by Janny Scott
Now that I think about it, my father had never disdained extravagance, even when he couldn’t afford it himself. He’d admired grand houses and grand gestures by those who had the wherewithal to pay. He was generous: He took pleasure in giving other people a good time, and he gave liberally to institutions (though, truth be told, the money was sometimes my mother’s). At sixty-six, the deaths of his parents had left him flusher than he’d been. Though the trust that owned the big house shared the cost of exterior repairs, he paid for the rest. His restoration project was an act of vanity, surely. You don’t pour a million dollars into a rental, as my brother, Elliot, put it crisply—especially when it stands a chance of being demolished. But my father chose to think of it as a decade-long exercise in historic preservation. In the process, he came to imagine he might save the land from developers and the house from destruction.
Not everyone shared his enthusiasm. Around the time the “Revised Preliminary Budget Estimates” first landed, at least one cousin of his made clear her reservations. She lived on Ardrossan, but she chose to raise the issue in a typewritten letter. She was taken aback by the scale of his undertaking: She’d had no idea, she said, that he intended to restore the ground floor. She asked him to hold off until the other members of his generation could meet with him, since the project could limit the family’s longer-term options for the house. My father, she told me years later, didn’t answer her letter. Other relatives, bobbing between puzzlement and bemusement, observed the goings-on from a distance. “This was just something he chose to do and was doing,” his brother, Ed, told me. “I thought it was certainly something I wouldn’t have done. But it was something he wanted to do.” Cathie Moran believed she’d seen that sort of thing before. “They don’t want to let go,” she theorized later. “They don’t want to see something deteriorate. But sometimes you have to let go. It’s like putting money into the fire, because you’re never going to get it back. And they do it over and over again. It’s craziness.”
It seemed also to be making my father happy. It was surely a diversion from the gloomy contemplation of aging and loss. If he had reservations about the colossal expenditures of cash, they were outweighed by the pleasure and pride he took in seeing the place transformed. Feature writers and photographers turned up to marvel at the progress, and to profile the self-appointed steward in the usual absurdist style—“the benign lord of Ardrossan, the squire of the farm, the last defender of the realm,” as one put it, casting aside all restraint. Always obliging, his lordship played along—escorting all comers around the house, discoursing wryly on the provenance of objects and the quirks of his forebears. That’s a portrait of a suit with my uncle in it. . . . Somewhere around, there’s a full set of Kipling. . . . Charming, wonderful, soft-spoken, flirtatious—even with me. . . . She was a marvelous hostess. Ran a very good household—if you didn’t care what you ate. . . .
A few years into the restoration, the house became the stage set for the first of my father’s Thanksgiving extravaganzas. His idea was to invite everyone to a feast on the day after. Invitations went out by word of mouth. He seemed barely interested in the head count. Cousins, nieces, nephews, children, grandchildren, great-nieces, great-nephews, and friends would turn up, from as far away as California and Maine. Minivans and station wagons would sail into the turning circle, scattering the new decorative pebbles in their wake. Elderly aunts and babies in arms would cross the threshold. Margaret would be in attendance; so would my mother. Not to mention the deposed “King of Wall Street,” John Gutfreund, forced out of Salomon Brothers in a bond-trading scandal. He and his socialite wife and my father had become friends. Now the Gutfreunds had rented the stone and stucco house where my father’s uncle Aleck had, not long before, whiled away his golden years in bed. Sometimes in those years, I’d encounter the Gutfreunds strolling down the driveway at Ardrossan, attired in their country-house finery and in the company of houseguests like Valentino.
