Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  It was ironic that my grandmother had married a man besotted with the internal combustion engine. To paraphrase the member profile for Burden, William A. M., in the 1939 Town and Country social directory, romance, for my grandfather, was centered in the engine of a car or a boat or an airplane. Following that premonitory first date, and since their marriage in 1931, my grandmother had been compelled to grit her big teeth and partner her husband around the world in all manner of motor-driven vessels, from the Graf Zeppelin to the Concorde. For her bravery, she was rewarded with enough jewelry and haute couture to wear into the afterlife.

  When I was little, I thought that was how people showed their affection for one another—by buying lots and lots of stuff. I had little thought to spare for my grandparents’ love life. Believe me, if I had thought about it, it would have grossed me out. It wouldn’t be until very much later, when one was dead and the other on her way out, that I would get to know, through the written word, the sweetness and intensity of their courtship, and the depth of love they had for each other.

  During the Eisenhower administration, my grandfather was ambassador to Belgium. You would have thought he was royalty brought back from exile by the manner in which he conveyed wife, butler, chef, chauffeur, and Cadillac limousine with blacked-out chrome; an extensive art collection; and fifty cases of Cheval Blanc (plus four of Mr. & Mrs. T’s Bloody Mary Mix) to the American embassy in Brussels.

  Soon after his appointment began, my grandfather flew down to the Belgian Congo, home to seventy hostile tribes on the cusp of liberation, to inspect some of the provinces. He brought his wife along for diplomacy. A visit was planned to the king of the Bakubas, one of the last traditional tribal rulers in Africa. On a steamy African morning, my grandparents prepared to board the single-engine Piper Cub that would transport them deep into the jungle. The pilot was a Texan missionary who held scheduled clinics in the villages, inoculating everything he could corner and attending to victims of various sanguinary rites. In addition to a picnic lunch that featured cold chicken and a nice Côtes du Rhône, my grandmother had taken the precaution of slipping a flask of sherry into her pocketbook.

  “And thank goodness I had, dearie,” she said. “A girl needs fortification for thermal descents and Lord knows what in the jungle!”

  According to my grandmother, as they loaded the tiny plane, my grandfather began to puke his guts out. “Ah, the African Complaint,” said the doctor. “I’m afraid you must be beside a toilet today.” He had my hurling grandfather bundled off to the guesthouse they had stayed in overnight. Presumably the doctor was happy to spend the day flying around alone with an attractive (if mature) blonde who smelled of French cologne instead of jungle B.O. or fetid body seepage.

  “As we were taxiing to the end of the grass strip,” my grandmother said, “I thought of poor Popsie retching away . . . ”

  The thought of taking off in a gnat over man-eating treetops made me want to retch too.

  “Of course I was terrified,” she confided, patting my knee, “but I had a bag of peppermints to give to the native children and I didn’t want to disappoint them. Besides, I had my Bible (miniature and condensed) and it always gives me resolution.”

  At the first village, a collection of grass huts in a forest clearing, the natives swarmed the Piper as it came to a stop on the dirt runway.

  “They pressed their dark faces against the windows,” said my grandmother, “sturdy little men with fur belts and spears, and goggle-eyed pygmy ladies with their heads shaved and, honestly, no clothes!”

  “Are you sure?” I eyed my grandmother with skepticism. I had a suspicion there’d been an in-flight cocktail service.

  “They were naked as the day they were born—well, except for a few very pretty beads.”

  Waiting at the clinic was a twelve-year-old who’d been delivering twins for three days. The doctor needed to rush her to a hospital, so my grandmother was left behind on the dirt, spiritually contained within a magic circle the doctor scratched around her with a borrowed spear. His parting words were “Don’t move a muscle till I get back.”

  “So there I sat, waiting and waiting,” my grandmother said. “Mercy, but I became anxious with all those natives staring at me, and me staring right back at them. I had my new Polaroid camera, so I thought it would be diverting to take some snaps and pass them around. Unfortunately, the camera wouldn’t cooperate, and I’m afraid each picture came out blank. I thought the chief was going to make a fricassee out of me!”

