The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  My parents’ own match turned out not to have been made in heaven. As children, we’d heard the story of how, on their honeymoon, they’d been mistaken for brother and sister. I probably found that comforting at the time. But, knowing what I know now, I’d say that being mistaken on your honeymoon for your spouse’s sibling might be a poor predictor of marital bliss. They certainly looked like a good fit; they were a good-looking and appealing pair. And I know they’d been in love because once, in my twenties, I came across a letter written by my mother to my father sometime before they were married. The tone of the letter, which was folded in a book, was unlike the tone of any exchange between them that I’d witnessed. It was tender and filled with longing. Disconcerted by the unfamiliar intimacy, I returned the letter to the book, and the book to the shelf. Some years later, I went back to reread it, but I never found the book or the letter again. It was as though I’d dreamed it.

  The truth is, my parents didn’t make each other happy. Not that you’d have known it if you’d encountered them at a party. Even I, as a child, would have taken it for granted that they were as contented as anyone—if I’d bothered to think about it at all, which I didn’t. Over the decades, the distance between them widened. In a low-level war of attrition, they waged their battles with muffled sniper fire and passive aggression. If they ever fought openly, they were careful to do it out of earshot, except, it seems, on very rare occasions. My sister recalls waking in her third-floor bedroom, when she was still young, to the sound of arguing in the master bedroom below. Stealing out onto the landing, she heard our father sounding angrier than she’d ever heard him. She remembers our mother interjecting, in a tone that sounded like defeat, “You’re a horse’s ass.”

  We could see, even as children, that he liked women. In his lexicon, it was high praise to describe someone, male or female, as “terribly attractive.” The term covered attributes both intellectual and physical. He remarked upon it more often, and more effusively, than other qualities like, say, empathy or drive. As far as I could tell, “terribly attractive” women to whom he directed his charm and attention did not object. The way they reacted left me with the impression that he was “terribly attractive,” too. He often behaved differently around those women—more playful and more wolfish at the same time. Many years later, after his death, more than one person would say confidentially to my mother, “He was very naughty.” It was a word I’ve heard not infrequently applied to his mother, too. Whatever it meant, it’s uncertain that those informants disapproved. “He was naughty,” a male interior decorator once said admiringly to my mother. “But he was my ideal.”

  In the early 1960s, our family became close to another family. The father in the other family was bald, bespectacled, funny. A Ukrainian immigrant’s grandson, he managed the most fashionable dress shop in Philadelphia. His wife was glamorous and flirtatious—a former debutante and model whose Main Line family had all but disowned her for marrying a West Philadelphia Jew. My father found her “terribly attractive,” that was unmistakable. In 1963, the two couples traveled together through Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, Austria, France, and England. After that, a photograph of the four of them, on camels in front of the pyramids of Giza, hung among our family photos on my mother’s bathroom wall. Because the other couple had children roughly the same ages as Hopie and me, we all became friends, too. We formed a secret club, which convened in a dusty garret above my parents’ garage. We called it the Bobcat Club—an homage to our father. We considered what life might be like if our families merged. Years later, we’d remember the atmosphere in that period as electrified in ways we didn’t understand. We were like warblers, sensing the advent of a storm, days in advance. The children in the other family looked back on that period, half jokingly, as their Camelot—a bright, shining moment that ended abruptly, a week after the Kennedy assassination, when their father, the dress shop manager, overweight and under stress, died of a heart attack at forty-five. By then, we’d begun to sense, from the presence of stray voltage, that something was up between our father and our friends’ terribly attractive mother.

