by Janny Scott
That last summer, he and Margaret relocated for several months to Vermont. She had a farmhouse on the side of a hill with a view across half of New Hampshire. They passed the weeks reading and moving between the terrace and a first-floor bedroom they’d added for when he’d no longer be able to climb stairs. At midsummer, I stopped by for lunch. My father sat at the kitchen table, his face looking ravaged, as though badly burned. Dark red blotches stained his cheeks. His eyes were watery. He was unmistakably in pain, though he never said so. It occurred to me that he’d acquired an alternate family in those final years. Margaret had become his de facto wife. Tommy Dowlin, his property manager, was a surrogate son; the two of them would sometimes have lunch together at my father’s club in Philadelphia. When Margaret was out of town, Tommy would cook lamb chops in the nursery kitchen while his wife sat with my father. Then the three of them would sit down at the dining-room table to eat.
“It sometimes struck me that you and Margaret had become his family,” I said to Tommy, years later.
“I think that probably is accurate,” he said.
He and I had never talked much about his experiences with my father until that day, seven years after my father’s death. Tommy had gone on to become the property manager for the family who owned the building that had been the Colonel’s stables. We were sitting in the renovated clock tower; outside, gravel paths crisscrossed a broad green lawn. Tommy seemed to make no judgment about my father’s precipitous decline—something perhaps I should have been better able to do. He’d respected my father. He’d appreciated having the job and an employer who cared about him. “The more I got to know him, the more I liked him,” he told me. “I would have liked to have seen him live a lot longer. I think he still had a lot to give and a lot to do and I just think it was unfortunate.”
“Did you understand what was wrong?” I asked.
He hesitated.
“I think he had a drinking problem,” he said simply.
Yes, I agreed. “He drank himself to death.”
“I know,” Tommy said. “I just didn’t want to say that.”
The end came on schedule, just like the liver specialist had predicted. By early autumn, my father was in the hospital in Pennsylvania. In a manila folder labeled “RMS Health,” in a file drawer in my desk, I find pages torn from reporter’s notebooks, covered in notes scribbled during phone calls with various doctors in those final weeks.
“If bowel looks viable, will put back in abdomen and sew up.”
“Lung in bad shape. If not do anything, toxic fluid will kill him.”
“What can do is operate on liver. Might take care of things. But 2 risks.
“1—operation kill.
“2—might → dementia.
“Should they operate or send home to die?”
I was at my desk in New York when word reached me that his doctors were out of options. By the time Hopie and Elliot and I arrived in Pennsylvania, our father was in intensive care. We sat in his curtained enclosure as people dropped in to say good-bye—his brother, Ed; the housekeeper’s family; the museum director. She’d brought her husband, the curator, and a poster-size image of a painting of a woman, which the museum had just acquired. With humorous fanfare, she unfurled the poster, like a hawker displaying a pinup. My father tried to grin, chuckling weakly. Then, in an expression of love and forgiveness I wish I’d been able to match, she and her husband leaned across the bedrail, before the flashing green blips on the monitors, and softly told their old friend how much they were going to miss him.
The unwinding, I learned later, had taken him by surprise. A decade after his death, Margaret and I were in my apartment in New York. I was asking her questions that can only have made her unhappy. She seemed to be doing her best to answer.
Did you understand he was killing himself? I’d asked.
“In the hospital, when the doctor said he was dying, I didn’t believe it,” she said. “I didn’t realize it was going to be so soon. . . . When the doctor said, ‘He’s dying,’ I said, ‘I had no idea.’”
And my father?
“Honestly, I don’t think he knew,” she said. Because, she said, after the doctor had broken the news, my father had turned to her and asked sadly, “How did this happen?”
