Dead End Gene Pool (2 page)

The sons of Henry Burden worked in the ever-expanding family business. His grandsons all followed suit—except for William Armistead Moale Burden, my great-grandfather; he was destined for a far more spectacular, if spectacularly shorter, life.

William did everything right from the get-go. He went to Groton, then to Harvard, where he was captain of the football team, class president, first marshal, and president of the Hasty Pudding Club. Throughout, he even remained a devout Christian. In 1900, after only three years, he graduated cum laude, and embarked on a trip around the world, during which he was photographed repeatedly (and becomingly, for of course he was also handsome) astride everything from camels to elephants and in front of every edifice referenced in Baedeker’s. Upon his return to New York he was elected a member of the New York Stock Exchange and became a partner in the banking firm of J. D. Smith and Company. And then he married my great-grandmother, Florence Twombly.

Florence must have sensed it was high time to clean up the waters of the gene pool. The family had been practically self-pollinating, what with all those cousins marrying cousins. And William in turn must have known it was time to evolve financially. The Burden fortune was known for its ups and downs, but mostly its downs, having been tossed about by several generations of ne’er-do-wells and inopportune matches.

My great-grandparents were married on April 12, 1904, in a ceremony at St. Thomas Church, in New York.
The New York Times
devoted several columns to describing what it called a “full force turnout by New York society.” After a false start (a baby girl who died in infancy and was never again mentioned), William quickly sired two sons: my grandfather, William Armistead Moale Burden II, and my uncle Shirley Carter Burden. And then he died.

A
New York Times
article dated February 3, 1909, explained:

If one has to die of a malady, it might as well be strange.

My grandparents met at a cocktail party in London in 1928. William A. M. Burden II was fresh out of Harvard and was on leg number four of his Grand World Tour. Margaret Livingston Partridge was in Europe for the season. My grandfather was bowled over by her beauty. For their first date, he picked her up at her hotel in a supercharged four-and-a-half-liter Bentley convertible. He remembered her as being unsuitably, if stunningly, dressed in high heels and an impressively grand picture hat. Which he also recalled she had difficulty holding on to during their fourth 110 mph lap around the Brooklands Raceway, which he only noticed because while she was cowering under the dashboard, the flapping brim of her hat was obstructing the temperature gauge.

Peggy Partridge was the autumn leaf and only child of respectable, if bohemian, artist parents. Her mother was a fashionable poet and a follower of the occult. Her father, William Ordway Partridge, was also a poet, as well as a novelist and a critic, but he was famous for his portrait sculpture, such as the equestrian statue of General Grant in Brooklyn and the beautiful Pietà in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which has been handled and stroked so many times, Jesus is beginning to look conceptual.

My grandparents were married at St. Thomas Church in New York City in February of 1931. After a four-month honeymoon to just about everywhere, they settled into a cozy duplex apartment at Number 10 Gracie Square with their French chef, their English butler, and their frequently intoxicated Scottish valet. My grandfather went to work on Wall Street, and my grandmother took classes at the Art Students League on Fifty-seventh Street, where she spent her days drawing naked people in charcoal.

Right away, of course, a son was born. Then another, and another, and another. My father, the eldest, was christened (un-surprisingly) William A. M. Burden III. He did everything he was expected to. He went to the Buckley School in New York, and then to Milton Academy, and then to Harvard. Along the way he met a girl named Leslie Hamilton. They fell in love and were married when both were in college. Their future was bright and scholarly.

In September of 1951 Ruth Vanderbilt Twombly died while vacationing abroad. A week later my brother was born. And it was a good thing his father gave him a Y chromosome when he was a zygote, because otherwise he would have been stuck with the name of Ruth, instead of entering the world as—you guessed it—William A. M. Burden IV.

None of Aunt Ruth’s heirs wanted anything to do with the three Brobdingnagian abodes and all their museum-quality contents; not her sister, Florence; her nephews, William and Shirley; or her great-nephew, my father. In 1955, the year I was to be born, Florham was put on the market, the Newport cottage was bequeathed to a Catholic college for girls, and the house in the city was sold. In an apocryphal four-day sale, Parke-Bernet auctioned off all of the contents of all three.

If that’s not an omen, you tell me what is.

 

 

 

“YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE—whoops!” The head stewardess, a beehived blonde, dropped her microphone. While she grappled for it on the floor of the DC-4’s galley, the resultant screech and the disclosure of her pneumatic bust ensured all eyes were directed her way. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” she began again, “we have a little problem. In a short while, the captain will ask all of you to . . . ah . . . to assume the crash position as illustrated in the safety information located in the seat pocket in front of you—excuse me . . . ah please, your attention again—PLEASE!”

The words
crash position
had thrown a switch. People began twisting in their seats, trying to figure out why such a measure was deemed necessary when the plane had not changed altitude for the last half hour and was, in fact, chugging nicely along. “Huh?” became “What’s happening?” which then turned to “Just what the HELL is going on?” Finally the stewardess lost it and yelled, “QUI—ET!” which was the cue for the captain to assume control from the flight deck.

