Dead End Gene Pool (12 page)

My grandparents’ annual New Year’s Day party was an all-out extravaganza that everyone from Upper East Side hoi polloi to Bowery pop artists showed up for. Preparations began the minute after Christmas. Extra help was brought in, and the maids ran around like chickens with their heads cut off. The kitchen and pantries became congested with the steady arrival of deliveries: linens and stemware brought up from storage in the basement, cheese and oysters flown in from France, wooden crates of vegetables, meats and poultry and game, silvery forty-pound salmon, a suckling pig, orchids and chrysanthemums driven in from the country. And there was wine—cases and magnums and jeroboams and Methuselahs of Burgundy and Bordeaux, and two standing lamp-sized Nebuchadnezzars of champagne.

The kitchen was a scene of harnessed insanity. I was allowed to watch, sitting on the tall metal stepstool in a corner, as long as I didn’t open my mouth other than to taste whatever the chef demanded of me, even if it was parboiled toenails. French cuisine during the sixties was about as labor-intensive as food can get, and that was reflected in the hubbub of stocks simmering, chickens roasting, sugar caramelizing, cleavers and knives chopping vegetables and mincing herbs and filleting fish and deboning meat, hands kneading flour, and pink-faced voices laughing and cursing and barking orders. Baking sheets with tartlets and barquettes waiting to be baked, or cooled and filled, covered the long central worktable. The chef, Joseph, might spend an entire day piping various mixtures in muslin bags through choking silver tips into tiny circles and squares and oblongs of pastry. I’d ask to taste what looked like mocha frosting, and he’d smile and pipe a star onto my fingertip. Nine times out of ten it was some aquatic bird’s mashed up liver, and I’d have swallow it holding my nose.

If I got bored, I played the bones game. I pretended that the leg and rib and neck bones roasting in the oven for stock were not from a cow but from whomever was on my hate list. Usually it was my brother Will boiling away in the stockpot with all the vegetables, on his way to being reduced, through indescribable suffering, to a syrupy essence of just rewards.

On bad days, Will got the duck press. The first time I saw the chef use it I just about had puppies. It was the quintessential Addams Family kitchen appliance. Joseph had explained the reasoning behind the torture machine, remarking that it was not very popular in America. “In my country,” he’d said, “we like to have the blood and the insides of the animal in the sauce.” Whereupon I’d leaned in next to him, breathing heavily in my rapture. Joseph had given me a rare smile, mistaking my enthusiasm for a burgeoning love of the culinary arts. Ha. I was imagining that those merrily crunching bones and that rosy emulsion trickling out the spout were my brother’s macerated brains and skull. I saw myself rising from the dinner table to make a little announcement: “That sauce you’re eating with the meat? It’s my brother.” Mrs. Astor would blanch. Nelson Rockefeller would choke and die. Andy Warhol would ask for seconds. My grandmother would say, “That’s nice, dearie, I wondered where that rascal was.”
BUUURRRRRUUUFFFFTT!

When I saw Ann Rose enter the kitchen to speak to the chef, I quickly substituted her head in the duck press for Will’s. When she saw me over in the corner and waved, I glared guiltily back at her and then clattered down from the stool, and was through the lineup of white-coated kitchen assistants and out into the help’s dining room before anyone could read my evil thoughts. Skirting the table, now set and awaiting lunch for fifteen, I slipped into the warren of tiny bedrooms and skinny, old-fashioned bathrooms that was home to the maids. I liked to sneak back there sometimes, mostly just to scrutinize their lives. The rooms were painfully humble; each had a chair, a small desk, a painted bureau with a mirror on top (now decorated with sentimental cards from relatives back in the Motherland), and a narrow bed made up so skintight you could dribble a rosary across it. On one wall there invariably hung a crucifix bearing an anorexic Jesus, or a picture of the Virgin Mary, looking all forgiving. In Selma’s room there were many of both. Taped to her vanity mirror was an ancient, misshapen Pepperidge Farm cookie that Selma swore “on a stack of blue Bibles” was the image of St. Rita, the patroness of all things terrible for females, like tumors and faithless husbands. Selma had shown the face to me, pointing out St. Rita’s festering forehead wound, but try as I might I could never see it as anything other than a moldy Milano.

I always felt calmer after breathing in the order of Ann, and Mary, and Grace, and even Selma. After a few deep breaths I reentered the kitchen just as a tray full of sizzling, buttery, sugary palmiers came out of the oven.

