Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  My grandfather, who had now finished a second bottle of wine, was expounding on Terrapin à la Florham to Will, who was vacantly pulling all the hairs out of his left eyebrow, one by one. It felt like we had been eating lunch for three days.

  “—and every night it was in season, terrapin was served at Grandma Twombly’s dinner table. It was superb, brilliantly superb.”

  Will started in on his other eyebrow.

  It was a forgone conclusion that any outing involving my grandfather and me would end in mishap. An hour later I was lurking behind the limousine, hanging on to one of the twin flags that were attached to the fenders, eavesdropping on the grown-ups. I was straining so hard to hear what was being said about so-and-so’s terminal illness and imminent death (both huge trigger terms for me) that I didn’t realize I had the flag-pole practically bent in two, and it had not been exactly flexible to begin with.

  Just when they were getting to the most interesting part—and the doctors had to insert a—and I was almost able to hear what they were saying, I started grasping the flag tighter—but since she insisted on an open casket—tighter—and Campbell’s said they wouldn’t—until SNAP!

  My grandfather made me sit up front with the Nazi, on the other side of the bulletproof glass partition. I tried to make conversation with him for a while, but it didn’t go well:

  “So. Selma tells me you’re redecorating the apartment over the garage.”

  “Ja.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  Between the on-ramp to the Turnpike and the toll booth at the Lincoln Tunnel, I plotted retaliation against my grandfather, my brother, the Nazi, my geography teacher, and the male race in general. When I had mentally sealed their fate with an ingenious plot I’d heard about, where a woman killed her husband by putting nicotine from liquefied cigarettes into his aftershave, which snuffed him in about an hour, I was over it.

  I couldn’t bear not being a part of the conversation. As we entered the gloom of the tunnel, I took advantage of George’s momentary blindness to flip the switch for the partition so I could hear what everybody was saying. I shouldn’t have bothered. My grandfather was talking about cheese. I was about to put the window back up when I heard the distinctive sound of his cigarette case clicking shut. Then I heard him ask if Will would do him the honor of lighting his cigarette.

  Just as my brother leaned over, proudly intent on his task, I put my arm through the partition and pinched the back of his neck so hard he squealed like a hamster and dropped the flaming match on my grandfather’s knee. A tiny smoky hole appeared in the exquisite Savile Row wool. The owner of the knee exploded, and so did Will.

  “She pinched me!” he screeched, and lunged through the partition. I was struggling to get the window up as expeditiously as possible, and leaning all over the Nazi to do it, which caused him to swerve and nearly sideswipe a delivery truck. It was all terribly exciting, depending on whose view you saw it from.

  When we got back to the apartment, I dove headfirst for the corner seat in the elevator, beating my brother to it and daring, with practically twirling eyeballs, anyone to say a word about it. I tore off my prissy dress, stomping up and down on it before stuffing it into a mothball-filled garment bag at the back of the closet. I pulled on a pair of the Y-front boys’ underwear my grandmother had actually bought for me, then a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and my PF Flyers.

  Rudely awakening them from their slumber beneath a forty-watt-lightbulb sun, I scooped up my brother’s three brand-new turtles from their plastic oasis, scurried up the spiral staircase, and made a beeline to the kitchen. It was almost four, and no one was around. I had maybe fifteen minutes before the chef started getting the help’s dinner ready. I placed the tiny reptiles on top of the rolled steel worktable, whereupon they instantly retreated into their silver-dollar-sized carapaces. I managed to get down a big soup pot from the overhead rack, and filled it with water. It took me half a dozen matches to get the burner on the big black Garland going, but I did it. I lugged the pot from the sink to the stove, spilling most of it, and then I carefully placed the turtles in the water, using a big spoon the way the chef did when he was poaching eggs. I turned the flame up as high as it would go and sat down on the counter to watch.

