Cheerful Money

by Tad Friend

  “I stopped my analysis last month, actually,” I said. He brightened, so I hastened to add, “But just because I had reached a natural stopping place. I’m not trying to push you away by clarifying that, just trying to tell you what’s on my mind.” He nodded and clasped his hands around one knee. So I went on, jumping some barrier at last. “Okay, it’s not about therapy, and whether I shouldn’t be in it or you should. You should do whatever makes you happy, and there’s no reason it has to be what makes me happy. And it’s not about the article. I guess we’ll agree to disagree about that. But what it is about is our relationship. Why won’t you talk about that, and about your feelings?”

  “I will try harder,” he said. He took a deep breath and sat for a while, thinking. “I suppose that in response to watching my father suffer so many defeats and humiliations, I overcompensated and became very well defended.”

  My mouth seemed to know what to say: “I’m sure that had a purpose, and has served you well in the past, but it doesn’t serve you now with your children. You’ve always been very articulate — ”

  “Not always,” he said softly.

  “Well, since I’ve known you, which is a long time. And I’m pretty articulate myself; I learned that from you. But I can imagine a whole different sort of conversation, where I came in here and we talked honestly, without being so carefully fluent, and you told me that you were angry with me — ”

  “It’s hard to imagine being angry with you — ”

  “Well, you are now. This is what it feels like. And I have been angry, at times, with you. And it would be better if we could just say so, instead of having it all leak out in disguise, which just leaves both of us grumpy, and distant, and exactly where we started.”

  He seemed to shrink into his chair. And then, with a visible effort, he shook himself forward again. “I appreciate your attacking me in such a sportsmanlike manner,” he said. “And I do love you.”

  “And I love you, too,” I said, feeling both the truth of it and my reluctance to say it, just then, the words feeling rote and niggardly.

  “Yes,” he said. He stood heavily, in one boot, and we hugged. His beard rasped my cheek, and he didn’t seem to want to let go. At last he stepped back and gripped my upper arms. “I tried to get her out of that hurricane,” he said. “But I never could.”

  ______

  IN THE new year, Day had Mom’s contractor begin building two bedrooms over the garage, to accommodate the late boom in grandchildren — Timmie was pregnant, a year and a half after her liver transplant — and solidify Villanova as the family’s winter gathering place. He pulled the Rouault mother and child out of storage and hung it above the spiral staircase to the new bedrooms. And he and I talked often about the family, relaxed chats at the butcher-block dining table.

  The seams were being sewed together again, and last Christmas, when Walker and Addie were finally old enough to run around the house on their own, they loved the place. Walker was particularly drawn to the playhouse, and would squirm backward into the hidey-hole beneath the drawing table, pull a pillow half over his head, and announce, “I playing hide-in-seeks!” Amanda had told Addie who Foffie was, and now Addie would occasionally say, “I see Foffie,” in a different tone than the one she used when pointing to a newspaper mug shot and saying, “That’s Uncle Pier!” — one of her favorite jokes. She was fascinated by Mom’s last painting, My Beasts and I, and would scramble up the stairs to study the work, in the hall outside our bedroom, in silence.

  The morning of our Christmas celebration, I woke Addie to get her dressed for “Hayfoot, Strawfoot.” She rose anxiously from sleep. “Where’s Foffie?” she asked. “Foffie’s not here?”

  Tears sprang to my eyes, and I had to collect myself before I could say, “She’s outside,” meaning in the hall.

  “Foffie’s taking a nap outside?” Addie and Walker saw life as binary: you were awake, and then someone made you take a nap.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Foffie’s saying bye-bye?” she asked.

  “In a way.”

  “Foffie’s in the painting,” she cried. “Foffie’s home.”

