The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  The task of choosing Helen Hope’s burial attire fell to Mary, the eldest and closest grandchild. Mary was familiar with the filing system in her grandmother’s closets: clothes for hunting, clothes for New York, clothes for dinner in town, et cetera, all hung by category. Mary settled on a stylish blue suit and the well-worn red Belgian loafers. Like an ancient Egyptian entombed with the essentials for the afterlife, Helen Hope was placed in her coffin with a purse into which Mary had slipped a few photos. One, taken in her thirties, found her flanked by her two young sons; in a couple of others—Polaroids apparently taken by Edgar—she was, in her early seventies, smiling bewitchingly at the camera while posing naked.

  Outside the church where the funeral was held, television reporters prowled the parking lot, trawling for sound bites. Inside, mourners overflowed the nave, spilled into the choir loft, and jammed the entrance. Latecomers, turned away at the door, made a beeline for the first-floor windows, which were open because the day was uncommonly warm. As late arrivals leaned in to listen, people inside handed hymnals out through the windows. From the book of epigrams my grandfather had bound as a boy, my father’s brother, Ed, read a quotation from the Scottish evangelist Henry Drummond: “To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever.”

  In the aftermath of his mother’s death, endings rained upon my father. His aunt Mary Binney died three months later, at eighty-eight, having spent much of the last third of her life traveling in India and Sri Lanka, creating nine thousand photographic images of bodhisattvas, cave monasteries, monks and mendicants, erotic sculpture, nomads, wrestling, worship, and other features of life in South Asia. The University of Pennsylvania, which later acquired the photographs, would call her “the last in a long line of ‘romantic’ artistic and literary travelers, true adventurers of the human spirit seeking to discover and unlock the mystique of faraway lands.” On the day of her death, she’d delivered a slide lecture to a sold-out benefit at her house. When the talk was over and the audience had departed, she suffered a heart attack and died. Her life had been a remarkable run—performance as a soloist at Carnegie Hall; a love affair with Leopold Stokowski, in two installments; the founding and running of a dance company; two adoptions, as an unmarried woman; fourteen trips to South Asia. Still, the opening sentence of at least one obituary identified her as “the sister of the late Hope Montgomery Scott.”

  Edgar was next. He died in May, at ninety-six. His brother-in-law Aleck was now the sole surviving child of the Colonel and Muz. After the death of his third wife, he’d stayed on alone in his big stone and stucco house, in the care of his housekeeper and cook. There, the two women kept him alive by bringing meals to him in his bed and diluting his drinks, dispensed via a delivery system constructed by a man who’d become something of a surrogate son. An intervention, years earlier, had bombed for the usual reasons; its target had announced he had everything under control. Increasingly deaf, and cut off from social contact, Aleck had carried on. His collections were gone. In bankruptcy, he’d even sold his share of the portraits and other paintings in the big house to his sisters. When kidney failure finally killed him, neither of his children spoke at his funeral. The eulogizing fell to their spouses and the local police chief. Aleck’s housekeeper, too distraught to attend, sent her nephew. “You wouldn’t have believed it,” he’s said to have reported back. “They had professional mourners!”

  With Helen Hope gone, the family moved swiftly to halt the outflow of cash through the dairy. Within two weeks, they announced it would close. The jobs, health insurance, and free housing for the farmers would terminate at the end of the year. An orthopedic surgeon with a ranch in Colorado and a herd of Ayrshires agreed to buy the cows—along with the “semen inventory” and some storage tanks for an extra ten thousand dollars. The arrangement looked promising. The orthopedic surgeon viewed the Ardrossan cows, he told me later, as “the Los Angeles Lakers of the dairy world.” My uncle Ed, in a letter sealing the deal, expressed confidence that he was “doing the right thing by my mother’s cattle.”

  Over the course of the summer of 1995, the cows headed west, one truckload at a time. Every one was a lineal descendant of the Colonel’s original nine. By the time the final trucks pulled out of the main dairy complex in September, the herd manager had decided to go along. The milking barn fell silent; grass grew high in the pastures; equipment idled in the sheds. It sometimes seemed as though the barns and silos, devoid of life, had aged a half century overnight. For the first time in eighty years, the pastures sat empty, apart from the presence of a handful of elderly cows kept on as pets. Mary Binney’s daughter Joanie, who’d spent much of her life on Ardrossan, told me later that the day the last cows departed was one of the most painful of her life.