  At first they didn’t do much, just paddled around, but then, as the water started to swirl a bit, they began swimming faster, and then they were really swimming faster, bumping into one another, their tiny claws scrabbling against the sides of the pot for a foothold. I hung over the stove and watched as they raced around, their nostrils fibrillating in fear. Tiny bubbles started to form across the bottom of the pot. Almost imperceptibly, the bubbles began to rise, and that’s when I burst into tears and grabbed a soup ladle and fished them out. I ran over to the sink and, sobbing into a kitchen towel, tenderly rinsed them under cool tap water.

  Later that night, after my bath, I went to visit Gran. Normally I had to go in with someone, in case she was resting or doing whatever it was that old people did when they didn’t want to receive, but the door to her apartment was open, so I let myself in. Gran was slumped in her chair, still wearing her dark day clothes, her knitting needles and the cheap blue yarn on her lap. Her face was turned away, and for a while there, I thought she was dead. This alternately horrified and thrilled me since I’d never actually seen a dead person, but when I crept closer, the rise and fall of her chest showed that she was merely sleeping. After I nosed around a little, looking for the chocolates I knew she always had on hand, and rearranging her collection of Battersea enamel boxes in a taxonomic progression of flora to fauna, I settled on the old-fashioned love seat across from her. In the companionable dark, Gran slept on while I ate chocolate, my feet tucked up beneath my nightgown, and kept a vigil over my great-grandmother because, at that moment, she was just about all I wanted to claim as mine.

  My Family and Other Domestics

  AS SOON AS we figured out that for all intents and purposes we had no parents, Will and I started filling in the gaps with the hired help. At home in Washington, Henrietta and Cassie Diggins assumed virtual parenthood the day our little brother was born, when, following a cursory offering of colostrum, our mother grabbed a couple of bikinis and fled the maternity ward to embark on an open-ended quest for the perfect tan. When she returned three years later, baby Edward was surprised to discover he was not, in fact, the miracle child of a Scottish nanny and an African- American cook.

  When we were in Burdenland, which was what our mother called the “goddamn spoiled rotten” world of our grandparents, my brothers and I had at our disposal an extended surrogate family who had known us since we were newborns. The core group, what I liked to consider our immediate family, was based in New York City, and consisted of the chef and his assistant, the butler and his wife, four or five maids, a couple of laundresses, the chauffeur, and the domestic gatekeeper, Ann Rose.

  My grandfather may have been avant-garde in his views on culture, but he was strictly Edwardian when it came to his household. In this era of civil rights and bra burnings, he stoically referred to his staff as “the servants.” My grandmother would have preferred to call them nothing at all, but she compromised by calling them the “help,” for which her husband chided her, saying, “Peggy, don’t be absurd. To call the servants the ‘help’ is insultingly euphemistic.”

  When it came to hiring, my grandfather referred to a standard formulated during the era of Florham: Butlers were ideally British, and came with a wife. Chefs were French, but could have Swedish or Finnish assistants. Maids were Irish, but ladies’ maids were French, unless they were English because they were married to the butler. Coachmen, footmen, and valets were English or Irish; and the order of preference for the chauffeur’s nationality was first French, then English, then—as a last resort—German. (Clearly George the Nazi was a last resort.) Head gardeners were absolutely always Scottish, as were the under gardeners, although the latter could on occasion be Italian, but only if they were exceptionally talente
d. Italian was as dark as anyone got.

  The most important person in the household was the chef, and there was fierce competition among my grandfather and his Francophile coterie as to who could attain and then hold on to the hottest one. Requisite criteria included a temper more volatile than Idi Amin’s, Swiss or French culinary training begun at the age of two, and documented tenure in the kitchens of de Gaulle, a Rothschild, or, at the very least, Douglas Dillon. Of the dozen or so books my grandfather consumed each week, half of them were on the subject of food or drink. The hallway bookshelves overflowed with the spines of Elizabeth David and Lucullus Beebe, Ali-Bab, Pierre Franey, and A. J. Liebling, and the bedside tables were stacked with wine quarterlies and epicurean almanacs. As he lay pillow-propped in bed at night, waiting for the velvet Seconal hammer, my grandfather did his food reading. He alternated between scribbling pencil notations in a shorthand that only Miss Pou could decipher and pontificating into the mike of a thirty-pound Dictaphone, one of the dozen he had installed, in addition to the one in the car, next to the toilet, the bed, the chair in the library, the indoor swimming pool in Maine, and the tennis court in the country. Within a day, these nocturnal musings (Curnonsky—Never lunches, but is tolerant of those that do. Or Fish are only fresh for a few hours. Or Midnight Supper Idea: Thin sandwiches of very rare, or raw, beef, pepper mill, tiny bottles of cold champagne) would be transposed and typed up in quadruplicate on five-by-seven index cards, to be filed for reference in the kitchens of each house.

