Dead End Gene Pool (30 page)

“It’s time you three started appreciating the other side of your family,” she lectured, hands on the wheel at precisely ten and two as she barreled along down Route 3. Edward and I quarreled in the backseat while Will, who at sixteen was in the throes of silent adolescence, glowered out the window. “All those servants waiting on you hand and foot in Burdenland must have your Colonial ancestors rolling in their graves!”

“It’s not our fault our grandparents are so rich,” I said.

“
It’s not our fault our grandparents are so rich
. . . ,” she mimicked back. “Well d’you think it’s their fault they didn’t pass some of your father’s money along to help me pay the goddamn bills? They cut me out of the bloody will, for Christ sake!”

We had all heard this story many, many times. Will turned to give her a mutinous look, and I was about to jump in when we were saved by the vision of Plymouth Harbor.

“Look! There it is—” said my mother in campy reverence, and her eyes actually welled up. It was maybe the third time I’d ever seen her cry.

Later, when I caught her whipping out a chisel and mallet from under her yellow and black cape, I tried to stop her, citing the words written on the “Do Not Touch!” signs everywhere, but she only said, “Oh, don’t have a cow. I have a right to some of this. My great-great-great-great . . . great . . . oh, whatever he was, my uncle Myles Standish was one of the first men to land on Plymouth Rock. Besides, they used to sell pieces of this thing as paperweights. My father even has cuff links and a watch fob out of it.” Shouldering me away, she found a foothold for the chisel. “I’m just taking a little souvenir for the Beast House,” she muttered, and with the muted
chink
of the professional, she clipped off an eight-inch piece from the seaward side of the iconic landmark.

The Beast House, that stunted, eighteenth-century Chinese chest of drawers that housed the artifacts of my mother’s forebears, now stood in a place of honor beside the large fireplace of the very small cottage my mother had recently purchased. We’d all questioned her motives when she’d cashed in her blue chip stocks six months before, but she must have known she would be needing a safe house. The cottage sat directly behind a hedge next to a busy road that led out to the causeway between the Old Town harbor and the ocean—and it had no view. It was the kind of beach house that owners never bother to winterize—a funky, sandy-floored, rundown thing with a kitchen too small to eat in, a bathroom with a rusty metal shower stall, and a well-rotted porch. And this was after the contractor had supposedly been working on it.

Six months later we were in our second semesters at boarding school—seven-year-old Edward at North Country School in upstate New York and fourteen-year-old me at National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Our mother was back in her English prison. A telephone call came on a spring evening just as the lady of the house, wearing nothing but Saran Wrap (another of their favorite outfits), was serving the Lord and Master his dinner. He got up to answer the phone (
Beer here
) and remained for some time in the hallway, listening intently as a woman on the other end of the overseas line delivered a death sentence.

Ten minutes later the plastic-wrapped Accused, even as she soaped the Dutch oven, was handed a twenty-four-hour eviction notice. My mother hightailed it out of there faster than you can say Tab, leaving everything behind except the dog. I still wonder what became of the contents of my room: all my hippie clothes, childhood books, LPs, posters, letters, and drawings—all my precious, identifying junk.

My mother’s two-timing came as no surprise to me; her appetite was bound to singe a hole through that marriage sooner or later.

That August, before the wronged wife’s call, my mother had been acting disturbingly unlike herself: soft, gooey, and transcendental. I’d seen that look on Maria Schneider’s face in
Last Tango in Paris,
when my roommate and I had used our fake IDs to see it.

“I’ve made a wonderful new friend,” my mother kept saying every time I passed through the kitchen.

“That’s great! How many legs does it have?” I kept saying in return.

“Don’t you want to know who it is?” she’d simper as I rummaged through the fridge.

“Friendships are so fun when they’re kept secret.” How stupid did she think I was? My mother didn’t have friends.

One Sunday morning she couldn’t hold back any longer. When I came into the kitchen to make toast, she was waiting to ambush me. I busied myself with the kettle, keeping my back pointedly toward her, but she continued from where she’d left off the night before, as if we were actually having a conversation about this. “He lives in Marblehead—”

She might as well have said:
Okay, so I’ve been screwing the contractor I hired to fix some stuff on that beach house I bought back in the States, and I forgot what it’s like to be all infatuated and horny for someone, and so what if he’s married, only now I’m back over here in this miserable little house with that sodomizing S.O.B. and I’m all moony over the contractor, and I really want to tell someone about it, but since I don’t have any friends, I’m going to unload it on YOU, Toots.

When I was young and nosy, and all I wanted were answers, I couldn’t get anything out of her. Now that I was older and didn’t want to know
anything,
I couldn’t get her to shut up.

