The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  I’d like to be told that I’d intuited that moderate drinking was not in the cards. But the fact is, I knew almost nothing back then about my family’s history. What I did know was that I’d spent more time than I’d have chosen in the company of heavy drinkers. I was tired of trying to talk to people who’d stopped making sense. I think it’s safe to say that my abstinence was a mode of resistance, unspoken and perhaps not even entirely conscious. I think it’s safe to say, too, that it was a judgment. If my father took it personally, he never said so to me. But I could tell that my testimony on the subject of his drinking never carried any weight. I was willfully ignorant of what he felt was one of life’s great pleasures. In an airport bar, I thought I saw a sneer flicker across his lip when, ordering a drink, he turned to me and asked, “Fizzy water?”

  I wrote to him anyway. “I fear you are killing yourself,” I said, after the reflexive preamble of apologia and obeisance. The response I received reminded me of constituent letters I’d written as a congressional intern, in which the trick was piling up enough agreeable-sounding verbiage to disguise the underlying message, which was no. He thanked me for my thoughtful letter, he appreciated my having written. He knew that his drinking has long been a legitimate concern to you. But not to worry. His doctor had just concluded that his health was good. The beta-blocker he’d been prescribed by the doctor for high blood pressure had been a mistake. The pain he’d experienced on the New Zealand trip had come from arthritis in his knee. “Do not . . . decide that I am going soon to self-destruct,” he assured me. “I am much too interested in you to shuffle off until I know more of the next chapters.”

  By the time the rest of us got serious, he was drinking close to a gallon of wine a day. Members of his staff were no longer giving him work to do after lunch. An anonymous letter sent to the museum trustees included this ominous coda: “Does the President’s drinking affect the museum?” Galvanized by the possibility that others were finally catching on to what we alone seemed to have noticed, my mother slipped away from her fortieth college reunion to scout out McLean, a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, known for treating “these thoroughbred mental cases,” in the words of Robert Lowell, who was one. She had two options, the head social worker in the alcohol and drug treatment program told her: Let him drink himself to death, or try an intervention. (“Is this the reason I can’t stop crying?” she told me she was intending to ask a psychiatrist who specialized in alcoholism. When I gasped, she said, “No, it’s not that I’m in pain. I just keep weeping. I wake up with tears streaming down my face.”) Soon she’d hired a recovering alcoholic named Frank who’d built a second career advising people on how to apply emotional duress to maneuver alcoholics into treatment. Even when an intervention fails, the platitudinous Frank assured her, there’s something to be gained from the family members putting their arms around the alcoholic and telling him they love him. My mother allowed as how that wasn’t exactly the way our family worked.

  We decided to ambush him on vacation in order to minimize the embarrassment of a sudden disappearance from work into thirty-day rehab. My parents went off to the house on Nantucket; then, one after another, Hopie and Elliot and I turned up. We rehearsed in a neighbor’s garage apartment. The night before the intervention, Frank and a museum trustee who was an old friend of my father’s arrived and checked into a hotel. The family alone, my mother had been told, wouldn’t have a chance at succeeding. We had a long letter from my father’s assistant at the museum, who’d had to back out of the intervention at the last minute because of a family emergency. On the morning of the confrontation, we waited in the living room for our target to return from a bike ride. At the sound of tires on gravel, Elliot and I stepped outside the front door to intercept him. Touchingly quotidian details remain lodged in my mind even now. The chin strap of his bicycle helmet was unsnapped. He was carrying a carton of eggs for Elliot’s breakfast.

  “We want to talk about your drinking,” Elliot told him.

