The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  The portions of a woman which appeal to man’s depravity

  Are constituted with considerable care,

  And what appears to you to be a simple little cavity

  Is really an elaborate affair.

  And doctors of distinction who’ve examined these phenomena

  In numbers of experimental dames

  Have made a list of all the things in feminine abdomina

  And given them delightful Latin names.

  There’s the vulva, the vagina and the jolly perineum,

  The hymen that is found in many brides,

  And countless other gadgets you would love if you could see ’em,

  The clitoris and God knows what besides.

  What a pity then it is that when we common people chatter

  Of the mysteries to which I have referred,

  We should use for such a delicate and complicated matter

  Such a very short and unattractive word.

  I come upon a scrapbook of my grandmother’s labeled “Miscel letters and funny letters for old age!!” Inside the front cover, she’s pasted a studio photograph of a man I’ve never seen. Receding hairline, soft face, full lips. I find nothing unlikable—or especially likable—about his looks. He’s in military uniform, circa World War II. On the following pages, I find hundreds of letters, postcards, telegrams, and phone messages—mostly from the same man. “Hopey honey darling,” he begins. He signs off, “I adore you my sweet.” The recipient, I notice, has dated phone messages, after the fact, in her looping hand: July 27, 1944; August 14, 1944; September 12, 1944. “Major Burden called,” many of the messages read. “Please call Major Burden when you come in.” I imagine the housekeeper who must have taken the messages, standing at the phone in the pantry, in her white uniform and white shoes. What went through that housekeeper’s head? Would Helen Hope have cared? The correspondent’s sense of humor is in sync with hers: He sends postcards of the Empire State Building, Nelson’s Column, other marvels of upright engineering. “Looking forward to seeing you Friday with vast anticipation,” he writes from New York City. Or, “Looking forward to seeing you again on Friday with constantly renewed anticipation.” His stationery is as fine as his Park Avenue address. But I find nothing clever about his letters. Because of their frequency, I entertain the fantasy that my grandmother, in her thirties, had a psychoanalyst on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Is it possible she had a shrink named Major Burden?

  A more plausible explanation, of course, is that Major Burden was arranging assignations with the woman we called Granny.

  That nickname was never a perfect fit.

  By the early 1940s, Major Burden is writing or calling weekly or biweekly. “So please, please manage to come up here next week,” he implores. “I need you and want to see you so badly.” Another week: “Honey darling . . . Looking forward to seeing you on the 17th all agog.” He tells her he’s recently encountered “the author of the rumor that I am violently in love with you, which I at once admitted.” My grandfather, it becomes clear, is acquainted with his wife’s admirer: Respectfully, the man addresses his Christmas cards to Mr. and Mrs. Scott. My grandfather writes home from Midland, Texas, “My best to Jimmy.” He tacks on a cautionary send-off: “Goodbye, good luck, good habits.” But by the late 1940s, I sense, the major’s star is waning. “Darling, Your crushingly disappointing wire received,” he writes. Or, “Darling. Your wire received last night but what were you still doing in Philly on Tuesday if you left for West Virginia Monday PM?” It’s as if, he complains, “some annoying demon or Nemesis” is interfering—some nemesis whose “initials are not ES, as they normally are.” Helen Hope, meanwhile, is reassuring Edgar. JIMMY BEEN AND GONE VIRTUE INTACT LOVE AND KISSES, she reports in a telegram. And, in a letter: “Jimmy remained in perfect control and didn’t even get his toe in my door.” A year or two later, Burden is writing from Paris. “Brace yourself for a shock,” he tells Helen Hope. She’s to keep the news secret until the announcement arrives, which it does, a few days later, addressed to both missus and mister. Everyone is pleased with “the new dispensation”—Burden’s phrase. Two weeks later, he and his bride, fresh from Paris, arrive in Villanova for a cozy weekend with honey darling and her husband.