The day after his death, I emailed the internist to tell him. My father had eluded him, I’d learned, in the last year or two of his life. Perhaps the patient preferred the specialists: They concerned themselves with his complications, not his underlying disease. Whatever the reason, I felt badly about my father’s circumventions. The internist had gone to superhuman lengths. “We may not crack this nut,” he once let me know, kindly. He must have intuited that from the start, but he hadn’t given up. So I sent him an email telling him that DOD was dead. That’s the name, Dear Old Dad, the internist had sometimes used. I thanked him for everything he’d done, and said I was sorry about how unsatisfactorily it had ended between them.
His answer came back a day later.
Sic transit gloria mundi, he’d typed in the subject field.
“I loved him too,” the internist wrote. “And he knew it. We had a truce. It’s all OK.”
Epilogue
The Duke of Villanova would have been touched by the send-off. The women in his life could be spotted in pews near the front of the church. There was an impressive display of High Church pomp, a moment of silence, and a melancholy bagpipe response. In an affectionate eulogy, the museum director called her sometime antagonist “that inimitable man . . . utterly and unabashedly himself.” Another eulogizer plucked a parallel from ancient Greece: Athens had Pericles, Philadelphia had Bobby. The headline on his obituary in the Inquirer summoned the spirit of the one woman in his life who couldn’t be there, with the words, “Philadelphia Story in His Own Right.” The obituary described him as one of the last true Main Line aristocrats, a civic éminence grise, “widely adored as a singularly stylish blend of wealth and brains, polish and strong opinions, pedigree and easy amity.” Had His Eminence somehow managed to stick around for the tributes, a copy of that day’s paper might have turned up in my mailbox, bearing a yellow Post-it: “This (page 1) was such an ego trip that I had to send it to you. Love, P.”
The cause of death, I’d told the reporter when he’d asked, was “liver failure after a long illness.” I knew that answer was a dodge when I served it up. Not that I was covering for my father; I wasn’t in the mood. I was just trying to avoid a charge of gratuitous indiscretion. The death certificate, when it arrived later, identified the immediate cause as “end stage cirrhosis of the liver.” It listed several secondary conditions, all of them complications of cirrhosis. If you were to ask me now, I’d say my father drank himself to death. But that leaves a lot unsaid. I’ve come to think of his disease as something more complex, shaped by the whims of economic and social history, along with the strands of the double helix. He was the beneficiary of abundant good fortune, that’s a fact. But good fortune doesn’t necessarily drop from the heavens unencumbered. Like the rest of us, he had his wounds. He was that hare, resolving to “practice each day going forth to live.”
Recently, I found myself reading another play by Philip Barry. Like The Philadelphia Story, it had been made into a movie starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. The play, Holiday, had some details that sounded familiar, as had The Philadelphia Story. In Holiday, a bright young man named Johnny Case falls in love with the aristocratic eldest daughter of a financier. Precipitously, they decide to marry. But when Johnny wants to quit his job so they can travel abroad for a year or more, his future father-in-law tries to derail the plan with an offer of a job in finance. The play opened on Broadway in 1928, a year after my father’s parents cut short their trip around the world after the Colonel offered to make my grandfather his partner in a new brokerage firm. Unlike my grandfather, however, Johnny Case turns down the job, blows up the engagement, and sets
sail for Europe. The message of the play, Brendan Gill writes, is “that wealth and convention suffocate the soul” and “a man must take radical chances in order to find out who he’s capable of becoming.” As Johnny Case puts it, “Damn it, there’s no life any good but the one you make for yourself.”
The descendants of the Colonel are scattered now. They’re in Los Angeles, Denver, London, Paris, and points between. They work in education, medicine, technology, consulting, music, banking, business, finance, landscape gardening, the law. They don’t live in big houses. They work for a living. But they’re beneficiaries, in one way or another, now and forever, for better and worse. These days, just one of the four surviving members of my father’s generation lives on what was once the Colonel’s place. Only one of the seventeen in my generation lives there. My grandparents, of the wondrous seventy-two-year marriage, didn’t live to see all five of their grandchildren divorced. As I write this, my mother remains in the house where I grew up, which she bought in one of the early sales. At eighty-eight, she still climbs those two flights daily to the studio where she teaches and practices piano. As for the cows, last seen heading west to their new home in the foothills of the Front Range, things didn’t work out quite as hoped. Unable to scale up his dairy, the orthopedic surgeon sold the young cows at a sale attended by dozens of buyers, then sold the milking cows to a farmer elsewhere in Colorado. Some of those were bred with Holstein and Jersey bulls; others, no longer considered productive, were auctioned off for slaughter. When I checked in 2014, the surgeon told me he’d heard there were no more than a handful of pure Ardrossan Ayrshires left.
