by Wendy Burden
Edward was inconsolable.
As we filed out of St. Thomas Church, a light rain had begun to fall. I stood at the top of the steps, looking down on Fifth Avenue. My mother stood beside me, looking like the cat that ate the canary. There was the hearse, a long lineup of dark limousines, and a police motorcade. Nixon came out of the church and scanned the cortege for his vehicle, while a Secret Service man struggled to open a massive golf umbrella.
Seeing me standing there, Nixon smiled and said, “Your grandfather and I had something very important in common.”
I smiled back, but didn’t say anything.
“Matthew,” he said.
“Matthew?”
“Our barber.” He sighed fondly. “Now there was a great man.”
Leaning on the arm of the agent, he limped down the puddled steps, past the mildly interested passersby, to his waiting car.
Edward would be smarter the next time; when our grandmother tottered on the brink, he pretty much moved in with her and waited for her to die. Nobody was going to take this one from him.
Deposition
OKAY, SO MAYBE I didn’t know where the ten-thousand-dollar Russian bribe money was hidden in the bomb shelter, but I knew where just about everything else was in Burdenland. Like how many English shooting bags were in the basement cupboards in the country (five), or how many pairs of Sperry tennis shoes were in the dressing rooms of the indoor tennis court (twenty-one—thirteen men’s and eight ladies’). I knew that at any given time there were between four and six Indian nickels in the tray on my grandmother’s vanity in New York City, and that in the third drawer down in the fifth file cabinet to the left of the door on the second floor of the garage in Maine were twenty-three copperplate-signed checks from Grandpa Twombly to McKim, Mead and White Architects.
From near-infancy I’d been the cataloger of all things inanimate, be they moldering luxury items, office supplies, or creatures newly dead. Snooping gave tangible substance to the lack of structure that surrounded me. I was good at it. The best. I thought nobody could out-snoop me. Wrong. I was completely outclassed by my baby brother, because he had discovered the metaphorical key to the locked drawers of the desk formerly belonging to the recently deceased gatekeeper, Ann Rose.
Usually, we bartered, but now, unasked, Edward presented me with what I continue to imagine had been hidden for years in the depths of that rectangular metal vault: a twenty-six-page carbon copy of the statement taken from our grandfather two days after our father’s funeral. Half expecting it to self-ignite, I quickly stuffed the thing in my handbag. Then, out of habit, I told Edward something like when he was two he used to eat his own feces for fun. When I got home I glanced at the document, decided I couldn’t deal with it, stuck it in a drawer, and consciously forgot about it. It wasn’t until a few years after my grandfather’s death that I finally read it.
It was one of those days when your family just can’t haunt you enough. The phone had rung shortly after nine: “Hey,” began a friend of mine, “isn’t that your uncle on the front page of the Observer?”
“Oh God, what?”
“Yeah, Ordway Burden. Great story.”
“I didn’t know . . .” I said, and signed off as economically as I could.
It used to be that everyone read The New York Observer (I for one liked the pink pages), so the wires were burning up all morning. The sensationalism of Uncle Ordway’s escapades inspired me to unearth some more family adventures. Of course I knew exactly where I’d hidden that sheaf of damning, onionskin pages way back when.
Armed with a Coke and a pack of Marlboro Lights, I settled myself on the couch in front of the windows overlooking noisy Prince Street. Pearl lay on the floor beside me, crunching on her soup bone like an industrial log splitter. I started in on the deposition my grandfather had given at the apex of his grief.March 2nd, 1962
My son, Bill, was a very brilliant boy; graduated valedictorian of his class from Milton, cum laude from Harvard, and has always been extremely brilliant, yet he had some psychological problems . . . there was talk of a suicide attempt when he was fifteen, but the doctors agreed it was merely a childish thing . . .
