The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  Linda was making her way down the creaky wooden staircase, barefoot, as we entered. Diminutive and blond, she was closer to my age than to my father’s. After his hasty departure from the house, she’d gone into the kitchen and cleaned up the remains of their lunch. Then, to spare herself the weirdness of being found bent over the sink, she’d gone outside onto the porch, then back into the living room, then upstairs. She’d studied herself in a mirror. She’d changed out of a shirt that had the initials of my father’s law firm emblazoned across the chest. She’d knotted her long hair into a not quite matronly bun. As Jim and I stood in the hallway shaking her hand and idiotically smiling, I watched from somewhere up near the ceiling. Who knew, back when Odille was teaching my sister and brother and me the importance of manners, in what unexpected circumstances they’d come in handy? It’s a miracle I didn’t curtsy. Once that hurdle was behind us, Jim and I drifted into the kitchen and finished off the uneaten dessert. Surveying the contents of the fridge, I noticed two bottles of champagne and a box of vaginal suppositories, for treating a yeast infection, the prescription label made out in our hostess’s name.

  Should I have been angry? There’s no evidence in the journal that I was. Should I have caught the next ferry back to the mainland? That might have made me a better person. Instead, I slid into the role of the reporter I was on the cusp of becoming. I watched closely, took mental notes, and, upon returning to Cambridge, filled a half dozen single-spaced pages with the story. My dispatch shows promise. There’s Linda’s age, occupation, and marital status. I took note of the line of work of the man she was divorcing. I remarked on her first-name-basis references to “Virginia” and “Lytton”: Having shaken off my own adolescent Bloomsbury infatuation, I appear to have found hers sophomoric. From scattered clues, I determined that this was not Linda’s first, or even second, visit to the house. She was well acquainted, she let it be known, with my father’s swashbuckling culinary style. When the conversation turned to movies, she reminded him, in my presence, that he’d seen The Last Tango in Paris with my mother and another couple, and that my mother had fallen asleep.

  I wondered if that was true.

  My father’s demeanor didn’t escape my attention. He’d gone to some lengths to import Linda, I learned. When his chartered plane had been unable to land at the little airport where they’d agreed to meet, he’d covered the cost of a taxi to drive her forty-five minutes to Newark Airport. At one point during the weekend, he let me know that my mother had called while I was out. She’d asked about the sleeping arrangements. In his account of the conversation, he made a point of telling me that he’d answered, “We won’t be taking up many rooms.” Did he expect from me a conspiratorial chuckle? After dinner, when Jim and I were loading the dishwasher, he wandered in from the dining room where he and Linda had been finishing off a bottle of wine. “We think you’re great,” he said, kissing me on the top of my head. Even now, I can’t think of the appropriate response. The obvious one, I suppose, is, “We think you’re both great, too.”

  My father and I never discussed that weekend in the months and years that followed. Maybe he figured no explanation was needed, or that the situation spoke for itself. Nor did he ever ask me, even indirectly, not to mention my holiday with Linda to my mother. Once, years later, he said he’d always assumed that I had. But how could I? By the time Jim and I left on the ferry the following day, I was complicit in the betrayal. I’d spent the night in my parents’ house with my father and Linda in the next room. I hadn’t even been shocked. What had struck me, in fact, was that my father had seemed more at ease with Linda than he often seemed at home with us. There’s just one reference in my journal to what I was feeling when the weekend was over. I thought it had made me more able to be myself in my father’s presence. The experience left me, I told myself, with a new feeling of autonomy—though perhaps what I really meant was that stumbling upon that particular secret had left me with a feeling of power.

