The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  But Linny, like her mother-in-law, was spirited and strong-willed. She’d moved willingly from Massachusetts, where she’d grown up, but she felt like an outsider on the place. When the butler answered the door on her first visit to the big house, and Ed said, “Linny, this is Hugo,” she’d answered, gamely, “Good afternoon, Uncle Hugo.” Linny also happened to be in her mother-in-law’s line of work—that is, horses. She rode with Helen Hope, hunted with Helen Hope, kept a horse in Helen Hope’s stable. But she disliked being under her mother-in-law’s thumb. When I asked my uncle why they’d left, he said bluntly, “Oh, my wife couldn’t stand her. They couldn’t share six hundred acres or whatever it was.” Helen Hope’s unsolicited memo on the proper handling of servants was the last straw. Ed and Linny moved an hour away, to a farm of their own. Helen Hope wasn’t pleased, but she was practical; she didn’t want a fight. Her mother, Muz, invited Linny to visit her at the big house before departing. Muz told her she understood why Linny was leaving. But to Helen Hope, Muz said something quite different: “Poor dear Ed—if she told him to jump off the roof, he’d do it to please her.”

  Ed and Linny weren’t the only members of their generation to leave. Aleck’s son, Bob, had moved into a house on the place after college, but he left for business school and then a job in California. His decision displeased his father, who seems to have subscribed to the idea there was a family obligation to live on the place. Bob, like Linny, wasn’t eager to take marching orders from Helen Hope. He had no desire, he told me, to be one more descendant on Ardrossan with, as he put it, its “fairly well-developed power structure” in which he’d be “the junior guy.” If an underlying principle of democracy is that agreement is not essential but participation is, Ed told me, that principle was reversed in the bailiwick overseen by Helen Hope. Participation wasn’t essential; agreement was.

  My father accepted those terms.

  I never thought to ask him if he’d ever had doubts about settling on the place. He’d married a woman not only able but willing to fit into its table of organization. He’d launched himself smoothly, I assumed, in the profession of one great-grandfather and several uncles. He’d slipped comfortably onto the boards of schools, hospitals, banks, cultural institutions. He’d even involved himself, like his grandfather, in the local Republican Party, for a time. He’d toyed with running for office, then had decided against it, telling at least one person that he didn’t have the money. In short, my father gave every appearance of having embraced the role written for him. He seemed to be playing it to the hilt. When I was younger, it would never have occurred to me to even wonder if he’d ever dreamed of a different life.

  But shortly before his fortieth birthday, a door was unexpectedly thrown open. At a dinner party at his parents’ house, he found himself seated two seats away from his parents’ friend Walter Annenberg, then the nominee to be the American ambassador to the Court of St. James. As the meal was winding down, the woman seated between the two of them turned and murmured to my father, “He’s going to offer you a job.” At least on the surface, Annenberg was unlike my father: An immigrant’s son, he’d built his father’s debt-ridden business into a communications giant whose holdings included TV Guide, which had a circulation of twenty-three million. He was a philanthropist and a collector of important Impressionist art. The job offer, which came several weeks later, was the position of special assistant, which my father liked later to describe as “somewhere between his deputy and his dog.” (In private, he called himself “Walter Annenberg’s nanny”—the smooth, Anglophile aide-de-camp to the sometimes ponderous billionaire who’d gotten off to a regrettable start with the British press when, presenting his credentials, he answered the queen’s question about where he was living with a thicket of verbiage—“at the Residence, subject to certain discomfiture owing to elements of refurbishment.”) The job offer filled my father, I now know, with panic. He worried about his career, his law firm, his “position” in Philadelphia. Friends encouraged him to go. “Your duty to yourself calls,” a civic elder told him. But several family members had doubts. SECOND THOUGHTS INCREASINGLY UNCERTAIN, his father telegrammed from Barbados. Ed said he’d turn the job down if the offer were his: If my father didn’t, he said, he might find himself rethinking everything, including his choice to go into the law. Ed would eventually be proven right about that. But a radical rethinking, it turns out, was what my father was after. “I have a theory about lawyers’ minds,” he’d say later. “Like pencils they get sharper and sharper and smaller and smaller. I wanted to stretch my mind.”