  IN LATE summer, Day suggested we plan a visit to Pittsburgh, an idea I loved. It would be my first visit since the Ice Cream Spoon controversy, and our first trip together since we visited the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown when I was ten. One Friday in December, I took the train down from New York and Day came aboard in Philadelphia for the haul to Pittsburgh. When we arrived, we checked into the Duquesne Club, which Big Jim Friend and Dorie Friend Sr. once frequented. It’s now a stately pile where gilt-framed portraits of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick overlook acres of empty function rooms. We were the guests of Henry Phipps Hoffstot Jr., a lawyer at the city’s renowned Reed Smith firm and the grandson of Frank Hoffstot, Big Jim’s partner. Henry and Day had become friends at Eugenia’s parties after Grandpa Ted died — Henry a rare kindly face in her aspic milieu.

  In the morning, my father called Allegheny Cemetery and arranged for them to open James Wood Friend’s mausoleum so we could visit the following morning. And then Henry picked us up for a day’s sightseeing. “This is our new car,” he said, as we settled into the red-plaid interior of his 1979 Jeep Cherokee. He also had a 1952 Bentley and a 1931 Pierce-Arrow, his father’s car, which he kept tuned by driving it five hundred miles a year. Henry himself, at ninety, was like his cars: so well maintained he appeared no more than seventy. Soft-voiced, anticipating and accommodating our every wish, he appeared supremely comfortable in a tattersall shirt, a green crewneck sweater with brown elbow patches, and a herringbone jacket from London that must have been forty years old.

  I had on a wool hat and gloves and a heavy overcoat, but I was still shivering as we stood with Henry on a promontory above the city; it was one of those brilliant winter days when the cold bores into your bones. Henry, wearing no hat, gloves, or overcoat, pointed out landmarks with custodial pride, including the former riverside locale of our ancestors’ foundry, Clinton Iron and Steel. “The steel flowed through a channel in the floor of the Clinton furnace like a river of milk,” he said, “and the sky was always black with smoke and soot.” “Hell with the lid taken off” is how journalist James Parton described the city in 1868; a half century later, H. L. Mencken wrote, “Here was the very heart of industrial America, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth — and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke.”

  Henry took us next to the Phipps Conservatory, a vast greenhouse and gardens built in 1893. His great-aunt had been married to Henry Phipps, the steel and real-estate tycoon who endowed the place, and Henry himself had served as the conservatory’s president. All that airy transparency enclosing orchids and fan palms must have seemed miraculously weird as it rose from the ambient grime. Henry observed, “The mayor of Pittsburgh said, ‘We need a hospital more.’ And Phipps told him, ‘No, the city needs a conservatory.’ ” Jews build hospitals, I thought, and Wasps conserve. The word “conservatory” chimes in our guilty souls.

  On the long drive to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Day asked about the 1909 McKees Rocks strike, and our ancestors’ method of squashing it. “I never heard my grandfather mention it,” Henry said. “He was rarely chatty. And, of course,” he added with a small smile, “it was not reported in the main Pittsburgh papers of the time.”

  After a tour of Wright’s masterpiece, we drove to Pike Run Country Club, in rural Jones Mills. Day hadn’t been back since he proposed to Mom here in 1959. “Our family would stay at Pike Run every weekend from May to August,” he said, as we walked onto the nine-hole golf course, deserted now, in the off-season. Henry had his hands clasped behind his back, the image of perambulation. We stood near the tee box of the fifth hole, a short downhill par-four whose green was surrounded by oaks. There was a snap in the air from distant leaf fires, and the flat cast of
the setting sun lit up the oak tops like torches. “I scored the only eagle of my life here,” Day said. “Two miracle shots, driving the green and sinking a thirty-foot putt.”

  “And isn’t this where you proposed?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “here” — he turned to the green just behind us. “We stayed in Wood’s End” — he pointed to a squat cottage nearby — “an ugly clunk of a house then and it still is. Elizabeth and I went for a walk in the fading sunlight, and I just blurted it out.” After Grandma Tim’s funeral, Mom had told us all about it: how, just when her mother was beginning to say, “I’m not sure I want that young man in my house anymore,” Day brought her onto the golf course and said, “After you’re finished with Dr. Higgins” — her analyst — “will you marry me?”

  We walked inside the low fieldstone clubhouse: hunting prints, chintz, floral wallpaper, and a card table. “Essential to the culture,” my father said, scrutinizing the table as if it were an arquebus in a museum. Above the bar was a caricature from 1949 of Ellis Burrows, the African American bartender, dispensing fifths of gin and scotch to sozzled-looking members. “Ellis used to rescue those who had been a little too free with the bottle,” Henry said. “He carried certain members to bed night after night.”

