![]() ![]() I’d always thought my children would live nearby, just down the road, and would be over all the time. ![]() “We have this beautiful lawn here, perfect for two soccer teams of grandchildren,” she said. Friend’s mother says to him, as she approaches the end of her life, I began building the internal Wasp rheostat, the dimmer switch on desires.ĭimming the light of desire leads to a family distance sorrowful for all. ![]() He understands this early on.įeeling that I had failed to delight her, I turned into a wary, watchful child. Friend’s mother, as mothers will, had her own unsatisfied needs, leaving her unable to bring heart and soul to child-rearing. Friend’s personal history is much more direct, and, while less entertaining in the US Weekly manner, both more moving and more universal. Which Timmy are we talking about? Is Jess male or female? And which wife of which husband is leaving whom for whom? Friend’s family history is one of painful complexity, language fraught with anxiety and hanging clauses of regret, along with a family tree that makes it quite simply difficult to figure who is who much of the time. Friend himself attended Harvard, where he was elected to the Harvard Lampoon and the Signet Society.īut our overarching impression of Mr. Wasp tableware is anything that abhors the dishwasher: gold-rimmed chargers, etched-crystal wineglasses, pedestaled fruit plates, egg spoons of translucent horn.Īll this because, in the turn of the century, “…the Friends made enough from steel, coal, and banking to become – briefly – smashingly rich chauffeur rich, yacht rich, $350,000,000-in-today’s-money rich.” Mr. When you hail from families that have lived for generations in houses with dumbwaiters and coal scuttles, your birthright includes a staggering heritage of bric-a-brac that has no bearing on modern life – the junk DNA that gets handed down along the the useful genes. Images of gray shingled houses against a vivid, blue, privileged sky. …in the Georgica Association, an enclave of two dozen houses on the western shore of Georgica Pond that faces houses owned by Steven Spielberg, Martha Stewart, and Calvin Klein on the eastern. Friend’s family owns Century House on the South Fork of Long Island, Juicy tidbits of privilege and accomplishment abound. I could proceed as a Robinson like Grandma Tim’s family (loquacious, madcap, sometimes unhinged) a Pierson like Grandpa John’s family (bristling with brains) a Holton like Grandma Jess’s family (restless, haughty show ponies) or a Friend like Grandpa Ted’s family (moneyed, clubbable, and timid). (By the way, as is common with WASPs, the Tims and Timmies are girls.) Friend says of his family tree, Tad is short for Theodore, as is Ted, as is Dorie, Mr. The second story is the Dickensian history of many people named Tim. ![]() Latte, from a popular New York Times series where his wife, Amanda Hesser, memorialized their courtship. One, time-honored, about a boy whose parents don’t show him much outright love, who spends his time looking for that love with girls of various sorts, and finds a happy ending, finally, in marrying. His memoir, Cheerful Money, chronicles his life, and the story of his WASP family. Tad Friend, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has decided to say something. Scorcese’s Age of Innocence makes an entire movie out of failure to speak. Richard Ford and John Updike have written novels characterized by trailing, wistful manliness. So how can we know what WASPs were if no one says much of anything? “Were” is the operative word. And if you are of the group, well then, indeed. It’s hard to write about a group that has a horror of talking too much. It’s hard to make entertainment out of a group that doesn’t believe in displays of wealth, accomplishment, or emotion. WASPs, however, have not yet had their brief moment in the blazing sun of the 21st century’s popular culture. Americans do that to all sorts of cultural species. The species has been simultaneously stereotyped, ridiculed, and envied, for one reason or another. The question is, while we might feel a prurient curiosity about privilege, do we have any real interest in the WASP story? WASPs were, after all, the source of our first big wave of wealth. The WASP, or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, has a place in America’s mythology. Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor But with Wasps, the caretakers lock the explanatory sorrows away, then swallow the key. Life is a scavenger hunt run backward as well as forward, a race to comprehend. ![]()
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