About Alice (3 page)

V

To state the provisions of the Alice Tax simply, which is the only way Alice allows them to be stated, it calls for this: after a certain level of income, the government would simply take everything. When Alice says confiscatory, she means confiscatory.

—Too Soon to Tell

She didn't delude herself about the chances of the Alice Tax being passed, but she did believe that it would have been a good idea. She thought that, in a country where millions of children didn't have adequate food or access to a doctor, there should be a limit to how much people could keep for themselves—a generous limit, maybe, but still a limit. She believed in the principle of enoughness. The Alice Tax seemed to come up in conversation most often when we were with people whose incomes would probably have made them subject to its provisions. This did not surprise me. Alice had what I once described as an “instinctual attraction for avoided subjects”—a description I used in the context of a dinner we once had with a man described by the friends who brought him along as a “sugar baron.” Somehow, by the end of that meal, the connection between sugar and rotten teeth had come up in conversation three times. If we'd had the misfortune to live in a milieu that called on me to work my way up in a corporation and on Alice to be the supportive and diplomatic and perfectly behaved corporate wife, I sometimes told her, I would never have emerged from middle management.

Once, I gave a speech at the annual dinner the Yale Westchester Alumni Association puts on to raise money for the scholarships it provides for students from West-chester. The other speaker was the governor of New York, George Pataki, who had grown up, in modest circumstances, in Peekskill, on the northwestern edge of the county. Although Pataki doesn't have a reputation for eloquence, he gave an elegant and moving speech about his older brother being admitted to Yale and his father, who worked in the post office, driving after work to New Haven to confront the director of admissions on how a postal worker's son was expected to go to Yale without a scholarship. (The director of admissions picked up the phone and called someone in the Yale Westchester Alumni Association.) “That was one of the best speeches I've ever heard,” Alice told the governor, when he returned to our table and sat down. “Why in the world are you a Republican?”

She was direct. There were things she didn't like, and she was never shy about saying so. She didn't like clubs, or just about any institution that excluded anybody. She couldn't understand why anyone would accept an invitation to join a club, and the fact that there were people in New York who would actually go out of their way to get into a club just made her shake her head. Her attitude toward religion was somewhere between uninterested and hostile, except that she claimed to believe that you could hear what your children said about you at your funeral. She didn't like games—athletic games, board games, any games. In the spring of 2001, she had a bypass operation—the massive radiation she'd had twenty-five years before had eventually damaged her arteries and her heart—and afterward the surgeon asked me if she was someone for whom, say, tennis was important. When I mentioned that to Sarah—this was before I looked back and realized that this question was among the things he said that had begun to scare me—Sarah said, “I think you could honestly say that she's never played a game.”

That was almost true. A friend she was fond of sometimes ordered guests to divide into teams for charades, and Alice didn't refuse to play even if she did grumble a bit. All of Alice's rules were subject to occasional exceptions, usually dependent on how she felt about the person in question. Despite her normal antipathy to clubs, for instance, she always spoke highly (sometimes almost covetously) of Tiro e Segno, an Italian-American social club on MacDougal Street; we sometimes had lunch there with one of her favorites, Wally Popolizio, a lawyer who had become, in effect, our surrogate uncle while we were looking for a house in Greenwich Village in the late sixties. She considered my membership in a Yale senior society terminally silly—she would have expected me to renounce it, or at least make fun of it—but when the subject came up I always had the feeling that she was struggling to be merely sarcastic rather than completely contemptuous. People we had come to know because a goddaughter of mine married into their family have some involvement in the cigarette business, and Alice, who could be frank enough on that subject to provoke a shouting match at a dinner party, never mentioned it in their presence. I realized that, because I thought of my goddaughter as family, they'd been granted a sort of family easement.

Easements on the subject of cigarettes were not given casually. Alice hated cigarettes. Cigarette companies did not anger her as much as those who did the companies' marketing for them by giving young people—particularly young women—the notion that smoking was a hip way to defy those square goody-goodies sometimes referred to as the smoking police. Given three overwhelming facts that she was always ready to quote—that lung cancer kills more women than breast cancer and ovarian cancer combined, that almost ninety percent of lung-cancer cases are caused by smoking and are therefore avoidable, and that the number of young women who take up cigarettes was rising each year—Alice thought that anybody who made smoking seem appealing was doing something that bordered on the criminal.