  * * *

  In the years after the return from London, Philadelphia was changing. Its population, having peaked in 1950, was in a downward spiral. Industries that had churned out money that had built the Main Line were dying or departing, taking jobs and tax revenue with them. As African Americans and Puerto Ricans flowed into city neighborhoods, white residents pulled out. They sprinted to the suburbs on brand-new highways and bridges. Indoor shopping malls sprang up in places like King of Prussia, undermining the retail strength of Philadelphia. As Ivy League universities dropped admissions quotas, the city’s business executives became more racially and ethnically diverse. On boards of trustees, the old Philadelphia establishment gave way to the more recently moneyed. After the first Irish American mayor came the first Italian American, the first African American, the first Jewish mayor. In nearly every sphere of city life, the influence of Philadelphia’s Protestant ruling class was ebbing.

  The life of a Philadelphia lawyer excited my father less than ever. His mind having been stretched by his years abroad, he had no interest in resuming its pencil-ization. He’d been attracted to public service since his twenties; he’d served on many boards and had been asked to join others. Now he devoted more and more of his time and energy to the city’s civic and cultural institutions. For the better part of a decade, he was president of the Academy of Music, the one-hundred-twenty-year-old concert and opera hall where, as a boy, he’d first gone with his talented, artistic aunt to hear the orchestra perform under her adored Stokowski. Then he became the president and chief executive of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Every morning, he delivered himself to the museum’s classically inspired temple overlooking the Schuylkill River. He could be spotted riding his 1952 Raleigh Standard up the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in the rain, poncho flapping over his blue pin-striped suit, or in city hall, wrangling with the mayor’s men over the shrinking city subsidy for the museum. “The job is tremendously exciting and awesomely loaded with problems, most of which are called money,” he wrote to a former colleague on his first day on the job. “Please come and see me. As a child, I had dreamed of living in a palace and the only palace I knew was the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Here I am.”

  He was an admired figure—the civic-minded, public-spirited, socially alert patrician. At a time when the finances of many families like his were dwindling, he could lead the city’s cultural institutions by contributing, if not piles of money, his lively and energetic service. He enjoyed the role and was undeniably good at it. He might choose to present himself, with amusing self-deprecation, as simply “a somewhat overweight man with a red face and a slightly English accent who seems to do a number of things,” but he was proud of his contribution to the life of the city. Magazines crowned him “the quintessential Philadelphian.” Reporters found him more interesting and fun than the stereotype suggested. Photographers sometimes shot him from below, his arms crossed imperatorially across his chest. In his sixteen years’ tenure as CEO of the museum, its attendance climbed to an all-time high. Its endowment increased fivefold. At the hundreds of parties, receptions, and openings all over the city that the museum president might be expected to attend each year, you could find him—face flushed, eyes twinkling, drink in hand.

  Bicycling had supplanted beagling as his extracurricular passion; he’d passed on his beagling duties to a younger man. On vacations, he’d check his bicycle on a flight, often but not always to some compact, English-speaking place. He’d set off with little more than a tin of tea, a set of Allen wrenches, a change of clothes. On a three-week biking trip we did in China, he congratulated himself privately on having “purposefully shed” the strongest younger cyclists on the trip—“largely to show that fat old men can do it, too.” On that trip, it rained so hard and so long, hundreds of Chinese in the province where we were biking drowned. My father wore a single pair of biking shorts, his saddlebags having been lost en route. Defying our Chinese minders, he woke me at dawn for an unauthorized spin through the backstreets o
f Guangzhou. In a restaurant, confronted with a dreary “Western lunch,” he charmed a young Chinese guide into sharing her pigs’ intestines with him. For a man who’d planted himself in a single corner of southeastern Pennsylvania for nearly all of his life, my father sometimes seemed happiest on an unknown road in an undiscovered country, with his bicycling companions, if any, a half mile behind.

