Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  With the help of a butler, a footman, a French chauffeur named Lucien, a cook, several maids, and a governess, Gran had raised her two sons on her own. Like Gran and Ruth, the two boys could not have been more different. My grandfather studied at Harvard, graduated cum laude in 1927, and went to work on Wall Street as an analyst of the nascent aviation industry. In 1949 he founded the private investment firm of William A. M. Burden and Company. As ambitious as he was civic-minded, he was eager to make his mark on the world, particularly because he didn’t believe in the afterlife. He was on the boards of everything from CBS and Lockheed, to Columbia University, New York Hospital, and the Smithsonian. He collected affiliations and memberships the way I would go on to collect CREEPY comics. A 1953 profile of him in The New Yorker concluded with: “If you ever wonder what the Brook, the Racquet & Tennis, the River, the Links, the Grolier, and the Century can possibly have in common, the answer is Burden.” By 1964 my grandfather had added the Knickerbocker, the Somerset, the Chevy Chase, the Metropolitan, the Cosmos, 1925 F Street, the Capitol Hill, the Jupiter Island and the Harbor clubs, Buck’s and White’s in London, and the Travellers and the Jockey Club in Paris, as well as Ye Ancient and Honorable Society of Chief Sorcerers and Apprentices, whatever that was.

  My grandfather and his brother, who, for unknown reasons, was named Shirley, remained the closest of siblings throughout their lives (both remarkably long, as both were remarkably alcoholic). Uncle Shirley never went to college. Instead, he went to Hollywood. He had married Flobelle Fairbanks, Douglas Fairbanks’ niece, and a member of Hollywood royalty, and they lived in the oldest part of sunny, delicious Beverly Hills. We had gone there for Christmas the year before my father died, and from the moment we entered the rambling Spanish-style mansion, I craved from the depths of my five-year-old soul to be a part of that domain. Everything about the place, the things we did, and the way we were treated was tantalizingly foreign. Uncle Shirley was warm, riotously funny, and endearingly irreverent, despite his conversion to Catholicism. Instead of a coffee table display of aviation officials and Republican presidents, film stars and Hollywood producers grinned from the silver frames in Uncle Shirley and Aunt Flobe’s living room. Their shelves and walls were crowded with black-and-white candids of their grandchildren, climbing over their parents, in the arms and on the laps and kissing the wrinkly faces of their adoring relatives; tumbling around in the grass in Connecticut, playing with their innumerable toys and pets and bikes; on the trampoline, in the pool, on ponies, on sailboats, and on skis. There must have been a thousand pictures of them. Back in New York, I looked with new eyes at our grim, formal lineups, the older generation with the retouched visages of dewy teenagers, my brother Will and I like Stepford children, a six-foot-wide stand of lilies beside us and a world renowned Léger painting behind.

  For a year after that trip to California I pretended I’d been a victim of mistaken identity and that any day now the hospital would call and announce that they had made a terrible mistake, that my cousin Lore and I had somehow gotten swapped at birth (despite being born a year apart and on different coasts) and that I actually belonged to the fun, happy branch of the family, not the horrible, girl-hating one.

  Surprise, that didn’t happen, and here I was, stuck in a car with my direct lineage.

  Will was taking impressions of the car door with Silly Putty, and then pulling all the little hairs it had collected from the wool. Nobody was paying any attention because a) he was Will and could do no wrong, and b) Gran was describing all the house parties they’d had at Florham when she was growing up.

  “Thirty guests each weekend!” said my grandmother with the tiniest brfft. (She was in a car, after all.) “Think of the planning! The staff and the linens and flowers and the meals.” She snapped open her pocketbook, the black lizard one I thought was so funny because it had two big gold poodles guarding its portals. She removed her lipstick and, without a mirror, applied it to her upper lip, which she then smacked against the lower one, a routinely hit-and-miss endeavor. My grandmother put on lipstick whenever she truly pondered something.

  “Mother adored it,” chuckled Gran. “Entertaining was her life.”

  “Well she did have the most superb French chef,” said my grandfather with a reverence he usually reserved for Charles de Gaulle or the Cummings Motor Company. “And Donan had five under him in the kitchen, not to mention a half dozen footmen in the pantry as well.” He sighed longingly.

  “Oh, Bill, nobody has footmen nowadays,” chided his mother.

