The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  Eight months later, the letter writer was dead.

  “Following a brief illness,” the Philadelphia Bulletin reported, citing friends of the family. Edgar Thomson Scott had died of pneumonia, the story went, having worked himself into a state of exhaustion. “Unceasing work, with insufficient sleep during nights passed in damp, unhealthy billets combined to cause a severe strain, under which his health finally broke down, and which ultimately caused his death,” read a florid report published by Harvard after the war. “. . . Edgar Scott gave his life for his country, and we who are his classmates and who knew him are glad that he found such a happy fulfilment of his life; and we shall ever be proud of the example that he left behind him of patriotic service and unswerving devotion to duty.”

  In the clubhouses to which upper-crusters still flock to this day, the name of Edgar T. Scott took its place in gold on plaques memorializing the clubmen killed in the Great War. As the years passed, his children rarely spoke of his death. His grandchildren grew up taking it for granted that their grandfather had been a hero. When I asked the youngest what he’d been told of the circumstances of his grandfather’s death, he said, “Just that it was unclear, that it was in the trenches and it was pretty awful and nobody was quite sure exactly what he died of.” My grandfather, who in his determination to return to France in 1917 had swept his father along with him, never spoke to his own sons about the circumstances of their grandfather’s death. It fell to Helen Hope, never one to mothball a good story, to unceremoniously spill the beans.

  My uncle, the third Edgar, was old enough to have a driver’s license at the time—a fact that places this memory of his during World War II. He was at the wheel of a car, driving his mother home from Philadelphia, when the conversation turned to his paternal grandfather.

  “He died in the war. He was a hero,” Ed would remember remarking matter-of-factly to his mother.

  “Nonsense,” she scoffed, of the father-in-law she’d never met.

  Then she let fly the long-obscured truth.

  “He shot himself,” she said.

  Chapter Four

  The swimming pool lay in a clearing a quarter mile from the big house. You reached it through a padlocked gate in a high, chain-link fence at the bottom of a steep hill. The mossy paving-stone path wound through a wood to a small bridge over a creek, then climbed toward the light. The pool was long and deep and the bleached blue of a beach towel after many summers’ use. Tall trees hemmed in the glade, littering the surface of the water with leaves. A buffer of ferns grew between the shallow end and the encroaching forest; a terrace extended along one side. If you lay on your back on the heavy wooden bench on the terrace, the patch of sky above, framed by treetops, mirrored the pool’s mattress shape. But because sunlight only briefly struck the pool head-on, the water temperature rarely broke sixty-three degrees. We called it the cold pool—not a pejorative, a term of respect. The cold pool wasn’t one of those oversized bathtubs where other people poached until their fingertips wrinkled. This pool flash-froze your nether parts.

  My father, in navy swimming trunks, would balance on the slippery lip of the deep end where water lapped out of the pool into a spillway and ran downhill to the creek. He’d sway in the August heat, sweat trickling down his hairless chest. From a pocket in his bathing suit, he’d remove rubber earplugs and fit them into his ears; he’d swum in frigid Maine water as a boy, and had paid for it, he said, with some fraction of his hearing. Arms outstretched, he’d dive noiselessly, cleaving the water. He’d emerge one-third of the way down the pool, and press on in a methodical front crawl. Hopie, Elliot, and I preferred to fling ourselves out over the deep, limbs rigid, slamming into the surface. In the churn, we’d bob up, gasp histrionically, bolt for the side. Once, when I was small, I flipped upside down in the cold pool in an inflatable ring, like a capsized sailboat—mast underwater, centerboard in the air. My grandfather, standing nearby, fished me out by the ankles. I like to imagine that I remember that moment, though maybe all I remember is the story. A swim at the cold pool wasn’t just a substitute for air-conditioning. It was a test of mettle—preparation, I now think, for the future, including a leap, decades later, into the sea off Greenland, in a bathing suit, just to say I had.