  The dairy operations weren’t all that Helen Hope had been keeping afloat. She’d sent monthly checks to beloved former employees, subsidized capital improvements, even paid health-insurance premiums for one of the last surviving employees of her parents at Mansfield. She’d funded those activities with income she received from trusts set up by her parents. “Regrettably, this will be the last check sent to you,” read a letter to recipients of her largesse, sent a month or two after her death. That she’d been squandering money to keep the dairy going had been clear ever since Ed’s examination of the books. My father would profess later not to have cared. “Never bothered me at all,” would say the man who’d go on to do something similar himself. She was “trying to keep something so anachronistic alive because it was so beautiful. . . . She was treasuring something that was going, gone.”

  The pileup of losses weighed on my father. He blamed himself for the separation from my mother—“probably of my causing but certainly not of my planning,” he wrote in a letter. On top of that loss and displacement, his parents were gone, too. “It is all very sad indeed,” he wrote. Vanity Fair assigned a magazine writer, steeped in Philadelphia, to write about Helen Hope, whom the magazine called “the unofficial queen of Philadelphia’s Wasp oligarchy.” The article was humorous, elegiac, and tinged with melancholy—a mood that also seemed to emanate, in that period, from my father. In one of the photographs published with the article, he’s decked out in a tuxedo, seated in a threadbare armchair in his grandparents’ library, the damask wall covering peeling in the yellow light of a sconce. He’d served champagne to the photography crew. “I didn’t realize how depressing it would be,” he told the writer, speaking of his divorce, his mother’s death, and reaching the age of retirement. “. . . It’s the death of a portion of me. This is the portion of my life that has no promise of resurrection.”

  Then came the news of his impending retirement as the museum’s president. Announcing his plans to the museum staff, he appeared close to tears. The standing ovation rumbled on and on until he finally cut it off. In the days that followed, the reviews of his fourteen-year tenure were admiring. Membership had soared; the endowment had ballooned; galleries had been renovated. He’d presided over a turnaround in operations. Major collections had been reinstalled. The job had been no picnic, an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer observed: It was “more like a bone-jarring ride down the Rocky steps on his treasured black bicycle.” A columnist for another publication lavished praise on the outgoing president, calling him a traitor to his class—the rare Philadelphia patrician for whom the “anti-leadership vaccine” identified by E. Digby Baltzell, the University of Pennsylvania sociologist of the once ruling elite, had failed to take.

  Rather vaguely, my father attributed his upcoming retirement to feeling older and “less elastic.” He’d be sixty-seven, past retirement age, by the time he stepped down at the end of that year. A few reporters speculated that testy relations with the mayor’s office might have been a factor. They didn’t dwell on the fact that his successor would be the strong-willed director, long thought to be eager to run the museum solo. For a decade and a half, they’d been equals: She’d run the art side; he
’d overseen the operations. They’d given every outward appearance of working well as a team. But in private, he’d complained about her, even occasionally to her curator husband. At McLean, he’d claimed that his frustration with her sometimes drove him to drink. Now the board was giving her the whole show. To Margaret, he said he’d seen it coming: The director wanted the top job, and some board members wanted him out. To my mother, he said, “I don’t know how much you know about what happened at the museum at the end?” Very little, she said. All she remembered him saying was, “It was pretty grisly.”

  Years later, I came upon a letter sent to him a month before the news broke. It came from a man who’d known him in the law office when they were young. They’d been friends. The man, Alan McFarland, had admired him for his style, humor, and intelligence; he’d remember my father later in bow tie and suspenders, seated in an antique corner chair. In January 1996, McFarland, who’d become an investment banker in New York, had found himself at a dinner at the big house. It was in honor of a few dozen supporters of a small museum in Philadelphia, and my father had agreed to host. McFarland had been pleased to see him again. His old friend appeared to have ascended to the role for which McFarland had imagined him destined. “I find your current status as lord of the manor one for which you must have certainly been intended since your earliest hours,” McFarland had written to him after the dinner. “. . . You’re as good at it as even the most rigorous casting director could ever have arranged.” But the letter had ended on a cloudier note. McFarland hoped my father would find that role fulfilling. “I worry, even from my position way down below the salt in your life,” he’d written, “that there will be a price, harder to pay than you deserve.”