  * * *

  My father’s return to his family’s place with his bride after college had coincided with his mother’s ascent to the throne left vacant by her father’s death. The family’s cash flow was no longer what it had once been, though that wasn’t necessarily evident to outsiders. In the late thirties, with war brewing in Europe, the Colonel had considered shutting off parts of the big house to save money (then had decided against it after concluding that even a pared-down household would require at least a dozen staff). By the late forties, he was bedridden and barely able to speak—from the stroke his doctor had hoped to avert; and, in January 1949, he’d expired in South Carolina at the age of sixty-nine. The man who’d taught the Colonel to fly headed for Georgetown, collected the body, and flew it home to Pennsylvania. There, the Colonel was buried in the cemetery of that small, stone church where his grandson would be buried nearly sixty years later. On sheets of lined paper that would remain in her desk in the library of the big house for sixty-five years, Muz recorded the names of the hundreds of people who sent telegrams and condolence notes—a group that ranged from Strom Thurmond, the segregationist governor of South Carolina, fresh from his campaign as the States’ Rights Party candidate for president, to Sara Grant, a former Mansfield employee identified in the list as a “Negro cook.” The Colonel’s will was thirty-eight words long. An obituary writer, effusing about how the deceased “had the foresight to build for the future,” noted, with what reads like approval, that the Colonel had set up his country estate in such a way “that his death imposed no confiscatory taxes.”

  The corpse of Colonel Montgomery was barely cold when a visiting dairyman, casting an eye over the Ardrossan Ayrshires, was overheard to remark that he’d never seen such a neglected herd. Upon learning of the comment, the Colonel’s adoring eldest, Helen Hope, my father’s mother, resolved that someone needed to take charge—and promptly accepted the assignment.

  “Within a month,” she’d recall cheerily later, “we’d doubled the losses.”

  Helen Hope knew little or nothing about dairy farming when she took command, just short of age fifty. Didn’t know a laxative from lactation, as she put it. For the first three years of the fifties, the dairy bled money: According to one profit-and-loss statement, which somehow survived, the monthly losses in that period soared as high as twenty thousand dollars. In the rare months when the dairy wasn’t operating at a loss, the amount of profit was counted in two or three digits. Helen Hope’s mother, Muz, shelled out loans to the farm in amounts as high as one hundred thousand dollars. In 1952, Helen Hope consulted an Ayrshire breeder from Connecticut, who, after finding the herd “very much above average,” concluded that years of “indifferent management” had taken a toll on milk production. He suggested changes in breeding practices and feeding, pasture improvements, and culling to remove the herd’s least productive cows. To raise cash, he recommended selling the services of the highest producers as purebred stock for breeding. In less than a decade, the farm’s average annual milk production tripled. By the late 1970s, the herd was the highest-producing Ayrshire herd of its size in the country. With a professional operations manager and herdsman, Ardrossan Farms was shipping three and a half tons of milk a day. How often the business broke even in those years is unclear. But its proprietor was famous.

  Helen Hope Montgomery Scott, glamorous dairy farmer, made good copy. She was Tracy Lord with a Rabelaisian wit, three hundred cows, and a meticulously organized closet full of designer clothes. Unlike others of her class, she did not disdain publicity. She understood what “the ladies from the social columns,” as my uncle called them, were after; and since what they were after often coincided with what she wanted, she served it up. “We chatted, she laughed, she told my wife she looked ‘simply divine’ and chided me for not warning her my wife was ‘such a beauty,’” a reporter wrote after her
death, recalling their first meeting. “Soon she had us supposing the whole party would have been a flop if we hadn’t come.” Returning the favor, feature writers rolled out her repertoire of stories. Once, I got locked in the rumble seat of a car—with a British trainer, no less! I won a Charleston contest at a Paris nightclub, and Josephine Baker gave me a big pot of flowers as a surprise! Even her departure to London for a hip replacement made news. “I saw your picture in the paper again,” her brother-in-law needled her. She laughed. “I just jump in front of any camera that’s in the room!”