My grandfather went on to tell how my parents had met in high school and married while they were both at Harvard. He said they’d been happy and interested in each other’s pursuits. Following an initial reporting job at the Blade Tribune in Riverside, California, my father moved on to The Washington Post, where he was a cub on the night police beat, covering homicides, suicides, and car crashes, and was “extremely brilliant.” Being a perfectionist, he couldn’t take the pressure of deadlines. He had to get every word right. So he quit, and took a job at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, where he studied the effect of modern weapons on international policy. Again, my grandfather described his son’s efforts as “enormously brilliant.” There must have been a hundred of those adulatory modifiers throughout the deposition. In my head I heard my grandfather articulating them in eulogy, and I felt his anguish at the loss of so much potential, even as I imagined my father’s suffocation from the expectation.
The marriage grew troubled after Will and I were born. There was a miscarriage, and my mother started behaving erratically, and became increasingly unpleasant toward her husband. She took to drinking in the morning—cranberry juice with rum. She threw plates. She began to “compulsively sunburn her body” and to seek the physical attention of every man in her path. My father started seeing a psychiatrist, on the pretense of having to deal with his wife’s emotional problems over her miscarriage. The psychiatrist decided my mother was far more disturbed than my father. He convinced her to come in for a couple of sessions. During the second one, my mother revealed that she hated her father, she hated her husband, and, as a matter of fact, she hated all men, thank you. The psychiatrist concluded that my mother was suffering from an acute castration complex.
My mother then took off for Haiti, and she stayed away for several weeks. It was no secret to my father that his wife was having an affair with an attaché at the American embassy, a man named Charles Thomas, but he believed that she had been tricked into it.
“Oh my God!” I said aloud. Why it was none other than the glorified daddy figure of yesteryear. Thanks to my youth, and my own self-centered bubble, I had completely forgotten about Charles. I put the deposition down and called my mother.
I didn’t tell her what I was in the middle of; I just casually said, “Hey, for some reason I got to thinking about that guy you used to date before Pete. What was his name—Frank? No, maybe Chauncey?” (What a lame liar.)
“Charles,” said my mother with suspicion. Or maybe it was apprehension. She was in the kitchen and I could hear her walking over to the shelf above the washer and dryer where she kept the gallon bottle of Bacardi.
“Yeah, Charles!”
“What about him?”
“Oh, uh, I was just wondering whatever happened to him. I mean he seemed like such a great guy and everything. Do you ever talk to him?”
Plink! went the ice cubes into the glass.
“You want to know about Charles?” my mother said. “Charles hung himself after your father decided to quit life. That’s what happened to Charles.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt achingly sorry for her, but mostly because I couldn’t imagine having two dead men under my belt.
The following day I gingerly picked up where the testimonial action had left off. When urged by his parents to seek a divorce, my father refused, saying he had seen too many examples of children being destroyed by split homes and he couldn’t do it to his son and daughter.
My mother returned on Sunday, February 25. Monday morning, my father telephoned his psychiatrist and told him he was very depressed. The psychiatrist prescribed some “energizing pills,” as well as some Seconal, and made an appointment to see my father the next day. My father picked up the prescriptions, and then drove home and went to his desk on the third floor, where he typed out his obituary
. This he placed in an envelope he marked “Press.” He then handwrote eight other letters, including one to the police, to which he paper-clipped the receipt for a .357 Magnum he had purchased the previous week.
The following day, my father did not keep his appointment with the psychiatrist. He went to work as usual, but left around 1:00 P.M., saying he would be back at 3:00. He drove home. No one was around except Obadiah, the basset hound. My father went upstairs to retrieve the letters and the gun. Then he drove to the DC city morgue, parked in front, and blew his brains out all over the backseat of the family car.
Things did not go according to plan. For one, the obituary that ran in The New York Times and The Washington Post was not the modest, forthright one he had written. Imagine his disappointment; the reason he had quit his job at the Post was that he couldn’t stand people messing with his copy—he would drive down there at two in the morning just to make sure the rewrite men didn’t change his words. For another, contrary to my father’s explicit instructions not to blame his wife, boy did my grandparents ever.