  Her son scowled and, with dexterity born of habit, reached across to the bar alcove and poured several fingers of Wild Turkey into a glass without spilling a drop. He tried not to bolt it in front of his teetotaler mother.

  My grandfather could never have enough staff. His grandmother Twombly had run her three behemoth houses with the help of two hundred servants, whereas he was forced to make do with a skeleton staff of twenty for his own four. He also could never have enough land. It drove him nuts that his property in Westchester County was only two hundred and fifty acres, whereas Nelson Rockefeller’s weekend retreat covered four thousand in Tarrytown.

  “Regardless,” he said, extracting a gold cigarette case from his pocket and selecting a filterless Chesterfield, “Donan was marvelous, brilliantly marvelous.”

  My grandfather said “marvelous” the way a character in a Fitzgerald novel would. Mah-velous. He said it about a hundred times a day, as if it were the only adjective that could aptly describe the talents of a chef, or the plate of Belon oysters before him, or the Chateau Petrus he was drinking, or how he felt about the overthrow of the Libyan government.

  He shook his head at the marvelousness of it all, and fiddled with the cigarette lighter on the door. I rolled my eyes and looked at Will, who rolled his back at me. Unable to make the lighter work, my grandfather began searching his pockets for matches. “Before the first world war,” he continued, “one could easily find Escoffier-trained, top chefs like Donan. But then, stupidly, they all went back to France to fight. And naturally they all died. Why the devil aren’t there any matches?”

  “Imagine the havoc that must have wreaked in the great houses of America,” my grandmother observed dryly.

  “Peggy, you have no idea how difficult it is to procure these fellows nowadays,” her husband retorted.

  “Why, Popsie, aren’t you satisfied with our chef?”

  “Yes, yes, of course I am,” he replied, patting down the pockets of his Huntsman overcoat for a light. “Only the fellow had no idea the other night that when you serve partridge they must all be from the same hatch. And he seems unable to procure the best terrapin.” He took off his round steel-rimmed glasses and polished them with a monogrammed powder blue handkerchief that matched his shirt exactly. I whispered to Will that he looked kind of like a terrapin himself, but Will didn’t agree. I resolved never to speak to him again.

  “Don’t you remember, Momsie,” my grandfather continued, “how marvelous the terrapin was at the luncheon we had for your eightieth at the Pavillon? Donan came out of retirement to prepare it himself. Why in blazes he wouldn’t come work for me—”

  “Bill, your language! The children.”

  My grandfather harrumphed, and I snorted into the hand-shirred bodice of my dress.

  Blazes? Was that even a swear word? I did a quick mental run-through of all the dirty words I knew, starting with fuck, shit, prick, and butthole, while I doodled tombstones across the front page of the Daily News. Will was picking a scab on his knuckle and flicking the pieces my way.

  My grandmother leaned toward me and said, “That’s a snappy dress you have on, dearie, is it new?” For the outing, I had been coerced into wearing a pale green Belgian party dress that cost as much as a pony.

  “No. I got it for Christmas,” I said.

  “Well it’s a lovely color. Did Santa give it to you?”

  “No, you did. And I look like a mint.”

  “A very nice mint
, dearie.”

  Still without a light, my grandfather told his wife to lower the glass partition so he could speak to George. After she’d fumbled with every other button on her seat arm, sending all the windows open and the grit and wind from the turnpike whooshing through the interior, and turning all the reading lights on and off, and the radio on at full volume, he reached angrily across her and did it himself.

  “Dammit, George,” he spluttered, “I’ve asked you repeatedly to always provide matches!”

  “Yes, Mr. Burden,” George said in his Gestapo monotone, glancing into the rearview mirror. I whipped around and grinned at him obnoxiously. George handed me a gold book of matches with MLB, my grandmother’s monogram, on the cover.

  “Thank you, George,” I said. “Can I light it, Granddaddy?” I started to tear off one of the matches.

  “No, no, no! Now, give them here and be quiet.”

  He reached forward and snatched them from my hand. Then he lit his cigarette and sat back, exhaling vigorously. I was used to smoke, but I coughed dramatically because I hated the smell of Chesterfields. I already knew I was going to be a Marlboro girl.

  I made a mental note to hide all the matches in the apartment when I got back, and added my grandfather’s initials to several tombstones in my drawing.

