Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  I’d been working there for about a month when it came to my attention that the publisher of Daily Dope needed an art director for a new magazine, one that would be devoted to the review of adult films being put out in the nascent format of video. I wanted to be an art director. Porn didn’t bother me; hey, I’d seen sex before. I’d been around it pretty much all my life, in fact. As an observer, I was an expert—which made me perfect for the job.

  Within three months I was fired for being too tasteful. Luckily, I had come into some of my trust fund, enough to buy a loft in Soho, and a lot of Stephen Sprouse and Azzedine Alaïa clothing, and enough to become a bona fide downtown painter. More importantly, I got myself a dog, an English bull terrier I named Pearl, and in her I found the true meaning of family.

  And as for my grandparents, they continued to erode, and so did Burdenland.

  In spite of its perfect address and immense square footage, the Fifth Avenue apartment now appeared dingy. In the forty years since they had bought it, the place had remained virtually unchanged from its original Philip Johnson reformation. Just about every piece of furniture in each of the twenty-one rooms remained in the exact spot where it had been photographed by Vogue during the fifties.

  In Maine the sea still wore diamonds in the morning sunlight, and there was the childhood-familiar crush of the raked bluestone gravel under your feet when you walked the long path up to the dock. The house still smelled of roses and pine and woodsmoke and mold, but now you could catch a whiff of dirty adult diapers. Handrails had been installed at strategic points, and the yellow Saarinen womb chair had been replaced with a dung-colored Barcalounger. There were wheelchair ramps and potty chairs and the television was always on. I knew things were wrapping up when I noticed, on a routine snoop through the bomb shelter, that nobody was bothering to restock the Campbell’s. (Unable to keep up with the demand, Miss Pou had long since ceased to replenish the morphine, Seconal, and opium capsules in the medical kit.)

  The estate in Mount Kisco saw a succession of scurrilous gardeners and live-in Portuguese couples who named their children after things they saw on television. The liberty my grandfather had exulted in when cocooned in his Tippler’s Bathroom eventually paled. Neither he nor his lifelong mixed doubles partner could even make it to the second floor, let alone down to the indoor or outdoor tennis courts. They still made the winter pilgrimage to Hobe Sound, and the summer one to Maine, but after a while my grandparents stopped going out to Mount Kisco, because it was just too much effort—for everyone.

  It was hard not to take advantage of my grandparents. I started having weekend parties out in Mount Kisco, playing house big-time and cooking up huge meals with all the tomatoes and squash, and carrots and beans and peas, and herbs, and strawberries and beautiful flowers from the garden, because honestly, no one else was using them. My grandparents didn’t entertain anymore, they ate next to nothing, and the vast gardens were planted each spring as if they were still supplying their hospitality of the past. Everyone ran naked around the indoor pool, and swung like monkeys on the ropes in the Tippler’s Bathroom, and downed cases of Petrus and Cheval Blanc and Margaux and Yquem like they were bottled water. The staff of yesteryear would have tanned my hide, but no one was left at the helm. Chef Michel was long gone, and in his place was an Irish cook named Nora. Her assistant was a Honduran woman who had been promoted to the position from laundress. The chauffeur was an Irish boozer, and the gardeners were all American. Juan was hanging on by the barest of threads, and a sense of Basque loyalty. Captain Closson had been injured while working on the boat in dry dock and was consequently let go. For a while, Will and I would drive over to the other side of the island and take him out to breakfast, but he spoke of his enforced retirement with such bitterness, we were always relieved when we left him. Finally, on a summer afternoon, he went into the workshop behind his little house in Southwest Harbor, took down the shotgun he used to hunt bears on the mainland in winter, and killed himself.

  That same year, Ann Rose didn’t show up for my grandparents’ forty-something annual New Year’s Day party, where her presence was even more acutely required, due to the faltering condition of the host and hostess. (The regulars may have been dropping like flies, but that show would go on until the final exit.) When Miss Pou failed to rouse Ann Rose on the telephone, she went over to her apartment. She found Ann Rose dead on her sofa, drowned in an ocean of her own regurgitated blood.