“Now, ladies and gents,” he began, “there’s nothing for y’all to get worked up about. This is a standard safety procedure we instigate whenever there is the little ol’ bittiest chance of an incident acurrin’.” His voice was creamy, with just the right amount of manly authority. But no one was buying that sky commander crap if the plane was going down.

A roar swelled up. Women cried out, babies squalled, and businessmen grabbed at the sleeves of the stewardesses, pleading for information and emergency cocktails.

“Oh, great,” I muttered, folding my arms, “we’re gonna miss
My Favorite Martian
.”

“Well, if the plane crashes, maybe we won’t have to go to school tomorrow?” my brother said helpfully.

“There’s no way the plane’s crashing, stupid. You gonna drink the rest of that Coke?”

My brother Will and I were en route from Washington, DC, to New York’s LaGuardia Airport to visit our grandparents. In spite of our youth—I was seven and Will eight—we were traveling alone, as we’d been doing for as long as I could remember. Our grandfather’s secretary, Miss Pou (satisfyingly pronounced
pew,
as in
pee-yoo
), had been forced to book us seats in the midsection of the cabin. The humiliating rear, that quarantine semicircle reserved for losers and the grandchildren of safety-conscious men who sat on the boards of TWA and Pan Am, had already been taken by a group of dark, glittering Indian women and their children. Will and I were thrilled not to be back there and, up until this recent announcement, had been deliberately out of control—which is understandable when you’ve consumed five Coca-Colas in under an hour.

I couldn’t decide whether to cry or hit my brother. I’d been in a horrible mood ever since that morning when I’d noticed our tickets were printed out as “Master William A. M. Burden IV and companion.” Being a girl meant squat in my father’s family. Honestly, you’d think I’d been born to Chinese peasants. So there hadn’t been any of us for a couple of generations; you’d have thought everyone would be delighted. I liked to think that my grandmother was, but her efforts were curtailed by my grandfather. It was obvious that he would have preferred me to have Will’s quieter disposition—and vice versa. He was forever telling me to stop talking and let my brother speak, and wanting only Will with him in the photo when my grandmother pulled out her Brownie.

My mother’s advice was to (quote) shut up and put up. Leslie Lepington Hamilton Burden (and eventually Beer and Tobey) was not one to coddle her children with parental guidance. She’d lectured me one evening while I was lying on her bed making snow angels on the striped Mexican bedspread.

“The sooner you figure out how to deal with being a female in your father’s family, the better.” I’d admired her covertly as she’d cinched a wide calfskin belt over her narrow black sheath, yanking it into an extra hole with a slight grunt. Her waist was smaller than mine and she made sure I knew it.

“I’ll figure it out, I guess,” I’d grumbled. My mother’s way of dealing sure wasn’t going to be mine. On the rare times I got to see her around my grandparents, she was weirdly unlike herself and acted as sweetly subservient and dumb as Snow White. It was so
fake
.

“If I were you, Toots—”

“Don’t call me Toots!” I said. I hated the nickname she used interchangeably on my brother and me. It was like some stupid moll-speak. But she had her own little language, a kind of lexicon she substituted for the vocabulary of humor she lacked; adages and names and twisting up of words that I guess she thought were funny. I found it unfunny and embarrassing. And I was already missing her. These days, it seemed I only spent time with my mother when she was getting ready to leave. My brother and I had recently come to view her as a glamorous lodger who rented the master bedroom suite.

“Why do we have to visit Gaga and Granddaddy so much, anyway?” I whined. “I feel like I
live
on Eastern Airlines.” Dusty Springfield sang from the phonograph in the corner and I waggled my legs in time to “Wishin’ and Hopin’.” Ever since our father had abruptly died the year before, Will and I had become virtual commuters shuttling back and forth from our home in Washington to those of our grandparents in New York, Maine, and Florida.

“Oh, don’t be so bratty,” my mother replied, blacking in her eyebrows with a red Maybelline pencil. “There are lots of little girls who’d give up growing tits for a chance to hang out on Fifth Avenue and be waited on by servants. Hand me my lipstick?” She passed the frosted tube across her mouth and smacked a Kleenex to set it. Fabergé Nude Pink was her lifelong color of choice, a pastel shade that brings to mind Sun Belt drag queens and leather-faced Junior Leaguers. She would die wearing it.

“Anyhoo,” my mother said, giving a blast of Final Net to her French twist, “you know your grandparents have insisted on this visitation schedule ever since your father turned up his toes. And so have their goddamn lawyers.” She walked across the room and stood over me then, a tanned blond bombshell in a cocktail dress, fishnets, and stilettos, reeking of Diorissimo. When she leaned down, I was afraid she was going to kiss me or something, but instead she remarked with disbelief, “That can’t be a pimple on your chin already!” I clamped my
CREEPY
comic book down over my head as the doorbell chimed.

Then she and Dusty sang their way down the stairs, leaving me to search my reflection in the mirror for the dreaded signs of preprepubescent acne.

It never occurred to our mother when she left us at the airport that we might not be returned in the same condition. The notion that our chaste little bodies could be taken aside and fingered by unfamiliar hands didn’t cross her mind. Nor did thoughts of Tunisian white slavery, the narcotic courier trade, Lower East Side sweatshops, or abduction by green pedophiles in silver pods. Or maybe they did.