Things got worse: At the funeral parlor my mother displayed no sentiment. At the service, she was equally composed and was even seen smiling at several young men. On the train up to New York for the burial at Woodlawn Cemetery, she asked everyone why her in-laws were treating her so coldly. Following the burial, my grandfather showed my mother the suicide note, in which my father admitted that a major part of his decision to end his life was my mother’s affair with Charles Thomas. My grandfather then told her that he had incontrovertible evidence of her affairs with several other men.
“Is that true?” he demanded.
“Yes it is,” my mother replied, “but I have been advised to do so by my psychiatrist for my gratification.”
“You know that’s a lie!”
“Okay, by my gynecologist then.”
Here was the part I had the most trouble with, even though I knew it was in the violently predisposed voice of my grandfather:She showed no emotion, did not even say that she was sorry for us at the loss of our son, and gave no indication that she had any sorrow whatever about Bill’s death. The three main points that she made in this discussion were: 1) It was very unfortunate that Bill had committed suicide at this particular time because she had a girlfriend from Haiti with her and had been hoping for ten days of pleasant vacation; 2) that it was very thoughtless of Bill to commit suicide without making a will because this meant “that his checks would bounce.” Her third point was that it was very thoughtless of Bill to have committed suicide in such an obvious way as shooting himself whereas it would have been easy to drive his car off a bridge or take an overdose of sleeping pills.
Not until I’d have children of my own would Miss Pou divulge how profoundly my grandparents had despised my mother. At the funeral, they broadcast details of her past and present lovers—the diplomat in Haiti, the beatnik sculptor in Maine, the arms dealer in Washington, who happened to be her husband’s best friend. In a circular to the “girls of the office,” in a transparent attempt to absolve herself, my grandmother declared her son would never have killed himself had he only received the love and support he needed at home.
Of course, manic depression had nothing to do with it.
The man who had delivered the eulogy at the funeral kept referring to my father’s deep strain of morbidity and the “chasm between the humor and the deep melancholia that was to make life intolerable for him.” Everyone knew about my father’s bipolar disorder, even though the medical community had yet to call it that and Prozac was still a twinkle in some future billionaire’s eye.
The deposition was a road map backwards. For years I had wondered why, beyond the obvious reasons, my grandparents had been so god-awful to my mother. I put the document down on the sofa and rubbed my eyes. Nymphomaniac was now permanently tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. I’d heard about my mother’s conduct at the funeral, even when I was young, but I assumed everyone had just read her wrong. She was an undemonstrative woman. I don’t remember her ever kissing us good-bye, or touching us even, except for the times when we clung to her back as she walked us around the swimming pool. But she wasn’t a killer. She wasn’t cruel; she was only mean.
When pressed, my mother liked to rationalize her husband’s suicide by saying that he’d been in love with death. She made no bones about the fact that they had grown apart, and would have eventually divorced, and when she was really into the Bacardi, sometimes she would rail on about how sexless he had been. If my mother felt herself at all culpable, she never showed it. She had disassociated herself with a survivalist practicality you see only in the insect world. And if my father’s suicide had been intended as the ultimate fuck-you, it was a wasted effort. She was over that one in the time it takes for self-tanner to work.
Nobody dislikes confrontation more than me; I mean unless it’s a matter of life and death, why bother—it only gets everyone all riled up. But this really was a matter of death. To my mother’s guardedly concealed joy, I called to say I would be coming up for the weekend. It was time to ask her a thing or two before she got condemned to the legendary boiling ocean of excrement.
At my mother’s house in Marblehead, after she and the contractor had weaved off to bed, I pulled out the frayed photograph albums from my parents’ marriage and lay down on the floor with the dogs to look through them.