  If the chef was God, then the butler was Jesus. My grandfather’s favorite had been a white-haired Englishman named Day, whom President Eisenhower had seduced from Buckingham Palace, and whom my grandfather had usurped from Ike. Day had retired, and now there was pink-cheeked Adolphe. He should have been English, but he had been with the embassy in Brussels, and despite his being Belgian, my grandfather had liked him so much that he had conveyed him back to New York along with fifty cases of Burgundy. A combination of Alfred Pennyworth (Batman’s butler) and Mervyn Bunter (the valet of Lord Peter Wimsey), Adolphe was the epitome of protocol, diplomacy, and discretion, with an appropriate amount of attitude. He may have held my grandfather’s underwear for him to step into, but he did it in a morning suit of sartorial perfection, with a ceremonial expression befitting the task. Impeccably turned out as he was—daytime black jacket, gray waistcoat, and pinstripe trousers; evening tailcoat with white gloves and wing collar—Adolphe ensured his master was too, whether in white tie with decorations for a dinner at the White House, a navy Huntsman business suit for the office, or spotless flannel tennis whites for the weekend court. Not a molecule of lint could be found on either man, and this was before the most important invention of the twentieth century: the rolling pet hair remover.

  Adolphe, in addition to being butler, valet, and avuncular nanny to Will and Edward and me, had the role of the archetypal family priest who must care for his half-witted sisters. In this case, they were the maids, and they needed explicit guidance from the moment their bunioned feet got out of bed to when they said their Hail Marys in the same spot at the close of the day. They flapped around him like Chicken Littles if the papers were late, or the vacuum cleaner belt broke, or the butter curler went missing.

  An old Irish maid has the shelf life of Velveeta. Change in the ranks was rare, and only necessary when one of them staggered repeatedly under the weight of the luncheon dishes, or became so stricken with dementia that she carpet-swept a single square foot of the library for hours on end. Even then, out of a sense of loyalty, they were kept on. Incompetence was never a reason to fire a maid, nor, in Selma’s case, was incontinence. Those women knew my brothers and me better than our own mother did, and when I was feeling frustrated in my attempts to have a so-called normal life, I sometimes wished for the predictable routine of the women who occupied the staff wings and basements and attics of my grandparents’ houses. Up at six, squeeze the oranges for juice, walk the poodles, choose the linens for lunch and dinner, have a chin wag with Nelly on ten, serve lunch, polish some silver, cup of tea and the Daily News crossword at four, serve cocktails, serve dinner, telly for an hour, prayers, and bed by nine. Tuesdays off, Mass on Sunday, a fortnight’s holiday in June. They were grounded. They knew what to expect. More importantly, they knew what was expected of them. Nobody expected anything of me, unless you counted my mother expecting me to become thin, blond, and tanned.

  There were definite perks to having four or five auntie maids in residence. You never had to make your bed. You could step out of your clothes and leave them puddled right there on the floor, and poof! they would disappear and be back in a few hours, magically washed and pressed and folded away in your drawers like you lived in the clothing department of Best & Co. Red-knuckled hands perpetually wiped and dusted, scrubbed and polished, mopped and waxed, and tidied and organized, putting to rights the everyday messes of we, the Goddamn Spoiled Rotten.