  For their twentieth wedding anniversary, Helen Hope and Edgar checked into a suite at the Ritz-Carlton in New York. I study the paper trail, including a Playbill from the original Broadway production of Oklahoma! Their marriage had proved, as people would describe it to me decades later, durable enough to survive conflict and whatever else happened along. Asked, near the end of her life, about the “secret” to their long marriage, my grandmother would give a deceptively simple answer, the complexities of which I’ve barely plumbed. “Both of us wanted to stay married,” she’d say. Their twentieth-anniversary letters to each other survived in a scrapbook. Hers was exuberant, all superlatives. His was a love letter.

  “Temperamentally, spiritually, physically you have been the perfect companion—captivating, devoted, passionate,” he wrote. “In the small things as in the great you have charmed my senses, possessed my thoughts and inspired my actions. . . . If during the next twenty years one of us dies, let the other remember gratefully and humbly the magic of our time together. The most important thought will be, not that it has ended, but what it was while it lasted.”

  The play dedicated to them, The Philadelphia Story, had opened on Broadway four years earlier. My grandfather and Philip Barry had met at Harvard after Barry’s arrival as a graduate student in 1919 to study playwriting under George Pierce Baker. A newly minted Anglophile, Barry had worked for the State Department in London during World War I, after being rejected from the ambulance corps and the military because of poor eyesight. “He was partial to palaces and to the people who dwelt in them,” Brendan Gill would write of him later; and he was even “more partial to people who might have lived in palaces and who chose instead to live in pavilions and pleasances, accepting with light hearts the responsibilities that their good luck imposed on them.” In the years after Harvard, Barry was a regular visitor to Ardrossan. Of the twenty-one plays of his that were produced on Broadway, the most successful were drawing-room comedies set in what a character in the play Holiday called “a general atmosphere of plenty with the top riveted down on the cornucopia.” The day before The Philadelphia Story opened in an out-of-town tryout in Philadelphia, a theater critic reported in the Philadelphia Record, “We understand that ‘The Philadelphia Story’ is concerned with a Main Line family who ‘manage their vast modern estate, hunt, fall in love and laugh much.’”

  I’d been foraging in the ironing-room papers for months before it occurred to me to read the play itself. I started scribbling notes and page numbers inside the back cover of the actors’ edition. Soon, to my amazement, a list of recognizable details was spilling backward into the dialogue, littering the margins. The setting of the play is a country estate on the eve of the wedding of the eldest daughter of “the Philadelphia Lords.” There’s a dairy and stables, like the Colonel’s, and a gatehouse built “for a summer place when they all lived in Rittenhouse Square,” as had the Scotts. The curtain rises on the sitting room, “a large, comfortably furnished room of a somewhat faded elegance containing a number of very good Victorian pieces”—a solid description of the sitting room at the big house. “I suppose that’s contrasted to the living room, the ballroom—the drawing room—the morning room—the—,” the interloping reporter in the play remarks. Glass doors open onto a porch—again, like the big house; a portrait by a famous painter hangs over the mantel; cardboard boxes are strewn about, “indicating an approaching wedding,” as in the summer of 1923. The bride’s father is in finance—with a controlling interest in the company that employs his future son-in-law. Ring a bell? His eldest, Tracy, has been writing thank-you notes. Her younger sister—fifteen, not yet in school—spouts off dreamily about, yes, Leopold Stokowski
. “She’s out schooling a horse somewhere,” the reporter remarks. “It’s the horses that get the schooling hereabouts.” There’s even a swimming pool in a grove of trees. Late in the play and late at night, Tracy ends up undressed and in the pool—with the reporter, not the man she’s about to marry.

