Many people, I’m fairly sure, engage in this reduction– once the sum of the faults becomes heavy enough to outweigh the endearing qualities.    When the balance falls to mostly aggravating, or destructive, our tolerance for the peccadilloes, which may have once even seemed mildly amusing, will disappear.  

When our tolerance goes, the view of their better nature tends to also disappear.  It’s common sense to avoid people who become hostile where they were once sympathetic.  At the same time, it seems wrong to reduce a person’s complex humanity to the sum of their faults, even as this reduction sometimes can’t be helped.  

A funny friend, who also has a sadistic side, one day laughs too loudly when your child falls comically and lands breaking an arm.  It doesn’t have to wipe away all the good qualities of that friend, but it can.  That ill-timed donkey bray, which the friend can’t stop even when the kid is writhing in unmistakable agony, becomes a last straw if enough other straws have already accumulated.  Hard after that to see that funny friend the same way.  Especially once you add in the reflexive sarcasm, the times you loaned them favorite books and tools that went missing, the time they forgot a solemn promise, leaving you in the snow, with wet socks and a dead cell phone, to trudge a long, icy way back to civilization to figure out plan B.

It is tempting to reduce people to caricatures sometimes.  The media does this constantly in their maniacal sorting of winners and losers.  The world is so complicated, so fast, so relentless, that the islands of calm understanding that we hope our friends to be are very vulnerable places.  A good friend’s faults we can most often overlook.  An asshole’s faults are impossible to ignore or tolerate. Reason and understanding only take us so far, then the real action starts.  Emotions come into play, and, as my friend’s father, Ralph, used to say “let the games begin!”

My father was famous for cutting off long time friends.  “The fall from grace,” my mother used to say, probably quoting some famous source only she and Google now know, “is swift and absolute.” (see FN, at foot)  She said this in reference to people we were delighted to spend time with, close, dear friends of my father’s, of the family, who were often at the house, laughing, and who fell, in a lightning flash, into the darkness of silent oblivion.

I used to try to argue my father out of some of these death sentences, although, as an adult I wouldn’t reverse any of the several I’ve found it necessary to hand down.  My father insisted that I didn’t understand (I actually didn’t at the time) and he was always angry when I tried to play peacemaker.  

He explained to me once, through clenched teeth, that Harold had put a price of $75 on their friendship.   He gave me the details of this last straw, which certainly would have weighed little without the many precursor straws piled on over the years of their witty, fraught, slightly competitive friendship.  

Shame played into this estrangement too, as I suspect it often does.  My grandmother moved and, in getting rid of things she couldn’t bring with her, sold her Chinese style furniture, lamps and little tables and cabinets, to Harold, who admired the things.  He bought the lot for $75.  Then he had buyer’s remorse, told my father the stuff wasn’t worth $75, wanted his money back, would return the things.  

My father told him that Yetta, the beloved mother-in-law he always called “Mom” (or “Grandma” to my sister and me), had already moved to Florida and she wasn’t going to take back the Chinese junk.  There was no place for her to take it back to, anyway, even if she wanted to.  Harold, apparently, would not relent. After an increasingly bitter argument my father paid him back the $75, put the Chinese stuff in the attic (this would prove a fatal mistake) and probably told Harold not to hurt himself when he shoved the bills up his ass.  

I agreed this was fucked up and petty behavior on Harold’s part, but hardly grounds for his beheading.  Then my father gave me the punchline that had sealed cheapskate Harold’s fate, caused him to lop Harold’s head off with no apparent emotion. 

“Grandma went up to the attic for something and came down with this weird look on her face.  She asked me why the things Harold bought from her were in the attic.  He said he loved them, my beautiful things, what are they doing covered with dust in your attic, Irv?  I didn’t know what to tell her, and you should have seen the look of hurt on her face.  I made up some feeble story she didn’t believe, about Harold having his floors done, asking me to store it, trying to put a good face on it, somehow.”  This was the emotional blow that put the final seal on my father’s newly found hatred of Harold.

 “It wasn’t hatred, you still don’t seem to get it.  I didn’t hate any of them.  I was just done with them, as they were with me.  The friendship was already dead, I was carrying a cadaver of a friendship and the thing was starting to decompose.  I got tired of the stink of it, and then there were the vultures overhead, swooping, beady eyed and very determined.  You know what a vulture’s beak can do to a man’s shoulder?” asked the skeleton under the hill in Westchester.  

I’ve since come to understand all of this all too well.  Friendships seem to have life spans, periods where the mutual benefits make everything cool.  Real friends for life are very, very rare.  If you have even one or two, count yourself very lucky and take care to give the friendship water and light.  I understand how a series of sympathies withheld erode a friendship until there is nothing left but the formalities of wrapping the stinking thing up and tossing it.

Still, there are a couple of scenes from my father reducing people to the sum of their faults, something he often tried to do with me over the years, that haunt me. I am thinking of one with a couple, the parents of my best friend in elementary school, that culminated in a scene so cinematic it is almost biblical.  

