The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  The master made the call: The pack would carry on hunting the injured hare, probably to the kill. If his beagles didn’t finish the animal off, he reasoned, the foxhounds that hunted the same territory would. So the huntsman set off down the road, the pack swirling and eddying at his feet. After crossing the road, working hard against a biting wind, the hounds found the line again. Running parallel to the pack along a steep hill, my father had the joy, as he’d later put it, of being almost on top of the hounds as they worked. They were beside the stream, following the scent. From his vantage point, he caught sight of the hare as it bolted from a spot farther down the stream, ahead of the pack, onto a dirt road. The hounds pushed on after it—across the road, up a hill, and into a cornfield. My father watched the hare, moving slowly among the fallen stalks, looking very lame. The hounds couldn’t see the struggling animal until they overtook it. The huntsman reached a gloved hand into the pack, snatched the hare, and killed it with a blow from his crop. With a knife, the master of hounds sawed off the head and feet. Several children who’d arrived early at the kill were awarded the bloody feet. The head went to my father. An honor.

  The next day, he took the body part to a taxidermist to have it stuffed and mounted. The hare’s leg, it had been determined, had been broken for some time: It had dangled, useless, by the animal’s side. Yet the hare had outrun its pursuers for an hour and a half. The spirit of the doomed beast, maimed as it was, had moved my father. For as long as I lived in my parents’ house, and for years after, that animal’s stuffed head hung on the library wall.

  “I feel very sorry for that hare,” my father wrote on the day he delivered the head to the taxidermist. “He was plucky, he gave us good sport, and he wanted to live. . . . When he hangs in my house, I think he will remind me of a lot of things. He deserves respect, that hare.”

  My father struck me as different from most of the fathers I’d encountered. He’d decided early on that his children should call him Popsy—a variant of the name he used for his own father, Pop, but also, I think, one that put some distance between this father and the default, Dad. Unconventional as it was, that handle pleased him. Once, he named a small, outboard-motor boat Seapoop. “‘Popsy’ spelled sideways,” he told anyone who asked (until he got tired of explaining, perhaps felt foolish, and quietly changed the name to “Popsy’s”). He abstained, too, from the standard leisure uniform of men of his ethnicity and socioeconomic station; no madras sport coats, no belts embroidered with racquets or whales. His summer vacation wardrobe consisted of a half dozen identical pairs of khaki shorts and a half dozen identical navy blue polo shirts. In winter, after returning from work, he’d disappear into his “dressing room” and wrap himself in a silk smoking jacket—an article of clothing that Hugh Hefner also favored. After we moved to London, he transitioned to custom-made suits, suspenders, and striped dress shirts from the bespoke shirtmaker that had outfitted Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr. No.

  He had no interest in football or baseball or golf. The only trace of a halfhearted stab at the country-club lifestyle was a barely touched bag of irons, wedges, and putters languishing in a coat closet under the front stairs. (“Relax!” the golf pro had barked at his student, wound tight as a watch. “Mr. Scott, relax!”) Unlike my mother, who had fond memories of climbing Mount Washington as a child on skis with skins strapped to their underside, my father had never been taught to ski. On a family ski trip with us, he gamely overlooked the ridicule of strangers by attempting to master an unpromising contraption that resembled a child’s tricycle on skis. Straddling the seat, he’d peer acrophobically downhill from the top of a ski slope, his thumbs rigid in an involuntary response to terror, as skiers whooshed past him, snorting in disbelief. Beneath his convincing conviviality, he had solitary inclinations. When he took up cooking, he cooked alone, the kitchen doors closed, a glass of wine at the ready, classical music blasting from speakers. Stewed things and blood and melted animal fat spattered the floor. On weekends, he’d shut himself in the library, reading biographies of British statesmen. Before it was fashionable, he was a serious cyclist, clocking as many as a hundred miles in a day. When I joined him on several cycling trips in exotic places in my twenties and early thirties, he took the lead and we rode in silence. It was parallel play.