  Once, when I was in my twenties, my brother and I joined him on a trip through East Anglia. He led us through ancient churchyards, spectacular gardens, country estates. We lingered at dusk in the silence of the Ely Cathedral close. On a trip through Ireland, I trailed him, against a mercurial headwind, through the Derryveagh Mountains in Donegal to a place called the Poisoned Glen. The ride was breathtaking and grueling, and it put me in a rage. Out of earshot, I cursed my stupidity. “I was wondering for the millionth time what it was about self-flagellation that appealed to him,” I wrote that night. “But couldn’t I wonder the same about myself?” If you’d asked me what I was doing, biking with my father, I might have said those father-financed trips were what I could afford. I was a reporter on a suburban daily, pulling down the pay of a garage mechanic and living in a one-bedroom apartment in Hudson County, New Jersey, next door to a philosophizing, disabled Vietnam vet who worked as a toll collector at Exit 16W. Years later, I came to see those trips with my father more clearly as an attempt at communication in a vernacular he preferred. He was “easier to do things with than to talk to,” he once said. In my twenties, it occurs to me now, I was still playing gin rummy on the hospital bed.

  In Hong Kong, at the end of the China trip, he threw a birthday party for himself. Three weeks earlier, after a fitful first night in a windowless room in a YMCA, he’d dodged an invitation to bond with our group and had taken me to lunch at the Peninsula Hotel. It was my father’s first trip to Asia. Yet he seemed to know instinctively how to find the oldest colonial hotel in Kowloon. The grand buffet, he’d assured me, would be “good for morale.” Now, five hundred miles of cycling and many pit toilets later, my father, turning fifty-three, resumed his acquaintance with the Peninsula’s maître d’. By the time we returned for dinner, a table had been set for eighteen. Everyone on the cycling trip came—the British economist from the Solomon Islands; the cider maker from Princeton; the teacher from Moose Jaw. The menu included quail with avocado, roast sirloin of beef, a 1978 Château Lagrange. Out the window, the lights of Hong Kong Harbor shimmered. To my father’s left, he’d seated the guide who’d shared her pigs’ intestines with him. To his right, he sat a dowdy Canadian who’d gotten on his nerves from day one by committing various misdemeanors including wearing a reflective vest and, as he put it, “doing up her hair to resemble a water buffalo.” A good host, he’d told me, always seats the worst “club dumper” next to himself.

  The last bike trip he and Elliot and I took together was the best. We rode down the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand at the dazzling peak of summer. The roads were empty, the mountains towering, the landscape constantly changing. Turning inland, we pedaled through a rain forest, up into foothills, and then mountains, where a helicopter eventually airlifted our group onto a glacier. Other days, we sailed past meadows blanketed in wildflowers and leaped off a bridge into a rushing river. On our final day, the three of us paid a call on a couple of charming, at-risk throwbacks. In a palatial terrarium in Queenstown, we gaped at a pair of kiwi, a remnant of one of the many species of flightless birds that once had the run of the North and South Islands. Before the arrival of competition, the birds’ forebears had roamed their territory unchallenged. But, spared rival species, they’d gradually lost the ability to fly. Now they were in grave trouble: On the South Island, they’d disappeared from the wild. Here were just two, the size of small chickens, teetering on spindly legs, poking the damp soil with long, curved bills. They looked vulnerable, like humans with their hands tied behind their backs. Because kiwis are nocturnal, the terrarium was dimly lit, designed to simulate kiwi habitat at night. Someone had put out a plate of what looked like take-out lo mein. My father peered curiously into the semidarkness, silently studying the birds. In their luxuriantly landscaped prison, the kiwi couple probed for insects, passing time before death and extinction.

  You might be wondering how a man in his fifties and sixties could drink heavily every night, bicycle up to a hundred miles a day, and repeat that regimen for weeks. In China, on nights when he and I found ourselves assigned by our tour leaders to the same room, I’d sometimes return late to find him beached on his bed, sheets damp with sweat, a vaguely medicinal smell radiating from his body. The only alcohol offered to us, in the places we went in China in the early 1980s, was beer. But I learned years later that my father had acquired a drinking buddy on that trip—a humorous, redheaded antitrust lawyer from Kentucky who’d made certain not to enter the People’s Republic without Johnnie Walker Black. After dinner, the two of them got together and drank. When the whiskey ran out, they switched to Chinese brandy, then Chinese vodka, then more brandy, then beer. In New Zealand, my father was drinking double vodkas when a man in our group introduced himself to me and got straight to the point: “I’m worried about your father.” One of the tour leaders took me aside a few days later: Why hadn’t anyone gotten him help? he wanted to know. Lamely, I told him we’d tried and failed. Before the sentence was out of my mouth, I felt like a fool.

