Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  Now my mother requisitioned the boxes she had stored when we’d moved to England. In a when-in-Rome celebration of her Colonial roots, she savored her trove of ancestral leavings: the Federal candlesticks, the tarnished sterling Queen Anne tea set, the various pewter soup tureens and chargers, the blue and white creamware, and mismatched plates by Spode, and Copeland, and Wedgwood. There must have been fifty christening mugs alone, many of them dating back to the early 1600s and passed down so many times the 1900 babies had to have their names inscribed in a jumble on the bottom. Out of their shallow wooden graves came portraits of long-dead Pilgrims—huge oils of large-eyed men and women in oddly modern, stark gold frames, and miniatures of their mothers and sisters and children. A long brown paper box revealed the wedding shawl of one Mary Lane of Bedford, Massachusetts, a kinsman known for a habit of picking off Indians with a shotgun from her upstairs bedroom window. There were enough domestic artifacts to start a museum, what with all the tortoiseshell hair combs, needle-pointed purses, cross-stitched patriotic slogans, golden thimbles, buttonhole scissors, pillowcases packed with yards of hundred-year-old lace, and frayed linen envelopes containing scraps of clothing purportedly belonging to everyone from the aforementioned Myles Standish to Bonnie Prince Charlie. On the mantel my mother proudly placed her favorite relic of all: the hallmarked family silver mug made by Paul Revere. (Which, of course, the Chosen One would get when she died.)

  After they were settled in to the new house, my mother and the contractor settled themselves into a pattern of drinking and arguing, and fawning over their out-of-control Rhodesian ridgebacks—huge, insane dogs that took up every inch of space in that tiny house. You see local stories on TV about the raiding of the homes of weirdos harboring hundreds of animals living in a sea of their own feces. Visiting my mother’s house was beginning to feel dangerously close to this. It might only be a matter of months before the floors became carpeted with a two-inch-thick layer of dog stool. There would be no money to heat the house, but the larder would be stocked with Iams and booze. My mother would be forced to pawn her leather outfits, and would trail around in winter wearing layers of filthy, hooded, zip-up terry-cloth robes. When summer came, the single raggedy bikini she was down to would expose a body covered with bruises from the happy, beating tails of her dogs.

  When you leave home, you instinctually modify the passage of time so that you, the child, develop at a normal rate, while your parents, and in my case my grandparents, age at about ten times that. I had seen little of my grandparents over the last few years and was unprepared for their sudden decline. Either that or I was able to see them for the first time with a modicum of objectivity. Between my grandmother’s Dubonnet and Percocetcoated perception of reality and my grandfather’s diminishing control over his limbs, and increase in drinking, they were a mess.

  When they were courting, my grandmother, who had been ingrained with a love of art by her parents, was surprised at how little my grandfather knew or even cared about painting or sculpture. She set about educating him and took him to her father’s studio, and the Metropolitan Museum, and the Frick. My grandfather took it upon himself to tutor his future bride in his area of expertise—the art of drinking—and every night they went to parties and speakeasies to increase her knowledge of wine and other libations. Who knows whether she would have found her way to alcoholism without his guidance, but she was as much an expert as he was now.

  For as long as I could remember, my grandfather always began his day’s drinking well before noon. Wherever he was—Hobe Sound, Mount Kisco, Northeast Harbor, New York—he would abruptly launch himself, like a wet rag fired from a sling-shot, and make his way to one of the cabinet bars located throughout his homes and his office. Selecting a Baccarat highball glass, he would fill it to the brim with Wild Turkey and drink it off in one go while standing there. Then he would replace the glass exactly where it had been and return to his seat. This routine was so, well, routine, you only took notice when he was staggering.

  Oddly enough, alcoholism suited him. My grandfather was a part of that urbane, if self-impressed, counterestablishment that never stopped thinking, or drinking. He was also from a long, proud line of drinkers. In the same way the royal French Bourbon nose was said to denote enormous sexual appetite, the VanderBurden nose, less protuberant and infinitely more refined, prophesies an insatiable appetite for drink. Alcoholism never suited my grandmother, though. Whereas her husband, when over-served, would simply pass out in situ, my grandmother would dance among the goldfish or crash to the floor in a maelstrom of Dior, pearls, and poodles. In the morning she would explain her bruises by saying she had stumbled over an eye mask on her way to the bathroom.