  For the last thirty years of my grandmother’s life, she was often reported to have been the original Tracy. “The real-life model,” said Vanity Fair. The Sunday Telegraph called her “the inspiration”; a slightly confused local paper alluded to “the role of Mrs. Scott.” Yet, Tracy is priggish in a way Helen Hope never was. For much of the play, Tracy is judgmental, scornful, intolerant of weakness. “You’ll never be a first class woman or a first class human being, till you have learned to have some regard for human frailty,” her ex-husband, C. K. Dexter Haven, whose weakness is drinking, tells her. Her father, who’s having an affair with a Broadway actress, is a target of Tracy’s scorn. Only after she drinks too much champagne, ends up naked in the pool with a stranger, and has to be carted off to bed on the eve of her wedding does she become capable of appreciating that, as Barry puts it, “the occasional misdeeds are often as good for a person as—as the more persistent virtues.” That wouldn’t have been news to Helen Hope.

  Even she, it turns out, may not have believed she was the original Tracy. Barry had taken the idea for the play to Katharine Hepburn, who was in need of a comeback, having been branded arrogant and “box office poison” after a string of flops. Together, they made the character of Tracy the booster rocket for Hepburn’s redemption. “Make her like me but make her go all soft,” Hepburn is said to have told Barry. Tracy became a redheaded graduate of Bryn Mawr College, like Hepburn, with an ex-husband idling on the outskirts of her life, like Hepburn. “Indeed, Tracy Lord is Kate Hepburn,” A. Scott Berg wrote in Kate Remembered. Donald R. Anderson, in a book on Barry’s plays, said, “There is no question that Tracy Lord was not only designed for Hepburn but also shaped by her.” The play became the most enduring of Barry’s plays, running for more than four hundred performances in New York, plus two years on the road. It was revived in New York in 1980, in London in 2005. The movie, starring Hepburn and Cary Grant and released in 1940, is an American classic. Tracy Lord and Hepburn had made Helen Hope “almost famous,” my grandmother wrote years later. Occasionally, though, she’d say the character might have been based on her youngest sister. She was even quoted, on at least one occasion, saying, “I don’t really think Tracy Lord was much like me.”

  But for feature writers, the story was too good to check. And their subject, it seems, never went out of her way to correct the record.

  Why not? I asked my uncle Ed.

  He shrugged.

  “She started to value the importance of being ‘Mrs. Philadelphia Story.’”

  Chapter Five

  My father was never one to linger over tales of his childhood. I see that now, looking back. If it had ever occurred to me to ask him why, he might’ve said, with a look of amusement, that he’d never given the question any thought. It was just, he’d have said, who he was. In our house, there were photographs of my mother as a child with her parents. We knew about their family camping trip to the Canadian Rockies, and the progressive elementary school to which her mother had wisely sent her, and her childhood friends, and the family dogs, and the French nurse, Marie. Of my father’s early years, we heard fewer details. There was a studio photograph of a towheaded child with a look of impish anticipation, and a picture of him as a boy in the “Alice in Wonderland” garden at Chiltern. We’d heard of the pet dove he won at a church fair, and a horse for whom he’d saved his wartime sugar rations while away at school. We knew that he adored his parents: He said so often when people brought them up. You couldn’t spend time with the three of them and not come away with the impression that the son was as taken with the parents as the parents were with him. I must have assumed I knew the story, since the setting of his childhood, and the cast of characters, overlapped with mine. Only late in his life did it begin to dawn on me that the emotional terrain had been more rugged than I’d understood.

  Six months before his death, he let slip a story that none of us remembers hearing. He was speaking to an oral historian, a stranger. I learned of the interview only years later, after his death, when I was given a recording. The opening question was routine, but I was surprised by my father’s answer. Asked where he’d been born, he gave his date of birth and the name of the hospital—then went on to say that his mother had left him there at one day old. She’d delivered her first child at home and would have preferred to do the same for her second. So she agreed reluctantly to hospitalization, then checked out as soon as she could, leaving her newborn in the nurses’ care. Sometime later, an ambulance pulled up at the house in Villanova and dropped off the infant. I’m sure this is a myopically twenty-first-century thing to say, but I can no more imagine voluntarily leaving my healthy, day-old baby behind in a hospital than I can imagine, say, abandoning him or her on the banks of the Tiber to be suckled by a she-wolf.