The albums tell the story through the transformation of my mother’s appearance alone. In the earliest photos she comes across as almost tender; she is very young, and a little plump, and her shoulder-length hair is mouse-colored, and her glasses thick, with clear, scholarly frames. There is a lot of studying going on, and open books are everywhere. There are pictures of a party at my uncle Shirley’s house in Beverly Hills, and my mother is dressed up, but still sweetly dumpy and unsophisticated. You can see Fred Astaire in the background, which is probably why she has removed her glasses. Her bare arms press tightly against the satin bodice of her cocktail dress, and she’s gripping the stem of a martini glass like it’s a lifeline.
There are pages and pages of friends and family, and everyone seems pretty darn happy. My brother gets born, and now there are a zillion pictures of him, and he’s adorable, the cutest baby you ever saw, on the potty, under the Christmas tree, sitting on the laps of his doting grandparents, and my mother is looking somewhat confused and still dorky, but you can tell it’s okay, and that as parents they’re getting the hang of things. There are no pictures of my father because he’s the one taking them.
Then I come along, and I am just about the ugliest thing anyone ever pinned a diaper around, but I’m a girl, so they dress me up in frills and start taking a zillion pictures of me and my brother doing cute things together, and my mother’s in there, orchestrating things. Her hair is getting blonder, and she’s thinner, and starting to wear dresses with wide, brass-buckled, cinched-in belts. Her glasses are gone, traded in for those revolutionary new contact lenses. There are birthday parties, with the candles—three, and then four, and then five of them, being blown out on cakes crowded with so many cowboys and Indians and fairies and ponies that you can’t see the icing. There are fewer friends in the photos. Then, within a couple of pages, there are none of them.
Somewhere between the second potty chair and the Christmas in New York where Will gets the four-lane slot car racetrack, the bookish young wife and mother has transformed into a full-fledged man-eater. In snapshots taken by the sea in Maine, she now lazes, legs apart, in a strapless one-piece. Her hair is lemon blond and her sunglasses dark and slanted, like those of a movie star. And she just gets hotter and hotter; one summer and a couple of pages later, she is on the bow of my grandparents’ boat, and the one-piece has been replaced by a bikini. Her hair is swept back by the wind, and her deep tan is the stuff Bain de Soleil executives dream of. If a camera can pay grimly wistful homage, my father’s Leica was doing just that.
The third photo album contains our one and only family trip to Disneyland
, and the focus is decidedly on my mother. There she is—carefree in the twirling teacups, circling the air on Dumbo, and giggling in a hovercraft bumper car as she tries to catch up with my brother and me. She is breathtakingly beautiful in a man’s untucked white shirt, black capri pants, and pointy black flats, her hair down and loose. Next to her, Will and I look like prairie children from the Dust Bowl.
And that’s it. The remaining soft black pages are empty.
The following afternoon I sat across from my mother at the kitchen table. I was prepared for anything. Kitchens are meant to be the heart of a house, and the beating one at that, but I couldn’t help thinking that this one was a reflection of my mother’s: the cupboards were a nondescript prefab wood, and the floor was a brick linoleum that could only be described as inventive, but the counters were beautifully fitted, custom maple and cherry butcher-block. The stove was Kenmore green and obsessively clean, and the textured fridge door had diet notes stuck all over it with animal magnets, only now they were intended for my mother’s husband instead of her. Superstition about the year she was going to die, along with breast cancer, had enabled her to finally let herself go.
She was poring over a dog-eared, fan-shaped diagram of hand-lettered names: a genealogical map of five generations of Hamiltons. My mother had discovered genealogy, not religion, in her waning years. There were enough ancestral registers and charts—dozens of them, all recorded in tight cursive by her own bored, sickly mother—to keep her busy throughout the several courses of chemotherapy she would endure. The comings and goings of people with names like Sarah and Fanny, and Ephraim and Nathaniel and Phineas, had become the object of her academic curiosity—men who were born in log cabins but went to Harvard, if only to become shoemakers and bricklayers before eventually getting murdered by Indians. (It was something of a family tradition—excellent education, unambitious choice of career, and untimely death.)