In 1999, a piece in the
Times
Style section portrayed a Manhattan “cigarette lounge” as an attractive and sophisticated and even sweet-smelling sanctuary where smokers, safe from their hectoring families, could enjoy a quiet drink or hold a private party—including, one waitress was quoted as saying, a recent baby shower at which everybody smoked. Alice was enraged. In an article in
The Nation,
she wrote, “I have always been puzzled that anyone thinks women who smoke are cool, probably because my mother…was the least cool person I have ever known. I guess she thought she looked good when she started smoking as a teenager, but by the time I knew her she was pathetically addicted to cigarettes, always desperately trying to stop.” In the piece, Alice mentioned that she admired Julia Roberts for working as a volunteer counselor at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a camp in Connecticut for children with cancer and other serious illnesses—Alice was on the board, and we were volunteer counselors as well—but had to wonder “how many young women had started smoking because of how appealing Roberts made it look in
My Best Friend's Wedding
.”

Alice had never smoked, but her mother was a chain-smoker and her father smoked cigars constantly. She didn't claim to know if the clouds of smoke she had grown up in were responsible for her lung cancer, but she was certain that her parents, who were exceedingly protective, would never have raised her in a house full of smoke if they had understood the danger it presented. She had testified to that effect in the late eighties, when the city held hearings on whether to ban smoking in restaurants—a ban that passed and was eventually extended to bars. By that time, she had allied herself with a loose band of anti-smoking crusaders led by the late William Cahan, a renowned thoracic surgeon at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, who was even more dangerous at a dinner party than Alice was, since he had access to X-rays of lungs devastated by cigarette smoking. In the version of her testimony that ran as an op-ed piece in the
Times,
under the heading
FOR A SMOKING BAN IN NEW YORK CITY
, she said, “I ask the city to ban smoking in public places because I want to do for my children what my parents would have certainly done for me, had they known what we know today.” Actually, she hadn't left that completely up to the city. The girls were only four and seven when Alice was operated on, but when they got old enough to understand she sat them down and told them that, given her illness, we had to face up to the possibility that a genetic predisposition to lung cancer existed in our family. Everything else that could be a part of a teenager's life was discussable, she said, but cigarette smoking was out. She was at that moment at her bossiest, and both girls took her at her word.

VI

Alice's Law of Compensatory Cash Flow holds that any money not spent on a luxury you can't afford is the equivalent of windfall income.

—Words, No Music

It's true that she tended to be the instigator of our family's money-spending schemes, but most luxuries didn't interest her. She didn't want expensive jewelry. She never wore perfume, expensive or otherwise. She couldn't imagine anything dumber than spending a lot of money on a flashy car or boat. Although she sometimes talked about how it might be fun to go to a chic spa and she always said she didn't see anything wrong with cosmetic plastic surgery, she never got around to either one. When she finally decided to buy a fur coat—she insisted on buying that and all of those other fancy clothes with money she had earned—she said that she wanted it only because of how cold she got during a New York winter, although the girls and I teased her by suggesting other ways of staying warm. She liked to travel, and she loved beautiful clothes. She liked living in nice surroundings. Her phrase for the opposite was “living like a graduate student.”

Before we were married, she accepted the notion that she would have to make do with something like graduate-student possessions. “I had always assumed that writers were poor,” she wrote in the article about her parents, “which at the time was fine with me.” She was surprised that, through what she characterized in that article as “a complete lack of concern for possessions and a devotion to the clothes he had bought during his freshman year at college,” her future husband had accumulated enough money for a down payment on a brownstone in Greenwich Village. At least Alice saw it as a down payment on a brownstone. To me it was just accumulated money. In the late sixties, nearly everybody in Manhattan lived in rental units. Co-ops were associated with a small number of wealthy people on the Upper East Side. The real-estate dreams of people who did the sort of things we did for a living were filled with roomy rent-controlled apartments. But I hated the idea of leaving the Village, which didn't have many roomy apartments, and Alice had a strong desire to own a house—not necessarily a house with an elaborate swimming pool and a basement bowling alley, but a house.

The brownstone we finally bought was not a turn-key operation. We had to deal with two rent-controlled tenants, which took months. For a while, we had what amounted to squatters. (When I saw Wally Popolizio to the door after he'd gotten rid of the squatters, he said, “Bud, you can sleep with Alice without asking me. But anything else, give me a call.”) We had to do the sort of renovation that people in New York tend to describe as “the usual nightmare.” During the renovation, I wrote furiously to keep up with the contractor's bills—above my typewriter I kept a quote I attributed to Voltaire, “Words Is Money”—and Alice acted as what we called the project manager. Once, after a particularly nasty scene with the contractor, she was sitting alone at the window of what was to be our living room, trying to revive her spirits by gazing down at the courtyard that had attracted us to the house in the first place. A quiet carpenter named Frank, who was working across the room on a banister, came over and said, “You know, sooner or later, we're all going to leave, and this is going to be your house.” Then he went back to his banister. Alice often mentioned what Frank had told her. It was actually simple, she said: This was going to be our house. Our children, the first of whom we'd been hauling around to a series of borrowed apartments, would grow up here. It was all going to be worth it.

