The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  Then came New Zealand.

  “It was glorious and great fun, but almost destroyed for my children by my being hopelessly intoxicated by the end of dinner,” he continued. “They viewed it as a miracle that I was always up in the morning and prepared to ride 100 miles. They viewed the evenings as a nightmare.”

  The intervention on Nantucket had convinced him, he said, “that the disease was ruining my family relationships and threatened my personal relationships with destruction.” He recognized “in my heart the truth of what they were saying.” Since entering McLean, he’d come to believe that his illness was worse than he’d thought: “Alcohol had come to pervade every aspect of my life, my decision making, my planning.” He’d become isolated, his energies dissipated. He’d arrived at McLean determined to make a recovery. Now, he said, “I am convinced I can.”

  There was one more thing.

  His aunt Anna, his father’s sister and the athletic clubman’s eldest daughter, had written to my father at McLean. She was in her eighth year of sobriety. She’d made a practice in recent years of mapping the march of alcoholism through the Scott side of the family. Now my father added what he knew of the Montgomerys to what his aunt had laid out.

  His mother, my father began, was one of four children. One, he said, had “died of alcohol,” another was “terminally ill with it.” His father, too, was one of four. He’d had “a severe drinking problem”; his sister was a recovering alcoholic; his other sister, now dead, had been an alcoholic; and their brother, my father said, had been a heavy drinker before he was killed in World War II.

  As for his grandparents, he continued, the Colonel had “shortened his life with drinking.” And Edgar Thomson Scott, his other grandfather, had “committed suicide in World War I while drinking.”

  My father read on.

  “Under the circumstances,” he said, wrapping up, “it is folly that neither I nor we recognized the problem for so long.”

  The folly, I’ve learned since, went back at least to the death of the railroad man’s son. His survivors buried the circumstances of his suicide, hiding the facts from even their children. I learned the details only because an account survived in the basement of a house near Boston, which had once belonged to Hugh Scott, Edgar’s nephew and friend. During the war, Hugh had been in France, working for the Red Cross, when the two Edgars, father and son, arrived on their fateful mission to become ambulance drivers. Hugh’s letters home to his wife, dating from that period, came to rest eventually in a battered, black suitcase in that basement. Two generations later, Hugh’s grandson, by then a denizen of the house, came upon the letters—the sole surviving record, it seems, of the final self-destruction of my father’s paternal grandfather.

  The facts don’t quite add up to the selfless sacrifice celebrated by Harvard. It’s true that Edgar the elder had become ill in France while working for the inspector general of the American Expeditionary Forces: He’d come down with dysentery in 1918 and had been ordered to report to a facility in Deauville to recover. But he’d headed for Paris instead, on what’s said to have been a bender involving a woman and booze. When he returned, his commanding officer “spoke sharply to him and said he had no business to spend his sick leave in that way when men were dying and fighting at the front where he was needed,” Hugh wrote to his wife. Edgar, fearing scandal and public humiliation, panicked. “I’m afraid Edgar must have brooded over this during the night,” Hugh wrote. “. . . He imagined everything worse than it was and made up his mind during the night that it was the only way out.”

  In a note to his superiors, Edgar wrote, “This all comes from drink.” Or so Hugh reported. A military inquiry concluded, “Gunshot wound self-inflicted. . . . Not line of duty. Result of own misconduct.”

  The cover-up fell to Hugh.

  “Am trying my best to keep stories from circulating to effect that he was to be court martialed—had been on a disgraceful drunk etc. etc.,” he wrote home. “Have had a busy time. Some of the actual details were very disagreeable.”

  Hugh prevailed upon a friend at the Associated Press to report only that Edgar had died suddenly and had been buried with full military honors. This was the party line: Edgar had suffered from dysentery, couldn’t stand the strain, was emaciated when he expired. Back in the United States, dysentery morphed into a less distasteful diagnosis: “Prominent Philadelphian, Acting Inspector General in France, is thought to have been a victim of pneumonia,” the Boston Transcript reported, citing relatives, unnamed. Newspaper obituaries lingered over the deceased’s mansions, his hobbies, his eighteen club memberships. The Social Register, the Burke’s Peerage of the American Protestant upper crust, updated Edgar’s entry with tact: “Died in service in France.”