  And as for the poodles, one dried up completely and was borne off to heaven on an updraft, and the other fell into the pool and was drowned.

  No one wanted to take responsibility. My grandparents’ two remaining sons were non compos mentis: Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham was only allowed to visit the apartment once a week, when he came to take tea with his mother on Wednesday afternoons; Uncle Ordway was finding it impossible to be even quasi-normal. When he wasn’t enwombed in his honorary sheriff ciborium watching porn, or The Blue Lagoon (he was still fixated on Brooke Shields), he lay in bed surrounded by newspapers and periodicals, reading and underlining and clipping articles written about the ills of inherited wealth and the sorrows of the incapacitated children of the rich, which he had his secretary send to everyone.

  My brothers were also helpless: Will was focusing on himself, floating along the path of sober, vegan spirituality up in Maine, examining his navel through multiple courses and work-shops to see where things went wrong. Poor Edward was trying to be the son his grandfather wanted him to be, wearing Huntsman suits and feigning an interest in the world of finance, but he was still just a teenager. Plus he was so doped up and wasted all the time, he was incapable of being anything to anybody. I’m surprised he still has all the parts of his body.

  I wasn’t any more accommodating; when they were in the city, I’d see my grandparents maybe a couple of times a month, and I always spent part of the summer with them up in Maine, but selfishly I had zero interest in becoming involved with the minutiae of their deteriorating lives. I was way too busy. It was the 1980s, and I was a Soho party girl having a blast in New York. As much as I loved my grandparents, I consciously adopted my grandmother’s Christian Science frame of mind toward the situation.

  Miss Pou was up to her eyeballs. My grandfather was getting as crazy as a coot, and he kept firing everyone, including Miss Pou when she wouldn’t do things like book the Chinese polo club to fly over for a match on the (nonexistent) polo field in Mount Kisco, and Miss Pou kept rehiring everyone, with raises in salary and concessions all over the place.

  It was becoming the reign of the nurses. You’d walk into the living room at night and they’d be lounging there, thumbing through magazines and reading the mail. My grandmother, once so vital and idiosyncratic, was now allowing her functions to be monitored alongside those of her genuinely ailing husband. Everything was meticulously recorded: time and body temperature, time and blood pressure, intake of fluids (legitimate ones), output of urine, intake of solids, number of poops. With nobody to deny them, the nurses soon took to making wardrobe decisions, and my grandparents were presented in clothing so radically different from their usual style that if it had been somebody else’s relations, it would have been hilarious. Like tracksuits—navy with white piping for him and pink for her. The only pink I’d ever seen my grandmother wear, besides her Playtex girdle, was her quilted velvet bed jacket. The Mainbocher luncheon suits, the Dior dresses, the chic Balenciaga jackets with three-quarter sleeves, the cashmere appliquéd sweaters from Belgium, the Givenchy evening gowns were all shoved to the back of the closet. The nurses took my grandmother shopping at Macy’s and gave her a makeover in pale, suburban old lady trouser suits, lace-trimmed polyester dresses in pastel colors, and Reebok sneakers, all of which my grandmother was too puzzled by to refuse. The flag over Revlon’s headquarters flew at half-mast when the stockpiled Cherries in the Snow and Love That Red were replaced with Maybelline peach-toned lipstick.

  My mother’s wardrobe was faring just as poorly. She had migrated from l
eather minis and over-the-knee boots to terry-cloth bikinis and cheap Indian caftans she got from a store near the Harvard Square MBTA stop. With her amulets of ceramic, rock, bead, and bone, and the hand-beaten jewelry she’d begun to create, she was starting to look like a walking museum gift shop.

  In time my little brother’s drug addiction became so obvious that even a family like ours had to acknowledge it—if only because there was no Krug left in the wine cellar. I got involved with a couple of the interventions, where we had him secured in a psychiatric holding tank, but Edward always freed himself after the mandatory seventy-two hours were up. He eventually ended up as a long-term patient at the White Plains Psychiatric Hospital. I didn’t visit him there very often because the inmates creeped me out.