  Photographers tracked her to the milk house, where she often sat with the herdsman at milking time, inspecting each cow as it sauntered into the barn. Every morning at 8:00 A.M., she’d be on the phone with the general manager. At haying time, she’d pull up in the fields in her gray Humber with a wicker basket of cold beer or ginger ale for the men. She sent the manager’s son to sleepaway camp, covered expenses when income from the trusts was short, and spent her own income on capital improvements. Her legend was such that people in Wayne were surprised to encounter her, with her dogs in the back of her car, in the parking lot of the Acme supermarket. At Angelo D’Amicantonio’s shoe repair store, she’d drop off shoes, free horse-show tickets, and her latest collection of off-color jokes. On Ardrossan, nothing happened without Helen Hope knowing. If a newly arrived family member asked the manager for salt for her driveway, she might get a call back from Helen Hope informing her that she’d be using sand, not salt. If you were foolish enough to cross a field with cows in it, figuring no one would see you, a stern phone message from Helen Hope would await you upon your return. When the residents of a subdivision on the far side of the northwest frontier committed some border violation, she invited them for cocktails and maneuvered them into submission. The sting of her reproach more than once left a family member in tears. “There was an underlying clarity that it was going to be exactly the way she wanted it,” one grandchild recalled. “And, if it wasn’t that way, then you’d be needing to fix it.”

  By the time I was a child, four generations of my father’s family were living in the houses the Colonel had bought or built. My great-grandmother was the lone family member in the big house. A half mile away, my grandparents were in the house where my father had grown up. My great-uncle Aleck was in a house halfway between. Aleck’s son, Bob, lived for a time in a house across Abraham’s Lane from my grandparents. Bob’s sister, Alix, alighted for a time in a house behind her father’s. My parents were in our house, in the northeast corner. My uncle and aunt were two fields away (until they took wing). Another cousin of my father’s, one of Mary Binney’s daughters, lived with her husband in one of the Colonel’s cottages—until she became pregnant with her first child and was reassigned to a six-bedroom house, near the main dairy barn, being vacated by my father’s godmother, who was heading off into a third marriage.

  My great-grandmother, Muz, passed much of her time with needlepoint work in her lap, perpetually stitching colored woolen yarn through a hand-painted canvas. She’d covered an entire eight-foot-long sofa in the ballroom, plus pillows, in floral needlepoint. All thirty dining-room chairs had needlepoint-covered seats. On the living-room walls, there were framed pictures of the big house, interiors and exterior—all done by Muz in needlepoint. You could idle in the living room, staring at a needlepoint image of the room in which you were standing. In the image, you could make out clearly the miniature portraits of the Colonel and Muz herself over the fireplaces. It was a needlepoint hall of mirrors. On beautiful days, she could be spotted outdoors, making her way beneath the sycamores along the driveway toward her son’s house for a cup of coffee with the cook. Those who came to call on her in the late afternoon knew not to show up until after her favorite soaps. For a time, there’d been only one television in the house. It had been in the servants’ dining room off the kitchen. It was there, I’m told, that she joined her heavily Irish household staff to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Anyone who spotted “cousin Archie,” one of the Scottish Montgomerys and a descendant of the thirteenth earl, in the crowd at Westminster Abbey was to alert her immediately.

  My father’s uncle Aleck, his mother’s next-door neighbor, often dressed in khaki, a preference dating from his days as a lieutenant on a Navy troop carrier during World War II. After graduating from Harvard, he’d gone to work in the brokerage house founded by the father he couldn’t please, but he was eventually sidelined, apparently for misbehaving with money from his mother’s account. In the basement of his house, he kept his liquor supply in a walk-in safe. On a map, he’d shaded in blue every country he’d ever visited or flown over. On the second floor, he’d turned a bedroom into a display case for his pistols, which numbered in the hundreds. “I hope Aleck never goes a little crazy,” the husband of a onetime maid remarked, “because he could wipe out the state.” In the root cellar in the pasture beside his house, his gun club had once stored ammunition for shooting live pigeons. Wounded birds had sometimes crash-landed in the garage, where, as a child, Aleck’s daughter would find them dying. Later, he sold the pistols and took out a multimillion-dollar bank loan to buy a collection of medals—which, when he decided it was time to sell, he discovered were fake. In the bankruptcy that followed, the bank took much of his personal property. Crushed, he repaired to his bed, where he spent his final years on his back, in the care of a maid and a cook, lubricated with sloshings of wine dispensed from a cooler nearby.