Thanksgiving-dinner turnout soared into the nineties. The dining-room table at the big house, fully extended, would be draped in white linen, set with crystal, china, and silver. Smaller, round tables spilled from the dining room into the breakfast room next door. There were place cards for everyone, toddlers included. The cooking and serving fell, naturally, to the catering company whose founding father had served as bootlegger to the Colonel. Waiters would glide through the newly restored rooms, circulating cheese sticks and party dogs on silver platters. At the appointed hour, the bagpiper would herd the guests toward their tables. The menu hewed to tradition: turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy, green beans, pureed sweet potatoes, pies, et cetera. Glasses would be raised, toasts delivered to those no longer able to be with us. Small children, their party finery rumpled, would disappear under tables. After my father’s death, my children were destined to find all Thanksgivings anticlimactic. No holiday meal could compete with a cast of thousands, a kilted bagpiper, and cheese sticks on silver platters.
There had been, of course, a few casualties of my father’s addiction. Among them was his relationship with Elliot’s then wife. On the occasion of our father’s seventy-third birthday, civil discourse between the two of them had abruptly snapped. On that evening, he’d arranged a celebratory dinner in the dining room of a starchy men’s club on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. He’d invited Margaret, the three of us, our spouses, and some of his oldest friends. He’d had plenty to drink by the time he made the fateful decision to seat my sister-in-law to his left. Sometime toward the end of the first course, an argument erupted between them. Angry fire was exchanged. Later, my father would concede to me, if not to her, that he’d lost his temper—“not entirely, but I did.” He’d even admit to being ashamed of himself. But the blowup at the table took place in such muffled tones, perhaps an accommodation to club decorum, that I, sitting just two seats away, remained oblivious. By the time I turned toward my father’s end of the table halfway through dinner, my sister-in-law had bailed. She was driving home to Scarsdale, vowing never to be in the same room with my father again.
She kept her promise until what would turn out to be his final day-after-Thanksgiving dinner. In the weeks leading up to it, word reached her that the host was hoping she’d attend. She polled a few of us on the question of what to do. My suggestion was that she learn to dissemble, like the rest of us, and go for the sake of her children, if not him. Which she did, to her credit. That evening, when she entered the big house through the heavy front doors, her erstwhile antagonist was in a wheelchair, becalmed amid his guests on the oceanic living-room rug. Entering the room through the milling crowd, she headed in his direction, kissed him hello, and concluded that she’d done her bit.
He’d been released from the hospital a day or two before, having gone in for treatment for a collapsed lung. A gallon of fluid had been drained from his chest. His spectral aspect that evening, with his hair mussed and his gaze uncharacteristically vacant, seemed to provoke some sotto voce speculation.
“It was his mother,” one of his cousins theorized about possible root causes of his troubles. “And he believed his grandmother never liked him. You must have heard her famous line, ‘Bobby never walks into a room: He makes an entrance.’ She got him completely—but she could never accept him.”
At dinner, I made a small toast to him, thanking him for his generosity and close-hauling between the shoals of hypocrisy and excessive obedience to fact. I couldn’t tell how the salute went down: How could I put the squeeze on some distant cousin for an honest appraisal when levity was expected to be on tap? Later, I somehow landed the assignment of wheeling him out of the dining room and upstairs to his apartment. As we circumnavigated the kitchen, he snagged a fistful of cookies in the hand not occupied by a glass of red wine. On the third-floor hall, the wheelchair kept getting jammed on the edge of the carpet. In his bedroom, I helped him out of his clothes and into bed. His face on the pillow, pink and round, reminded me fleetingly of my children and,
at the same time, a sadly distorted version of himself.
His health was failing, that was clear. In the summer of 2001, on the beach below the house on Nantucket, his belly was a basketball, fully inflated, belly button angrily protruding. Even he must have been alarmed. That fall, he acceded to pressure from the rest of us to ditch his longtime doctor, author of effusive testimonials to his patient’s superior health, and try someone else. The new internist came highly recommended as a wise soul with charm, wit, and a certain social cred assumed to be a prerequisite to winning the confidence of the patient in question. He’d known alcoholics intimately, too. In the unsettled days after 9/11, when the conversations of stunned New Yorkers kept veering toward flight, my first trip out of the city was to meet my father and Margaret at the office of the new doctor. The diagnosis, we learned that day, was cirrhosis. The damage done to my father’s liver couldn’t be reversed. Continuing to drink would kill him. The doctor declined to venture a guess as to how soon. But a liver specialist, to whom he referred my father, didn’t hold back. Two to four years.