  In keeping with family practice, my father was placed in the care of a French governess. He came to adore her, he said long afterward, while everybody else disliked her “rather cordially.” The summer he turned six, during an extended stay in the Bar Harbor “cottage,” his Scott grandmother unceremoniously canned the object of my father’s devotion, giving neither of them the opportunity to say adieu. (The governess had been venting her aggression, I’m told, by clobbering my father’s older brother, Ed.) From then on, my father passed many days and nights, not unhappily, in the company of his parents’ Irish butler, Irish cook, and Irish maid. (A cousin of my father’s, who spent his early years on Ardrossan, told me, “If there are any redeeming qualities in me, it can be attributed to the fact that I was raised by Irish cooks and maids.”) Years later, my father professed to have spoken English with an Irish accent until the age of nine—“to the consternation of my grandmother Scott who was a Boston Brahmin and did not approve of her second grandchild speaking in the tongue of the people who had taken over Boston from the likes of her family.”

  His parents were an intermittent presence. During his first decade, they kept an apartment in Manhattan for proximity to the stock market, the theater, clubs, New York friends. They had a cottage, too, for a time, in the open country to the west of Delaware County, to which the foxhunting crowd was increasingly heading. Piecing together the timeline, it dawned on me, for the first time, that my father was fourteen months old when his parents sailed off to Ireland for their first, month-long encounter with Augustus John. When they left again for Europe the following summer, he’d just turned two. By the time they embarked for London for the third John portrait, he and Ed were old enough to accompany them on the train to New York for the privilege of seeing them off. Back in Villanova, aunts, uncles, grandparents, maids, and cooks pinch-hit. The big house was, my uncle told me without any trace of self-pity, “a resource that was used at such times to ship off the kids and go away.” My father used the same tone—an irony so finely planed as to almost slip by undetected—when he wrote, in his sixties, that his parents “returned from time to time to look after their Philadelphia life, including their horses, their dogs, their donkeys and their sons.”

  I study the margin between said and unsaid.

  “My mother and father were wonderful parents,” he told a journalist after their deaths. “Enormously kind and caring, in their way.

  “But quite . . .”

  He hesitated.

  “. . . distant.”

  He ventured further.

  “Unused to children.

  “Busy with their own lives, entertaining and so forth.

  “But very decent, loving people.”

  As a young boy, he had what one teacher called in a report card “considerable social charm.” He was lively, talkative, funny. “Such a personality,” his father marveled. In elementar
y school, he could be found amusing his classmates instead of attending to the teacher. “Bobby never walks into a room,” his Boston-bred grandmother remarked frostily. “He makes an entrance.” He had an interior quality, however, that his mother diagnosed as a “slight shyness.” Perhaps she passed along to him her own mother’s miracle cure. For, by the time he’d reached adulthood, my father gave every appearance of having absorbed the imperative to “always give people the best possible time.” He seemed to have vanquished whatever surplus of self-consciousness his mother had labeled shyness.

  He alone, I now see, knew better.

  For all her charm and gifts, Helen Hope had limitations as a parent. She was self-centered, she liked recognition, she was quick to take offense. One of the few episodes from my father’s childhood that my brother, sister, and I all recall him recounting concerned her fury after he, as a small boy, compared her midriff to a wrinkled paper bag. Though she worked tirelessly at many things, that energy and focus came at a price: She was not, it seems safe to say, overly involved in the lives of her sons. In the event of some run-of-the-mill screwup, she could be less than scrupulously honest in assigning blame. Once, after skidding into the side of a stone bridge while driving to the big house with Ed when he was a boy, she took to fulminating against her father—presumably for bridge misplacement thirty years before. Her approach to discipline was tough. “Toilet training was particularly rigorous,” my father wrote in a rare confession many years later, “my mother treating the process like housebreaking dogs.”