46 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022
asked to see layouts for the piece, pho-
tos of Mom and me when I was young.
Examining them, he exclaimed, “How
can you look at these photos and not
know that your mother loved you?” I
was stunned. I knew that she loved me,
and I was sure that the piece made that
clear. I bit my tongue, and Timmie de-
fused the tension.
Three years later, I published “Cheer-
ful Money,” a book about growing up
as a Wasp that had been inspired by
that piece. Day had written his family
history after conducting archival re-
search and reading the relevant socio-
cultural experts; I wrote mine after grow-
ing up in my family. To limit the fallout,
I asked him to read my book before-
hand. He wrote to say that my portraits
of his parents, Ted and Jess, were too
cutting: “I feel that you write with a di-
amond stylus on crystal self-prepared,
and believe that your reviews will say
such in many positive ways. But gems
are cold objects. May it not be possible
to write, in future, in a way felt to be
more loving and forgiving? That may
actually ensure that the writing will be
more enduring.”
Steeling myself, I called to talk through
his concerns. He declined, saying, “Now
you must do what you think best.” I of-
fered to send him the next draft for fur-
ther thoughts. “No, thank you.”
I said, “Maybe you’re not just con-
cerned about Grandpa Ted and Grandma
Jess but about how our relationship
comes across.”
“That would be the standard Freud-
ian couch vector,” he replied. I didn’t
wave the receiver at my crotch, but I
was tempted.
Several of Mom and Day’s friends be-
lieved that the book was too hard on
them, and sent me notes of reproof on
creamy stationery. One wrote to Day, “I
thought that Tad is a very self-absorbed
young man who extrapolated large themes
from his own limited life experiences.” (I
was forty-seven.) Day replied that his
friend’s critique “allows for any deficien-
cies of view on Tad’s part, from which we
pray he may emerge in due time of growth.
Growing up includes, I think, forgiving
parents for their insuperable deficiencies,
as part of learning how limited oneself
may be, and will inevitably be.”
His response now seems to me both
forbearing and wise. Yet he was stung.
In his journal, he jotted, “On Reading
a Family Memoir by My Firstborn Son”:
a frosty, crusty one
now that you may see yourself
as your eldest child sees you—
a distant, heavy pedagogue
from the ex-planet Pluto—
how shall you try to be,
how indeed?I
n my fifties, I, too, started working
intently at my squash game, trying
to vanquish middle age and middle tal-
ent. While doing physical therapy for
the resulting frozen shoulder, I glimpsed
my face in the mirror and my whole
body stiffened. My bleached wince was
exactly Day’s in a painting Mom made
of him after he had prostate surgery,
when he was fifty-seven: stripped and
scoured, ashen in his flannel bathrobe.
The painting revealed what Day sought
to keep hidden, and what I had inher-
ited, to my dismay—a hatred of indig-
nity. And my increasingly noisy sneezes! I
thought. Day’s echoed like rifle fire in
a box canyon. And my sweet tooth! When
Addison and her twin brother, Walker,
saw me angling toward the cookie jar,
they’d cry, “Daddy, no!”
Addison showed evidence of a dif-
ferent inheritance, an aptitude for ver-
bal compression. At eight, she wrote a
poem for my birthday:
The great apple
Tree shakes as
The wind blows
And fallen wishes
Are taken into
The wild and
Lovely worldAt breakfast a few months later, she
told me, “Daddy, I think I want to be
a poet!”
“That’s great, sweetie!” I said. “You
have a gift for putting your feelings into
words.” Behind her, my wife, Amanda,
was vigorously shaking her head. “Of
course,” I went on, “you also have to fig-
ure out a way to support yourself. A poet
named Robert Graves once observed,
‘There’s no money in poetry.’ ” Bending
close, I whispered, “He added, ‘But then
there’s no poetry in money, either.’”
When Addison brooded about her
friends—their fickleness, their indiffer-
ence to deep feeling—or exploded about
their shabby behavior, I told her that
having a poet’s sensibility is a blessing
and a curse. Because she feels more,she’ll be sad or angry more, especially
in middle school, the Mariana Trench
of human shittiness. But being able to
express those feelings ringingly will be
a great consolation. She absorbed this
in silence, gazing past me toward her
cloudy future self.P
rovoked by “Cheerful Money,” Day
began working on a memoir. He told
me it would be a personal book, just for
the family. Every few months, he made
a fresh start, only to repeat the same vi-
gnettes, the same strong early music. His
father telling him that his mother had
been “laid, relaid, and parlayed by every
man in Western Pennsylvania.” “Stars
Fell on Alabama” playing in the restau-
rant of his and Mom’s honeymoon hotel.
A four-man pissing contest, during a
college summer spent laying track on the
Alaska Railroad, in which, he noted
mournfully, he came in last.
He didn’t send me this material, but
in 2017 he began mailing me poems,
late offerings. “Reckonings on Reach-
ing Age Eighty-six” begins:I am sorry about the novels I have not
written—
Fifteen of them perhaps—
And sorry about the women I have not
kissed—
fewer than fifteen, using a standard of mu-
tual attraction and accessibility
I am sorrier about the novels: only I could
have brought
them to lifeI called Day to say that I liked being
privy to his inmost thoughts, but he
stopped mailing them. Fatigue had over-
taken even regret.
Still, as the slabs of his personality
shifted, in a late tectonics, you could
glimpse the boy he might have become
if he’d ever been encouraged. One night
at dinner, he joked that he’d spent the
day kayaking and baking cupcakes, two
activities he’d have hated even in his
prime. Chortling, he favored us with a
rare open grin.
Wanting more of this, I began read-
ing through his letters again. In 1985, Day
wrote me about visiting a close friend,
the poet David Posner, who was dying
of AIDS. Posner had been everywhere
and known everyone; he’d told my fa-
ther that both Thomas Mann and Som-
erset Maugham had been in love with
him in his youth. Now he could no lon-