  My parents rented a corner house on a garden square in Belgravia. The Russian-born violinist Nathan Milstein and his wife lived a few doors down. In the window of a house across the street from ours, we’d catch sight of an elderly man, whom we knew of only as Dr. Winnicott, gazing in our direction. Years later, I discovered that the man had been D. W. Winnicott, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst (who developed the concept of the “false self,” the social manner that children exposed to inattentive mothering construct in order to comply with the expectations of others). My father became a member of several exclusive men’s clubs on St. James’s Street—cushy redoubts populated with marquesses, viscounts, and earls. His job brought him and my mother in contact with MPs, visiting bigwigs, the occasional royal. Sometimes, when a double-barreled name with aristocratic overtones might be advantageous, my father startled us by identifying himself as Mr. Montgomery-Scott. He insisted the British liked it. Sotto voce, my mother rechristened him Mr. Montague-Splotch.

  I was dispatched to a girls’ boarding school on a piece of land in Kent said to have a mention in the Domesday Book, William the Conqueror’s eleventh-century survey of England and Wales. There’d once been an Elizabethan house, with a moat, on the site. By the time I got there, the main building was a nineteenth-century mansion, remodeled in a Tudor and Jacobean style, with leaded windows and crenellations. Girls from London arrived, in uniform, by train from Charing Cross Station, hauling trunks stuffed with regulation neckties, twenty-four linen handkerchiefs, and a floor-length cape. We battened on a diet of batter-fried Spam, toad in the hole, and dead man’s leg. The longer we stayed, the plumper we became. Our intellectual intake included Virgil, Homer, Shakespeare, Molière, Racine, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Metaphysical poets. But our consuming preoccupation was food. We pilfered cheese from the staff kitchen, and hoarded iced buns, known as greased rats, served as a snack. We raided nearby orchards, filling book bags with stolen apples that we stored in our lockers until the study rooms reeked of fermentation. The gray-eyed headmistress, who bestrode the school’s landscaped grounds with a matched set of dachshunds in her wake, occasionally sent us into mass hysteria by announcing, in morning assembly, a surprise day off—which we’d spend lolling among the gorse bushes, swilling hard cider until we could have sworn we were drunk. Once, returning from a weekend lacrosse match at another school, I found that my father had ridden the train out from London, biked to the school, found the music wing, stuffed my French horn case with fruit and chocolate, then slipped away, unnoticed, back to London.

  My mother, unable to study music seriously while raising children on the Main Line, seized the opportunity presented by the move to London. She found a piano teacher and a college of music that accepted older students; and, after a next-door neighbor objected to her finger exercises, she rented a piano studio in Mayfair, where she took to spending her days. Her musical education was one of many reasons she loved the years in London. For both my parents, those years may have been their happiest together—not because they managed to shrink the distance between them, which they didn’t, but because the distance now worked for both. My mother had wanted a piece of her life that would be hers alone: Music wasn’t merely a passion, it was a foundation on which to begin rebuilding if the marriage fell apart. Before taking the job, my father had written a list of his and my mother’s concerns. On that list, he noted that my
mother’s greatest fear was “my over drinking.”

  He moved first, ahead of the rest of us, to start work and move into the house. He was swept immediately into his new life. By the time my mother arrived a few weeks later, he’d been to the races at Ascot, seen Così Fan Tutte at Glyndebourne, watched Knights of the Garter take the oath at Windsor Castle, and been a guest at country-house weekends. When she landed at Heathrow, exhausted from the red-eye, my father met her, smelling of alcohol. At dinner that night, he was so drunk she considered flying home. Later that evening, in the handsome house on the square, which my father had stocked with flowers for the occasion, my mild-mannered mother reached for a leather-framed wedding photograph in their bedroom, wheeled around, and, in a moment of anger I find hard to imagine, smashed the frame on what may or may not have been my father’s head. Glass rained in shards on the twin beds.