  My transatlantic homecoming had not been an entirely welcome one to my grandfather. Alas, he got to see a lot of me, because when I wasn’t in a dorm room, I was in Burdenland. We muddled through, mostly by adhering to a strict regime of ignoring each other. And if things like my grandparents’ decision to attend my brother’s high school graduation and not mine hurt my feelings, I’d take them to the grave rather than admit it.

  Nineteen seventy-four was the annus horribillis. In June, my uncle Bob was killed while making a U-turn in his rented green AMC Gremlin. He was forty years old and had never been married. There was talk of suicide, but it was never confirmed. For my grandmother, the gloves were now off; she began drinking in earnest. Uncle Bob had been her favorite.

  My grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and he did not take it well. The pharmacological effect of the experimental drug he began taking, L-dopa, combined with his daily fifth of bourbon, two to three bottles of Bordeaux, and a handful of sedatives was a disastrous one. Despite her grief over another son’s death, my grandmother continued to wear her usual armor of denial, but around her husband, she was walking on eggshells. She was desperate to help him, but he was making himself inaccessible with his misery.

  That mid-summer before I started college, I drove up to Maine, arriving late in the afternoon after a ten-hour drive in my windfall Porsche 911 T, a car that had adventitiously found its way to me after yet another suicide. The year before, my maternal grandfather, the Colonel, had shot himself when his doctor informed him he had cancer. Thankful to have made it without the cantankerous engine erupting on I-95, I pulled up to the small parking area behind the bomb shelter, only to find it entirely taken up by my uncle Ordway’s Greyhound bus. A police car of indistinct origin was parked beside it. Fearful of flying, and unable to drive himself (due to alcohol and drug dependencies plus an acute case of agoraphobia which had, at one point, prevented him from leaving his apartment in New York for an entire year), Uncle Ordway transported his entourage from Point A to Point B in his very own tour bus and satellite squad car.

  Of the youngest of our father’s brothers, Uncle Ordway had at one point been enigmatic to my brothers and me. When he was in his prime, and girlishly handsome, he had gone through a series of pretty women and hip cars that falsely foretold success. Now thirty, Ordway was bloated and gray-skinned, and a recent hair transplant (that appeared to have been harvested from his pelvic area) had left his head looking like that of a cheap doll, with plug marks marching in regimental rows across his scalp. He should have stuck with the toupees.

  At least I didn’t have to worry about running into him; I knew he was holed up in the third cabin, up near the dock, and would stay there, maybe even through dinner if I was lucky. I parked the Porsche under the sappy pines near my own cabin and made my grand entrance into the main house at what was traditionally teatime, only to find my grandmother with a half-empty glass of Dubonnet instead of the usual four o’clock cup of Constant Comment.

  “Hello, dearie,” she said in greeting, not rising from her chair. One poodle was on her lap, and the other was feebly trying to scale its way into it. I kissed my grandmother’s soft, squooshy cheek and breathed in the usual aroma of Joy and hair spray and face powder.

  “No tea?” I said.

&nb
sp; “Oh—well, uh, Popsie and I have already had ours, but I’ll ring for some right away, won’t we, girls?” Brfffftt. My grandmother grappled with the buzzer, which turned out to be the TV remote. Phil Donahue came booming onto the Sony embedded in the bookcase.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll go ask for some,” I told her, replacing the remote on the table beside her. I bumped smack into Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham slipping out of the pantry with a six-pack of Coke. “Oh, hullo! Hullo!” he tooted, eyes on the floor, and flew past me to the powder room.

  Note to self: don’t go in there for a while. And take a deep, deep breath: seems the whole family would be together for a few days. Out the big picture window I could see my little brother, Edward, burning something gratuitously nasty on the rocky beach. I decided to skip tea and went out to join him.