  My grandmother poured some more coffee and shook out two tiny saccharine tablets from a bottle. She continued her story after a couple of sips. “The women were all staring at me with these silent babies strapped to their backs, so I said to one, ‘That’s a lovely bracelet, dearie.’ ” If nothing else, my grandmother was known for her manners. “And it was. Why it might have been the inspiration behind that snappy little Cartier cuff Popsie gave me for our twenty-third.”

  She paused to remove Edward’s hand from the canine pudenda it was groping.

  “So what happened next?” I said, tracing the letters A-U-TO-P-S-Y along the edge of the half-finished crossword. I was picturing the Addams cartoon of a missionary couple simmering in a stockpot. Both are wearing pith helmets and khaki shirts, and they are roped together back-to-back. The husband is admonishing his wife for her remarks about how cute the natives surrounding the cauldron are, calling them knee-high to a grasshopper—which of course they actually are. I imagined my grandmother sitting calmly in a similar kettle, checking her lipstick with a compact and patting the curls around her head, oblivious to the rising temperature of the soup.

  She repositioned Edward on the pillows and the indignant dog at the foot of the bed. “I handed each of them a peppermint Life Saver.”

  “YAP!” squealed Edward. “YAP! YAP!”

  “One Life Saver?” I asked.

  “Why, that was more than plenty.”

  This didn’t surprise me. My grandmother was a complete, if completely innocent, cheapskate. I hated riding in taxis with her because she always stiffed the driver. As soon as I was mature enough to grasp the concepts of both guilt and money, when I was about four, I began to supplement her miserly gratuities once she was out of the cab. At first it was Monopoly money, which didn’t make me any more popular with the drivers than my grandmother, but I slept better at night.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “the natives weren’t terribly appreciative, because they popped the mints in their mouths and then stuck their dark little hands out for more. They were upset when I couldn’t produce any.”

  Six hours later, my grandmother was still sitting in the magic circle, shivering in the chic linen Mainbocher suit that had seemed so appropriate that morning. Her flask was empty and she was down to her last two Pep-O-Mint Life Savers (and nobody was getting them but her). The natives were leaping back and forth across the line in the dirt, brandishing sticks and bones and shaking their booties to tempt the Bwana magic.

  “And when the doctor finally returned,” said my grandmother, “I positively skedaddled for that plane! And for once, I must admit, I had faith in the concept of flight.”

  They were late arriving in Bakuba and had to spend the night. The king received them in his straw palace, to which they were delivered by the head tribesman.

  “Was he naked?” I asked.

  “Certainly, dearie, and so was the king. But he was too fat to get up. He received us from the floor, where he lay on a leopard skin, surrounded by all his councilors.”

  “I bet you never saw so many naked guys in your life,” I said, sniggering at the thought of my modish grandmother taking the time to dress in exactly the right outfit only to face a barrage of natives in the raw. I was proud of her, and pushed my face closer into her cozy-smelling bed jacket.

  My grandmother glanced at her watch now and hurriedly concluded her Congo tale. “Poor Popsie, he really was quite miffed to not meet the king.”

  She threw off the be
dclothes and was pushing her feet into her slippers when the phone rang. After a few terse words, she handed the heavy black receiver to me. It was my mother calling on a crackling line from Acapulco.

  “Listen, you,” she shouted, “I got a wire from your grandfather’s secretary talking about some kind of nitwit behavior. If you don’t stop harassing the servants, you’re going to be in deep shit. What the hell did you do to that poor ignorant maid, anyway?”

  “Nothing.” The great thing about the phone is no one can read your guilt.

  “Well nothing somehow had the old bird serving your grandfather lunch with piss all over the backside of her uniform.”

  “It was Will’s idea,” I protested. Actually, it had been Wednesday’s. She had subliminally suggested I put Saran Wrap under the toilet seat in the help’s bathroom. Poor Selma had taken a pee in between serving the vichyssoise and the crab soufflé.