The internist put him on an antidepressant to raise the level of serotonin in his brain, and a second drug to reverse the buildup of fluid in his abdomen, a complication of cirrhosis. There was talk of his seeing a psychiatrist, returning to AA, going into rehab, this time at a different sort of place, like the Betty Ford Center in California. But the patient stalled. To me, he said he was thinking. To Margaret, he said there was no way he was going. A routine colonoscopy, requiring the removal of a few polyps, landed him in the emergency room with uncontrolled bleeding, another complication of cirrhosis. On a trip to Paris, he fell, gashing his head, and was hospitalized with bleeding from his liver. He began falling regularly—a problem attributed in part to shrinking muscle mass because of disease. He stopped drinking at breakfast. He had other problems, too—arthritis, spinal stenosis, a pinched nerve—unrelated to his illness. Then came vertebral compression fractures, from a fall, leaving him in a corset and on painkillers for weeks. He began using a walker. Fluid built up in his abdominal cavity, causing an umbilical hernia. He was back in the hospital. This time, doctors siphoned off eight to ten quarts of fluid.
I wonder now whether I honestly imagined he could be persuaded to stop. He seemed barely willing to acknowledge his diagnosis: He talked of his symptoms as though they were mysterious, unrelated to any underlying cause. In the hospital in Philadelphia, he had bottles of wine delivered to him in a padded cooler. The hospital in Paris thoughtfully served wine with meals. At home, bottles piled up in the recycling. On visits to the doctor, the patient sometimes showed up loaded. I asked for the advice of his cousin, the recovering alcoholic working as an alcohol and drug abuse counselor. “It’s a low-grade suicide,” he said. The most effective way of maneuvering a recalcitrant alcoholic into treatment, he told me, was to do something I couldn’t imagine: tell him that if he didn’t go, he’d never see his grandchildren again.
I call my father to check in. He tells me he’s decided against “going to California”—a euphemism, apparently, for what I’d have called going back into treatment. He’s feeling cornered by the pressure, he says. It’s a nasty feeling: It leaves him unwilling to “run into the cage that’s been prepared in the corner.” In a couple of weeks, he’ll be seventy-three. “Is that really what I want to do?” he asks. The question, evidently rhetorical, goes unanswered but silently answered. He’s been thinking about how to explain all this—“why not to do it just now—or why not to do it at all”—to me and Hopie and Elliot and the doctor. It’s especially difficult, he says, to make me understand why he enjoys drinking. In case I’m too obtuse to get his point, he likens the challenge to, say, my “trying to explain about fucking” to my six-year-old son.
“It doesn’t mean that I’m intent on drowning,” he says, by way of fatherly reassurance.
Doesn’t it? I ask.
“I said, ‘It doesn’t mean that I’m intent on drowning.’ That doesn’t mean that I won’t drown.”
Eventually, I gave up playing lifeguard. The swimmer showed no interest in staying close to shore. My campaign seemed to be having the opposite of the desired effect: My quixotic incursions only annoyed my father. What’s more, I’d begun to question my motives. Was I driven more by anger than kindness? Maybe I wanted to prove to him that I’d been right. Or maybe I couldn’t accept that I wasn’t, after all, an irresistible argument for going on living. A year or two before his death, we talked about his drinking for the last time. We were sitting in a pair of slipcovered armchairs in the sitting room of his apartment—like President Nixon and Mao Tse-tung. Except that I’d been sobbing, probably more in rage than sorrow. There was a table between us, scattered with books and newspapers. We were barely looking at each other. Appearing unmoved, he restated his position: He no longer had things he needed to get done; he had the right to decide how he wanted to live. He loved us all but he had no intention of giving up drinking. He was asking—he said this with a jocular air—that I fuck off.