  Day responded with one of his most characteristic expressions — a complexly humorous shrug. Then he drew my attention to a photograph of the interior of the old clubhouse, which had burned down in 1947. It showed a spacious great room bordered by a second-floor balcony. “Joan Fisher, who was always doing things like that, was challenged to jump off the balcony,” he said. “Everyone laid pillows on the floor to cushion her landing, but, unsurprisingly, she — ”

  “Broke her back,” Henry said mournfully.

  “No, only sprained an ankle,” Day said, smiling at Henry.

  We visited Henry’s son, Henry Phipps Hoffstot III, known as Phipps, and his wife, Darlyn, on their nearby estate, which featured horses, cattle, and a squash court. The Hoffstots had evidently managed their finances well, while we had spent our capital, one way and another. As soon as I stepped inside the house, I knew what it would be like, because the smell — dogs and fires and soup — was exactly Maplewood’s. It was just as I’d imagined, only better maintained: a hard-used mudroom, a crooked stairwell, sloping floors beneath low ceilings, a fire blazing out of a stone hearth. Soon we were sipping Earl Grey on a chintz sofa with Phipps, who was looking gray after recent knee surgery for a squash injury, and Darlyn, in a down vest and a blue turtleneck, who was eager for news of New York. They could have been Grandma Tim and John McDill a half century ago.

  “Poor Phipps is not flourishing,” Henry said after we were back in the car and heading, in twilight, through meadows owned by the Mellon family. Soon we were on Route 30, drawing nearer to Pittsburgh amid shopping malls studded with Arby’s and Steak ’n Shakes. “I wonder who goes to those things,” Henry said. “They’re always full.”

  “Americans are buying things all the time,” Day said.

  They shared an elegiac silence as we drove through Squirrel Hill to the block the Friend compound once occupied. “Now, slow down, please, Henry!” my father said, once we came to the Tree of Life, the synagogue that now bestrode much of the property. My father began describing everything as it was — the three houses, the lawns and the boundary of poplars and the large garage where chauffeurs buffed the family’s Pierce-Arrows; and how Didi’s ear trumpet never worked, so everyone used signals to bid at bridge: spades was a shoveling gesture, and hearts was touching your heart. “It was wonderful territory for a little boy,” he said. “My great-grandfather thought dynastically, God bless him, imagining his family living there forever. It lasted fifty years.”

  We cruised down Solway Street, where a dozen small houses now sat near the former main entrance. “Here’s the driveway gate!” Day cried. Two mighty brick pillars stood by the curb, bracketing an asphalt drive that now ran only twenty yards before it dived into a sunken garage. Rearing from the frozen ground, the pillars were like the femurs of a brontosaurus. We looked at them in silence awhile, and at last drove on.

  Henry had organized a dinner for us at his house on Fifth Avenue, and as a treat for my father had asked the daughter of the Pike Run bartender Ellis Burrows to cook. Day recalled her helping out at parties, long ago. When we arrived at Henry’s house, a neoclassical beauty, Day went to the bathroom and I wandered about admiring the parquet floors. When I came into the kitchen, Gretchen Burrows, a slight woman in a white work shirt, started up from the stove with a smile. “I remember you, Mr. Friend!” she said. “You haven’t changed a bit!”

  SUNDAY MORNING, we put on suits and check out of the Duquesne Club, then wait for Henry in the club’s front room, where a small toy train circles a plastic Christmas tree on a platform covered with green felt. Someone, feeling that the tableau was too schematic, has surrounded it with an abundance of red poinsettias. “It’s exactly the way it was at our Christmas Eve party in my youth,” Day says. “Except that we had steel tracks instead of plastic, and my parents and their friends would build a whole village, with trucks and houses and villagers, after Charlie and I had gone to bed.”

