The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  He was careful, I now see, in what he said about her.

  “I adored my mother, but she was not easy,” he’d say, leaving it at that.

  Or, “It was a pleasant existence, if we were careful not to cross my mother.”

  Or, “When the light was shining on us, we were very much there. When it wasn’t, we made do.”

  In my grandfather’s letters, his pleasure in his sons is evident. “The boys were perfect,” he writes to their mother, after taking them to a baseball game. “I’m always so happy with them, and so proud of them.” Having decided not to wake his youngest to say good-bye as he leaves on a business trip, he’s afflicted with remorse. He sends a telegram to Helen Hope, then a letter. “I’m still worried I may have hurt Bob’s feelings,” he writes. “He’s so nice, I’d hate to.” But my grandfather’s life was busy, too, in those years. Alighting in Pennsylvania for a meeting of the sewer commission on which he’s serving, he recaps the day’s events in a telegram to Helen Hope, who’s also out of town: TOO BUSY OFFICE TENNIS SEWER OPERA WITH MAMMA BOBBY THREW UP SCHOOL LUNCH TODAY FINE NOW DOGS HORSES FINE.

  My father didn’t share his mother’s passion for horses. When his brother asked to resume riding at age eleven, having quit at six, she offered him a donkey, not yet broken, to ride for the summer. Come September, they’d see if he was ready for a horse. Ed rode the donkey, bareback, all summer, trailing his mother, who was on horseback, up and down hills. By fall, he had the donkey clearing small jumps—a feat that I take it is not entirely unlike teaching a dachshund to dance. Impressed, Helen Hope gave her elder son a horse. From then on, they rode together, as she passed on to him everything she knew. Once, when a horse she was breaking kicked her in the stomach, she surprised Ed by handing him the horse to complete the job. In a sphere that was central to her life, she and her eldest connected. In a household dominated by the personality and interests of his mother, my father sometimes found himself on the sidelines. He went through, Ed told me, “a sort of wintry period in his youth.”

  His maternal grandfather, it seems, left a deep impression on my father. When he dreamed, as a small boy, of living in a palace, the palace in the dream was the Greek Revival temple that the Colonel’s architect, Horace Trumbauer, had designed for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When, many years later, my father would remember his grandparents’ house, he’d remember the white-gloved, blue-waistcoated footmen—“like something out of a Revolutionary War–themed painting”—and library shelves lined with Kipling and Trollope. Other grandchildren kept their distance from the irascible, oversized, unnerving Colonel, but my father would look back on the Colonel’s fits of temper with fond amusement. He’d remember, with the same indulgence, the Colonel’s practice of piloting private planes after a wine-fueled lunch. “I was the first of his grandchildren to be named after him, and I absolutely adored him,” he’d tell the oral historian who interviewed him late in life. The words he used to describe his grandfather: successful, opinionated, aristocratic. “Wonderfully enough, I was probably his last great friend,” my father said. He’d recall sitting with him after lunch—the older man with his cigar and brandy; the child, age eleven, drinking rum. In his midtwenties, stupefied by the tedium of his newly chosen profession, the law, my father would daydream about writing a novel based on the character of his grandfather.

  The two of them understood each other. That’s how my uncle Ed put it.

  The Colonel was in his early sixties when my father was a boy. A quarter of a century had passed since he’d built his Xanadu beside Darby Creek. What had become of him in the decades following his heyday was a question I hadn’t considered until I came upon a letter from a former business partner of his, written after the Colonel’s death. “Many times I have tried to figure out what caused the great change in him,” the man confided to my grandfather, the Colonel’s son-in-law and a business partner himself. The change had come on gradually, the man said, through a series of setbacks. In the years immediately after World War I, the Colonel’s partners in the investment banking firm had turned against him. “He was so used to being recognized as the Captain of the ship, which he certainly was, that it was impossible for him to understand how any of us could challenge his leadership,” the man wrote. The resulting dissolution of the firm, in 1921, was a mistake, the former colleague wrote. It had left the Colonel, “a man of action,” becalmed.