  My grandparents were regulars at the cold pool. Sometimes, after my parents had wrangled us into the wayback and driven up the long driveway toward the big house, after we’d turned onto the farm road that descended steeply between pasture and wood, and after we’d left the paved road to rumble across grass toward the gate to the pool, we’d catch sight of one of my grandparents’ cars, parked under an elm beside the post-and-rail fence. They drove Humbers—the car favored by Viscount Montgomery of Alamein in the African campaign. Their cars smelled like leather; their red seats were crazed, like the glaze on old ceramics, by wear and tear. If there was a Humber parked under the tree, my father would slam our car doors, clear his throat, bark orders, rattle the gate in the chain-link fence. Our grandparents, we came to understand, liked to swim naked. Years later, I learned, too, that they’d found a use for the big wooden bench other than keeping towels off the ground.

  Helen Hope and Edgar, it was often observed, had a rare sort of marriage. They were one of those couples off whom stories fly like sparks from a fast-moving train. Which of those stories were entirely true, I’m still not sure. They were true enough. In one, my grandmother happens upon her darling in bed with another woman. Instead of taking some more pedestrian course of action, she wedges herself between them, inquiring, “You don’t mind if I sleep here, do you?” I’ve heard it reported that she turned up at a costume party wearing a rooster on her head. She’s said to have entertained dinner guests by wriggling into an antique metal chastity belt—a gift from a congenial friend, repurposed by my grandmother as a cachepot. They made an eye-catching pair, my grandparents did, down to Helen Hope’s black-and-white calfskin coat by Pauline Trigère. (“It’s pure Holstein. I’m afraid I’ve been unfaithful to Ayrshires.”) In a picture taken before a trans-Atlantic crossing in 1938, they stand side by side, camera-ready, at the gangway to the Île de France. He’s in a dark overcoat and a fedora. She’s in a fur-trimmed coat, openwork heels, and a broad-brimmed hat that could well be a Stetson. They look like some Hollywood couple—maybe William Powell and Myrna Loy. If they ever got seriously bored with each other, my guess is few people knew. “To quote Winston Churchill,” my grandfather liked to say, “‘My most brilliant achievement was my ability to persuade my wife to marry me.’”

  Their union was legendary. After seven decades together, they still talked about how crazy they were about each other. But it wasn’t easy, as a grandchild, to see the inner workings. Once, scanning a bookshelf in their bedroom, I stumbled upon a lead. I took down a small, slim volume with a cartoon in the style of The New Yorker of the 1950s on its tattered cover. A perky-looking housewife, high heels cast aside, feet on a footstool, was sitting at a desk, poring over a ribbon of tape. At first glance, it seemed she was sewing. But, upon closer examination, the tape turned out to be spilling from a ticker tape machine: The lady, phone at her elbow, was studying stock prices. The book was How to Lay a Nest Egg: Financial Facts of Life for the Average Girl, a humorous introduction to investing, by Edgar Scott, published in 1950. The back cover carried testimonials from improbable authorities whose names I vaguely recognized as belonging to my grandparents’ friends—Helen Hayes, Katharine Cornell, Anita Loos. Inside, my grandfather had inscribed the copy to my grandmother, “a friend of the author.” An engraved calling card dropped out. “Darlingest Bee,” he’d written. “One inscription is not enough for You, who are my inspiration in this as in everything else.”

  If I want to fathom my father, surely I need a better handle on them.

  Their house on Ardrossan was unlike the mammoth houses in which they’d each grown up. It nestled in the folds of the surrounding landscape, instead of eyeing it from above. The rooms were m
odestly sized and intimate, though the living-room fireplace was wide enough to accommodate dozens of Christmas cards on a string pulled taut between the two ends. A painted wooden carousel horse stood in a bay window, a potted plant on its saddle. Along with the paintings by Degas, Manet, Renoir, Boudin, Cassatt, Corot, and Toulouse-Lautrec, most of which my grandfather had inherited, there was an Al Hirschfeld caricature of Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story; pewter tankards from a visit to Damascus; a spinning wheel said to hail from some ancestor’s 1772 trousseau; framed cartoons by Charles Addams; and dozens of editions of books by John O’Hara, the novelist and short-story writer, remembered these days for having limned the finest of social distinctions once discernible only to members of a now vanished upper class. My grandfather had met O’Hara at Philip Barry’s house in Easthampton in the 1930s and had become a collector of his books—an avocation in which O’Hara assisted by annotating my grandfather’s copies, and insinuating into manuscripts occasional inside jokes like “a three-gaited bay mare owned by some people called Scott.”