  One after another, each of us made our case. My mother recalled how he’d brought her a bouquet of flowers on their fortieth anniversary, then had to hold on to the furniture to cross the room. Elliot said he’d long ago gotten used to the fact that his father was usually drunk whenever they talked, but he took it as a slap in the face that Popsy had chosen a moment when he’d been drinking not only to question Elliot’s choice of a wife but do it in a loud voice within earshot of her. Hopie spoke of how inaccessible and withdrawn he’d become. I stumbled through my statement, intermittently sobbing. The trustee spoke admiringly of my father’s work as president, then got to the point: “You know as well as I do that any bank CEO with such a problem would be given two choices: Get treatment or take a walk.”

  It was an unsettling business, not cathartic in the least. It was hard to tell if we were doing the right thing. Shot full of adrenaline, I felt a burning sensation in my body. Our prey sat motionless in a rocking chair, his face an unreadable mask. When we’d finished our statements, he said he wanted five minutes alone. He rose briskly from his chair, exited the room, and tramped upstairs. We could hear the floorboards creak as he moved around. Suddenly, Frank, the veteran interventionist, snapped to attention. Was there a gun in the house? he wanted to know. My mother looked startled. Frank hastily dispatched Elliot and me to see that everything was all right upstairs. We found our father in the bedroom he’d been using, door closed. When we knocked and went in, he was looking at us, from across the room, his eyebrows raised as if in question. Just making sure he wasn’t going to hurt himself, we explained. He shook his head. He said he wanted to pray.

  We idled downstairs while our victim conferred with his God. If you’d asked me then what was going to happen, I’d have had to say I had no idea. We’d left the capsule and were floating untethered in space. Then my father appeared in the living room and said he’d go to McLean. “Why not go now?” he asked. He telephoned his mother. “I’m going into the hospital for thirty days to take care of my drinking,” we heard him say. He called his colleague, the museum director, and said the same thing to her. Soon, he was back in charge, joking with Frank and offering the trustee a ride to Boston. When Hopie and Elliot and I stepped forward to hug him, he shrugged us off, half humorously, half not. “You’ll drive me to drink,” he said gruffly.

  We set off in an entourage—like an FBI escort delivering a white-collar felon to prison but without handcuffs and shackles. A chartered plane was waiting at the airport to fly us to Boston. With a roar of propellers, we flew out over the ribbon of sand that forms the wilder, south shore of the island, where my father had often taken us in a Jeep Wagoneer with beach towels and Coppertone stuffed in a faded purple canvas bag. High above the breaking surf and the boogie boarders in the waves, the plane banked sharply and headed northwest toward the mainland. Sitting alone, my father exuded more than his usual air of preoccupied self-containment. He gave every appearance of working his way systematically through all four sections of the New York Times. Upon landing at Logan Airport, we parted company with Frank. Instead of delivering our hostage straightway to Belmont, we stopped in an airport restaurant for lunch. Food dreary, conversation desultory.

  “You OK?” I asked my father.

  “Me? Yes.”

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  Bad idea.

  “I’d prefer not to comment on that right now,” he answered. Then he added, “You’re not going to get that for your newspaper.”

  Not grinning.

  McLean, with its red and yellow brick dormitories dotting the landscaped grounds, had the look of a New England boarding school on a languid summer day. A flag hung limp against its pole. A balding psychiatrist with a green binder took us to a conference room decorated with an Edward Hopper print. “How do you come to be here?” the psychiatrist asked. There’d been an intervention, my father told him, prompted by what he called his “compulsive drinking.” The p
sychiatrist asked him a lot of questions about his health, then about his family. Were you ever separated from your parents as a baby? Well, they had an apartment in New York and I lived in Pennsylvania with my brother. How old were you when they died? They’re still alive. What can you do to please your mother? Well, she has a fierce temper, so—avoiding that.

  It occurred to me that he was, by habit if not enthusiastically, charming the shrink. The psychiatrist, though pleasant, was not disarmed. Fixing my father with a look of detached interest, he pressed on with his questions, occasionally glancing at the pages in his binder.

  “What are you like when you’re drunk?”

  “Withdrawn,” my father answered. “When pushed, abusive.”

  Not violent, the rest of us chimed in.