  I can’t help but wonder what effect all this had on Edgar’s eldest son, my grandfather. He was the one who’d pressed his father to accompany him to France. It was he, too, who’d written ecstatically, three months before the suicide, “He’s the peach of peaches now; wide awake, and in the game heart and soul, for the best motives.”

  The job of breaking the truth to his mother fell to the son.

  What, I wonder, did he tell her?

  More than a half century later, on the day of his youngest sister’s funeral, I was surprised to hear him allude briefly to his experiences in World War I. I knew almost nothing, at that time, about his year in France, but the way he referred to it left me with an impression of an ineradicable grief. Another war had just ended, not long before my great-aunt’s funeral. So the conversation at the reception turned to war. My grandfather recalled having seen troops turn on their commanding officers and shoot them. He mentioned, too, having been back at Harvard on November 11, 1919, the first Armistice Day. He’d traveled that day from Cambridge into Boston, where entire families had poured into the streets for the first remembrance. Alone in the crowd, my grandfather had wept.

  The account of his father’s death, in Hugh’s letters, had surfaced before. Hugh’s grandson, who now lives in the house, had come upon the suitcase in the 1980s. He’d shown the letters to my father’s cousin Mike, who’d telephoned his mother, Anna, offering to have them sent to her. He thought the descendants of Edgar T. Scott, Anna’s father, might benefit by knowing how and why he’d died. Perhaps a better understanding, he thought, would help someone someday. There had already been a suicide in Mike’s generation in the family—that of his youngest sister.

  “It’s all here,” he’d told his mother, amazed by what he’d read.

  But Anna and her brother, Edgar, my father’s father, had no interest in the letters.

  “Let the dead bury the dead,” she told Mike. She told him to return the letters to the basement.

  My father, I now know, had known enough of his grandfather’s story to want to know more. Some years after Helen Hope, his mother, had let the cat out of the bag, my father had, in his twenties, let slip the secret of the suicide to a younger Scott cousin. “Who would you most like to have known?” he’d asked her one evening after dinner, where they’d been swapping family stories. Our grandfather, she’d answered gamely. My father, she remembered years afterward, had lit up. “Yes!” he’d agreed. “Anyone who could take a gun and put it to their head must have been quite something.”

  Years later, he came into possession of a cache of papers and mementos linked to his grandfather’s abbreviated life. I found them in a steel box after my father died. I imagine he’d claimed them after the death of his own father, though I can’t be sure. The collection had been curated by the elder Edgar’s widow for her children. They included the passport their father had used when he traveled to France in 1917 and the military identification bracelet he was wearing when he died. In all the papers, there was no hint of suicide. But there was a letter from a brigadier general, who professed to believe that Edgar, severely ill and under psychological stress, had suffered a breakdown shortly before his death.r />
  “I am convinced that Scott laid the foundation for the trouble which carried him off in the hard work he did for me just prior to and during the San Mihiel offensive,” the brigadier general, Malin Craig, wrote to Edgar’s commanding officer. “I am not certain that you know how hard that fellow worked regardless of hours or weather conditions which were particularly vile. I found him in what I thought particularly bad shape while attending to some work in connection with the handling of some German prisoners and it almost took an order before I could persuade him to go to bed and keep quiet for twenty-four hours while I sent a doctor to look him up. He had a rather severe attack of bowel trouble which was prevalent at the time though his attack was more severe than in most cases. Knowing how fond Scott was of you and you of him, I thought I would like to tell you, although you already know it, of the great assistance he gave me, and to express my personal as well as official regret that a man who worked as hard as Scott did for the Government, without consideration whatever for his own convenience or comfort, should have been taken.”