  As Gran’s soft old voice continued:—a marvel . . . whomever came to visit . . . Chicken á la King for Mrs. Prentice . . . Lobster Lafayette . . . Thomas Edison—my grandfather picked up the mike to the built-in Dictaphone below his seat and rattled off a memo to his secretary.

  “Miss Pou, a record of all Vanderbilt houses in Newport and in New York City. Dates and principal residents. On my desk by Monday. And terrapin for lunch in the country this weekend. Must be in season somewhere. Check Australia. Fly them in. Females.” He thought a moment and added, “Send six cases of Mr. & Mrs. T’s Bloody Mary Mix to all houses. And phone Kyoto about the best chrysanthemums for Mount Kisco greenhouse.”

  Hmmm, I thought. Weren’t chrysanthemums poisonous?

  “We’re here!” piped Will. Gran sat up abruptly as, at last, we turned through a pair of towering, elegantly wrought iron gates. The gravel crunched and popped beneath our tires as we drove past smooth lawns and orchards. My grandmother pointed out the farm in the distance, and the dairy with its shingled silo and beautiful, ivy-covered barns. We blinked at the greenhouses repeating their glare in the sun, and at the imposing glass-and-brick orangerie, and the very adult Playhouse, with its central barroom, and separate wings of tennis courts and swimming pool.

  The house was the biggest thing I’d ever seen in my life. The Nazi swung the car around the circle and stopped in front, and Will and I tumbled out. We started chasing each other around the wide frontal columns, and clambering over the pair of life-sized marble lions guarding the two-storied portico. My grandfather walked up to the massive front door and touched it with a fingertip. “Not as shiny as it used to be,” he commented.

  His mother struggled up the steps to stand beside him. “No,” she admitted, adjusting her hat. “In Mother’s time we employed it as a mirror, to check our appearance before we went in to see her. I suppose the university doesn’t see the need to keep it that polished anymore.”

  We were early, so there was no university tour guide waiting to greet us. Gran pushed the door open and we followed her in. We stood for a moment, blinking in the dark coolness of a black-and-white marble hallway that seemed to stretch forever. A massive fireplace faced the entrance, and my brother and I ran to stand inside it.

  “Perfect for roasting your victims,” I whispered in awe. I imagined bodies on spits being slowly hand cranked by hunch-backs with leprosy.

  “Hel-lo . . . hel-lo,” called Will up the flue.

  “That fireplace is almost twenty feet high. Can you imagine?” said Gran, leaning on her cane. “Father had it copied after the one at Windsor Castle.” She turned in a slow circle, remembering. “Mother’s Sargent portrait used to hang over there.” She pointed to where an aerial map of the buildings and grounds hung crookedly on the wall, and the grown-ups all squinted at it in recollection.

  Gran’s mother, Florence, was not only the last surviving grandchild of the Commodore, she was the least attractive. In her portrait by John Singer Sargent, the court painter of his day, she is depicted in the ripest of swirling peach tones, all warts and moles removed. Her eyes are as dark and moist as Hostess cup-cakes, her mouth chastely sensual. Her figure—in actuality, angular and stick-thin—is as luscious and languid as a Boston cream pie. Seated on the edge of a needlepoint Louis XVI foot-stool, she is surrounded by icons of her opulent life: a Barberini tapestry (Apollo and Daphne visible in a discreet state of undress), an exquisite ivory fan, a rich Aubusson carpet. It is the portrait of a wealthy fertility goddess, and nothing remotely like the cross, dried-up, dark little bird I’d seen in all the family albums.

  “And remember all the Caesars that lined this hallway on their fluted stands?” my grandmother said with a wave of her gloved hand.

  “Pilasters, Peggy,” her husband corrected.

  “Let’s see,” she continued, counting them out on her fingers, “Tiberius, and Caligula—and Claudius and Nero, Augustus and, and—oh, Galba and Titus, and . . . I can’t remember the others.” Barfufft! She subsided, pleased with herself for remembering that many.

  Traveling slowly down the hallway, we looked into rooms that had once been the library and the salon, the billiard room and the oak-paneled smoking room. Across from the formal living room was an immense alcove that had held Grandma Twombly’s beloved Aeolian pipe organ, an instrument reportedly larger even than the one at Radio City Music Hall. It had gone on the block with everything else, the massive Louis XV gilt chandeliers from the ballroom and the roomfuls of English furniture, the Chinese porcelain, the beautiful paintings, and books, and carpets and tapestries, all of which had contributed to my grandfather’s inheritance and allowed him to purchase paintings like Francis Bacon’s Screaming Pope, which my grandmother had to close her eyes and put a handkerchief to her mouth to walk past.