It has occurred to me—again, I've done no systematic study—that among married couples the person who actually makes out the mortgage check is likely to be more cautious about spending money than the person who doesn't. No matter where the money comes from, according to this untested theory, there is something sobering about sending away that much of it every month in the knowledge that, rain or shine, you'll have to come up with the same amount of money the next month and the month after that. I made out the mortgage check in our house, but there were a lot of other factors, some of which weren't obviously connected to luxuries or even finance, that affected the difference in the way Alice and I felt about spending money. I had been brought up in Kansas City by a thrifty grocer who was so wary of debt that, as far as I can tell, the house that my sister and I grew up in was not built until he could pay for it in cash. He would have been appalled at the idea of people who couldn't even afford a cleaning woman living in a huge house that had to be rented most summers to pay the taxes. In the article about her parents, Alice said that my cautiousness about money (she was kind enough not to say my petit-bourgeois cautiousness about money) made her feel safe—made her feel that she was not at risk of losing her house again, or having to rent it out to strangers. Still, she saw no reason to live like a graduate student if you didn't have to.

Studies are always showing that most marital disagreements are about money, but a lot of those disagreements about money are, of course, really about something else. In Tokyo once, Alice and I had a disagreement that seemed to be about how much we ought to be spending for a hotel room. I was on a U.S. Information Agency speaking tour of Japan, with a per-diem allowance—and not an amount that would have shocked the taxpayers. This was during a period when Japan was so expensive for people with dollars that one result of the trip was a column about how the main subject for discussion among Americans in Tokyo was how much a melon cost. I had inquired about the hotel recommended by the USIA people for Tokyo, where we were to spend the first few days of the tour, and it sounded fine. When we arrived, after a long flight, our room turned out to be spartan. Okay, very spartan. Well, all right: very spartan and small. Quite small. I started to unpack. This was a mistake. I felt a chill in the air. It lasted through breakfast the next morning. Finally, Alice said something like “You're just intending to live in that room for the next four days? That would be all right with you?” Her view was that my willingness to stay in such a room without comment was a rebuke to her. I was implying that she was some sort of privileged and spoiled New Yorker—more or less the person she looked like. As I remember, I had enough sense not to say that it's difficult to criticize someone without opening your mouth. Instead, I reminded her that I was an insensitive lout who wasn't terribly aware of his surroundings; in other words, I copped to a lesser included offense. Then we moved to a nicer hotel.

We once had a disagreement about how much to pay someone who was replacing the floors in our bedroom and in my office, the room next door. The contractor, whose name was something like Herbie, was a rather coarse but cheerful man, as I remember him, and I liked his approach to pricing a job: he looked over the area in question and then gave the customer a fixed price, not an estimate, of what the job would cost. When our job was in its final stages, Herbie told me that it had turned out to be more difficult than he'd predicted, so he thought we should pay him more than the agreed price. I didn't think so. Alice did. I told Alice that Herbie was in the business of judging what a job would cost him and then giving customers a price that was low enough to win the job but high enough to give him a profit. If he guessed wrong now and then—and I wasn't even taking it for granted that he was telling the truth about guessing wrong this time—he'd presumably make up for it by guessing right most of the time. If Herbie had found that putting in our floors required less time than he'd figured on, would he have suggested that we pay him less than the agreed price? In Alice's view, the point was that Herbie had, in fact, been required to spend more man-hours on the job than he'd estimated—she did assume he was telling the truth—so if we didn't pay him more we were being unfair, taking advantage of him. What he would do if the situation were reversed wasn't relevant to our behavior. I said the world didn't work that way. Her world did. I can't recall what we finally paid Herbie, but, now that I try to reconstruct the issues, it occurs to me that if we had retained some Talmudic scholars to mediate, they would have decided that Alice was right.

In the discussion about Herbie's pay, she didn't resort to her final argument in such situations: “He doesn't have a very nice life.” If I pointed out that some repair-man's bill was obviously inflated, for instance, or if I said that I would never again enter a store whose proprietor had in some way broken any clause of my father's unspoken but deeply etched Shopkeeper's Code of Conduct, she would often say, “He doesn't have a very nice life.” Sometimes she would add, “And we're so lucky.” I don't think the Talmudists would go for that as a way of deciding disputes. (“A farmer went to Rabbi Eliezer to complain that a merchant had sold him two milk cows that, as it turned out, did not give milk, and, after listening to the farmer, Rabbi Eliezer said of the merchant, ‘But he doesn't have a very nice life.'”) On the other hand, she was right about one thing: we were so lucky.