  In The Big Laugh, a book Fran Lebowitz once called the greatest Hollywood novel ever written, O’Hara slipped the lesser-known Scotts into a roll call of (real-life) luminaries invited to a (fictional) actress’s imaginary closing-night party—“which was attended by her friends the Lunts, Woollcott, Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic, Noel Coward, Beatrice Lillie, Alice Duer Miller, Philip Barry, Ina Claire, Jack Gilbert, Marc Connelly, Deems Taylor, the Damrosches, Jascha Heifetz, Condé Nast, Carmel Snow, William Lyon Phelps, Charles Hanson Towne, Walter Prichard Eaton, Sidney Howard, Elisabeth Marbury, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Neysa McMein and John Baragwanath, and the Edgar Scotts from Philadelphia.”

  O’Hara, not above making a joke of his famously thin skin, told my grandfather, “Now, Edgar, you have to tell me all about that party because, of course, they would never ask me.”

  In an era before Rolodexes and Google Contacts, my grandparents had a staggering abundance and variety of friends. There was Henry McIlhenny, the Philadelphia curator and collector whom Andy Warhol is said to have called “the only person in Philadelphia with glamour.” There was Anita Loos and Tallulah Bankhead and Claudette Colbert. There was the British First Sea Lord, Sir Caspar John. There were horse people, cow people, burghers of the Main Line, and successive generations of men who ran Angelo D’Amicantonio & Son, the shoe repair place on Lancaster Pike. Walter Annenberg, the press baron and philanthropist, was the source of the chastity-belt cachepot. Once, when I was backpacking around Europe, my grandparents invited my boyfriend and me to lunch in Venice, where we found them hanging out with Jack Profumo, the disgraced British cabinet minister who’d been forced to resign a decade earlier over an affair with an aspiring model with ties to a Soviet naval attaché. In a pile of condolence letters sent to the family after my grandmother’s death, I came upon one from the Ayrshire Society of Stavropol, Russia. The undersigned remembered fondly how the mistress of the Ardrossan herd had once kissed him and told him he was a very unusual man.

  The stories my grandparents told teemed with names I should have known and sometimes didn’t—names like Josephine Baker, the Stork Club, the Duke of Windsor. (My grandmother had persuaded him to stand on his head, it was said, so she could find out what he wore under his kilt.) “I was stuck with Winston Churchill one Christmas on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht,” was the sort of thing she sometimes said (and once did). “I didn’t know what to say. I asked him about the weather and he just grunted. As they handed him a double martini, I said, ‘Sir, I heard it was a very windy crossing at Gibraltar. Were you seasick?’” She had a rollicking narrative style not unlike the voice in Eloise at the Plaza: People in her stories were always throwing a fit, falling right down with apoplexy, going mad. A flight attendant was “a buxom stewardess with a hangover, who looks like a sow”; a man with designs on her was “so tight he could barely dance.” In the service of a laugh, she had few qualms about making herself look preposterous: “He asked me did I know Goya,” she once said, recalling her first encounter with the portrait painter Augustus John. “I was so shy. I said, ‘Yes, I often see him at parties.’ I thought Goya was a gigolo!”

  At its inception, my grandparents’ union looked to some like an unlikely coupling. At Harvard my grandfather Edgar had been a student of the nineteenth-century French comedy of manners and had translated a period play into English verse for its first American production. His circle of acquaintance included young writers and playwrights like the Algonquin Round Table regular Robert E. Sherwood. One of his former girlfriends was Helen Hayes (who my grandmother liked occasionally to suggest was the real love of his life). My grandmother Helen Hope was the product of a less cosmopolitan, somewhat more provincial upbringing. After an initial encounter, my mother’s Boston Brahmin father pronounced her “ravishingly beautiful and spoiled rotten.” Her future husband once wrote to her, “I realize what an overwhelming responsibility you’re going to be—if, every minute you’re alone, men dash up and converse with you! (It’s nice, though—and, in a funny way, makes me proud.)” In an unsigned list of their respective personality traits, preserved in a scrapbook, I find my grandfather characterized, in his midtwenties, as sensitive, adaptable, altruistic, even-tempered if moody. His young wife is gay and hospitable but also hot-tempered, competitive, intuitive, tenacious, with an appetite for power. When Maisie Sturgis Scott learned that Helen Hope Montgomery had taken Maisie’s eldest son out for a ride, she deduced that he had to be in love. If he weren’t, she told his sisters, he’d never have been caught dead on a horse.