  “See that girl there?” my brother would say, indicating a normal enough looking brunette with a cast on her arm.

  “Yeah?” I would reply.

  “They had to put her in the Quiet Room for a while, and she smashed her hand through the window and swung it around all the jagged parts. Almost got to bleed to death. See that guy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He got so fucked up one night, he tried freebasing someone’s stick deodorant. See that other guy?”

  Technically, Edward had been admitted for his heroin problem, but after a year in the hospital he confessed he was staying on because it was as good a place to live as anywhere. Plus, he really enjoyed all the therapy.

  While Edward was in his second year, an art school friend and I decided he should get to have sex with someone since he’d basically only experienced it with a mother figure in her fifties. We fixed him up with her studio assistant. Norah was from New Jersey and had big hair, a big ass, and humongous breasts. We figured on the strength of those features alone, she should be the one to sleep with my brother. That she resembled him in both coloring and physique—they had the same pinky-blond hair and soft, gel-filled bodies—made it seem a little like incest, but when you live at the funny farm you can’t be too choosy.

  A few months later, Edward gave up hospital life and moved in with her. Then he began looking around for something to do. He tried a few semesters of college at SUNY, but college life wasn’t able to hold his attention. Managing the assets of his grandparents seemed a good alternative—and he wouldn’t need a degree. In seemingly next to no time, my brother became a partner in William A. M. Burden and Company and went to work all dressed up in Huntsman pinstripe suits and John Lobb shoes. He proved to have an astute and creative financial mind. He became a trustee of his grandmother, and then of Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham, earning a salary for the positions. He oversaw the trembly signing of papers, and he became involved with managing the household staff, and the nurses. Both would scatter like mice when he walked into the room. He seemed like he was in control of himself as well, but he wasn’t. He relapsed, and started back in on heroin, and on painkillers. He had a devil camped full-time on one shoulder, and an angel only part-time on the other.

  My grandfather was now in and out of the hospital on a regular basis. Each time he was admitted he made sure he had two things with him: his favorite flashlight (the one packed with miniature airline bottles of hooch) and a copy of his autobiography, Peggy and I.

  It had taken my grandfather years to dictate his memoirs, and many hired professionals to put it into something resembling a narrative. The book had been privately published, and my grandfather had ordered a first printing of ten thousand copies. He was certain he had a blockbuster on his hands. Not wishing to insult him, Miss Pou had asked what she should do with the remaining nine thousand after she’d sent the book to everyone my grandfather had ever known, and to the few bookstores that would accept a couple.

  “Why, Miss Pou,” he had said, “I want you to send a copy to every library, every university, and every college in every city in every state in the United States!” In spite of a full-page ad in The New York Times Book Review, maybe three copies were sold.

  My grandfather had Miss Pou come to the hospital every day to read to him from his autobiography. He particularly liked to hear the beginning chapters—those extolling his heritage and the past opulence of Florham. He was probably the only one left now who still viewed the Vanderbilt name as one aligned with God, not apocalyptic genetics. He had been born into a societal position that had been ripe with opportunity. Anything, especially for a man with privilege, brains, and money, had been possible. The world had been his Oyster Rockefeller, New York City the epicenter of cool, twentieth-century America.

  His life, at once so gilded and so scarred, now had the unpredicted denouement of no worthy successor or dynasty.

  Given my grandfather’s limited vocabulary, conversation with him tended to be one-sided. Luckily, Miss Pou had learned to speak Phooey.

  “Certainly, Mr. Burden. I’ll schedule the architect to come to the hospital and meet with you. May I ask what for?”

  Phooeys, hand gestures, nods, grunts, and more phooeys.

  “A swimming pool. But, Mr. Burden, you already have five of them.”

  Meaningful eye rolling, hand gestures, and multiple phooeys.

  “A swimming pool in your hospital room. I see. Well, Mr. Burden, I don’t think it matters if you are a trustee, and that you did give that bank of elevators; I can’t imagine—”

  “Phooey! Phooey, phooey, phooey, Phooey!!!”