  He was, I suppose, no more or less involved in the lives of his children than were many fathers at that time. For the first decade of my life, nurses and governesses came and went, the most durable of whom was a French Canadian named Odille, who’d be remembered by her charges for, among other child-rearing strategies, her creative repurposing of old party favors—specifically, Paddle Ball paddles—into instruments for the administration of spankings. On weeknights in the Odille years, face time with our father was often limited to a ritual called “spending.” It coincided with the cocktail hour, when he would return from work, settle in the library in his smoking jacket, and put away a few scotch and sodas. Hopie and Elliot and I would be delivered downstairs to spend time with our parents, after which we’d take our places at a Formica-topped table in a room off the kitchen to eat our supper. At a certain age, I learned to feign nonchalance when our parents stopped by to say good night before heading out for the evening. A cousin of my father’s, also raised on Ardrossan, told me that his family, too, had practiced a version of spending. “You got to see your parents once a day, whether you wanted to or not,” he recalled, laughing. After Odille came a succession of white-uniformed cooks. Our favorite was a small, perdurable Irish woman who, I didn’t fully understand at the time, had been a beloved stand-in parent to my father during the “wintry” period of his boyhood. During her tenure, we graduated to eating in the dining room with our parents. We were to dress for dinner. (No jeans.) We’d maneuver serving dishes through the swinging door from the pantry and arrange them on the sideboard. Serve from the left. Clear from the right. Snuff the candles between thumb and forefinger, to avoid spattering wax across the gleaming surface of the mahogany table.

  My family, plus Odille

  Collectively, our father addressed us as his troops. Preparing to depart on some expedition, he’d stand at the foot of the front stairs and bellow, “Troops!” Or, with a call on a hunting horn plucked from the front-hall table, he’d summon us to muster. I see him now in the basement with a hand drill, a hammer, a bowl, and our first actual coconut. The three of us squat in a semicircle around him, rapt. He drills holes in the hirsute exterior, decants the milk into the bowl, clobbers the shell with the hammer, hands around fragments. I think of him, too, at the wheel of the station wagon, driving down Abraham’s Lane toward the cold pool on a hot summer day, the three of us in bathing suits, balanced on the tailgate, feet dangling. I see him sitting on the end of my bed at the Bryn Mawr hospital, dealing a hand of cards on the expanse of institutional bedclothes between us. I’m recovering from peritonitis. Do I really remember this? Probably not. What I remember is how he flattered me years later, saying he’d taught me gin rummy when I was five years old, tethered to an IV pole, with a three-inch incision in my flank. He claimed I’d beaten him every time, which can’t be true; he must have sensed how much I wanted his respect.

  It’s winter in the early 1960s. The fields, woods, stone barns, and houses on Ardrossan are blanketed in white, like a scene out of a painting by Grandma Moses. The wind has whipped the snow into drifts. In the paved yard between our house and the garage, the snow has been plowed into hills as high as the seven-foot stone wall. Two-foot-long icicles hang, glittering, from the eaves. On the front lawn, the drifts are solid enough to burrow into; we’ve built igloos using the drifts, the snow cold and sticky enough to be made into blocks for building. The beagles need exercise and so do we, so our father musters his troops. We haul a five- or six-seater wooden toboggan from the garage, and he arranges to meet a few beaglers. At the kennel, hounds clamor at our arrival, then tumble through the gates when we push them open. In our parkas, snow pants, and rubber galos
hes, we trail our father and the hounds up the farm road, past the big house, and across a couple of windswept fields to the top of one of the steepest hills on the place. There, we arrange ourselves, zipper-style, on the toboggan—legs interlocking. Our father, positioned at the rear, inches it forward. As we begin to move, hounds lunge after us, barking, ears flapping. Gathering speed, the overloaded toboggan begins its exhilarating descent. Hounds tumble, bark, flail, some marooned in the snow. Now we’re hurtling downhill, the sound of barking growing distant. The wind stings our cheeks. We’re flying. Somewhere ahead, beyond the bottom of the hill, looms a post-and-rail fence and a half-hidden stream. Nearing the bottom, we throw our weight to one side in unison, as instructed. The toboggan capsizes, depositing us, facedown, in the snow. Cast adrift in the sudden silence, snow in our sleeves and our mittens, we lie on our backs, picking out the hounds on the hillside, scattered in the toboggan track. Toboggling, he called it.