  A bow-tied psychiatrist with a shiny face peered around the door. The patient would be unable to leave his residence hall, the man said, for the first twenty-four hours. Was he feeling violent or suicidal? the man inquired. Destructive toward himself or others?

  “Not toward myself,” the patient answered.

  The rest of us, led upstairs, were introduced to a social worker. We’d been given a list of so-called enabling behaviors, which included “keeping feelings inside” and “allowing him/her to ignore or avoid dealing with the problem.” How are you feeling? the social worker asked. Guilty, I confessed. Now that I think of it, apprehensive might have been the better word. It had begun to dawn on me that there was going to be fallout from our rescue mission.

  My mother volunteered how cooperative the patient had been.

  “Isn’t that kind,” the social worker said wryly. She seemed to be suggesting the opposite.

  Could he have a single room? my mother asked.

  “A single room sometimes reinforces a patient’s sense of himself as special,” the social worker said simply. The answer, it seemed, was no.

  “He’s really a very bright, charming, kind man,” my mother offered.

  The social worker nodded.

  “The first two will be a hindrance here,” she said.

  We found him sitting downstairs in a cluttered lounge with a paper cup of chipped ice next to him on a table. His hair was uncharacteristically mussed, as it had been all morning. A counselor took him away for a “body search.” When he returned to say good-bye, he kissed my mother on both cheeks.

  “Thanks for trying,” he said, with an enigmatic chuckle.

  Two weeks later, we returned for family therapy. My mother had warned Hopie and Elliot and me that our father was angry at the prospect of more than another week. We climbed a staircase framed with high bars to discourage potential jumpers. In an office, we talked to the social worker my mother had met during her college reunion. What did we hope would come out of the patient’s treatment? he asked. Elliot hoped for better communication and some insight into who our father was. I said I wasn’t sure what I wanted: maybe just to get through dinner with him coherent.

  Our mother looked distressed.

  After fifty minutes, Popsy was ushered in. He’d lost weight and his hair looked whiter than I remembered. When the social worker asked him to tell us what he’d been doing, he began by delivering a rather formal expression of gratitude that seemed to border on grudging. Then he launched into what felt like a prepared speech. He’d come to see, he said, that his drinking was far worse than any of us had known: It had pervaded everything he did. But he’d taken to Alcoholics Anonymous, he assured us. He was committed to staying sober; he’d be working hard at not drinking. We were not to expect a personality change. Bob Scott, as he put it tightly, would not become Bob Hope.

  Why didn’t you look at anyone when you spoke? the social worker asked him.

  “Just a matter of style,” he said, sounding defensive. He’d do the same thing at a board meeting or a bank meeting, he said, or at any time he was “in his head.”

  The social worker had suggested earlier that my mother ask my father if he had any idea how hard his drinking had been on the rest of us. When my mother did, he bristled. Making an alcoholic feel guilty, he countered, is a bad idea. He chided her, too, for any implication that there’d been a halcyon period in their marriage, with all its passive aggression and muffled warfare waged under cover of darkness. Not all their problems, he said, stemmed from his drinking.

  “Well, most,” she answered, almost under her breath.

  Someone raised the possibility of psychotherapy. Would he be willing to try it? He said he wasn’t opposed but had no intention of beginning it immediately upon returning home. Before agreeing to undertake it, he added, he’d want to know the purpose.

  I said I was struck by what appeared to be his anger. I said we’d gone way out on a limb to try to help him, out of what I believed was love and desperation. Now he seemed to be suggesting that we wanted to make him someone he was not. He countered by insisting that he was neither angry nor resentful. A little defensive, maybe. He’d thanked us, hadn’t he?