  A night or two earlier, an argument about the British Empire had erupted over dinner. My father was at one end of the table, slouched in his chair, and flanked by a man from Aspen who was a designer of expensive homes. The man had the tanned, chiseled looks you might expect in a designer of expensive Aspen homes. A few seats away was a blowhard named Fred, advancing the view that the British had sent other countries into battle first so their soldiers could do most of the dying. My father, gazing balefully at him, snarled, not exactly under his breath, “Fred, you’re an asshole.” He was just lifting his hand to give Fred the finger when Fred happened to turn away. My father was looking unwell. Food had spilled on his shirt, and his eyes were glazed. After he weaved across the dining room on his way to bed, stopping to kiss Elliot and me on the tops of our heads, we wondered what might happen if we had a videotape of that evening to play back to him the following day. Instead, our father turned up at our room the following morning with cups of tea and an endearing expression of befuddlement on his face. Was he, consciously or subconsciously, after forgiveness? I suspect not. I’ve since learned that he woke up regularly with a great blank in his head where, under other circumstances, there might have been some memory of what had gone down the night before.

  We’d broached the subject of his drinking with him more than once. But we’d done it so ineptly, we might as well not have tried at all. Deferentially, apologetically, we’d raised it around the kitchen table at dinner. He’d listen patiently, an expression of mild curiosity arranged on his face. When our speeches had petered out, as they inevitably did, he’d step in, like the pilot with hundreds of thousands of miles under his belt, expertly taking the controls. He was touched by our concern, he’d assure us. He was sorry to have caused us worry. But our fears were unwarranted. His doctor had just given him a clean bill of health. Et cetera, et cetera. “And now, lovely people . . .” he’d say, pushing his chair back from the table, signaling that he’d put up with enough. As the muffled thudding of his feet on the carpeted front stairs faded out, we’d sit in stung silence, marveling at how swiftly we’d been disarmed. Occasionally, we’d stay on in angry tears. It had seemed futile. But in New Zealand, Elliot and I wondered how we’d feel if something catastrophic happened. Would we feel we’d tried?

  Elliot took up the matter again, in a letter sent a few weeks after returning from New Zealand. My father wrote back to him, “You are right about the drink. It did, of evenings, tend to take over.” He said he was saddened by the distress it seemed he’d caused; he’d try to do better. But he blamed a new blood-pressure medication and t
he pain of long-distance cycling at his age. Then he added, trying a new tack, man to man, “There is also the fact, which is not an excuse, that I enjoy being drunk. Like the classic Irish figure in literature, or Churchill or Pitt (not that I put myself in their class) . . . intoxication is a release, particularly after a strenuous day. A lady sitting at dinner next to Winston Churchill said to him, ‘Mr. Churchill, you are drunk.’ He replied, ‘And you, madam, are ugly; but in the morning I will be sober.’”

  If he was Churchill, then I was that tight-ass lady at dinner. He’d never have spoken so frankly to me about his drinking. I couldn’t be reasoned with on the subject because I’d decided sometime in my late teens or early twenties that I was never drinking again. When people would ask me, for years afterward, why I’d stopped—the way drinkers invariably do—I’d say that I’d stopped after waking up drunk one afternoon after a party. I thought I remembered the whole thing clearly. It was the summer after my freshman year in college. There’d been a vat of innocuous-tasting punch; and when I’d gotten out of bed the next afternoon, my room was spinning on its axis. But, many years later, I discovered that wasn’t exactly true. The party had taken place two years earlier than I remembered, and I’d gone on drinking into sophomore year. I had to concede I didn’t remember exactly when I’d stopped or what had precipitated the decision. Which is strange since I now suspect that that single, unaccountable, impetuous, unarticulated, possibly angry resolution may well have spared me a heap of grief.