  Later, when we were old enough, we tagged along when he took his hounds twice a year to a five-hundred-acre farm in rural Virginia where, on a weekend every fall and one every spring, packs from all over the East would converge to compete in field trials. We’d sleep on lumpy mattresses in bunk beds in log cabins heated by potbellied stoves. We’d take our meals in a barnlike building that had once been an agricultural college—and which, it was said, the beagle club had acquired after a man intending to use it as a hunt club went down with the Titanic on his way home from a hound-shopping trip to England. All day, pairs of hounds from each pack competed in field trials. At night, our father caroused with other beaglers. On the long drive home, with the Sunday evening sky turning the purple of eggplant, signs advertising fireworks flashed past beside the barely lit roads. My father would steer the car and trailer into the gravelly parking area of some roadside stand where we’d squander our allowance on sparklers before crossing into our fireworks-free state.

  Robert Montgomery Scott and Helen Gay Elliot, my parents, had met when they were eighteen. Though she was from Boston and he was from Villanova, their circles intersected. They met for the first time in the wedding party when my father’s brother, Ed, married my mother’s childhood friend. Shortly afterward, Bob and Gay were in the same class at Harvard and Radcliffe. They began seeing each other, broke up, resumed. By senior year, they were talking about marriage. By certain measures, they had a lot in common: Her father, like the Colonel, was a successful investor (who, like Edgar T. Scott, had gone to Harvard but had left before graduating). My mother had learned French at a young age, from a nurse, as had my father’s parents, Helen Hope and Edgar. My mother also rode horses, as did Helen Hope; and she was a pianist, as was Helen Hope’s sister Mary Binney. Yet my mother’s parents had their doubts about this marriage. They thought both my parents were too young, and her father thought my father might benefit from some time in the military. He’d also heard, through the old-boy network, that his future in-laws were “café society,” a quality unlikely to endear them to his intelligent, rather formidable wife—whom my father would amuse himself by calling, after she’d been widowed, “the Dowager Duchess of Boston.” At the Dowager Duchess’s insistence, my mother’s father invited my father to lunch. They liked each other, as it turned out—though my grandfather later remarked, as perhaps only a successful investor would, that his daughter’s intended, son of an heir to a Pennsylvania Railroad fortune, “didn’t have two nickels to rub together.” But my father was leaving Cambridge to go to law school in Philadelphia the following year; my mother would have been unable to go with him unwed. So, the month they graduated from college, they were married in Manchester, Massachusetts. The café society in-laws arrived by private plane from Pennsylvania, attended the ceremony, then offended their new relatives by skipping out on a dinner, planned in their honor, in order to fly home in time for what was assumed to have been a more desirable party.

  Fortunately for my father, my mother did have nickels. In the late 1960s, they used some of her money to buy a weather-beaten, gray-shingled house on a cliff overlooking the water on Nantucket. My father had first been to the island a few years earlier with the old master of hounds, who made a practice of taking his beagles there in summers to hunt. My father had discovered both Nantucket and bicycling, which had turned out to be a pleasant way of exercising hounds. For the next four summers, my parents had rented a house on the island for a month. On the fifth summer, a real estate broker showed them the house on the cliff, with its tumbledown widow’s walk and wooden steps leading through beach grass and beach plum bushes to the beach. On a wall in the front hall, near the phone jack, the owners had scratched, in ballpoint pen, the phone numbers of half-a-lifetime’s worth of summer friends. At a lunch with my parents to celebrate the transfer of the property, the sellers wept. In return for my mother’s having paid for the house, my father agreed to take charge of all upkeep from then on. In the years that followed, he waged war on the poison ivy choking off the beach grass that surrounded the house on three sides. He had a bulkhead built to shore up the eroding cliff. He hung the living-room walls with paintings of steam yachts rigged as topsail schooners—like the Sagamore, which had transported his grandfather on his grand tour. He bought a small sailboat and a canoe. On picnic days, he’d test the wind direction and accordingly select our destination. For thirty years, the deed to the house remained in my mother’s name. But when the divorce came through in the midnineties, my father asked to buy half. To my mother, it seemed unnecessary; they’d been sharing it amicably since separating. But my father insisted. So my mother sold him half for a dollar.

