memory of My Father. Robed in red, she surrounded herself with Grandpa John’s tiger and other animals, like a priest in some ancient ceremony. Wiped clean of gaiety, her face looked scourged, gaunt, and wise. “It’s quite something,” I said when she showed it to me. “Very powerful.” I knew I sounded mealymouthed — she was obviously proud of the work — but the painting frightened me. I had longed for greater candor between us, but not this candor, not death as the mother of beauty.

  Later that spring, Grandpa John called to see how Mom was doing; they had grown much closer since she challenged him in Grandma Tim’s old manner. He asked Day, “How’s my bride doing?” — then caught himself, with a chuckle, and said, “I mean, How’s your bride doing?”

  Mom was doing increasingly well. For months there was napping, and constant nausea, and an auburn wig. And then, after a year, she was back. As a consequence of gazing into the abyss, perhaps, she had stopped feeling unappreciated, mostly, and she and Day had never been closer. Her hair came in short and sleek and gray, and she looked like a wise elf. Now that she’d ripened into a true grande dame, her crotchets were a vital constituent of her character. Proud of her hard-won victories, Mom would correct anyone who congratulated her on being in remission — a word that, to her, suggested that the cancer was merely in abeyance, tucked away. She was cured, and just the person she had hoped to be when, in 1955, she wrote a “Memo to Myself” on a sheet of blue stationery:

  Today, when I am twenty-one, just fresh from what will probably be the last of my formal education and full of misgivings about my future, wondering especially if I will ever fall in love with someone and marry him — today John Bishop [her boyfriend] said to me one of the nicest things that I have ever heard. In answer to my suggestion that I might, you know, be an old maid after all, he told me: “No, that couldn’t be, for I know that the older you become the more beautiful and the more charming you will be.” How good if that were true.

  IN 1997, I fell in love with Christine Wells, a book editor. Smart and precise and sensitive as a seismograph, she had a laugh that was all the more eruptive for being reluctant. She also had a fiancé, and I spent a long time lining up saucers of milk beneath her tree as she stared down at me, her eyes shining through the darkness. We had a wonderful five months, and I particularly remember how happily intent she was one afternoon when we went for a long bike ride on Long Island and stopped to pick blackberries, her face crimson with juice and exertion. Then, after we’d traveled in southern Portugal, she said she needed to be alone for a while. Well, it hadn’t always been wonderful: I had gone that summer to Mongolia and Los Angeles and Vermont in part to weather her storms of sorrow, hoping they’d blow over while I was gone, as if depression were a nor’easter. But it had always been promising, and breaking up didn’t seem to make either of us feel any better. I missed her smell, a distinctive combination of laundry bluing and anxiety.

  My father faxed me from Jakarta to say, “I think you are wise to use time as a resource for whatever it offers that you may wish to choose, including (1) repair toward commitment or (2) easing off to affectionate detachment; or (2) enabling (1) but not, obviously, (1) entropic to (2).” Then Christine wrote that she had “a few lovely pictures” from a weekend we’d spent with her parents, including “one where you’re poised on the cliff above the beach, looking out to a misty sea, Cortez-wise, and I’m laboring up the slope. Isn’t that funny.” We got back together, on and mostly off, for five more months. So (1) entropic to (2), if I understand what that means. She was different now, wary of me not on principle but from experience — a verdict that only made me redouble my foredoomed efforts to retrieve her. I seemed to have perfected, with Christine, my ability to inspire women to progress from writing long e-mails burgeoning with declarations to short e-mails as clenched as a thistle. Later, she wrote:

  You seemed quite sure (as I probably was as well; we were two prickly people cautiously attempting to disarm ourselves) that there was no such thing as a surfeit of affection and regard, that the supply was always going to be finite, and that any giving of it had to be counterbalanced quickly by a getting of it. This didn’t seem ungenerous to me, just exacting. But I noticed a real shift from when we went from being friends — and you were a kind and very generous friend — to being in love. Then things that might not seem to be about love and attachment itself — who paid what part of the check, who performed which errand, who went uptown and who went down — all began to symbolize who had been loved more, and this, for you, in a very concrete way. And I began to get the sense that an imbalance in these things would be killing.

  When I told Sylvia of Christine’s views, she said, “Yes, you seem all needy and sensitive and then, once you’ve lured them in, you get mean.” I scowled at her textbooks. “You’ve kept this analysis very clean, you know — you don’t talk dirty,” she continued, gathering speed as she ran for one of her trains of thought. “It’s why you were relieved to break up — you basically told her, ‘Go off and work on your mess.’ It’s all connected, don’t you see? — your fear of intimacy, of your own imagination, of mess, and of expressing emotion. This is very exciting!”

  “You’re ex
cited,” I said. “But you’re not the one who has to work on all these problems.”

  “But I am working on them,” she said gently. “I’m working on them with you.” I lay quiet, trembling. “Why is it so hard for you to acknowledge that you want me to love you?” Her perceptiveness, just then, made me hate her.

  When I came home that Thanksgiving, Mom asked me whether I had any romantic prospects. I said, “No,” in a leave-me-alone tone.

  “It’s possible,” she said carefully, “to look at my interest as an acknowledgment of having done damage in the intimacy area, and a wish to help.”

  “Well, I appreciate that, but I’m not sure you can at this point.”

  “It seems easier now to raise children, because they have those carriers where you go into a museum and the child goes with you,” she said, referring to BabyBjörns. “I can imagine, as a grandmother, wanting to take a child to a museum. But when I was a child that never happened, so I basically liked to spend time alone. At camp, when I was nine, I would go into the woods, scrape leaves from a rock, and commune with it — my only friend.” She pouted, jokingly.

  “I’m sorry for that, but didn’t that teach you what loneliness is like?”

  “Day and I tried very hard to pass on less loneliness than we got.”

  I could see that that was true, but said only, “That’s a worthy goal.”

  She frowned at the slight stress on goal but continued, “You were a very nice baby. Mrs. Krushke said you were one of the sweetest babies she’d ever seen.” Mrs. Krushke was my baby nurse. “But I wasn’t really sure I wanted this baby, and you were always spitting up and going through your whole wardrobe.” She sighed. “Well, it was my loss.”

  No. Mine.

  Then she touched on another mutual sore point. “I think it might just be too much therapy,” she said. “You can think about these things too much and be paralyzed.” This was an idée fixe of hers: everything would improve if I just stopped analysis. It was striking how much, in this, she resembled my insurance company. A few years later, she would meet Sylvia at a party in Georgica and, flustered, introduce herself by asking, “When will this wretched ordeal be over?” I stood between them, feeling a confused wish to let the moment play out but also to rescue Mom with a joke or two. She was at her worst with Sylvia, awkwardly changing the topic from analysis to real estate — Where is your house, exactly? — because she feared that she was being supplanted.