  My father, I now know, had a theory about his grandfather. He told his cousin Mike that he believed their grandfather suffered from a mild form of bipolar disorder. Mike mentioned my father’s idea to me, though he said my father hadn’t elaborated. The term, bipolar disorder, is more recent than the life and death of Edgar T. Scott; but the idea that a cyclical pattern of depression and manic excitement might run in families had been around since the nineteenth century. My father’s theory, and it was just a theory, seemed potentially to put the puzzling trajectory of the railroad heir’s life in a different light. I was left wondering what my father, who hadn’t told Mike on what evidence he based his diagnosis, knew about manic depression.

  So “the problem” of alcoholism, as my father was calling it that day at McLean, had been passed down on both sides of his family. There was little evidence it was stopping: A cousin of his had preceded him into treatment; members of my generation would follow. Yet my father’s recounting of that history marked the first time I’d heard anyone take stock of the destruction. Disregarding the pattern had been a perpetual exercise in turning a blind eye. When my father had called his mother to tell her he was off to McLean, she’d said, “I didn’t know it was a problem.” Had she forgotten how her husband had sent the kettle soaring across her kitchen? Had she forgotten the plantation in South Carolina where, as she’d put it, “people went down there and drank themselves to death”? Long afterward, members of my father’s generation would tell me their stories—of being confronted by offspring, of delivering themselves to AA, of swearing off even the Communion wine. My uncle Ed told me he, too, could have become an alcoholic—except for the fact that he had a habit of throwing up after the fourth drink.

  Would my father have made different choices if he’d stared down the history early on? I wondered. Would he have gravitated toward a different life? Would he have stayed away from jobs that placed a high value on being unfailingly sociable and charming at parties? By the time I had children, the toll of alcoholism in the family was out in the open. Make sure your children understand that they’re in danger, I was told by the cousin who’d transitioned from banking into alcoholism and drug-abuse counseling. Tell them early, he said, though my kids were young at the time. Tell them again and again and again.

  The air that afternoon at McLean was loud with the din of cicadas. The five of us embarked awkwardly on a stroll along a path that wound through a wood on the hospital grounds. We fell into the old order of march—my father in the lead, my mother scurrying to keep pace, the three of us dawdling at the rear. At one point, I caught up with my father. To break the silence, I asked what he’d been reading. I’d sent him a package of magazines and books the morning after we’d dropped him off. A guilt offering.

  He’d been reading material put out by AA, he said.

  Had he learned things about alcoholism that he hadn’t known? I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” he said.

  Like what?

  He was quiet. I glanced at him sideways, thinking he might be weighing the choice between degrees of self-revelation.

  “The duplicitousness and deception involved,” he answered, looking straight ahead.

  He left it at that.

  Chapter Eight

  My father kept diaries nearly all of his adult life. His medium of choice was college-ruled filler paper in a black three-ring binder. He loaded sheaves of it, I now know, into a slim, vinyl-covered book that traveled in his brown leather briefcase. He wrote on station platforms, in his office, at men’s clubs after work. From time to time, he transferred his finished pages into extra-large binders. Each one was big enough to hold hundreds of pages on its bangle-size rings. The binders he chose were nondescript, and he stored them out of sight. He wrote in black ink, using a black Sheaffer fountain pen he’d bought the day after he and my mother were married. He occasionally thought that, if he were to lose that pen, their marriage would come to an end. His penmanship was steady and even, like waves in an etching of the ocean. If he fell behind, he relied on the scribblings in his pocket calendar to catch up. Once, he destroyed several years’ worth of diary entries, to make sure they’d never be discovered. On another occasion, he locked what remained of the 1960s in a steel box, then forgot where he’d stashed the key. Fifteen years later, a flat key surfaced in a stud box he’d taken to England. He tried it, and the strongbox sprang open.

