A Ship Made of Paper

doesn’t have to see it, all he looks out on are tree-lined streets, and pastel blue, pink, gray, and cream brick Federal town houses, with their tiny backyards and steep tiled roofs and the crooked old chimneys right out ofMary Poppins.

He’s taken the subway home, the most efficient way uptown after work.A taxi fromWall Street to Jane Street would take an hour, whereas the subway gets him there in ten minutes.And the cost is a token, not the fourteen to twenty dollars a crawling, ticking taxi would cost.Hampton is becoming more and more careful about spending money.This creeping fiscal conservatism has nothing to do with how much he’s making, be-cause he’s making more money than ever before, and it has nothing to do with rising expenses, because his expenses are stable.It just seems that the older he gets, the more watchful he becomes about his expenditures.

He is still a long way from the miserly habits ofhis grandfather—who, ac-cording to family lore, held on to a dollar until the eagle grinned—and he will always disapprove ofhow his haughty, judging, acid-tongued mother would say things like“That Negro spends money like a nigger.”But lately it seems to Hampton a breach oftaste to squander money.When shop-ping, he counts his change carefully, increasingly certain he is about to be cheated.On the train up to Leyden he looks with contempt at the pas-sengers who have paid nearly double to ride in that dopeyAmtrak Busi-ness Class.For what?A bottle ofSaratoga water and the mandarin delight ofsitting in a seat that is exactly like every other seat on the train, except that the upholstery is blue rather than red.Yet even carefully monitoring his own expenditures leaves Hampton unsoothed and insecure.He wor-ries over his investments, suffers the manic fluctuations ofthe NASDAQ, the slow attrition ofsome poorly chosen mutual funds.But even more than he worries about the stock market, Hampton worries about Iris’s management oftheir household accounts.In his view, she remains a child with money, without impulse control, with no sense ofsobriety, or plan-ning, or self- denial.Sometimes in the middle ofthe day, like one ofthose mothers you read about who are suddenly certain that their son has just fallen on some battlefield halfway around the world, Hampton will look up from his work and practicallyfeelIris making some ill-advised pur-chase, an antique rug, a digital camera that will never be used, a halfgal-lon oforganic milk at twice the price ofregular milk, a full tank of premium gasoline, even though he has told her over and over that a friend who covers petrochemicals has assured him that the so- called high-grade gas doesn’t extend the life ofyour car’s engine by so much as an hour, nor does it protect the environment.

He is sitting in the L-shaped dining room, with its narrow window looking out onto Hudson Street.Rain is falling in sheets, it’s loud enough to drown out the usual sound oftraffic, the taxis bumping over the cob-blestone street.He flips through today’s mail—statements from Smith Barney and Citibank, two phone bills, a Con Ed bill, requests to sub-scribe to magazines, buy golfclubs, upgrade home security, vacation in Portugal, switch credit cards, purchase vitamins, support the United Ne-gro College Fund, and, on the bottom ofthe pile, an actualletter,with his name and address written in ink.

Eagerly he opens the envelope.The letter is from his old friend Brenda Morrison, now Morrison-Rosemont, sent fromAtlanta, where she and her husband, Clarence, are doctors—he’s an allergist and Brenda’s a pedi-atrician.The letter is written on Brenda’s professional stationery, at the top ofwhich the first and last letters ofher name seem to be toppling over, held upright only through the efforts oftwo hardworking teddy bears.She has sent along a snapshot, and Hampton notes that Brenda’s weight gain continues unabated.She is now two hundred pounds, with two chins and working on a third.Hampton has known Brenda since they were children and she was a wild and bony thing, with scouring-pad hair and furious eyes, and enough ofa survival sense to work her way into theWelles family fabric, first as Hampton’s sister’s best friend, and then as a kind ofhon-oraryWelles—Hampton’s parents ended up sending Brenda to college.In the snapshot, she sits next to Clarence, with his prim little mustache, good-natured smile, his baby-blue turtleneck, and, on either side ofthem, golden retrievers, Martha andTiconderoga, mother and son.The Post-it on the back ofthe picture explains:Tiwas the runt of Martha’s litter and we just didn’t have the heart to give him away.But now he’s nearly eighteen months and he still acts like he’s a baby.Except he think’sI’mhis mommy.

Hampton finds himself staring at the note.He is stuck on the fact that she has spelled“thinks”with an apostrophe.A sharp twist ofracial impa-tience goes through him, about how his people have had three hundred years to learn the language and here they are still misspelling the easy words.Dear Hampton!