  Reading the letter twenty years later, I was startled by McFarland’s presentiment. He’d encountered my father only rarely in later life. Yet, when I reached him, he remembered the evening and the letter. My father, he said, had done many things well; he’d ended up where McFarland had imagined he would. Yet McFarland sensed that something was amiss: His old friend didn’t seem happy. McFarland knew that my father’s marriage had ended; he wondered about his health. Whatever the causes, McFarland said, he detected a certain sadness. “We make choices, all of us do,” he told me. “And we’re measured by our choices. But we don’t always pay attention to the cost of our choices—and the devil is in there somewhere.”

  In the years that followed, the lord of the manor inhabited his part. He transformed his mother’s nursery into his late-in-life home. In his sitting room, he hung one of the Augustus John portraits of Helen Hope. Beneath it, he positioned the antique desk he’d inherited from his paternal grandfather’s vanished house in Maine. On a library table in the hallway, he arranged other artifacts—the framed photograph of his parents at the foot of the gangway to the Île de France in 1938 and the hooves of his mother’s pony and of the Colonel’s Irish stallion—stuffed, mounted, and trimmed with engraved silver. On visits to the apartment, I’d pass that table and think of all the disembodied animal parts that had hung from the walls in my great-grandparents’, grandparents’, and parents’ homes.

  My children, young then, were fascinated by their grandfather in his aerie. He kept a rocking llama, with flowing hair and big enough to carry a grown man, in his book-lined study. He’d brought it from his office at the museum, where it had been christened “the President.” Above the staircase to the third floor, he’d hung a full-length portrait of himself. I’d never try to make the case that it did him justice—though you’d have to assume, since he’d hung it there, that he liked it well enough. My daughter, Mia, who would turn thirteen the year her grandfather died, would be left with an indelible memory of his presence. In his company, she once told me, she felt as though she belonged to some exclusive club. Perhaps it was the house, she said, or the portrait or the way he walked. He left her with an impression of power. She respected him, and sensed that he respected her. There was something protective in his interest, even on those occasions when he affected a certain humorous irascibility. On a visit late in his life, we found him in his wheelchair in the playroom at the far end of the long hall. My son, Owen, six or seven, hovered nearby, uncertain how to proceed. My father, at his most Churchillian, turned and growled at the curly-headed boy, “Kiss me, goddammit.”

  After a couple of years in the nursery, he turned his attention to other parts of the house. To the surprise of some of his cousins, he began planning to restore the first floor. That seemed odd because, as I’ve mentioned, the house didn’t belong to him: It was held in a trust that wasn’t set to expire until he was almost ninety, and he was just one of its six beneficiaries. Not long after he vacated his office at the museum, a document arrived in the big-house mail. It came from the interior decorator who’d helped him redo the apartment. Titled “Revised Preliminary Budget Estimates, Phase 1,” it listed dozens of proposed purchases for the downstairs ballroom—from drapery fabric ($15,120) to armchair trim ($10) to plaster-restoration and wall-paint labor ($28,660). The estimated total price for restoring the ballroom alone was $98,357 (not including $3,643.40 for shipping the carpet to England for repairs). A year later, an updated version of the “Phase 1” plans arrived. By then, they’d expanded to include the first-floor library, living room, dining room, front hall, study, and powder room. The document was eleven pages long. The estimated cost of the project was $478,590—for decoration alone.

  Once, an architect friend told me something I hadn’t considered. A renovation, she said, is a difficult thing to stop. Once you restore one room, the one next to it looks shabby; so you renovate that one, too. And on and on it goes. My father’s apartment wasn’t, of course, next to the first floor. But he was intimately familiar with how the downstairs looked. He knew what it had been like when he was young; he’d seen it age; he’d used it for parties and charitable events. “You could put a million dollars into this place and it wouldn’t even show,” one guest had remarked in the presence of a reporter, who’d then tossed the line into the newspaper. My father, it began to seem in those years, had set out to test that premise.