  “No, I don’t want you to fire me, Mr. Burden, but if—”

  Agitated gestures with pointed frozen fingers, and so forth and so on.

  Eventually my grandfather checked into New York Hospital for what would be his final visit. In his mind, he had always been immortal, but just in case he wasn’t, Miss Pou had been updating his obituary on a regular basis for years. Certainly he had no discernible religion, other than old French vines, the mandate of the mid-sixties Republican Party, and the internal combustion engine. Even though he was terrified of dying, my grandfather begged Miss Pou to help him do it each time she came to see him. The hospital nurses were tired of his craziness and his arrogance. He was tired of the indignity and the painful tests. Necessity had enabled him to add two words to his vocabulary: no more. He repeated them over and over.

  One day when Miss Pou went to visit, she found my grandfather alone, sitting in his wheelchair, naked from the waist down, covered in his own shit. It was caked all over him, the chair, and the floor. The bank of elevators with his name on it was only twenty feet away.

  I went to see him the day before he died. I stood toward the rear of the room, as far away as I could get while still managing to convey a sense of compassion. My grandfather was as shriveled as a freeze-dried apple, and his glasses were enormous on his face. A feeding tube was stuck in the side of his neck, and he had lines and wires traversing his body like an old-fashioned switchboard. He saw me flinching uncontrollably, and it embarrassed both of us.

  A nurse was standing by the bed, holding on to my grandfather’s exposed foot with the intimate familiarity of a woman holding on to her lover’s cock. To think it had come down to this—my arch nemesis, lying wretchedly in a hospital bed, his bare foot being fondled by a Filipino immigrant who had no clue of who he had once been; and could not have cared less if she had.

  Talk about feeling conflicted. Standing in that room of imminent death, I was still mad at him for something that had happened years earlier, before he had lost his speech. My grandfather had just returned to the apartment after one of his first stays in the hospital. When he had been settled by the nurses, I had gone into my grandparents’ bedroom and welcomed him home. He had looked at me coldly and said, “It’s my home. Not yours.”

  I thought of my favorite picture of my grandparents, a black-and-white press photo taken when they were newly married. They’re walking down Fifth Avenue in front of St. Thomas Church in the Easter Parade. He’s in a top hat and spats and is looking at the photographer with an expression of mingled surprise, both at having his picture taken and at his extraordinary good fortune. She�
��s in a gray fox coat with padded shoulders and a huge corsage. They are young and vibrant, cultured and entitled. He is rich and she is beautiful, and they are the envy of the city.

  I thought of the packet of love letters and telegrams I had found deep in an old Vuitton trunk in the Mount Kisco barn. They had been sent from my grandfather to my grandmother during the summer of 1930, when they were at the peak of their courtship. My grandfather had been abroad, and the envelopes bore the postmarks of far-off places like the Panama Canal and Brazil. The scribe referred to his sweetheart as Goldilocks, and himself as Big Bear, and the pages were covered with funny little drawings of a bear doing silly things, and missing his Goldilocks, and getting up to no good, and even though it was a little dopey, it was achingly cute. There was also a stapled sheaf of telegrams (the Twitter of yore), sent from a couple of lovelorn weeks aboard the SS Bremen. My grandfather, so remote, so parsimonious, declared his adoration for my grandmother with obtuse, pasted-on dispatches like True Blue Love and Phone interruption frightful at sea but connection perfect in forest. I remember watching my grandparents unfold as people I’d never imagined, as, like a compassionate spy, I read my way through their summer.

  That night, as he had done for a week, Edward maintained a solemn vigil, lying on the floor beside our grandfather’s bed. He had insisted that the nurses wake him if he fell asleep, because he did not want to miss the exact moment when his grandfather reunited with Eisenhower and Pompidou. (Whereas I am merely morbid, Edward likes to witness the crossing.)

  The old man kicked the bucket in the night, and his grand-son slumbered on. The nurses sniggered behind their latex gloves as they stepped soundlessly over him, unhooking catheters and monitors, and quietly removing the body. Like grandfather, like son. They were tired of being ordered around by the rich.