When I described our family as Wasps in front of my mother, she corrected me, saying, “Your father’s Catholic.” (Of course, she didn’t mention the other reason he couldn’t be a Wasp.)
“He’s lapsed,” I said. “Anyway, we’re not Catholic.” Todd and I had no religion, having never been baptized.
“Doesn’t matter,” my mother said.
“But you’re a Wasp.”
“I’m Presbyterian and Norwegian. That’s different.”
“Close enough,” I said.
I wasn’t concerned with exact definitions—I could never even remember if the W of the acronym stood for white or wealthy.
Besides, my mother and my brother certainly looked Waspy: blond with strong jaws, high foreheads, and lips that disappeared when they smiled. (I have the same angular, thin-lipped features with my father’s darker coloring.) And my mother’s family had money—her maternal grandparents owned lumber mills in Minnesota—but an uncle secretly transferred the bulk of it into his name, robbing her of her inheritance. Even this story, with the ne’er-do-well relative, seemed classically Wasp to me.
If my family didn’t fit the bill genetically, we did by association. To my mind, where we lived, how we lived, and who we lived next to made us Wasps, which I understood to be a combination of habits, wealth, and taste rather than a matter of birthright, unless a person was Jewish, a practicing Catholic, or African American, in which case they couldn’t be a Wasp nor a member of certain local country clubs.
In the sixth grade, I received my first pair of white gloves, to wear to Miss Sadler’s ballroom dancing class, held once a week in the community room of the Pequot Library in Southport. We learned to waltz, fox trot, and cha-cha, steps that would be forgotten and have to be relearned five years later for the holiday cotillions and coming-out parties that populated our junior and senior years.
In the winter my schoolmates skied at Killington, Aspen, and the Bugaboos in Canada, which were accessed by helicopter; a class trip headed to the French Alps over Christmas break. In the summer my friends rode horses, played tennis, and learned to sail on Block Island, Cape Cod, or at one of the country clubs at home. My family spent July and August on Martha’s Vineyard, taking with us our two black Labrador retrievers (Smudge and Pepper), a friend each for Todd and me, and a babysitter, whom we referred to as the au pair.
Largely true to the Connecticut stereotype, the local mothers dressed sensibly in slacks and knee-length skirts, pumps by Pappagallo and tennis shoes. They cleaned their own houses, tended their own gardens, ran the dogs, darned the socks, cooked their husbands gourmet meals. They had their hair styled every six weeks. They kept their nails short and their lipstick bright. Their manner was cheery and charming or steely and polite. In their free time, they donated their considerable skills to beautifying the local private schools or raising money for the arts.
The fathers worked in Manhattan in law or investment firms, banks and insurance companies. They ran IBM and Stanley Tools. They took the 7:10 train in every morning and the 5:47 train home every night. They read the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and biographies of historical figures. They talked about the stock market, and they didn’t talk about money.
Some of them drank too much or pushed around their kids or had affairs. Some of their wives were cold or crazy or desperately sad. Occasionally a couple got divorced; more often they stayed together, for the sake of the children. These families weren’t exempt from tragedy: a classmate’s sister was killed in a car accident one year, and the following year two other classmates tried to kill themselves; one of them succeeded.
But there were many people who seemed happy, in their beautiful homes set on big tracts of land, among the family heirlooms, prized peonies, and boxwood hedges, with their attractive, athletic children, their purebred dogs, and German cars. Many of them couldn’t imagine a better or different life. Polo matches and pool parties, fox hunts and antique fairs—this was the way it had always been, the way it would always be.
I can’t remember when or why I first began to question how well my family fit into this world. Maybe it was the way we kept moving all the time. (My mother would tell people, in a sort of self-deprecating brag, that we’d moved six times in less than twenty years without ever changing our phone number.) Or how unmoored we were to the community. My parents kept mostly to themselves, importing their friends on the weekends from New York City, or disappearing up to Martha’s Vineyard for months at a time. What Connecticut people they did socialize with tended to be other writers or the (mostly) single women and gay men that my mom knew from her previous career as a modern dancer.
But the main difference between us and our neighbors was that everyone else seemed to have a lot more money. By working at the Times and writing various freelance articles, my father was able to cover the mortgage and most of the crucial bills, but his annual salary never made it to six figures and wasn’t nearly enough to afford our family’s lifestyle.
One night over dinner, my brother asked my dad if our family was middle class or upper middle class, a distinction that nobody makes anymore. Our family’s situation was confusing because, on the one hand, the succession of elegant houses in Connecticut, the vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard, and my dad’s pied-à-terre in New York made it seem as though we belonged in the upper reaches; but then, on the other hand, we rented out our home in Fairfield while we moved to the Vineyard for the summer, my mother cut coupons, we shopped mostly off the sale racks or at outlet stores, and, as a rule, we never ate out at restaurants.