  A feature of life on Ardrossan in those days was Sunday night supper at the big house. Adult family members were assumed to be attending unless they called to say they weren’t. They were encouraged to bring friends, not least to keep the family members on good behavior. The seating was at card tables, with place cards cut from old invitations; if you flipped one over, you might find details of some wedding still two weeks away. The menu was predictable—very often, cold roast beef and a hodgepodge my parents called, no judgment implied, vomit salad. For dessert: mint chocolate chip ice cream with a dusting of Nestle’s chocolate powder. Ed’s rebellious wife, Linny, called the event the “Sunday Night Ghastlies.” Others felt the suppers captured the spirit of what Ardrossan was intended to be. “You weren’t missing Downton Abbey,” Aleck’s son, Bob, told me. “You were Downton Abbey.”

  In my father’s generation, there were powerful inducements to settle on Ardrossan. It was a full-service, cradle-to-grave operation. In return for living there, a descendant of the Colonel would have not only a house but a place in a web of colorful clansmen and retainers. He might even end up with a job in a family firm. For small household emergencies, there was a plumber and a painter on call. A laundress would accept your linens and send them back starched, and smelling of cigarette smoke, in a woven, split-wood basket. There was a tree surgeon nearby whom we called Uncle Sidney; he was the youngest half sibling of the Colonel. My grandmother worked hard to maximize the number of family members in residence. They were assumed to share her feelings about ensuring the enterprise’s survival. The family would keep the place intact—and the place might do the same for the family. On Christmas Eve, when the generations sat down together, in black tie, in the big-house dining room for dinner, after a frenzy of gifting and regifting, a member of the older generation would rap his or her wineglass with a knife and invite everyone to bow their heads for a moment of silence to remember those no longer living. In those fleeting seconds, a few fractious, fourth-generation, undergraduate cousins might be thinking dark thoughts about cultural hegemony, Thorstein Veblen, and social stratification. But most of those in attendance believed down deep that they were the beneficiaries of something rare and worth preserving. They were willing to stick around and do their bit to see that it endured.

  Strange to say, I’m not sure they thought of themselves as rich. Or should I say that “rich” isn’t the word they’d have used? Rich was people with income cascading in from more immediately identifiable sources—television stations, supermark
ets, vodka. In the case of my father’s family, the financial picture was, at least to me, more opaque. Decades had passed since the money that built and sustained Ardrossan had been amassed. Maybe my grandfather could have said exactly how that money had been made, and by whom, but I doubt I was the only fourth- or even third-generation descendant with no real clue. By the second half of the twentieth century, the men in the family behaved like lots of others on the commuter trains in and out of the city: They went off to jobs in which they did well, but didn’t appear to be making a killing. The income from the trusts went to the oldest generation; or it went to maintaining the property and paying the taxes. The cost of all that upkeep added up; money for major expenses was downright tight. On at least one occasion, the trustees borrowed fifty thousand dollars from my grandmother to cover something unavoidable, like an exterior paint job for the big house—then paid her back by slashing her rent. My mother’s father, the Bostonian who’d made his own money, had shrewdly sussed out the situation: After telling my mother that he’d found her mother-in-law ravishingly beautiful and spoiled rotten, he’d tacked on, “and land-poor.”

  They did, however, think of themselves as fortunate. Ed, my father’s brother and the eldest of that generation, had been the first to settle on the place. He’d come back from World War II and college with his new wife at age twenty-three. If anyone had asked him then, he told me, he’d have said he never wanted to leave his family’s place again. As long as he lived in an Ardrossan house, his father had told him, his parents would pay his rent. So Helen Hope ejected the tenants from a small house in an outpost of the place known as Banjo Town, said once to have been a racially mixed neighborhood before the Colonel annexed it. When Ed’s wife, Linny, became pregnant, Helen Hope ousted a second set of tenants from a bigger house about a mile away. “That will be the third generation to live there,” her newly widowed mother, Muz, wrote with satisfaction to Helen Hope. “I think your father would be so pleased.”