  There’d been another blow, too—a public humiliation. A month after the United States entered the war in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson had set up a five-man board charged with stimulating the rapid production of three thousand, five hundred military aircraft. My father’s grandfather, appointed to the new Aircraft Production Board because of his experience in finance, was soon in charge of finance for the equipment division of the United States Army Signal Corps, then head of the division, briefly. He was commissioned as a colonel. Congress had appropriated $640 million for the production program; another $840 million had followed. But by the time the war ended in November 1918, the program had failed to generate a single American-built combat plane, pursuit plane, or bomber at the French front. With thousands of trained aviators ready to fly, the United States had had to borrow or buy planes from the Allies. All the aircraft-production program produced was a couple hundred observational planes. Investigations—by Congress, the Department of Justice, and news organizations—traced the debacle to inexperience, errors of judgment, and what the congressional report called “a record of stupidity and stubbornness that involved an inexcusable waste of men and money, and invited military disaster.”

  In the letter three decades later, Michael Gavin, the Colonel’s business partner, wrote to my grandfather, “Some called it a scandal, and some demanded criminal prosecution. You can easily understand how that sort of thing would stagger Bob.”

  At the height of the uproar, the Colonel summoned his business partner to Washington. Gavin found him “in bed looking tired and worried.” The Colonel had been detached from aviation duty and assigned to cooperate with the Department of Justice in its investigation. Aware that Gavin was acquainted with the new chairman of the aviation board, the Colonel asked Gavin to see what he could learn. The new chairman told Gavin to tell the Colonel that “he thought all the talk about scandal and criminal prosecution would die down and be forgotten,” Gavin wrote. But the scandal, understandably, hit the Colonel hard. “He seemed, after that, to gradually lose some of that boldness and confidence,” Gavin said, “which was a great asset in anything he undertook to do.”

  The story of the Aircraft Production Board fiasco wasn’t one I’d heard in the family. I learned of it from the letter, then newspaper archives, then government records. Did the Colonel’s children ever know the details? Did his grandchildren? It was not a descendant but a son-in-law, Edgar, who preserved the lone clue—the business partner’s ruminations on “what caused the great change.” A century later, I’m unable to determine the Colonel’s precise involvement in the crack-up. Was he personally to blame? Or not? Did he belong on that board? Maybe it was perfectly reasonable to appoint a man with experience in industrial finance. All I’m left with is the irony of the Colonel’s eternal title and that story: Rank lives on when the facts are forgotten. In the family, Robert L. Montgomery remains “the Colonel” to this day. The title is like one of those stately gateposts, still standing after all other traces have disappeared.

  So the Colonel withdrew from what he called “active business” at forty-two after the dissolution of the investment banking partnership. He turned to managing his investments, serving on boards, and pursuing miscellaneous personal interests. In anticipation of Prohibition, he laid on enough champagne, my father would later say, to last the family for decades. He became active in the campaign for Prohibition amendment repeal, set up the bar manager of his men’s club in the bootlegging business, and tried his hand at home distilling. He took up flying, having been warned off of foxhunting and
steeplechasing for health reasons. He bought several airplanes and an autogiro. And, in one of the more curious stories I heard, he had mature oak trees shipped across the Atlantic after hearing they were to be felled on some distant Scottish relative’s estate. He stored them in a hay barn, where they sustained a colony of termites for a time before finally being hauled away.

  The crash of the stock market put a dent in the Montgomerys’ wealth. But the extent of the damage is unclear, at least to me. In the 1930 census, the big house was valued at two million dollars. Later in the decade, I find the Colonel asking the township to slash the entire estate’s valuation to just four hundred thousand dollars. Turning down a tenant’s request for a rent reduction, he says the rental income from his properties is barely covering operations and upkeep. As for his investments, he tells a friend in 1933 that their market value is a fraction of what it once was—“but today they have kept up their income payments and I am no worse off.” The same year, he cuts his employees’ pay by 20 percent, blaming shrinking dividends and rising taxes. He tells a friend that his income has been “substantially reduced” and that he’s worried about an income tax hike. Yet he says the new brokerage, started with his son and son-in-law, has done “very well and, indeed, transacts one of the comparatively large volumes of such business on the New York Stock Exchange.” It has “neither made nor lost any great amount of money.”