  “Not a good evening,” my father wrote, without elaboration.

  The years in England were a turning point in my father’s drinking. Until then, he’d drunk only at night—or so he’d say in a confession a quarter century later. But in England, there was sherry before lunch, wine with lunch, port after lunch. If there were fewer cocktails before dinner than back in the United States, there was more drinking during and after. My father was a diplomat in demand, good company, and a food and wine connoisseur. Those attributes conspired to multiply his opportunities to drink. “My overall consumption rose dramatically,” he’d admit years later. He tried never to appear drunk, for the sake of his job; but back in the United States on his summer vacations, he abandoned restraint. “There the lid came off,” he’d say. “High every night, beginning about 6:00.” Returning home to Pennsylvania after four years in London, he added his British drinking habits to his American ones. Once, withdrawing from cigarettes, he stopped drinking for three weeks because alcohol made him crave tobacco. He never smoked again. But he resumed drinking, with his momentum redoubled. In retrospect, he’d concede later, it was too bad he didn’t stop both.

  “I never considered it,” he’d say. “I liked to drink.”

  Chapter Seven

  The ritual objects of my father’s devotion had long held for me a special fascination. There was the industrial-strength corkscrew, like a man-operated grenade launcher, bolted to the pantry wall. There was a brushed stainless steel martini shaker, and a tool called a Tap-Icer with a leaden head capable of detonating an ice cube in your bare hand. On my periodic assignments as wine steward, I road tested every gizmo in his collection—the twist corkscrew, the winged corkscrew, the cork puller with two prongs. “The waiter’s friend,” with its folding blade, was my favorite; it never let you down. Outside his wine cellar, he’d hung an illuminated manuscript certifying that he was a member of a fraternal order of burgundy enthusiasts called La Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin. He had their official wine-tasting cup—a sterling silver, miniature Jell-O mold sort of thing you could dangle on a ribbon around your neck. All those accoutrements seemed to me to have meaning for my father. Perhaps they possessed supernatural powers. Perhaps clues to the elusive chevalier resided in the gloomy recesses of the liquor cabinet, where, he used to tell us, the missing hindquarters of the stuffed hare might be found extruding from the back side of the wall—like the other half of the magician’s assistant, after the magician saws her in two.

  For a long time, I saw nothing ominous in my father’s drinking. Pretty much every adult I’d ever encountered drank. If anyone had told me there were people who didn’t, it would have been like learning there were people who’d sworn off, say, soap. At the annual Easter egg hunt on the lawn at the house of my great-aunt and -uncle, grown-ups swilled vodka and Dubonnet while their offspring rampaged across the greensward, Easter baskets flying. My grandfather, admired for the Meursault he served with shad roe at dinner parties in spring, and for the champagne that came out with dessert, kept a sharp eye peeled, during cocktails in his living room, for a drained glass. “How about a dividend?” he’d ask, like FDR mixing martinis for Harry Hopkins and Missy LeHand. After a bibulous dinner around my parents’ dining-room table one night, one of my aunts went missing, only to be found, sometime later, nodding off on the downstairs john.

  But the acceleration in my father’s drinking collided with my belated adolescent rebellion. The year my parents returned from England, I set off for college and a wider world. The Senate Watergate Committee was holding televised hearings that summer. Nixon resigned the following year. South Vietnam surrendered, Saigon fell, and, during a summer job on a newspaper in Arizona, someone loaned me a copy of The Second Sex. A few years earlier, I’d been flattered by my father’s gift of a subscription to The Economist. Now, during my visits home, our conversations burst into flames. The war, capital punishment, elitism, public education: Any topic could turn combustible after 7:00 P.M. My father’s rhetorical style, when he’d been drinking, was maddening—all short-angle volley and backhand slice. Arguments, loaded with spin, bounced backward after clearing the net. To me, he seemed patronizing and dismissive. No doubt I was ill-informed and thin-skinned. But at least I was sober. Stung by my disrespect, he’d stalk off to the pantry. I’d stay behind, holding back tears. I’d hear the refrigerator door open, the splashing of wine into glass. Had the ambush of his children’s adolescence caught him off guard? “Distant” was how he described his own parents later. Was he unprepared for intergenerational hand-to-hand combat?