  “Man, what a weird night,” I said to Will the next morning. “Have the GPs lost it or what?” By the time we’d all sat down to my welcome home lobster dinner, my grandfather had soiled himself, and my grandmother had five stitches and a bag of frozen peas taped across her swollen left temple. We had tried to play a game of Hearts after dinner, but in the middle of the second hand, a Gremlin commercial had come on and my grandmother had burst into tears and sloshed her drink all over the cards. Turning on her husband, she had demanded that he call CBS at once and tell them to stop running those godforsaken ads. Then she excused herself, headed for the bar in the hallway, refilled her glass, and retired for the night.

  Will and I were lying on the long built-in sofa in the living room, listening to Todd Rundgren. After a brief stint at Hampshire College, Will had given up any further attempts at higher education and was now living full-time in one of the cabins and having a go at sculpture. He had made the classic WASP mistake of remaining in a summer place after Labor Day, and, faster than you can say substance abuse, he had joined forces with the ranks of Maine’s full-time drug abusers and alcoholics. Unless I was in Maine, I hardly saw him anymore because he never went off-island. I only saw my younger brother in Maine too, it seemed.

  “I guess,” grunted my brother. He was critically hungover. His hair was as thick and unruly as a hay field, and his glasses needed some serious updating.

  “Don’t you think we should do something? I don’t give a shit about Granddaddy, but Gaga’s going to break her neck.”

  “They’ll be fine,” said Will, closing his eyes.

  The new butler, who was disconcertingly young, good-looking, and Basque, abruptly materialized with a silver tray. He set it down between us on the sofa and, after asking our permission, poured out thick black coffee into two perfectly white Limoges cups. Assured there was nothing more required, he left as quietly as he’d come in.

  “Anyway,” Will said, through a mouthful of English muffin, “they’ll be going in the hospital after Labor Day, as usual. Pass me the marmalade.”

  Before there was the Betty Ford Center or Promises, there was good old New York Hospital. That’s where my grandparents went once a year to dry out. They took a room together and lay in their beds with private nurses bustling around them and IV drips in their arms as if they were afflicted with an entirely different disease. They planned their detox around the chef’s vacation and had all their meals catered by their favorite restaurants—La Caravelle, Le Cygne, the Four Seasons, and La Grenouille. When they got out of the hospital, clear-eyed and healthy, they took up right where they had left off the week before.

  My grandmother seemed resigned to her general deterioration. She stayed in bed longer in the mornings, watching television, munching on her All-Bran, sipping from her thermos of coffee, an old pink bed jacket around her shoulders and a fire crackling away. Instead of who would be her doubles’ partner, her greatest concern now was who would be attending which meal.

  “Will you be in for lunch?” she’d ask, when we popped our heads in to say good morning.

  “How many for dinner?” she’d call out anxiously as we ran through the living room later in the day.

  A lifetime spent monitoring the comings and goings of family and friends, household and staff, and this was what it had come down to.

  I voiced my concern after stopping in to see her one picture-perfect morning when the sky was sapphire and the breeze fresh. She seemed genuinely taken aback.

  “But, dearie, I’m always up and out for my ladies’ game by nine!”

  “Then you’re an hour late,” I pointed out.

  “Ah. Well, that’s because I’m having my hair done this afternoon.” She nibbled on the end of her pencil and went back to studying the Ellsworth American crossword puzzle. “I simply cannot get twenty-three across—Bennie and the blank. Four letters, ends in S.”

  “Jets.”

  “The jets?”

  “It’s a song. Would you like to come for a little hike with me?”

  “Well aren’t you clever!” Ignoring my question, she penciled in the answer.

  After she’d asked me what meals my brothers and I would be in for, I left her sipping the last of her coffee with a small frown on her face.

  Half an hour later, I heard the soles of her Belgian flats come squeaking down the hall. She was humming one of her favorite hymns of fortitude: And it holds, my anchor holds: Blow your wildest, then, O gale . . . The kitchen door swung open, and there stood my grandmother, battle-ready in yellow linen slacks and her favorite black cardigan with the yellow velvet piping and the appliquéd bumblebees around the neckline. She had her face on and her hair pinned together as best she could.