I was pretty much over the Ann Rose/Santa debacle by the day of the party. A couple of times I’d even had to work myself up just to give her a show of my lingering indignation. Will and I were dressed up, he in a bow tie and blue blazer, and me in a red velvet number that clashed horribly with my red hair and had a crinoline slip that left scars on my knees. Edward, in Henrietta’s arms, was presented in a tiny jacket and a pair of green plaid shorts with suspenders. We were allowed to run free, and did just that, our bloodstreams so charged with Coca-Cola and sugary carbs that flying was a real possibility.

The warm smell of wine mulled with cloves and cinnamon and raisins and almonds was the first thing that hit people when they walked off the elevators and into the long gallery, where a Viennese orchestra played and the Christmas tree rose in a ridiculous blaze of artificial light over the goldfish pond. (Actually, you could smell the wine even before you got to the sixth floor, because the doormen traditionally began drinking the stuff with the first run of guests and didn’t stop until the last of them had left, eight hours later.) Waiters swam through the currents of guests, proffering caviar and hors d’oeuvres that resembled shiny mosaic tiles. People lined up at the three bars, where it took a team of men to pour champagne from the fifteen-liter bottle of Moët.

By seven my caffeine quarter had run out. It was exhausting having your cheeks pinched and your hair patted by so many pterodactyls. I was taking a break in my grandparents’ bedroom, now the ladies’ cloakroom, where, to the horror of the attendant maid, I was flinging myself repeatedly onto the bed piled high with the overflow of minks that couldn’t be squeezed onto the teeming coat racks. There must have been fifty of them on the bed alone, in every shade of expensive imaginable. I was interrupted by Mrs. Pell’s call of nature.

Pyrma Pell was one of my grandmother’s “girlhood friends,” and she was a fixture at the annual party. She had been the Pears soap girl back in the seventeenth century, and supposedly a great beauty. She was tiny, with hair like the stuff they put in Easter baskets, and she had a huge face, sort of like Nancy Reagan’s. At any rate, there was a lot less of it than she was born with because Mrs. Pell had to have been on her fifth face-lift by the time I started remembering her. She could barely close her eyes. Mrs. Pell had initially gotten my attention because she always wore a Glinda the Good Witch dress to the New Year’s party, and this year’s outfit didn’t disappoint; it was right out of a cotton candy spinner.

Gracing me with a look of intention from the dressing table, Mrs. Pell said, “I understand they’re bringing out dinner now.” She carefully repowdered her powder-caked nose, and then she rose and came over to where I was stretched out, spread-eagle on the fur bed. “Let’s go in together, shall we?” She spoke like she was blowing on a dandelion stem, but I got the point. And I am nothing if not polite under duress, so I struggled to my feet with a dramatic sigh, pulled my party dress into shape, and we went to the dining room together.

When the cocktail drinkers had left, and the party had calmed down, they brought out the real food. Waiters loaded up the marble table in the dining room with hulking crown roasts of beef and the decorated salmon, game pie and terrines of foie gras, wheels of Brie de Meaux, crisp baguettes of bread, golden potato-petaled cakes of Pommes Anna, wild rice, and white asparagus, and haricots verts, and big wooden salad bowls of sherry vinaigrette-dressed mâche. Afterward came Baked Alaska, and Floating Island, and a Bûche de Noël enveloped with spun sugar and meringue mushrooms, and soaked with so much alcohol it was, by my standards, tragically inedible, so I stuck to the petits fours, which I was filling a plate with when my grandfather stood up to make a toast.

After the usual New Year and auld lang syne stuff, he said, “Peggy and I would like to publicly acknowledge a few absolutely marvelous members of our staff that we would be hard-pressed to function without.” The chef was trotted out, the butler and his wife, the head waiter who was hired each year for the party, the small, fat, sweaty leader of the Viennese orchestra, my grandfather’s two secretaries, Miss Pou and Heidi, and finally George the Nazi. Everyone clapped in drunken acknowledgment, even Ann Rose, who stood in a corner near the swinging door to the pantry, utterly unacknowledged.

After devouring way too many palmiers, iced little cakes, and chocolate truffles, I had to lie down for a while. When I felt better, I didn’t want to go back to the party, because everyone was waltzing up a storm and you could get killed just trying to cut your way through them to get a Coke. I decided to go for a restorative snoop in the bathroom that adjoined Ann Rose’s office.