  That my father was keeping diaries had never been a secret. If we happened upon him writing, he made no move to disguise what he was doing. But I now see he went to some trouble to avoid leaving his pages lying around. If he hadn’t, I, for one, would have read them. As it was, I’d never wondered why he was keeping diaries. I’d never asked what kept him at it, year after year. He was a reader, a letter writer, a denizen of a world of words on paper. So it seemed unremarkable that he kept a journal, too. If I’d bothered to think about it, though, I’d have assumed I understood the impulse. A diary was a bottomless box into which to toss unsorted experience for future contemplation. It was an illusionist’s trick, a means toward making order from chaos. It was fire insurance against forgetting. But when he told me in my twenties that he intended to leave me his diaries, I sensed I’d come into a complex inheritance. When no volumes surfaced after his death, I had no trouble coming up with reasons he might have changed his mind. More interesting was the riddle on the flip side: Why had he offered them in the first place?

  By the winter of 2014, I’d given up hope of finding the missing volumes. My father had been dead for nine years. It had been three years since his girlfriend, Margaret, had handed over a few short diaries she told me she’d found in his top drawer. I’d asked her to let me know if anything else turned up. She’d never mentioned the subject again. On the day after Christmas, I was in the house my father had left twenty-one years earlier. My mother and I and my children were poking around in the basement. In a small room past the furnace and the boiler, she pointed to a tall wooden box—the kind moving companies use for packing dishes. The box was filled, she said, with what appeared to be love letters from long-dead men to that great-aunt who’d died around the time of the end of the Vietnam War. They’d been entrusted to my father after her death. Maybe there’s something in there of interest, my mother suggested, with nothing particular in mind. Unlikely, I figured. But why not check. Soon, my daughter, Mia, and I were bent over the box, pawing through drifts of love letters, digging to China.

  Up from the bottom floated a black, bound notebook—like a boot on a fishing pole in an old cartoon. It had a faux-leather cover. It belonged on the desk of a small-town bank officer in one of those movies admired for getting every period detail just right. Inside, the pages were lined. The first one was dated two days before the birth of Hopie, my parents’ first child. The handwriting, in black fountain-pen ink, was my father’s. The book was an early journal from his midtwenties. Its contents were unli
ke anything about my father that I’d ever read.

  I won’t soon forget reading those pages for the first time. They exposed, no doubt, just one of many facets of my father. But it was a facet few of us had seen, despite his dropping of the occasional inscrutable clue. In those pages, it was as if he were performing exploratory surgery on his spirit—operating without the anesthetic of self-pity. His self-diagnosis was eloquent and damning. To me, it suggested a band of darkness verging on despair.

  Bear with me. I want him to speak for himself.

  I take my diary down from the shelf and I begin to write when I am in moods of reappraisal and reform. Judging from the dates of the entries in this volume, the moods are becoming less frequent. But their sensible intensity does not seem to have diminished. Formerly the moods were short, a day or two of depression or elation and the episode soon forgotten. This time it has been much longer. For almost three weeks now the mood and I have been cohabiting rather regularly. Perhaps it is the influence of vacation. The urge to create, create for the satisfaction of creating runs strong during these moods. I would try to write a novel, perhaps built on a projection of my grandfather Montgomery’s life. Since I have never tried to write and never had any reason to believe I had any ability to do so, I read instead. The reading slowly stimulates the urge to write. . . .

  Tonight, my first preoccupation is that I feel enormously dull. Aiming to please, I am first upset by the fact that I am and have for a long time been unable to dredge up topics of conversation, am unable to amuse. I am also dull to myself. I do not bore myself, as I do not sigh and wish myself away when I am alone, but I know within myself that I am not only uninteresting but uninterested. I am dull to other people and to myself because there is very little other than myself that I care about. There is nothing which I find exciting, stimulating, except the things which I do alone, unanalyzed and unspoken. Work (perhaps), beagling, reading, drinking (perhaps). I am cold, in the sense of being dead to so much. Short in values and interests, my horizon is illumined by the glow of human admiration. Without that glow, I am undirected.