  I adored my father. I emulated his heaving laugh, which, on nights when my parents had parties in Pennsylvania, floated upstairs from the living room, through the open transom, and into my bedroom on the third floor. When we walked together, I extended my stride to try to match his, as if to prove my pace was the same. Before breakfast on school days, I’d hover in the wing chair in his dressing room, while he shaved or polished his shoes, listening to the voice of the classical station host coming from the radio on his dresser. For a time, when my sister and brother and I were young, he told us stories about the adventures of an ostensibly fictional character called Henry Huffy Puffy, and a creature, species uncertain, known as the Ant. I have little memory of the details of those stories, but I believe they centered on the personal and professional struggles of Henry Huffy Puffy and the Ant. When we were much older, we came to suspect that those characters had been surrogates for himself. Their anxieties were his. Knowing what I know now, I’m stunned by how much of his inner life he kept hidden. I’m touched, too, by his oddly oblique attempts to make himself known.

  I can’t say I ever understood him. I did not. Something inaccessible lurked behind all that charm. For me, he was the fifteen puzzle I never solved; the tiles refused to slide into place. Even in the intimate precincts of our family life, there was a prickliness about him. One felt from time to time the sting of his not entirely inadvertent rebuff. I’m not sure he knew what to do with the longing of his children to know him better. Perhaps it felt claustrophobic. He and my mother knew hundreds of people. I know because I sometimes lay on my stomach on the library rug and put the stamps on the stacks of Christmas cards he was addressing. Yet he had few, if any, intimate friends. “Do you have any friends who you could really go to about anything?” he once surprised a cousin of his by asking. “Yes, of course,” she answered. To which he said simply, “I don’t.”

  Another of his cousins, Mike Kennedy, told me he both knew and didn’t know my father. “There was a side of him that was very closed,” he said. “I wonder how many people really did know him.”

  He and psoriasis waged perpetual war. His elbows, chest, back, the palms of his hands were stained purple and itching. He alluded cryptically on occasion to “the black dog”—a term, I learned only too late, Winston Churchill used for his own periods of intense depression. “Like most people, I do go through vile, black depres
sions,” my father once told a magazine writer, who shoveled the quotation into the story. More than once, he predicted he wouldn’t live past fifty. Because he seemed jovial, sociable, and in good health, it was hard to know whether he meant it. Looking back, it seems an odd thing to say to your children.

  His style as a parent was less pedagogical than Pied Piper. Our mother took the lead in seeing that we studied music. She organized us into a chamber music group—piano, French horn, clarinet—to accompany cousins singing carols on Christmas Eve. She read poetry to us from a book she’d been given as a child. She played tennis with us, rode with us, skied with us: The sports we learned as children were the ones her parents had made sure she knew. My father, however, wasn’t of the kind that teach their children backgammon or economics in eighth grade. He was a reader but never pressed particular books on us. He knew quite a lot about art and music, but, around Christmas, he’d be alone in the library, paying bills and listening to Handel’s Messiah. He did challenge us to walk around the house with a collegiate dictionary on our heads, as a lesson in posture. He taught me to drive, with a stick shift, in a Jeep Wagoneer. And he introduced us to Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc—most memorably, “Matilda, Who Told Lies, and Was Burned to Death.” What I remember most vividly are his expeditions on which we tagged along—to sample the Double Gloucester at the cheese store in London; to the farmers’ market every Saturday morning. He organized bicycle outings and boat trips. Later, he refrained from offering unsolicited career advice. He never presumed to understand our work. He might, however, let you know, after you were already married, that it would be OK to bail if you concluded you’d made a serious mistake.