A British Airways flight from Heathrow to Logan brought the Accused back to the land of her forebears; more specifically, the New England town of Marblehead, where her grandfather had summered, and where the
Spirit of
’
76
, that emblematic portrait of young America, hangs in the town hall. My mother moved into her tiny one-bedroom beach house. When news spread that the ex-pat home wrecker had moved to Marblehead, the contractor’s wife kicked him out, and he and his Labrador, Mac, moved in with my mother. For all of her trouble, the wife then got cancer and died.

My mother threw herself into the role of wicked adulteress. She streaked her hair platinum and didn’t get out of a bikini all summer. She sold off Kodak stock and bought herself a red Fiat convertible and drove around town with the top down, plying her fake English accent on anyone who would listen, like the checkout girl at Schube’s liquor store. In the beginning the contractor, whose name was Gil, tried to get us to like him. And we were prepared to—anything would be better than Hitler’s littermate—but we just couldn’t. For one thing, he was
old
. He had gray hair and a gray beard, and he was barrel-chested and bowlegged and tubby, and had the kind of hands that only look comfortable holding a can of beer or a hammer. He tried the Dad thing by palling around with Edward, who wasn’t having anything to do with tossing a football back and forth or building a shoe box, and he tried to be cool bumming cigarettes and mixing Will and me drinks and trying to smoke pot, but he wasn’t cool because he was still
old
. The first time I went to visit (armed with three girlfriends for moral support), my mother and the ancient boy toy gave us the bedroom, and they slept in a tent in the scraggly backyard. You could hear them doing it all night, what with the tent bouncing around like its stakes were going to pop out of the ground every time one of them climaxed.

“You do know that Gil went to Williams,” my mother kept saying, whenever she thought we were brushing him off.

“Uh huh,” I’d answer, thinking,
So fucking what
.

“And he’s a member of the Eastern Yacht Club, which is very snooty.”

“Wow.”

“So I really don’t understand why you can’t treat him with a little more respect!”

“Well, he is a contractor,” I’d fake-joke, like that was the real reason, and I was just the worst snob ever.

Going “home” became a necessarily brief, annual event. And with the three of us spread up and down the Eastern Seaboard in boarding schools, we were able to keep it that way.

Through the miracle of Island Divorce (and it will come as no surprise that the island was Haiti), my mother and the contractor became man and wife. They moved from the one-bedroom beach house into a one-and-a-half-bedroom beach house next door. The new house had even more of a transient feel to it than the old, despite their proud makeover of the bathroom, which boasted a plastic all-in-one tub-shower-and-tile unit that looked like it was pressed out by a Mattel Vac-U-Form. The living room had my mother’s signature hard couch, and a couple of small, square armchairs that were as comfy as bleachers, and all the furniture was covered with old sheets to protect it from the dogs. The rear of the house had two enormous sliding glass doors that led onto a deck and provided, at last, a wide view over the marsh to the sea.

Now my mother requisitioned the boxes she had stored when we’d moved to England. In a when-in-Rome celebration of her Colonial roots, she savored her trove of ancestral leavings: the Federal candlesticks, the tarnished sterling Queen Anne tea set, the various pewter soup tureens and chargers, the blue and white creamware, and mismatched plates by Spode, and Copeland, and Wedgwood. There must have been fifty christening mugs alone, many of them dating back to the early 1600s and passed down so many times the 1900 babies had to have their names inscribed in a jumble on the bottom. Out of their shallow wooden graves came portraits of long-dead Pilgrims—huge oils of large-eyed men and women in oddly modern, stark gold frames, and miniatures of their mothers and sisters and children. A long brown paper box revealed the wedding shawl of one Mary Lane of Bedford, Massachusetts, a kinsman known for a habit of picking off Indians with a shotgun from her upstairs bedroom window. There were enough domestic artifacts to start a museum, what with all the tortoiseshell hair combs, needle-pointed purses, cross-stitched patriotic slogans, golden thimbles, buttonhole scissors, pillowcases packed with yards of hundred-year-old lace, and frayed linen envelopes containing scraps of clothing purportedly belonging to everyone from the aforementioned Myles Standish to Bonnie Prince Charlie. On the mantel my mother proudly placed her favorite relic of all: the hallmarked family silver mug made by Paul Revere. (Which, of course, the Chosen One would get when she died.)

After they were settled in to the new house, my mother and the contractor settled themselves into a pattern of drinking and arguing, and fawning over their out-of-control Rhodesian ridgebacks—huge, insane dogs that took up every inch of space in that tiny house. You see local stories on TV about the raiding of the homes of weirdos harboring hundreds of animals living in a sea of their own feces. Visiting my mother’s house was beginning to feel dangerously close to this. It might only be a matter of months before the floors became carpeted with a two-inch-thick layer of dog stool. There would be no money to heat the house, but the larder would be stocked with Iams and booze. My mother would be forced to pawn her leather outfits, and would trail around in winter wearing layers of filthy, hooded, zip-up terry-cloth robes. When summer came, the single raggedy bikini she was down to would expose a body covered with bruises from the happy, beating tails of her dogs.