  “According to Mom,” one of their nephews told me, “everybody gave that marriage six months.”

  But my grandparents were magnetized by a ferocious mutual attraction. As a child, I couldn’t have appreciated the high-voltage current that leaped between them; but, long after their deaths, I witnessed its traces, still sparking on the page. My grandmother saved the vast majority of the written communication that passed between them—hundreds of love letters, sonnets, postcards, humorous poems, erotic poems, erotic cartoons, cablegrams, scribblings on menus. “My keen, glorious, desirable, and desirous, and perfect woman,” he writes. “My arms—and everything else—just ache for you!” Their ostensibly chaste nine-month engagement practically killed them. Over seven decades of marriage, their correspondence was amorous, adoring, reproachful, ravenous, jealous, penitent, aching. They tantalized and tortured each other with the specter of other lovers—bewitching theater companions, lascivious train conductors, old flames imagined and real. “The wolves seem to sniff your absence,” she writes to him, away on business. “Wright has been frantically trying to get here all last evening.” My grandfather to her: “You’re much too attractive to be a thoroughly safe proposition in spite of your A1 loyal-type heart.” They imagined the worst, hungered for reassurance, begged forgiveness. “A confession, darling,” he writes. “I did kiss her—on the cheek—very brotherly.” They engaged in outlandish flattery. “Your telegrams almost made me jump out of my skin with excitement,” she writes, “but I got so lonely that I almost chewed the sheets and blankets—and really seriously thought of calling the conductor.” Beware stallions! he warns. Behavior excellent but dangerously lonely! she reports. “The train is a flop,” she writes. “No one has accosted me. Could I be slipping?”

  The summer before their wedding, I find her spending several weeks as a houseguest of her future mother-in-law in Bar Harbor. Her sixteen-year-old sister, Mary Binney, has been sent along as chaperone, a mission impossible. When Helen Hope boards a sleeper train at Ellsworth, Maine, for the trip home in late July 1923, she and her betrothed are facing a month-long separation. As the train barrels south, she fires off letters and telegrams from every station—Bangor, Waterville, Portland, and beyond. Upon arrival at home, she dispatches a special-delivery letter in an envelope plastered with stamps: “It seems like a year and it’s only yesterday at quarter of four that I left you.” H
e sleeps with her letters in his pajama pocket; she keeps his under her pillow. If a day passes letterless, they panic, fear the worst, telegram for relief. “I imagined someone had kissed you all of a sudden,” he writes, “and you didn’t know how to tell me.” Her letters are full of wild hyperbole: Life is disgusting without you! You are engaged to a perfect lunatic! Please miss me like the devil and have a rotten time! His are ardent, steamy: “O, I just want you, want you, want you with every inch of me!”

  A thousand wedding announcements and invitations sailed off that summer to addresses as remote as Argentina. Orders went out for initialed cuff links for the ushers, monogrammed luggage, calling cards for the soon-to-be Mrs. Scott. The scene in the big house in those weeks bore an unmistakable resemblance to the opening scenes of The Philadelphia Story. Tables sagged under the weight of wedding presents delivered daily—silver platters, engraved pitchers, volumes of Ibsen, a complete set of Shakespeare. Helen Hope dedicated herself to writing thank-you notes—when not rushing to the train station to intercept incoming mail from Maine. Newspaper reporters, idling through August, telephoned for wedding news. Old boyfriends, said to be bent on blowing up the engagement, dropped in; some stayed for a ride, a game of bridge, a swim in the pool. Mary Binney warned her older sister that regaling her fiancé with tales of her socializing in his absence would soon leave her “minus a husband.” But Helen Hope had no patience for a premarital cloister: “Otherwise, it’s so, so lonely and I think I would go mad.” My grandfather, in Maine with Mamma, had little choice but to agree. “But please, my Angel, love me best.”