Hampton looks up from the letter.Why in the world would she put an exclamation point after his name?

How are you?You wanted us to send you some material pertaining to Clarence and my idea for a business— helping patients collect what is due to them from their insurance companies.Well, we’ve been hard at work on a prospectus, and ifI do say so myselfwhat we’ve come up with is pretty damn impressive! Unfortunately, the computer design company we entrusted with our work was in the process ofmoving.I’m sure you would have advised me against doing business with family, but Clarence’s nephew is really amazing with computers and graphics and that whole world I feel so uncomfortable with.Unfortunately, he’s pretty disorganized.I think he’sADD or something, he just races from one thing to the next.I guess a lot ofcreative types have that problem.All this is to say, our work got lost in the shuffle.Clarence’s nephew was really upset and we all spent a whole weekend looking everywhere for the stuff.It was really heartbreaking and quite a pain in the butt, and it’ll set us back a couple of weeks.In the meanwhile, I didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten about you or this project.We’d still love to get this thing up and running and you are still our favorite investment banker.(All right, you’re the ONLY investment banker we know, but even ifwe knew others you’d still be our favorite!)

Amateur hour.Does she really expect him to raise money for her little cottage industry? Hampton senses her nervousness coming right through her handwriting.Just as he could once detect the hesitations, the soul-stammers ofdesire back in the days ofcourting and conquering women, so now, too, in these moneyed days ofhis early middle age, can Hampton radar out the slightest tremor ofanxiety before someone de-livers a pitch.That this fumble for poise should come from Brenda is sad, in a way—she’s like family and she doesn’t even need the money.But it also gives him the grim, burnt comfort ofthriving in a world that is, for the most part, brutal and uninhabitable.He spends the best part of nearly every day surrounded by people who make money, only money, not houses, or soup, not steel, not songs, only money, and who quite openly will do anything for financial gain, anything legal, and a few things a little less than legal, too.But Hampton’s proximity to this school of sharks is more than physical, he has made analliancewith these squan-dered souls, these are his people, his teammates, and among them he feels the pride ofthe damned.His friends are the guys who will fly halfway around the world to convince someone to take a quarter ofa percent less on a deal.Everyone else is a civilian, all those fruits and dreamers who do not live and die by that ceaseless stream offractions and deals that is the secret life ofthe world, that reality inside reality, the molten core ofprofit and loss that burns at the center ofhistory and which everything else—temples, stadiums, concert halls,everything—has been built to hide.

Clarence and I hope to be up in NewYork for a Conference ofAfricanAmerican Physicians Meeting from December2–5.Clarence calls it the Funference ofAfrican-American Positions.We’d love it ifyou could join us for dinner or a show or anything on any ofthose days.Ifyou could talk Iris into coming into Manhattan then we could make it a foursome.I hope you can tear her away from her school work.Maybe she can give us that Harlem Renaissance tour she’s been promising.Is her thesis still on the Harlem Renaissance—or has she changed her mind?

Hampton stops reading.The rain continues to lash at the windows.

Thunder booms like an avalanche ofboulders.He knew Brenda couldn’t get through a letter without a dig at Iris.Brenda couldn’t possibly care what Iris is doing to fulfill the requirements ofher Ph.D.What’s Brenda, with her intellectual curiosity measuring something like2on the intel-lectual Richter scale, planning to do? Go to some college library and read Iris’s monograph?

Yet.His heart feels queer, as ifit is suddenly circulating blood that is a little oily and a little cold.Hampton is vulnerable to the suggestion that Iris might not be in possession ofa first-class mind.There is a vagueness to her, a lack ofprecision.Sometimes, he thinks this is a result ofher pro-foundly feminine nature, yet in his line ofwork he meets dozens of women whose minds are scientific, logical, calculating, aggressive.Iris’s is not.Both she and Hampton have been explaining her long career in graduate school to themselves and to the world at large as somehow a re-sult ofan excess ofintellectual curiosity, an unwillingness to be pigeon-holed, and the demands ofmotherhood, and Hampton is perfectly willing to stay within the confines ofthis official explanation.What he is not will-ing to say, except to himself, is that Iris is still in grad school, and no closer to the end than she had been last year, or the year before, or the year be-fore that, because she is simply too confused to complete her work;that, in other words, the machinery ofher mind is not quite up to the task.Did he consider her hisinferior?