Dead End Gene Pool (13 page)

“Now this heeah is what we call one of our Down East un-attractions, folks!” the smart-ass tour guide would boom on his PA system. “Had the fella that did the Yoo-nited Nations Building in New Yawk do it for him. Godfrey mighty, if they ain’t got his ’n’ her privies with a hole in the wall above the soap so’s they can talk to each other through the wahl when they’re takin’ a bath!”

Click, click, click
would go all the Polaroids.

“Ayeh—slick as a smelt, this one is. Drives a cah can take you to Ellsworth and back in an hour, and that’s the truth.”

On cue, my brother Will and I would rush out and wag our butts, dancing around for the tourists like the predictably demented offspring of a wealthy eccentric.

On the morning of the day my grandparents’ chef bit me, I hurried down the gravel path from the cottage my brothers and me and our governess, Henrietta, slept in. The sun scattered diamonds across the ocean in a path to the rocky beach that circled our point. I was halfway to the kitchen when—
THWACK!
—a seagull smacked into the colossal living room window
.
“Number Fourteen,” I noted aloud, and ran back outside. By the time the screen door slammed behind me, this one was dead, a tiny smudge on the thick glass and a drifting feather the only signs of recent mortality. I picked the bird up, and it felt as weighty and warm and limp as the newborn baby someone had once mistakenly tried to get me to hold. Breakfast could wait; I hopped off the terrace onto the immaculate lawn that ran between the beach and the west side of the main house, and, skirting the wall but scrupulously avoiding the panoramic windows of my grandparents’ bedroom, I ran to the kitchen garden. At the far end I had a little summer project going.

Along with snooping, collecting is another of my genetically coded destinies. My cousin Carter Burden spoke for the entire family when he said,
Collecting is in my blood. It never stops. It just keeps getting more expensive
. My grandparents were into modern art and French wines and first edition novels and Schlumberger jewelry (and sleeping masks and prescribed barbiturates). My mother was into tans acquired in different parts of the world, and anything shaped like a turtle. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham hoarded Nazi relics. Uncle Ordway had already amassed an exhaustive stockpile of pornographic literature and would go on to curate the authoritative collection of Brooke Shields memorabilia. My initial foray into this family arena had been eraser rubbings. The summer after kindergarten, I went through a case of Eberhard HBs to get about a quart’s worth of shredded pink filings. This summer I was concentrating on a dead bird collection. To be specific, I was chronicling (meticulously) mortification of the flesh—specifically, seagull flesh. I had my own little morgue going behind the English cucumbers, which, owing to the latitude of Northeast Harbor, no one had as yet gotten wind of.

Ten minutes later I was in the kitchen (hands washed) sitting on the red Formica counter and banging my sneakers against the white painted cabinets below. Three perfect circles of batter sizzled on the griddle of the massive black range, awaiting consummation by yours truly. A plate stacked high with flat, crispy bacon was keeping warm on the shelf above, and I stole a piece, cramming it into my mouth like a stick of Juicy Fruit.

“You know, I don ’ave all the day to cook for you.” Arturo, the new chef, winked as he flipped the pancakes over. We were at the zenith of the houseguest season (plane met at Bar Harbor airport twenty-six times, sheets in the guest cottages changed forty-nine times, signature lobster dinner prepared and served nineteen times). He turned back to his preparations on the worktable: an elaborate picnic lunch he and one of the kitchen girls were in the process of assembling and packing into creaky wicker suitcases. Gloria, a sluggish native with a showcase bosom and bountiful rear, simpered at him. Arturo was the most exotic piece of Mediterranean manhood she had ever seen outside of the Bar Harbor Criterion movie theater. Arturo rewarded her with a grin and a clack of his long white chops, something he was unfortunately prone to doing. A drop of oil slid down the forelock he vainly positioned each morning to escape the hold of his toque.

It had taken a leap of faith for my grandfather to hire a non-Gaul, and it never would have happened but for the publication of Elizabeth David’s
Italian Food
. Arturo had exploded onto our domestic scene only a few months earlier, all springing black hair and ion-charged machismo.

“I think they’re ready,” I announced to him, jumping down from the counter to see what was more important than my blueberry pancakes.

Arturo turned the pancakes onto a warm plate and left me to get the butter and syrup myself.

“I gotta get the peek-neek ready so you must do for youself,” he said, pouring a stream of smooth red gazpacho into a steel thermos. He wedged it into one of the baskets, beside a corpulent slice of Brie and a stack of cream-colored Bakelite cups. “’Ay! Not so theeck!” He admonished Gloria, who was slathering sandwich bread with egg salad. Arturo politely moved her aside. He added some chervil and a stick of soft butter to the bowl, and then demonstrated to his devotee how to smooth a thin layer of the mixture onto the pieces of brown and white bread; and how to cut off the crusts just so, and then the square into triangles, so what you were left with was an elegant little sandwich with the caloric testosterone of a Big Mac. “You finish this, then you do the ros bif. And
theen, theen, theen!
Not fat like your kine a san-wich!” Gloria’s response was to bat her chalky blue eyelids and squeeze her elbows together so that her breasts struggled to leap out from her pink uniform.

As the summer progressed, the menus my grandfather planned became increasingly elaborate as more and more houseguests arrived on the shuttle from Boston. He began each day by ringing his secretary in New York.

“Miss Pou,” he would pronounce into the telephone, lying in his bed with a crackling morning fire, gazing out the window at yachts and sailboats and Boston Whalers coming through the Western Way.