  Ann Rose, the gatekeeper, was the liaison between front and back, the settler of petty grievances, the soother of egos, and consequently a nervous wreck. She was a mournful, spaghetti-like thing with dark puffs under her sad brown eyes and deep lines on either side of her disappointed mouth. I liked to pretend she was from the Swiss branch of the Addams family, although really she looked more like she came from the clan of Edward Gorey. Sepulchrally dismal, she was the three-dimensional equivalent of woe.

  It was difficult not to take Ann Rose for granted. Even the back elevator operator enjoyed more recognition than she did. She had been an au pair dispatched from Zurich the moment the wet nurses had finished with my grandmother’s fourth and final son, Uncle Ordway. When, in the tradition of his three older brothers—my father, Uncle Bob, and Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham—Ordway was sent to boarding school, Ann Rose the au pair became Ann Rose the household watchdog, and she spent the remainder of her life in bondage to my grandparents.

  Ann Rose was grimly reliable. If she said she’d have the poodles groomed in time for my grandmother’s luncheon for Mrs. Astor, you knew the dogs would be posed on the yellow sofa beneath the Monet water lilies in the living room, coiffed and perfumed, when the ladies arrived. And you could always find Ann Rose exactly where you expected her to be, at any given moment, which meant I could ferret around in her office without being disturbed.

  Ann Rose’s office was my favorite hunting ground. It was also the most accessible, since she went home to her own apartment at night. The office was in the back corner of the apartment, at the end of the long, red-carpeted, book-lined hallway, next to the spiral staircase that led downstairs to the bedroom Will and I shared. Tall wire-glass windows looked through a fire escape onto a quintessential New York view: a brick wall with a scrap of sky visible above it. Floor-to-ceiling shelves bulged with reference books, and iron-colored file cabinets were squeezed shoulder to shoulder in front of them.

  The long metal desk that squatted beneath the east-facing window looked as utilitarian as a business envelope, but inside it was a candy store. I considered myself the curator of its eight skinny drawers, and I was forever rearranging the green and red felt-tipped pens, the black china markers, the staples and magnifying glasses and fountain pens and ink cartridges and scissors of a dozen shapes and sizes, and bringing everything to regimental order for Ann Rose—who was forever messing with my arrangements. (How anyone could stand to have their office supplies all higgledy-piggledy was a mystery to me.) A constant source of irritation was the locked drawer on the bottom righthand side. I could not jimmy or pick my way into it. Nor could I figure out just what could be so important as to be locked up. Nothing in Burdenland was ever locked. Not the wine cellar, or the silver cabinets, or my grandmother’s jewelry boxes—even after the time when the window washer stole her rectangular-cut, Color-D, Clarity-SI1 10k Cartier diamond engagement ring, which she got back three hours later because the moron tried to pawn it during his lunch break.

  Sometimes I began with a perusal of disfiguring diseases in the medical encycloped
ia, but usually I just went straight for the files to catch up on current events. In addition to evaluations from Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham’s psychiatrist, Dr. Sharp, and Will’s shrink, Dr. Berman, and secret information on the help, like their references, and what my grandfather had ordered from his tailor in London (forty blue shirts and twenty white), and what my grandfather had ordered for my grandmother from Mainbocher and Givenchy and Balmain and Dior and Balenciaga, there were Will’s and my report cards, which the schools sent because my grandparents paid the tuition. My mother was forever telling me how Will had scored higher on his IQ test than me, so I needed to keep tabs on the situation and reassure myself I was still smarter than him, even if it was the battle of the D+’s over the Ds. I was terrified of having to repeat a grade the way my brother had, and then having to go to boarding school.

  I wanted whatever Will had, but not his school. Glayden was a hippie encampment in the woods of Virginia that catered to children with learning disabilities. These ranged from severe dyslexia, like Will had, to headline mental retardation. My mother had sent me to camp there one summer, with disastrous results. After a few days surrounded by the afflicted, it was impossible for me not to speculate that since I didn’t have any learning disabilities, clearly I was there because I was retarded, and this was my family’s way of telling me. The nurse said in twenty-six years of working with the mentally ill she’d never seen anyone have such hysterics.