  In the library, he had sofas and armchairs dismantled down to the frames, rebuilt, and reupholstered. He had new silk damask wall covering woven to order in France. Portraits were taken away and cleaned; decorative fixtures were restored and reinstalled. In the dining room, he had his grandmother’s needlepoint seat covers removed, refurbished, and reapplied to all thirty chairs. He had the oak paneling treated. He had wood carvings renewed, porcelain cleaned, silver touched up. In the ballroom, original textiles were meticulously copied, and draperies were reproduced. Furniture was reconstructed. Needlepoint sofa covers were removed, cleaned, stabilized, and returned to the sofas from which they’d come. In the long hall, the lanterns were taken down, carted away, cleaned, and rewired. For the living room, my father had a carpet custom-made, copying one that had caught his eye at the Wallace Collection in London. He’d liked it so much, he had it reproduced for three downstairs rooms.

  Combing through the paper trail he left behind, I was reminded of the Colonel’s rodent exterminator from the Ritz-Carlton. The extravagance of my father’s undertaking was puzzling. The man who’d taken pride in driving his green Chevy Nova for twenty years was now spending $17,419.54 for a custom-made front-hall rug. He’d dropped $13,320 to clean gutters and power wash the roof, $6,853 to reupholster a chair, $3,360 for fourteen “double crisscross tassel tiebacks,” $925.50 for “lampshade tassels,” $400 for a monogrammed bathroom rug. I suppose some of the expenses couldn’t have been avoided. But were there others he came to regret—for example, the ten thousand dollars he spent on an unsuccessful effort to clean a couple of limestone walls? Once in a while, he objected to bills for unapproved items. At least once, he scaled back his plans. “Not for now,” he scribbled next to a proposal for guest room number three. But for the most part, it was as if money was no object. Had he resolved to do a museum-quality restoration of the
house, regardless of the price? Or had he started off wanting a comfortable place to live, then gotten seriously carried away?

  He had the exterior trim of the house scraped, scaled, sanded, caulked, primed, and painted. He had the driveways repaved and potholes filled. He had the turning circle spread with eighteen tons of decorative stone, and the mile-long wall treated with sixty gallons of silicone sealer. Damaged storm drains and broken water pipes worked again. Water flowed into the pond beside the back driveway for the first time in years. Tree crews planted zelkovas, sweet gums, oaks, locusts, sugar maples. Where the driveway turned sharply and headed uphill to the house, overgrown rhododendron bushes disappeared. White dogwoods bloomed beside the road to the pool. Tree crews came and went, racking up bills of eight to ten thousand dollars each time. Bothered by the sight of empty fields, my father made arrangements for them to be used for fattening beef cattle before they went off to be slaughtered.

  I’d never thought of my father as especially cavalier about money. In fact, I’d seen him occasionally be quite frugal. Early in their marriage, he and my mother had made a point of trying to hold the cost of dinner at home to one dollar a night. Once, I’d watched him squander an hour over lunch trying to repair a cheese grater he could have replaced for $3.99. Now, I can only conclude that his attitude toward money had gradually changed. After returning from England, my parents had bought two unpretentious, reliable 1973 and 1974 Chevrolet Novas. But, in the late eighties, my father had taken my mother’s Nova in for a modest overhaul, which turned into the automotive equivalent of a month-long rest cure at a medical spa in the Alps. Six weeks in, my mother began to wonder what was up with her car. Dropping by the body shop my father had chosen, she discovered it specialized in restoring antiques. On the day of her visit, all that remained of the 1973 Nova was its chassis: The body and the engine were off being rebuilt; the trim had been sent off for replating; even the upholstery was being redone. By the time the car came home a few months later, its sanded, primed, and painted body had the feel of exquisite enamel. Its chrome parts gleamed like mirrors. For years afterward, gas station attendants would sidle over to admire it whenever she went to fill up. The bill had come to twenty thousand dollars—more than the price of a new car.