  “And what the hell did you do to the poodles?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing doesn’t require a trip to the goddamn vet. Listen, Toots, I’ve had it up to here. No more riding lessons and I’m cutting your allowance and throwing out your troll collection. End of story.” Click.

  So what. Most of my trolls had been metaphorically disemboweled or were undergoing various stages of mutant transformation. But the riding lesson thing hurt.

  “Madame—?” Angelle padded into the room. “Madame ’as a fitting in ’alf an hour?” She lowered her head and backed out of the room.

  “Right-o,” my grandmother called out and sprang for the bathroom with a vigor she normally reserved for playing the net in doubles.

  The poodles trotted arthritically off to investigate the preparation of the help’s lunch, always served promptly at eleven-thirty, and Edward managed to clamber down and crawl after them, out the door and down the long, red-carpeted hallway.

  I remained alone on the big bed, surrounded by picture books and the mounting rhythm of the traffic below, suddenly missing my grandmother. I stayed for a while, hatching petulant plots of revenge against my unjust family while I systematically covered the photograph of my brother and his pony with a pattern of angry little skulls.

  Terrapin Soup

  AFTER THEIR MOTHER died, my great-grandmother, whom we called Gran, had been happy to have her sister, Ruth, occupy the three Twombly houses. When Ruth died, Gran sold the block-long town house on Fifth Avenue and donated the fifty-room cottage in Newport to a Catholic school for girls. Florham remained unsold for several years and was boarded up. Just when it seemed the beautiful thousand-acre estate would get carved up into suburbia, providence arrived in the form of higher education, and Fairleigh Dickinson University purchased the property.

  On an April morning a few years later, my grandparents, my brother Will, Gran, and I drove out to Florham for a tour of the new campus. We had an Asprey picnic hamper in the trunk of the limousine and George the Nazi at the wheel. Edward, being the unreliable age of two, had been left at the apartment, in the capable hands of four maids, one nanny, the laundress and her niece, and Ann Rose. The back of the limo was bigger than my bedroom at home. Sitting in it made me feel like a ring in a jewelry box because it was all padded in soft, dove gray felted wool and suede, and there were pleated pockets and snug little compartments all over the place. There was even a matching gray sheared-mink lap rug to pull across your knees, just like the puffs you were supposed to cover your diamond bracelets with in the real thing.

  The grown-ups were on the deep seat in the rear, and Will and I perched on the two forward-facing jump seats that pulled down from the driver’s partition and were only fun to ride in if you didn’t have to. We were playing the highway memory game.

  “I packed my grandmother’s trunk and in it I put an apple, a body bag, a Cadillac, a decapitation machine, an eggbeater, a funeral home, a gamma ray, a hearse, an Indy car, a jellyfish that was poisonous, a kangaroo, Lurch, malted milk balls, a necromaniac, an orangutan . . . and . . . the sawed-in-half body of a pygmy,” I said in a triumphant rush.

  “No fair!” protested Will. “Sawed-in-half doesn’t start with a P.”

  “Okay, half a pygmy then.”

  “I’m not sure I’d like even a whole pygmy in my trunk, dearie,” my grandmother remarked.

  “You’re cheating and I don’t want to play anymore,” Will said and turned away from me to face his window. I kicked him, he kicked me back, and then my grandfather got involved. “He said he doesn’t want to play, now will you, for five minutes, just be quiet!”

  George allowed himself the smallest of smiles, and I clamped my arms around myself like I was in a straitjacket and glowered out my window at the New Jersey Turnpike. I hadn’t wanted to come on this dumb trip to Ancestorland in the first place. There were few things less appealing than a long car ride to look at an old house with a bunch of old people. I’d already done my annual duty with my mother’s grim, colonial kin in Massachusetts, a handful of decrepit spinster third cousins and widower historians, all as concerned and up-to-date with the goings on of the Colonial Dames and the Sons of the American Revolution as if the Redcoats had just been sighted cresting Bunker Hill, even as they sat drinking sherry in front of the fire and the turkey rested on the sideboard.