  The election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt finds the Colonel increasingly politically active. A local newspaper called him the township’s Republican boss. By 1933, he was heading a taxpayers’ league, bent on slowing the rise in the cost of county government. Meanwhile, legislation passed in Washington in response to the crash and the Depression put an end to a business practice that had helped make the Colonel rich—a practice my father called “kiting public utility companies.” The Public Utility Holding Company Act put a stop, in 1935, to the creation of huge utility holding companies. The Colonel, professing to champion the interests of small stockholders, railed against Roosevelt: “We ask for a square deal, not a New Deal.”

  By the late thirties, the Colonel’s lawyer was telling township officials that the value of the Montgomery property was plummeting. Nearby estates were being unloaded onto the market, he said; even the foxhunters were leaving in search of open land to the west. In 1939, I find, the Colonel flew in from South Carolina in his private plane to testify against a neighbor’s plan to donate her estate to be used for a home for twenty “convalescent crippled children”—a move, at least partially philanthropic, that would have removed her thirty-six acres from the tax rolls. “Why, I could give my estate to Delaware County and save all these taxes, enough for me to live on my South Carolina plantation,” the county’s largest taxpayer thundered, in what sounds quite like a veiled threat. “The schools are piling on new things and additional buildings all the time, and taxes are always advancing. It is very difficult to maintain a large estate nowadays.”

  Ardrossan wasn’t the only white elephant imprinted on the consciousness of my father. There was Chiltern, the four-hundred-fifty-lightbulb fortress on the Maine coast, to which he was dispatched during childhood summers to stay with his widowed Scott grandmother and various cousins, uncles, and aunts. Each of those houses loomed on the horizon of his emotional landscape, each with its family legend attached—the tale of the aspirational future Colonel, horseless on the hilltop, espying his future, and the story of the doomed railroad heir’s vow to build himself a gilded cloister if he couldn’t snare the woman he loved. Over the decades, my father observed his elders shoring up those monuments. If he ever entertained the possibility that the cause was lost, he must have concluded it was not. Otherwise, why would he embark, as he would do near the end of his life, on the grandest restoration campaign of them all?

  By the 1930s, Bar Harbor had changed since the days when Edgar the elder had used his vision of luxurious rustication to entice Maisie Sturgis. With the advent of the income tax and World War I, “cottagers” had begun pulling up stakes. The arrival of automobiles on the island had brought a new class of tourist, and the stock market crash and the Depression made it harder to pay large staffs to operate dinosaurian summer homes. But my father’s grandmother Maisie Scott retained a romantic attachment to Chiltern. In 1929, she’d extricated herself from the king-size house that her husband had built in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, and moved to a more manageable place on the Main Line, freeing herself to pour her money into perpetuating Chiltern. In the style of a benevolent despot, she presided over a rolling open house for four months every summer. In the first thirteen summers of my father’s life, his parents regularly packed him off to Chiltern. He and his cousins were often long-term guests. Years later, they’d remember those summers as idyllic.

  My father rode the Bar Harbor Express up from Philadelphia, often unaccompanied by parents, and with or without his brother. He shared a bedroom with his cousin Mike Kennedy, in the children’s wing on the third floor. From a playroom window, they could gaze across the crescent-shaped cove to a small island, Bald Porcupine. In the early morning, grandchildren would visit their grandmother in the sitting room adjoining her second-floor bedroom. At sit-down lunches in the dining room, marrow bones came individually wrapped in linen napkins, ready to be mined for their marrow with a long-handled spoon. There were steamed clams on Sundays, consumed competitively by the bushel. At dinnertime, the children dined in the playroom. Downstairs, long dresses were de rigueur. During long July and August days, the cousins played in the rocky tidal pools at the water’s edge. They climbed mountains, chauffeured to the trailhead with their grandmother and her Irish setters. Charlie Chaplin movies played in the Bar Harbor theaters. The house library was stocked with Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. There was tea on the octagonal porch. There was a vegetable garden where, during the Depression, the less fortunate could help themselves. “It was total security,” Mike Kennedy told me. More than thirty years later, as a hostage in Iran for four hundred forty-four days, Mike dreamed of Chiltern.