  “Good morning, all!” she said. Then, clearing her throat, my grandmother announced that she wanted to make dinner.

  The chef ran his knife straight through the squab he was disjointing; Selma let go of a pitcher of orange juice and it exploded as it hit the pantry floor; Juan, the new butler, audibly sucked in a breath. Madame only appeared to comment on the success of dinner or to forage for a nightcap.

  I happened to be in there. My favorite spot was still up on the counter with my heels banging, bugging Michel, the chef, and stealing bacon from the pile on the shelf over the stove. Captain Closson leaned beside the screen door, drinking Sanka while he waited for Selma to finish packing up a wicker picnic basket he would then carry down for lunch on the boat. It was taking Selma forever, because now she really was about a hundred.

  After an awkward moment, everyone started saying good morning back, and nodding, and shuffling their feet, unsure of what to do next.

  “You want to do what?” I said in disbelief.

  “Well, dearie, I thought I might try cooking Popsie’s dinner one night when the help are off.”

  My grandmother could not even boil water. I’d seen her make a cup of tea—just once—using tap water. The idea of her operating the twelve-burner Garland was enough to jolt Michel out of his stupor. “Oui, Madame!” he blurted. “Yes, of course. You have something particular in mind?”

  “I would like you to teach me how to make Steak Tartare,” said my grandmother, visibly brightening.

  There was a collective sigh of relief. Steak Tartare is served raw.

  News travels fast in an overstaffed household. Suddenly the kitchen was filled with all kinds of people busily intent on doing next to nothing. My grandmother accepted a fresh apron from Michel and tied it over her bee ensemble. Then, while he nervously minced an onion, she stood eyeballing the mound of hamburger meat someone had placed on the table before her.

  “You’re supposed to squeeze it around like Play-Doh,” I told her.

  “Right-o—like this?” Marshaling her courage, she picked some up and patted it with her hands. This wasn’t so bad. Emboldened, she picked up another bright red handful. “Oh!” she cried, surprised by the squelchy sound of it going through her fingers. Everyone laughed, and my grandmother giggled a little herself. Before long her manicure was smeared with fat and tissue, and her big diamond flashed through the globs as she squished and squeezed and hummed and mooshed the meat around like a two-year-old making g
ory mud pies. As Michel instructed her, she added the onions, capers, Worcestershire sauce, parsley, some mustard, and an egg, and then smoothed it all into the shape of a loaf before etching decorative crosses over the top with a butter knife.

  “There!” She beamed. (And farted the tiniest of tinies in her pleasure.) She smiled at everyone around the room, and everyone smiled back at her. We knew she would as soon repeat this exercise on her own as she would apply for a job at Dairy Queen.

  On the evening of August 8, my brothers and I sat with our grandparents in the big, curved living room and watched Nixon give his resignation speech. Tears streamed down my grandfather’s face as he slumped in his yellow Saarinen chair, a dark Rorschach stain spreading across his lap. It was as if the entire carpet of his world had been pulled out from under him. Nixon had been my grandfather’s last ticket to diplomatic fruition. Through favors and donations, my grandfather had long been greasing the conduit to what he wanted most in the world: the ambassadorship to France.

  A couple of weeks later there was a cocktail party at Nelson Rockefeller’s place in Seal Harbor. My grandfather and Nelson were good friends. Both were from wealthy families, and both had the ambition to govern. They shared other passions: France, art, food and wine, and (surprise) the Republican Party. Their summer houses had been designed by Wallace Harrison, the architect of Rockefeller Center and the United Nations. Each was a past president of the Museum of Modern Art (Nelson’s mother had founded it), and philanthropy was of paramount importance to both. The difference was, Nelson was the real thing; he was not only substantially richer, he was far better at being rich. He was from one of the contemporary world’s wealthiest families, whereas the financial glory days of the Burdens and the Vanderbilts was his-tor-ee. Career-wise, Nelson had it going on too. He was a professional politician who won elections (even if his campaigns were heavily self-funded), not a diplomat who had to win appointments. Now, to cap off a perfectly ghastly summer, President Ford had nominated Nelson for the vice presidency.