It seemed the wiser course.
Meanwhile, the question of the long-term fate of the house and the land hung over his generation. The trusts that held the property would expire in the decades to come. If he and his brother and four Montgomery cousins couldn’t come up with a plan for the disposition of the land and buildings, how would the next generation, with seventeen members, decide anything when the problem landed in its lap? In the late nineties, the older generation and the trustees had agreed twice to go ahead and sell some buildings and land for low-density development. A man who’d made a fortune in supply-chain software was now living in the Colonel’s onetime stable. A Big Pharma heir and his family were in my grandparents’ house. Rolling fields were studded with self-consciously tasteful McMansions, each with its own swimming pool and four-car garage. It wasn’t easy to love what the place was becoming, though there was no denying it could have been much worse. And there were three hundred thirty more acres awaiting a decision. So when two local women put up a notice in the last independent bookstore in the area, proposing a conservancy to save open land, Bob Scott was the first to call.
He was no longer walking by the time the fledgling conservancy and two other land organizations held a four-day workshop at the big house in the spring of 2005. The objective was to come up with ideas for preserving what remained of Ardrossan. Traditional approaches were out: The land couldn’t simply be donated to some nonprofit because the trustees were required, under the original terms of the trusts, to get something like fair market value. So the three organizations invited nine experts in land conservation and historic preservation to come for a visit and throw out some ideas. They arrived from as far away as London; toured the house and the farm; immersed themselves in local history, regional demographics, the economy; and sat in on panel discussions on possible cultural, agricultural, and public uses. By early June, they’d come up with a proposal. The family could form a nonprofit to serve as steward of the land and the buildings in future. The big house could be used by a research institution or become a “premium entertainment venue.” The farm could be converted to community-supported agriculture. The township could buy some of the land for open space. Easements would protect much of the rest of the land. And a corner of the property could be sold, if necessary to provide the required financial return, for residential development.
It was a possible starting point, nothing more than that. It was going to take time, commitment, and money in amounts that family members may or may not have felt they had. They’d need a business consultant, a master plan, a strategic plan, a land-use plan, a house-conservation plan, an operating budget. But it wasn’t impossible, the conservancies believed. How the various family members felt about the exercise was less clear. Some seemed curious. But another round of land sales with limited development—big houses, big lots—would be simpler and would generate more cash. My father, I’m told, was elated. The outsiders who took part
were touched by his passion for the place. He was delighted to be showing it off to people who appreciated it in all its facets—as landscape, as architecture, as open space, as an opportunity for historic preservation. Because many of the visiting experts ran other historic properties, they knew what was possible; others, who didn’t, could glimpse the potential through the experts’ eyes. I don’t know whether my father believed Ardrossan would be saved. But he seems to have intended to give it a shot. If he couldn’t finish the job, someone else might.
I saw little of him that summer. In the years since the divorce, my parents had both continued to use the house on Nantucket. My mother would be there in July, my father in August. I’d straddle the transition, spending time with each. My children took it as unremarkable that their grandfather drank orange juice and champagne in bed first thing in the morning. Later, they’d be at his elbow in the kitchen while he concocted a dessert he’d discovered in England, made from stewed berries and slabs of bread. But after his diagnosis, his attachment to the island had seemed to wane. The house wasn’t easy to get around; nearly every inside doorway involved an unexpected step up or down for no apparent reason. The place hadn’t changed in the thirty-five years since my mother had bought it. Nor had the expanse of beach grass and poison ivy on which it sat—except that the value of the land, being waterfront property, was on an upward trajectory toward Pluto. Which may have had something to do with why my father proposed to my mother that they sell it—the half that still belonged to her, and the half she’d given him for a dollar. She wasn’t interested, so it never happened. But, on the advice of her lawyer, she made sure her half of the house would be out of her estate when she died. My father, the former estates lawyer, did nothing. As his condition worsened, the most valuable asset in his possession had undergone a thirtyfold capital gain.