  My mother, frozen in the crossfire, dreaded my visits.

  Once, during a year I took off from college, a British writer named Enid Bagnold stayed in my parents’ house for a few nights. She had a play opening in Philadelphia, at age eighty-six. From a failed hip operation, she was addicted to morphine; my father had been asked to tap his sprawling connections and find a doctor to arrange for sixty milligrams, four times a day. On the evening of this august personage’s arrival, I happened to be at home between jobs. My father had drunk more than on previous nights. Over dinner, he directed me to tell the jet-lagged octogenarian why I’d chosen to take a break from college. I’d once turned in a “good performance” on the subject, he told his guest. This time, apparently, I bombed. He cut me off. “Isn’t it funny?” he observed to her, half laughing. I’d spoken “the King’s English” perfectly upon leaving school in England, he said, referring to me; now I was um-ing and ah-ing “like an ordinary American.” The playwright, napping over her roast lamb, came to. She’d missed most of my speech, she said, but “the last page and a half” had made sense. “That doesn’t say much for the previous four pages,” my father remarked, grinning in my direction.

  Like him, I kept journals, too. I’d been flitting from spiral to loose-leaf to bound notebook in pursuit of the most congenial medium. Now I took refuge in scribbling and venting. I vowed repeatedly to myself to steer clear of debates with my father—a strategy that met with mixed success. The semblance of harmony seemed to give rise to a whole new problem. “We have so little to say to each other anymore,” I reported. “I sense this huge mass of mutual distrust.” I couldn’t raise this issue, I told myself, “since the lesson I have learned all along from him is we must maintain this appearance of everything is fine, just fine.” But my silence was no better. “This really is a quite serious problem,” I told myself. “Will things become more and more forced, less and less genuine, generally worse and worse, for the rest of our life together?” I scrapped my plan to become a lawyer, like him. On visits home, I became Bronislaw Malinowski in the field. I was the participant observer, master of a newfound detachment. “One big battle,” I boasted to myself, after a weekend at home. “. . . I was great—totally (almost . . . ) calm.”

  In a forgotten journal entry from one Memorial Day weekend, I’m struck by my measured, ethnographer’s tone. I was living in Cambridge, in the final days of my senior year in college, and I’d called home for clearance for a spur-of-the-moment visit to the Nantucket house. My mother had said sure, of co
urse, why not. My father, she said, had flown up with some man, whose name I didn’t know. They’d be thrilled to see me, she was certain. So, with a college boyfriend named Jim, I took the bus to Woods Hole and the ferry to the island on Sunday morning. Upon arrival on the island, I found a pay phone and dialed the number for the house. I’d been suppressing a nagging suspicion.

  “Where are you?” my father asked briskly, after the initial exchange.

  Just off the ferry, I answered.

  A second or three elapsed.

  “I’m not alone,” he ventured.

  I neglected to ask the obvious question.

  He elected not to volunteer the answer.

  The habit of apology, culturally overdetermined, was triggered—like the patellar reflex at the tap of a rubber-tipped hammer.

  No problem! I reassured him. We’ll stay in a motel!

  He would have none of it. We must come ahead.

  “We won’t bother you,” he added, “if you won’t bother us.”

  Jim and I repaired to a doughnut shop for a breakfast of wild speculation. Jim was just fleshing out a scenario in which my father’s companion was a nine-year-old Puerto Rican boy when the swinging door to the doughnut shop flew open and suddenly the man I called Popsy was standing above us, redder in the face than usual and breathing heavily. He’d checked every restaurant, he told us, in the couple of blocks between the ferry terminal and where he’d finally found us. Sliding into the booth, he apologized for the state of alarm that my call had set off. “Her name is Linda,” he said, with a degree of directness that, I can say in retrospect, I admire. In a moment of panic, he said, she’d accused him of staging the encounter. She’d even threatened to leave. He reached for our bill and paid it. Then he drove us to the house.