The children and grandchildren of the men and women who worked on Ardrossan are scattered, too. In a single generation, those immigrant families entered the middle class, the children leaping from the farm labor and domestic service of their parents to professions like veterinary medicine, business, and finance. Molly Roddy, who left Ireland in 1928 and went to work as an upstairs maid in the big house, had grown up as the eldest daughter of cattle farmers in Roscommon. She was eighteen when she traveled alone to the United States to establish a foothold for her half dozen sisters being raised back home by their widowed mother. On a trip home, she married a prizefighter and barber named Terry Casey, who returned with her to Villanova and went to work on the farm. They raised their two children in a white house on the periphery of the place, where they and other Ardrossan children raced go-karts on Sunday afternoons on the empty road and floated in inner tubes down Darby Creek. Molly worked in the houses; Terry worked with the cows. Their children went off to college and into careers in defense contracting and teaching. The children’s children, in turn, have gone from college to graduate school or jobs in environmental contracting, finance, public relations.
The relics of the Gilded Age are on the endangered list now. The colossal house built for Edgar T. Scott in Lansdowne is subsiding into ruin: After years as an orphanage and as a nursing home, it sits abandoned, ringed by barbed wire and chain-link fence. In Whitemarsh, the hundred-forty-seven-room palace built as a wedding gift for the second wife of another investment banker is history: Twenty-eight bathrooms couldn’t save it from demolition. The iron and steel man with the Elizabethan manor in Lower Merion had it razed after an incinerator smokestack intruded upon his view. It lasted less than fifty years. There are freshman dorms in the castle in Glenside that Horace Trumbauer built for the sugar-refining magnate; and the former home of a Baldwin Locomotive Works president is now part of a retirement community that boasts nine dining rooms. As for the house still known as Ardrossan, its future is up in the air. Because of its full-body makeover during my father’s tenure, it’s in good shape for its age. But entropy has set in again.
There’s no nonprofit acting as steward, as the delegates to the “visioning workshop” had envisioned. There’s no community-supported agriculture farmer dispensing rutabagas from the back of a truck. There’s no master plan, no strategic plan, no land-use plan: Those ideas expired with DOD. Instead, the final few hundred acres have been sold for “limited development”—more large houses on large lots. The old stone houses are being tidied up for market. The cold pool in the woods is derelict, its contents as black as the oil in the La Brea Tar Pits, from decaying branches and leaves. One proposal discussed at the workshop, and for years before, has come to fruition: The township bought the fields on either side of the intersection where the traffic paused on that now distant memorial-service afternoon. Those fields will be preserved as open space. Someday, the sole intact vestige of the Colonel’s demesne will be those rolling meadows and an adjacent ninety acres, known as Skunk Hollow, which the township had bought from my father’s grandmother forty years before.
Philadelphia is no longer the roaring industrial furnace it was in the years when the Pennsylvania Railroad set its sights on developing the farmland along its main line. Its suburban zip codes, however, remain some of the richest in the country. In some towns, average home values are closing in on one million dollars. Main Line denizens crop up regularly on the Forbes list of the four hundred wealthiest Americans. And while the white population in Philadelphia shrank by a third between the censuses of 1990 and 2010, the towns along the Main Line, though less monochrome than they once were, remain overwhelmingly Caucasian.