The William A. M. Burden Company was at Rockefeller Center, where the titanic bronze Atlas struggled under planet Earth at the entrance to the building, and upstairs, on the thirty-second floor, Miss Pou struggled under my grandfather. She had been hired during his ambassadorship to Belgium and would remain until his death, which she would fervently wish for throughout the last ten years of his life. The offices took up the whole of the floor and had killer views from every window of the modern, hard-edged space. The carpeting was a shocking yellow, the leather chairs and sofas black, and the built-in desks smooth white Formica. Workers moved discreetly past paintings and sculptures by Léger and Arp and Diebenkorn and Warhol and Brancusi.

There were only two people on my grandfather’s payroll to whom my mother was civil, and one of them was his secretary. Miss Pou’s first name was Mildred, which cracked Will and me up almost as much as her
pee
-
you
last, and her daily recommended vitamin C intake came from whiskey sours, which is probably the biggest reason my mother liked her. She was from Shreveport, Louisiana, and had once dated Elvis (“Nothin’ but a wet kisser, darlin’ ”). She changed her hair color once a month, but my favorite thing about her was that she had no belly button because the surgeon had forgotten to put it back after her tummy tuck.

“Miss Pou, the president of M.I.T. is arriving tomorrow at three and I would like to serve grouse for dinner.”

“Certainly, sir. Though I believe it may be a bit early—”

“Miss Pou. My food calendar states that mid- August is the season for grouse, so I am certain you’ll find a resource.”

“Yes, Mr. Burden. I suppose I can call Scotland.”

“Marvelous. Bring twelve. Catch the eight-thirty flight. Good-bye.”

After dressing for his ten o’clock doubles game at the Harbor Club, my grandfather held a morning consultation with Arturo in the living room, seated beside the floor-to-ceiling window that faced the ocean, in his favorite bright yellow Eero Saarinen chair, a Chesterfield smoldering in the ashtray beside him and a pencil poised above his customary brown spiral notebook. “Arturo,” he would begin, adjusting his steel-rimmed glasses and signaling with his long fingers for the chef to take a seat. “This Wednesday I’m hosting a luncheon for some important people from Washington . . .”

My grandfather was a devotee of chaudfroid. This is the culinary technique whereby ordinary foodstuffs such as poultry and fish are transformed into gleaming, elaborately decorated
objets
that seem hardly edible. A lot of white sauce and rubbery aspic is involved, fortified to cementing capability with abundant amounts of gelatin. It stands to reason that chaudfroid has gone the way of pillbox hats and employing leeches to bring down a fever.

Arturo was also excessively fond of chaudfroid. His kitchen could produce a buffet worthy of depiction by Tiepolo. He was Bob Mackie with a stewing hen; tied up and into the pot she went, and out that bird came to be placed on a jittery stage of aspic, enrobed in gelatinous ivory sateen with intricately stenciled truffles and greenery running up and down her showgirl breasts. Arturo knew how to please the ladies. For my grandmother, a Kon-Tiki enthusiast, he fashioned Tahitian cucumber outriggers with little oars carved out of carrots, filling them with composed salads of lobster or crab or tiny diced vegetables, bound with copious amounts of mayonnaise, aka French luncheon glue. These vessels were set to sail on the table between the dishes of glorified poultry, fish, and pastry-wrapped terrines. “Oh, Arturo!” my grandmother would exclaim. “You are so very talented.” And she’d hum a snatch of “E Le Ka Lei Lei” as she helped herself to one.

After I’d polished off my pancakes and a dozen strips of bacon, which my mother would have been horrified to witness (
Jesus, Toots! How fat do you want to be?
), and after I’d checked on my birds, and been forced to bury two of them due to mortification of the flesh so extreme that if left unchecked might lead to olfactory discovery, I returned to the kitchen because I had nothing better to do until we set sail for the picnic later in the morning.

Arturo and his sous-chef were making tortellini. They were shaping and sealing the delicate spinach dough with the economy of assembly line workers. Arturo asked me if I would like to make one, and he showed me how to do it with unexpected patience. I watched as he caught up a spoonful of the filling, a pink and green mixture of raw veal and fresh herbs, and plopped it on the square of dough. He brushed the edges with water; then deftly folded the square diagonally, then into a sort of croissant shape, sealing the tips together with a tender little pinch. He might have been diapering a baby.

After a couple of village idiot efforts, I shaped one perfectly. In recognition of my accomplishment, Arturo clapped his hands, threw me up in the air over his head, and soundly bit me on the ass.

Well, what do you
think
I did?

Wailing like a fire engine, I ran from the kitchen, leaving the bewildered chef standing there with his arms stretched out and a
ma?
on his lips, and ran straight to my grandparents’ bedroom. They were getting changed after their morning tennis game and were, as was their habit, walking around in their underwear, oblivious to anyone who entered the room.

“Hello, dearie,” said my grandmother. “You’re just in time to hook me up, isn’t she, girls?” The poodles stared blankly from the nest of expensive French linen they had clawed around themselves at the foot of the bed. I began fumbling with my grandmother’s long-line bra/panty/girdle contraption, halting along the way to tuck in the ripples of her soft back.

“Arturo BIT me,” I told her, exhibiting the spot on my butt and pointedly wiping tears from my face with the hand that was fastening her up.

“Well, I’m sure he didn’t mean it. Brothers can be like that!”

“Arturo. The CHEF,” I said.