  My father’s past had permeated my childhood, living as much as I did with his parents, but I found my mother’s family esoteric and impenetrable. Each Thanksgiving, we visited her childhood home, a small, spotless house on Dudley Lane, across from the cemetery in Milton. Her widower father, whom everyone called the Colonel, was an intimidating, reflective man who looked like a partridge and wore waistcoats and watches on chains, and pince-nez glasses. He wrote books about the French and Indian Wars, carved beautiful wooden birds, and collected and rebuilt clocks and watches for fun. In the summers he moved up to Lake Champlain to oversee the running of Fort Ticonderoga. He scared the academic hell out of me, and from the moment I crossed the threshold of his beeswax-scented little history-house, I didn’t open my mouth other than to squeak a couple of times at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, which we were allowed to watch “quietly!” on the small black-and-white television in the spare bedroom. Despite the repository of curios that the Colonel’s house was, I would no more have gone through a drawer in it than I would have eaten horse meat.

  My great-grandmother tapped the toe of my shoe with her cane. “Mr. Frick’s son once brought a pygmy back from Africa,” she said. “Donan, my mother’s chef, never batted an eye, and cooked him all of his favorite meals.” She knew I was into the Addams.

  “What did he eat, Gran?” I asked. I was hoping she’d say missionaries, but she smiled and said, “Rice and vegetables and potatoes, and I believe broiled steak, but no missionaries.” God I loved her for that.

  Gran was cozy in a dignified, Victorian way. Whereas my grandfather had the rounded physiognomy of a blue-eyed owl, his mother had creased eyes and a crumply sort of face that managed to look austerely bluestocking, yet warm and amused. She was tall and functionally bosomy, and she wore her snowy hair set in soft waves, and little velvet headband-hats, and the kind of pumps from the forties that made everyone’s ankles look puffy, although hers really were. Gran’s husband had died of leukemia shortly after they were married, so she mostly wore plain black or navy. When she got dressed up for someone’s anniversary dinner or black-tie birthday, she’d simply pin on one of her gigantic Schlumberger brooches and she was good to go.

  My other great-grandmother, Nina, was a dud as far as I was concerned. She might have been riveting in her prime, like when she was living in Paris and was publishing poetry, into séances and smoke interpretation and listening to distant tambourines, but now she was ancient and looked like one of those humanized chimpanzees you see on postcards. She wore flowery tea dresses, tiny hats with veils, and ropes of pearls, and to this day I can’t remember a single word she said. One of my least favorite photographs on the desk in my grandmother’s bedroom was of me as a hairless, fat bab
y, sitting in Nina’s lap. She’s holding me like I’m a two-minute egg that jumped out of its egg cup, which is exactly what I look like.

  Nina lived in the apartment building next door to my grandparents, but Gran lived directly underneath us, on the fifth floor. My grandfather had built a spiral staircase to connect the two floors, and hung a big red and black Calder mobile over the top of it. You could almost always find Gran in her football-field living room overlooking Central Park, sitting in a wing-backed chair near the window, knitting sweaters for the blind. She knit the same boxy pattern for as many years as I knew her, and always in the same tiny size, using rough blue yarn that was as charmless as the Atlantic in winter. Not that the color mattered. Upstairs, my grandmother knit the identical pattern with the same yarn, and for a while there I thought blind people only came in one size.

  It was appropriate that Gran’s sister, Ruth, died of alcoholism. She was completely wild. The two of them were close, despite being as different as wax and string. Gran, the elder by several years, had never looked at another man after her husband died. Ruth had never looked at a man, period. Referred to as “a handsome outdoor girl,” which back then was a quaint way of saying she was a lesbian, Ruth had lived her life in hedonistic opposition to her sister’s abstemious one. And she had died that way, too—magnificently, if painfully, of full-blown cirrhosis of the liver, while vacationing at the Ritz in Paris.