  The following morning, back in the social worker’s office without the patient, we said we were troubled by the previous afternoon’s session. The social worker said it might be unrealistic to expect anything better. Growing up with limited access to one’s mother leaves a hole in one’s heart, he said—channeling, I now see, our old London neighbor, Dr. Winnicott, with his concept of the “false self.” In such cases, the social worker told us, interactions with others may be “more style than substance.” Those were things that might be worth exploring in therapy, the social worker agreed, but our parents’ marriage was first item on the agenda. How would we react if it ended in six months? he wanted to know. If our parents entered couples’ therapy, the status quo would not remain. Was my mother willing to run the risk that the marriage would end?

  Good question. That’s what she said.

  We adjourned to a cluster of picnic tables and chairs on the lawn. My father was waiting at one of the tables. As part of his treatment, he’d been required to write a history of his drinking, a kind of autobiography of his addiction. He’d filled fifteen single-spaced pages in longhand. He’d made a presentation to his fellow patients. Now he was to read it to us.

  His account began with the landscape of his early life. The dominating figure—that’s the adjective he used—was his mother, whom he described as “equally at home in the loftier social life of Long Island and Park Avenue and in the fields with her horses or her father’s cows.” The writing was evocative, sometimes funny in a dry, muted way. His voice was mellifluous, his cadences lilting. In the damp heat of August, I remembered a moment from childhood, sitting cross-legged on the living-room rug, listening to him read from The Wind in the Willows.

  He was speaking of his parents’ absences, when he was a boy, in a degree of detail I’d never heard. The familiar and the unfamiliar mingled. Some details were startling. But he read on. There was no opportunity to interrupt, to ask him to go back.

  “Toilet training was particularly rigorous, my mother treating the process like housebreaking dogs, rubbing one’s nose in it and administering a beating,” he was saying. “Most of the beating, however, was done by my father at my mother’s request.”

  He pressed on.

  “At the age of thirteen, I was sent to boarding school,” he said, “which, like after the first few days here, I came thoroughly to enjoy, in part because it was an atmosphere more just to young people than my home had been.”

  College, marriage, law school, children. He steered his narrative back into known waters. Then came the years in London, his return to Philadelphia, his job at the museum. The chronology and groundwork laid, he looped back to his childhood, focusing now on his drinking.

  He’d had a recurring dream as a small boy, between the ages of four and ten. At its center, he said, was “an extraordinary drink, red, not sweet, with euphoric and restorative qualities.” From early adolescence, alcohol was a p
art of his life—“always in the context of the home.” His grandfather, he said, drank from lunchtime on. There was hot buttered rum served on cold winter nights, and champagne, left over from before Prohibition, at Sunday night suppers. He’d had his first taste of a superior burgundy at nineteen. He could still remember the grower, the vineyard, the year—just the way his aunt, I now know, would say she could remember every piece of music performed the first time she heard the Philadelphia orchestra play under Stokowski.

  At college, drinking was encouraged in the circles in which he moved, my father continued. “My first loss of equilibrium was by age twenty, and if a blackout is loss of memory, I do not remember when I did not have them thereafter,” he said. By twenty-two, an evening rarely passed without “significant consumption.” It never occurred to him to stop—only, occasionally, to try to drink less.

  The decades rolled on. His drinking waxed, his tolerance waned. As the museum president, his presence was appreciated at well over one hundred cocktail parties, receptions, and other evening events each year. The absurdity of the situation didn’t escape his notice. He began, he said, “having wine to prepare for the wine served before the wine served at the press lunch before the wine served before the opening dinner of a major exhibition.”

  The museum’s financial challenges were formidable. The director, he believed, wouldn’t confront them directly. His frustration with her, he said, triggered more drinking—“to the point where sometimes I would have a glass of wine in midmeeting to quell my anger.”

  At home, he said, “I was generally out of it by 9:00 . . . drunk, ready for bed.” He’d wonder what had happened between sitting down to dinner and waking the next morning. For major parties, he’d try to stay just sober enough. But, among friends, he said, “my desire was to reach a certain level of oblivion as soon as possible. To my wife’s sadness, our friends included us less in their activities because of my drinking.”