And my parents worried about money constantly. Sometimes on the desk in my father’s study, I would spy pages from a yellow legal pad filled with columns of numbers, labeled “mortgage,” “taxes,” “electric,” “tuition,” added up over and over as if they could be made to total a different sum. My parents had managed—through luck and good timing—to continually trade up in real estate as they bought and sold their various homes, but they ended up house-poor in the process. One year there was talk of a lien being placed on our home, which filled the air with such tension that I began to imagine a physical force actually leaning against our walls and nearly toppling them.
Every fall my parents scrambled to come up with my brother’s and my school tuition. At the start of my junior year at Greens Farms, my mother met with my headmaster to inquire if, given that I’d ranked among the top students in my class the previous year, I might qualify for a scholarship. The headmaster explained that financial aid was reserved for those with financial need. Was he mistaken or didn’t we own two homes and three cars? That’s right, my mother told him, and that’s why we don’t have any cash for the tuition.
The disparity between how my family lived and how much money we had was a constant source of unease and uncertainty. I was never sure if my parents were exaggerating our money problems or if we were simply living beyond our means. The moments they chose to splurge or the reason behind a sudden switch from feast to famine always felt arbitrary and slightly unfair. Nevertheless, I did my own share of keeping up appearances. Over one spring break, as my classmates headed off to various islands and mountain ranges, I lay in our backyard in my bikini. For nine days straight, I shivered in the cool mid-April air so that when school resumed, I’d fit in among the newly bronzed student body.
Of course not everyone I knew was rich. (My perspective didn’t extend enough beyond our zip code to consider that our family was far richer than most everyone else in the country and the world.) There were kids at Greens Farms who were raised by a single working parent, and others whose families made great sacrifices to afford the steep tuition. But they didn’t seem like they were trying to pretend they were rich people, as we were.
When you have class, you don’t need money, my mother would say in response to the question of our family’s standing. By class she meant good taste—which she had in abundance, as evidenced by the people who flocked to our home during the annual house tour to benefit
the Young Women’s League—and polished manners, which my parents tried to instill in Todd and me, mostly during dinner (served always in the dining room), making it near impossible to complete a story without some interruption. Raise the food to your mouth, don’t lower your face to your plate like a beggar. Don’t stab at your meat like that; it’s already dead. “May you,” not “can you” have some more.
How can we be upper class? I’m just a newspaperman, was my father’s ironic reply, which summed up the truth of my family’s place in society. My dad may not have earned as much as our neighbors, but his job as a widely read critic made up for it in clout. And cachet was almost as good as cash when it came to buying certain things: like admission to the Pequot Yacht Club or my acceptance to my prep school, although I’d applied after the deadline. A series of phone calls to the right people, along with a signed copy of one of my father’s books, usually did the trick.
My parents’ bohemian, artistic edge also made them “cool.” People, even my friends, wanted to be around them. When I was young, they threw dance parties instead of cocktail parties. They would roll up the rug in the living room and play Patti LaBelle’s “Lady Marmalade” on the record player, the Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing,” and anything by James Brown. When I was sixteen, they started taking my brother and me along when they went out dancing at the Seaview Lounge on Martha’s Vineyard. Todd, who had just turned eighteen, could get in legally, since those were the days before the drinking age was raised, but I had to be sneaked past the bouncer by my father, who’d pretend to be my date. “She’s with me,” he’d say, jerking his head in my direction, and I would saunter by in my best cool-girl impersonation.
The house band, Kitch ’n Sync, played covers from War, the Commodores, and Santana. My mother, with her Martha Graham dance training, favored abstract gestures and contractions. My dad, who grew up on jazz and Afro-Cuban music, asserted his rhythmic sophistication by dancing off the beat, either double time or half. With one leg in front of the other, he’d switch his weight forward and back and twitch his hips in a funked-up salsa. He’d tweak his pant leg, kick his foot out Michael Jackson–style, and spin around, caressing an invisible partner. Nearby, my parents’ friends stomped, shuffled, and swung to the music. One of the women might venture over to my father, where she’d try to match his prowess, spicing up her steps with some sexy moves.
The tempo would increase, and someone would start spinning. Arms flailed, heads snapped, and long hair waved back and forth overhead. One friend, Morgan, would drop to the floor, lie on his back, and wiggle his arms and legs in the air—he called this “doing the lobster”—which was the signal for the band and the dancers to kick it up a notch, and for the owner, Loretta (who was said to have been a cigarette girl at New York’s Savoy Hotel in the 1950s), to bang a baseball bat on the wooden bar and yell, “Turn it down!” But the band would loudly jam on to the finish, sweating, hunched over their instruments, to the last harmonized chords, strummed again, and once more, and once more. Then everyone poured onto a side porch and pressed cold beers to necks and foreheads, sipped ice waters and fanned themselves, or stepped away a few paces to smoke a quick joint before the last set.