  A feature of those summers was the beguiling presence of the children’s uncle, Warwick, my grandfather’s younger brother, named for their father’s friend who’d died on the Sagamore circumnavigation. A born parodist and performer, Warwick had gravitated to theater in school. After studying Shelley at Oxford, he’d become a lawyer—a courtroom showman who relished the formality of the interplay with judges and other lawyers, and made a fetish of being correct. At six foot four, with gray-blue eyes, he was a memorable courthouse figure, attired in a long coat and in gloves that he removed theatrically, for maximum effect. He was a tennis player and a competitive sailor. When the United States entered World War I, he’d begged his parents, at age sixteen, to let him join the Coast Guard. Thwarted on the grounds of youth, he’d arranged instead to do his bit for the war effort by raising sheep on the Chiltern lawn. His nephews and nieces adored him—a childless uncle with a fanciful imagination and a sense of humor rooted in the ridiculous. On racing days, he’d climb to the second-floor balcony, brandishing a red megaphone and uniformed in a blazer and cap, and call across the water to the family’s boatman. By the time he and his crew had crossed the lawn, his racing boat, Artemis, would be waiting at a neighbor’s dock. He’d take along a small nephew as ballast.

  In a photo, I find my father, at two, against a backdrop of billowing flower beds in the garden at Chiltern, in the company of his parents’ cook and maid. From a letter written the summer he turned nine, I find he’s requested his parents’ permission to stay an extra month—a request that, it seems, was promptly granted. His parents themselves spent little time at Chiltern: Edgar worked during summers; Helen Hope spent those months developing young horses for the fall. She had no interest in sailboat racing or tennis. In fact, she appears to have detested Chiltern. THRILLED TO BE COMING HOME, she cabled my grandfather from the train, after leaving my father, age two, and his brother, six, in Bar Harbor. COULD NOT STAND IT THERE. She di
dn’t entirely trust her darling at home alone, it’s evident from letters. Plus, relations with her mother-in-law were frosty. Maisie Scott disapproved of the fast life Helen Hope favored, and Helen Hope had no intention of knuckling under to her mother-in-law’s house rules. Once, I’m told, Maisie excavated a wayward corset buried beneath a sofa cushion; on another occasion, Helen Hope may or may not have been the prime suspect in the case of a newspaper that her mother-in-law found unfolded. The final blowup is said to have come one summer when Maisie tore into her daughter-in-law, newly arrived in Bar Harbor, for her deficiencies as a mother. The rupture was so deep, it’s said, that my father’s parents walked out. From then on, they returned only for occasional, awkward, duty visits.

  As a boy, my father sensed that he was somehow sullied in the crossfire. Years later, he’d describe his grandmother as terrifying—a person who, he said, disapproved of him because he was “too Montgomery.” He suspected she preferred his brother, her firstborn grandchild and her late husband’s namesake. It seems she felt my father could have benefited from some parental attention. Ensconced in the Oak Room, she once observed an intimate moment between my father’s cousin Mike and his father, talking quietly on a window bench, the son nestled in the curve of the father’s arm. Turning to her elder daughter, Maisie said ruefully, “If only Bobby had that.”

  In my father’s childhood letters to his parents, I’m struck by how hard he worked to please them. There had never been a better Christmas, a more wonderful vacation, more popular parents. “There are lots of people who keep mooning over the fact that ‘the most attractive people on the face of God’s earth aren’t here,’” he wrote from Maine at seventeen. “And since I found out long ago that it always means you, I thought you’d maybe like to hear it.” In his letters, he inquired after every aunt, uncle, grandparent, cook, maid, horse, and dog by name. He solicited his parents’ views on the Bretton Woods Conference and the presidential election, and gently ventured his own. “Please don’t think me fresh, or criticizing your opinions,” he wrote. “I don’t, but merely vehemently express my humble ones.” Toying with the possibility of taking up pipe smoking, he gave them veto power. Instinctively, he knew which stories would pique their interest: “The possibilities and actualities of my love-life are most glowing and very bewildering. I’ll tell you about it all someday.”