Not only was this couple the parents of my best friend at eight, nine and ten years old, they became very close friends of my parents.  The families spent a lot of time together, knew each other very well.  We spent a lot of time at each other’s houses.  In some families we would have called each other’s parents “aunt” and “uncle”.  My parents were very good friends with my friend’s parents.  I won’t stop to paint the detailed portrait of that friendship, but it was deep and mutual.  They remained friends for decades, even as my childhood friend and I went our own ways for ten years or so, met and renewed our friendship during the college years.

Fast forward now over the decades.  The mother, a very active and dynamic woman who often told her long-suffering, droll husband to stand up straight (this tic, and the husband’s perfect facial response each time, delighted my father, who often barked out the line to us after a visit) was constantly in motion, visiting the sick, tutoring, counseling, offering her warm presence wherever needed.  My sister and I loved her.  

My mother had a major operation and was laid up in nearby Long Island Jewish hospital for a week or so.  My father was peeved that their friend apparently hadn’t found time to visit my mother.  I think that was the start of the end of things. Then, while my mother convalesced at home, five blocks from the home of this couple, the friend apparently hadn’t found time to stop by and see how my mother was doing.  I can’t confirm these details, but that was my father’s perception.  I don’t recall my mother contradicting it, though she was much more philosophical and didn’t seem to hold any kind of ill feelings about it.

“I was at the restaurant all day, your mother was alone.  You mean to tell me she couldn’t have stopped by with a bowl of soup, she couldn’t check in on her way home from any of her hundred missions of mercy to see how your mother was doing?  It made all her running around to heal everybody strike me as complete bullshit, she lived five blocks away and couldn’t find a few minutes, even once, to see how her old friend was doing?”  I had no answer, and it was a rhetorical question anyway.  

My friend got married and lived near where we all grew up.  His parents had retired to North Carolina.  My parents had become “snow birds” (a phrase hard for me not to reflexively translate to ‘shit birds’ somehow) commuting between Florida and New York to have the best weather of both worlds.  His parents had long rented the house my friend had grown up in.  My parents owned and hadn’t yet sold my ancestral home.  It was natural, since the house was empty all winter, for their friends to stay there on visits to their son and daughter-in-law, and soon, their first grandson.  They stayed in the otherwise empty house a few times.  

My father, down in Florida, began to chafe each time they spent a few days there. I’m not sure exactly what this was about, but I know he felt used, and manipulated into agreeing to let them stay.  My mother asked him what the big deal was, pointed out how convenient it was for their old friends, how little a thing it was for him.  Truly, I never saw what the big deal was either.  I don’t know what, if anything, brought it to a head, but I got a call from my father one night, when their old friends were at the house, asking me to drive over and tell them the free ride was over, get the keys back from them.

I’d drive over periodically to check in on the house during the winter, make sure the boiler had water in it, the pipes were OK.  It was not a tremendous inconvenience to drive out there, but I truly didn’t get the urgency to evict them on this particular wintry night.  I argued.  My father argued.  “Is it my house?” he asked me, and the rest followed from that.   I gave up the argument and drove out to the house.

It was well after dark when I arrived.  Caroline (the reader will note that I’ve hesitated to use her actual name so far) came to the door and put a brave face on it.  My father had already called.  I was sheepish as I told her, and Ralph, another adult I thought of as my friend, that I honestly didn’t understand what this was about.

“No, no,” said Caroline, “I get it completely.  Look, it’s his house and he doesn’t want us staying here anymore.  It’s not hard to understand. He’s right, it’s his house, and, I mean, I wouldn’t do this to my good friends, but he has every right to do whatever he wants with his house.  There’s nothing to understand.”  

Ralph was carrying their bags out to the car, I followed him out.  Snow was beginning to swirl in the air, it was already sticking to the dead grass and the cars. I urged them to at least stay the night, there was absolutely no reason to drive off into a snow storm.  It couldn’t possibly make any difference if they spent the night, headed off the next day.   My father was being a punitively judgmental asshole, the timing was arbitrary, unreasonable.  There was no reason for them to drive off into the teeth of a snow storm.

Caroline shook her head there in the driveway, as the snow fell. “No, your father is right, we really are bad people.  You know, he feels we’ve been using him, and I understand that.  He feels like he has no say, and he’s been uncomfortable the whole time, and I’ve kind of steamrolled him into this, because it’s so convenient for us… and, of course, we’d do it for our friends, you know, we’d let our friends stay, the house is empty anyway, nobody’s using it, we’re not harming it in any way, but that’s his prerogative, none of us has a right to judge him for exercising it…”  

In my dramatic memory she is crying as she delivers these lines, though I know she wasn’t, she was putting on her usual brave face.  Ralph, standing now on the passenger side of the car, was silent as Caroline protested about what bad people they were, what a righteous, if slightly misguided, man my father was.  

My entreaties were in vain, I hugged them both, took the keys, Caroline slid into the driver’s seat and I watched them drive off down 190th Street as the gathering snow continued to swirl.

(FN)  Google gives us this paraphrase, supposedly from a 1995 poem– probably not the source of my mother’s comment, which she made as early as 1968:  The fall from grace is steep and swift, and when you land, it does not make a sound, because you are alone. ”