  The grown-ups kept going on and on about how things used to be and what was gone and who had died, and I felt badly for my great-grandmother. As much as I loved the idea of dead people, I couldn’t imagine being the only one from my generation left alive. Then my grandfather started reminiscing about Phillip, everyone’s favorite footman, and how he would bring them their breakfast in bed—hothouse Marshall strawberries with morning dew on them—although how something grown inside could have dew on it was beyond me.

  In the nick of time a university official came hurrying apologetically down the hallway, and Will and I escaped up the marble staircase to the second floor. We counted thirty-six bedrooms, now dull, utilitarian offices, albeit with fancy plasterwork and marble bathrooms en suite with fireplaces. There were still the original brass holders on the doors, where the names of the guests, written out in copperplate, would be inserted for their stay. Up a lesser staircase we found another twenty or so bedrooms, and we ran dizzily in and out of them until we burst in on a large lady in a dusty little office, manning a mimeograph machine that smelt of vanilla. She shooed us out with lavender-stained fingers, but as we retreated, I puffed myself up self-importantly and hollered, “Hey! This is my great-grandmother’s house, you know!” Like she cared.

  We ate our picnic lunch outside on the wide stone terrace, though it was hardly a picnic since my grandfather insisted a table be brought out. The grown-ups sat at it and ate egg salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and cold roast chicken, and Camembert with huge dusty black grapes, the kind you practically need to cut in half and pit like a plum. Will and I straddled the stone balustrade next to them and drank Cokes and gnawed on drumsticks, and when we got bored with eating, we stood up and balanced on the balustrade and tried to jinx each other into falling into the bushes below. After a bottle and a half of Meursault, my grandfather was waxing even more nostalgic for Chef Donan and carrying on
about his marvelousness like a tent revivalist.

  After lunch that day, I think I knew every dish in Donan’s repertoire. Turns out he was famous not only for his food, but because he was the highest paid chef in the country. In Donan’s New Yorker profile, he got five pages. My grandfather’s was only three.

  “Tell me about the breakfast-es you used to have,” said Will. Breakfast was his favorite meal. He could eat eggs and pancakes and Little Jones fried sausages all day long. Gran told him how breakfast had been served between seven and eight, either on trays in the guest rooms, or in the breakfast room, and how every morning there had been eggs of every description, and all kinds of fruits from the hothouses, and Donan’s famous croissants, which he was credited with introducing to America, and hot muffins and toasts and brioches and biscuits, and cooked or dry cereals, and different cheeses, and chicken hash, and creamed hash and brown hash, and fish balls, and sausages, and bacon, and ham, and any kind of juice you could want, and strong hot coffee, or French chocolate, or China tea. And that was just breakfast.

  I only interrupted twice, once to gag at the fish balls, and the other to tell my grandmother there was a bee drowning in her wine, but she ignored me and drank it down on the next gulp. I then had to project potential allergic reactions for her, and spent the next ten minutes worrying that her throat might swell to the point of suffocation and she would die.

  “What was Grandma Twombly’s favorite?” my grandmother asked, her voice disappointingly normal. God, what a boring last question to be remembered by, I thought.

  “Well, Mother adored soufflés,” Gran said. “In fact, her very last meal was a chicken soufflé.”

  That started my grandfather off on a long recourse about egg courses, which I knew would lead to fish courses, and then meat courses, and then caviar and turtles and lobster and pheasant, so I shut my eyes and concentrated on what my own last meal might be. Obviously it would be dependent on what my crime was, as well as how I was going to be martyred. The most important factor to consider was what I’d want the contents of my stomach to be in the hereafter. I wouldn’t want to be too gassy for the embalmer, though I knew that was unavoidable, due to the metabolism of my intestinal bacteria. Lobster, maybe? Or would that just sit like a lump in my stomach for months, years even, before the worms broke it down? Perhaps something lighter, like popovers soaked in butter. Or a bacon cheeseburger from the Chevy Chase Club? That’s it, I thought.