I would take my own turn across from my dad, trying to mimic his complicated rhythms, abandoning myself to the funk in the sea of familiar faces, welcoming the break from the constant self-consciousness of being sixteen. When I caught the rhythm, when it was moving through me so that my steps came without thought or effort, my father would smile and nod. And when I added an extra bit of shine, he would clap and call out, “Do it, Bliss,” making me dance harder, and when I finished, with a dip, a stomp, or a pose right on cue with the end of the song, he’d yell, “¡Fenómeno!” like the dancers did at the nightclubs in Spanish Harlem he used to frequent.
On those nights I felt distinctly like a Broyard in a way that expanded the identification beyond my happening to carry this particular last name. The Broyards were graceful, cool, and confident on the dance floor; sensual, witty, social, earthy, and fun; a center of attention while at the same time remaining one step removed. Mostly it was my father who was all of these things, but nevertheless on that wooden floor I formed a sense of our collective identity—complete with my mother’s abstractions and my brother’s reluctance to be out rock dancing with his parents and their friends. At the end of the night, the four of us rode home in the car, the island dark and shadowy with twisted scrub oaks and low pine trees on either side, the high beams cutting a misty path in the fog before us, my mother driving, tapping her thumbs on the wheel to a melody still echoing in her head, my father quiet except for a comment about the band being really on tonight, didn’t we think so?, and Todd and me in the backseat, leaning into our separate corners but not yet fully retreated into our secret teenage worlds, the spell of our coming together lasting until we reached the house, the barking dogs, the question of who would walk them, and our respective beds.
On nights like these, I reveled in the ways that my parents were different. None of my friends back in Connecticut went out dancing with their folks. By the end of high school, I came to think of my family as our own special breed of Wasp—elegant but eclectic, cultured and cultural, upstanding and up with the times. We were well-bred bohemians, an identity, once I thought about it, that suited me just fine.
Therefore it didn’t matter that I wasn’t invited senior year by the local cotillion committee to be a debutante along with some of the girls from my crowd. My mother claimed that she and my father could fix it for me to be included if that’s what I wanted, but then she told me about the time she was hired to teach the debutantes to waltz, and how at the balls, they spent the entire evening in the bathroom where they smoked cigarettes and complained about the snugness of their dresses. Neither did it hurt me that I also wasn’t invited to some of the holiday balls where my schoolmates slow danced with the boarding-school boys home on Christmas break from Choate, Taft, and St. Paul’s. These blue-blood traditions were outdated and corny. In the end, it was my mother and I who rejected them.
It didn’t matter, finally, because my father was famous, at least among the people I knew, not only for being a public intellectual with a regular byline in the paper of record but for being successful at life. At parties at our house, I’d watch the way he moved through people, laying his hand on a shoulder, firmly gripping someone’s arm, and how they turned to him, their faces lit and expectant, as if he held a fistful of fairy dust over their heads, and he’d offer a word or two, nothing much, but with a subtext that declared, Aren’t we fantastic, you and me? Isn’t this world great? And because he was smart and observant, they believed him, and they answered back with a line that was extra funny and sharp, and he’d laugh and move on, and they’d turn around again and dig their heels a little deeper into themselves and think, yes, life is all right. It sure is.
That was my dad, at least the way I saw him. And this man loved me with the conviction of someone who, after being often disappointed by love, had finally found one that lived up to its billing. Loving your kids can be sweet and easy.
When I was growing up, my father and his success were my ace in the hole, my divining rod, my saving grace. If I ever wondered about my place in the world, I’d always have that on everybody else.
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In order to be hired by Scudder, Stevens & Clark, the mutual funds company where I was working when my father died, I had to take a personality test. I didn’t particularly want to work answering shareholders’ letters, but I’d just moved to Cambridge and was living with my mom and dad until I found a job and could afford my own apartment. The only way I knew of getting a job was to appeal to my parents’ circle of friends. Someone knew a director at the mutual funds company; he was a Saltonstall, from one of Boston’s oldest and most prominent families. This friend called up the director, and then, after a five-minute chat with me in his office high above Boston Harbor, the director called down to human resources and told them, i
n so many words, to hire me. The personality test was a formality, given that I came so highly recommended, or rather that I had been recommended by someone so highly placed in the firm.
I stayed at this company for five years, moving up through the ranks until I eventually had my own (much smaller) office overlooking Boston Harbor. Each time I applied for a new position, I had to take the personality test again. It involved picking from a list of adjectives those that you thought other people would use to describe you, and then picking from the same list the words that you would use to describe yourself. According to your selections and the discrepancies between the two lists, you were fit into a personality model—leader, team player, rule breaker, and so on. Normally your results were not revealed to you, and I never gave the whole business much thought.
When I met with the human resources administrator after taking the personality test for a third time, she told me that I had gotten the job despite my results—my new boss was willing to overlook them. She went on to explain that, in fact, each time I’d taken the test, the results had raised a red flag, so much so that if I had walked in off the street, the company never would have hired me in the first place.
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