Page 46 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Part One

That winter, Frankie invited Wash to go to her father’s home in Vermont. Ellsworth
Cornwall was a professor of politics in Middlebury College and, like his daughter,
was an avid skier, and so they invited their visitor to go skiing with them. But Wash
would not be persuaded. “I was always worried about making the grade—and now
skiing! I was thinking what would happen if I broke a leg. My father had sent me to
the States to study, not to have fun.”

During that same visit, Wash volunteered to do the vacuuming—something that must
have been, to him, a novel and engrossing experience, because Frankie remembers
him “cheerfully maneuvering the Hoover vacuum around the living room furniture.
He was having a good time. Ed was startled by this picture. He quietly took me
aside to say that when Wash was at home he lived in a house with an abundance of
servants.”

Still, Frankie says, “Wash was always fun to be with. He was lively, cheerful, optimistic,
and extremely intelligent, an attribute he never used simply to impress people. He
was thoughtful and helpful and, as I discovered when I pressed him for some training
in accounting, he was patient. From Ed I learned something of his background—that
his father was an important banker in Manila, that he was a friend of Wellington
Koo. But Wash was secure about who he was and what he did and could do and
didn’t feel the need to broadcast his background.”

Frankie was the friend that Wash gifted with the duck from the client he audited. “I
bought a duck for her once from the place where I worked— a small duck. I carried
this duck on the subway, and the subway in those days was so crowded. I was worried
that when I arrived there it would be pressed duck. I didn’t know if the passengers
knew it was a duck.” Setting her PhD aspirations aside for the moment, Frankie
took and cooked the duck. “Duck was extraordinary fare for us, a great treat,” says
Frankie. “I hope I did it justice.”

One afternoon, Frankie took a walk with Wash, Ed, and another friend named Jan;
they had decided to take a spaghetti dinner at Caruso’s, an Italian restaurant on 42
nd
th
Street. The only problem was, they were on 116 Street—74 blocks away. But they
marched gamely downtown and got to the restaurant. There’s no record of how Wash
felt about that excursion—but Frankie remembers that he appeared the next day
wearing new golf shoes with one-inch-thick rubber soles, just in case.

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