Somewhere in the world, a new “place” is being born. Maybe it’s in the Bay Area or Mumbai or Shenzhen or Hangzhou. Maybe it’s fueled by a fortune reaped in private equity or online shopping or social media or a quantitative hedge fund. The titans of the new gilded age, like their predecessors, wish to be known for their superior taste. They, too, recruit the go-to architects-to-the-plutocracy to design their homes. They adorn their houses with Abstract Expressionist paintings, cruise the high seas in custom-built yachts, own homes in Wellington, Florida, to watch their horsey daughters compete. Their net worth dwarfs anything the Colonel could have imagined. Surely even he never envisioned the twenty-seven-story house built by India’s richest man. But the rules of the consumption game appear to be not all that different. The signifiers of arrival are remarkably unchanged.
Biggest remains best. There’s a sixty-two-thousand-square-foot beach house in the Hamptons built by a junk bond billionaire. There’s a Manhattan penthouse that sold for one hundred million to an anonymous buyer. Any self-respecting tech billionaire needs a yacht, it seems, ideally measuring somewhere north of three hundred feet in length. Things British remain enviable, one hundred years later. Today’s titans hunger for the best English country garden outside England. Wealthy Chinese want butlers schooled in England who wear white gloves and speak with the diction of Jeremy Irons.
Killing animals for sport has not lost its cachet. Nor have private aircraft: How else to get to Jackson Hole? Vacation homes, birthday blowouts—it all continues. Though today’s rich want their rural and subterranean retreats to be doomsday-proof.
They are, after all, planning for the future, just as the Colonel did. They’re stashing their money in irrevocable and generation-skipping trusts. They’re transferring land and houses to their children and grandchildren.
Do they ever wonder how it will play out, one hundred years hence?
My father left his affairs mostly in order, as I would have expected. With one not-insignificant exception: He still owned his half of the Nantucket house when he died. Maybe the former trusts and estates lawyer had good reasons for ignoring the advice of his trusts and estates lawyer. But he omitted to give a heads-up to his executors, his children. The value of the Nantucket house had multiplied so many times over, in the years since my mother had bought it, that the half my father took from her for one dollar was the most valuable item in his estate. Because he’d spent so much of his money on the big-house restoration, he left just one simple way to pay the estate tax owed on the Nantucket property: sell it. But his co-owner loved the house. She was the only one of us who used it for a month every summer. She kept a small piano in the dining room t
hat dangled off the west-facing side. On windless afternoons, a grandchild climbing the wooden stairs from the beach would hear Schubert’s Impromptus wafting across the field of poison ivy. I’ve sometimes wondered why our father put us in that awkward position. Maybe he was no longer thinking clearly. Maybe he’d never intended to shell out so much in those last years. Whatever his reasons, the three of us spent the next five years jousting with the Internal Revenue Service, while the lawyer who’d let him do it logged billable hours. In the end, we and the government reached a settlement on the value of the property, making it possible for us to pay the estate tax without having to throw our mother out of her house.
There were few objects among my father’s possessions that I felt driven to keep; the spirit seemed to me to have been drained from them by his death. I took the black leather wallet, its edges softened, in his pockets, like a bar of soap; and I took the umbrella he’d carried thirty-five years earlier in London, which turned up in the back of a coat closet in his apartment. It had a black silk canopy and a dark, polished, wooden crook handle with a gold-plated band engraved with his name. It had been handmade by a British company with a two-hundred-fifty-year history in umbrellas. But when I opened it in the rain on Broadway a few months later, it exploded into pieces. I couldn’t bring myself to throw the carcass into the nearest trash bin. In response to an email query, the umbrella company said, yes, they could fix it. Off it went in my beloved’s luggage to England, returning by mail some months later. Every part but the handle and name band had been replaced: canopy, ribs, rib tips, runner, stretchers, ferrule, et cetera. When I discovered that the company wanted nine hundred dollars for the repairs and shipping, the restoration impulse seemed idiotic. Then again, such extravagance applied to refurbishing a memory seemed in the spirit of the umbrella’s original owner.