  As a cold rain falls, we walk with Henry to his church. Shadyside Presbyterian, a massive granite muffin around the corner from Henry’s house, was Grandpa Ted’s church, too, if you believe his obituary. Henry says proudly that Shadyside features perhaps the best singing and preaching in the country. The pews are two-thirds full, a mix of well-dressed older Wasps and younger people like the mother and daughter in front of me, who wear stretch pants and have matching tattoos. Bemused to find myself in church for the first time in years, I listen carefully to the fine sermon about why we, all of us, find ourselves here, on this first Sunday of Advent. The explanation, the minister suggests, is that none of us have life figured out yet, nor can we, because God’s purposes are beyond our anticipation. God is not finished with us yet.

  Afterward, I hasten back to Henry’s house to meet the cab we called earlier; the driver, a bear of a man in a Pittsburgh Steelers fleece, smokes a cigarette as I sit in the back watching the windows bead up with rain, heavier now and turning to sleet. Day and Henry come along a few minutes later, sharing Henry’s tartan golf umbrella. Something about the two men picking their way together through the puddles in Henry’s gravel drive, each with a hand on the umbrella handle, touches me. They seem still to be observing the proprieties of their departure from Shadyside, the long recessional. There is a round of handshakes and warm well wishes, and as we pull away for Allegheny Cemetery, I turn and give Henry a final wave, and he smiles.

  The cemetery, rolling lawns outlined by spreading maples, would be beautiful much of the year. But the trees are gaunt and wet now, and the weather and absence of visitors give the old Wasp graveyard the aspect of a potter’s field. Shoulders hunched against the sleet, Day and I stork-walk from the cab across the grass to James Wood Friend’s granite Greek temple, a crust of ice crunching underfoot. Despite the cemetery’s promises, the tarnished brass doors are shut tight. We peer through the tiny window into the nearly black interior, making out a damp floor of polished granite and the dim outlines of sarcophagi: James and his wife, Martha; his four children and their three spouses; Eugenia and Ted (and my stowaway Roberto Clemente and Danny Murtaugh); and Uncle Charles. The number of us eager to lie among that company has tapered, and the one empty crypt may never be filled.

  Our cabbie tools us around in search of an attendant, and finally, in a small office just inside the Temple of Memories, we find a friendly woman named Sandy. She has twin pearl earrings stapled into the helix of her left ear and sits huddled between twin space heaters. Day settles into the chair opposite her desk and explains the situation, beginning with his phone call the day before, as she takes notes. “My son would like to see his ancestors,” he concludes gently, “so we certainly hope you can help us, Sandy.”

  She calls the main office and makes a sympatheti
c moue when she gets the answering machine. “This is Sandy,” she begins. “I have James Wood Friend here, and he needs to get into his mausoleum.” Day and I exchange an amused look. Hanging up, she says, “Of course, no one’s ever there on Sunday. But you can always open a family mausoleum with your family key; did you try that?”

  “What key?” Day says.

  “You have a key and we have a key. That way it’s fail-safe.”

  “I’ve never had a key,” he says in consternation. “No one, to my knowledge, has that key.”

  It suddenly seems fitting that the key has been lost. It is like the task set in a childhood fable: he that opens the tomb shall have all the treasure that waits within. Only I have no magic staff or singing bird to show me where the key lies. “That’s okay,” I say. “We’ll see it another time.” Day will be flying back later, but my train for New York — the only train of the day — leaves in twenty-two minutes. Our cabbie lead-foots it to Union Station, and I jump out and grab my suitcase. Day opens his arms, and we hug. And then I run for my train, turning at the door for one last sweeping wave.

  As the locomotive labors to take me from the city, snow begins whirling down, beating at the bleared windows of the old steel carriage. I find myself thinking about those brick pillars on Solway Street, and how, soon, no one alive will know why they’re there. Events escape us at light speed.

  Eleven hours later, I am back in Brooklyn, turning my key in the lock. Stepping into a pitch-black apartment, I slip off my muddy shoes and stand a moment in the hall. No one stirs. There is only the tick of the radiators, marking time. But I am comforted knowing that, all around me in the darkness, my family sleeps.

  A jaunty James Wood Friend aboard his yacht, the Rebemar, c. 1900.