It was so cool and peaceful in there, I felt instantly better. The narrow, high-ceilinged room had beautiful prewar fixtures: a wide, curvy pedestal sink, a deep, seven-foot-long tub, and a toilet built for the posteriors of yesteryear. On the far wall there was a mirrored, floor-to-ceiling cupboard with the most comprehensive collection of medical paraphernalia any child with an aberrant sense of curiosity could hope for: enema bags and douching equipment and strange rubber bulbs and bedpans, swabs and forceps and tweezers and
long
needles, and toenail clippers and scissors with peculiar angles to their noses (which I liked to pretend had mistakenly been ordered from a mortuary supply house).

I was standing there, holding one of the ends of a long, thick, pink tube in each hand, wondering what on earth this wonderful thing could be meant for, when I heard the door to the office click open. I stuffed the tube back in a corner of the cupboard and crept to the doorway to see who it was. It was, of course, Ann Rose, and she was pouring something from a tall, clear bottle into a Dixie cup. She saw me too, and on any other day I’m positive her knee-jerk reaction would have been to quickly stash the vodka, or at least pretend it was water, but not that night. She kept on pouring until the cup was full, and then she bent her head and gulped it down. A lesser sleuth would have missed her whisking a scrap of red and green striped paper under the desk with the toe of her shoe as she refilled the cup.

Well it was no real surprise to me. Ann Rose may have vigilantly hidden the traces of her Santa-ing, but I’d seen similar bottles, and then some, tucked behind the douche bags and the Time-Life This Fabulous Century series.

The sorry question I should have asked myself that night in bed, when I was too jacked up on petits fours to sleep, was what did Ann Rose get for all her slavish trouble? For trudging through the slush of holiday-crazed New York to purchase all those trinkets and toys and baubles and gizmos; in short, everything from a Revillon mink to a trick set of squirting nickels? As I’d find out in future years, I’d only witnessed a segment of Ann Rose’s annual shopping odyssey. The day before the poodles and I had followed her, she’d also gone to Hammacher Schlemmer, then across town to Zabar’s, then down to B. Altman, and over to Macy’s, and then through the slush and ice to Verdura, east to the James Robinson Galleries, finishing up in the madness at Bloomingdale’s. And who knows where she’d been the day before that.

This is what she got in return: a Christmas bonus and a bottle of Ma Griffe.

And this is what I got for the remainder of Ann Rose’s life: a better stocking than Will’s—even if he still got bigger presents than me.

 

 

 

A DECADE BEFORE I was born, my grandparents built a house on Mount Desert Island in Maine. They positioned it on the pink granite rocks at the entrance to Northeast Harbor, making it a beacon to anyone who was traveling by in a boat; and in Maine in the summer that means everyone. Even if you looked the other way, you couldn’t miss it; the sun bounced off the Belgian hand-rolled picture windows like a paparazzi flash off a Harry Winston sparkler. Natives, tourists, and summer residents gawked as they passed by, and commented freely on the design, the artistic delusion, and the obvious moral depravity of both architect and owner.

When the sea was calm, you could hear the shrewd observations of the lobstermen:

“Jeez, Bert. Thing looks like it got skwashed by a rawk.”

“Ayeh.”

“Why’s your house so weird?” the towheaded heirs and heiresses in my sailing class would ask when we had to tack in front of the house all the magazines had labeled
Trendsetting! Original! The Last Word!
“I don’t know,” I’d say, waving my hand dismissively like I didn’t care, “my GPs are weird.”

Summer people on Mount Desert traditionally own “cottages.” This is a coy name for the brooding shingled fortresses that populate the island, both the genuine old dinosaurs and the hulking new fabrications that exude the venerable trust fund look parvenus strive for. My grandparents were done with that look; they were hell-bent on the avant-garde. I guess that’s one of the only problems with old money—you get bored with it.

Positioned as we were at the mouth of the harbor, and within shouting distance of a picturesque island replete with calendar-worthy lighthouses, tour boats passed by our house all day long. They teemed with sightseers—all cameras and binoculars and lobster T-shirts—who paid to ogle the moneyed piles lining the shore. You could hear the collective intake of breath when they putt-putted round the headland to confront the shock of the new.