Dead End Gene Pool (32 page)

There was a collective sigh of relief. Steak Tartare is served raw.

News travels fast in an overstaffed household. Suddenly the kitchen was filled with all kinds of people busily intent on doing next to nothing. My grandmother accepted a fresh apron from Michel and tied it over her bee ensemble. Then, while he nervously minced an onion, she stood eyeballing the mound of hamburger meat someone had placed on the table before her.

“You’re supposed to squeeze it around like Play-Doh,” I told her.

“Right-o—like this?” Marshaling her courage, she picked some up and patted it with her hands. This wasn’t so bad. Emboldened, she picked up another bright red handful. “Oh!” she cried, surprised by the squelchy sound of it going through her fingers. Everyone laughed, and my grandmother giggled a little herself. Before long her manicure was smeared with fat and tissue, and her big diamond flashed through the globs as she squished and squeezed and hummed and mooshed the meat around like a two-year-old making gory mud pies. As Michel instructed her, she added the onions, capers, Worcestershire sauce, parsley, some mustard, and an egg, and then smoothed it all into the shape of a loaf before etching decorative crosses over the top with a butter knife.

“There!” She beamed. (And farted the tiniest of tinies in her pleasure.) She smiled at everyone around the room, and everyone smiled back at her. We knew she would as soon repeat this exercise on her own as she would apply for a job at Dairy Queen.

On the evening of August 8, my brothers and I sat with our grandparents in the big, curved living room and watched Nixon give his resignation speech. Tears streamed down my grandfather’s face as he slumped in his yellow Saarinen chair, a dark Rorschach stain spreading across his lap. It was as if the entire carpet of his world had been pulled out from under him. Nixon had been my grandfather’s last ticket to diplomatic fruition. Through favors and donations, my grandfather had long been greasing the conduit to what he wanted most in the world: the ambassadorship to France.

A couple of weeks later there was a cocktail party at Nelson Rockefeller’s place in Seal Harbor. My grandfather and Nelson were good friends. Both were from wealthy families, and both had the ambition to govern. They shared other passions: France, art, food and wine, and (surprise) the Republican Party. Their summer houses had been designed by Wallace Harrison, the architect of Rockefeller Center and the United Nations. Each was a past president of the Museum of Modern Art (Nelson’s mother had founded it), and philanthropy was of paramount importance to both. The difference was, Nelson was the real thing; he was not only substantially richer, he was far better at being rich. He was from one of the contemporary world’s wealthiest families, whereas the financial glory days of the Burdens and the Vanderbilts was his-tor-ee. Career-wise, Nelson had it going on too. He was a professional politician who won elections (even if his campaigns were heavily self-funded), not a diplomat who had to win appointments. Now, to cap off a perfectly ghastly summer, President Ford had nominated Nelson for the vice presidency.

My grandmother was desperate to make her husband feel better. She figured it was high time she made Popsie that cozy dinner, or at least pretended she had. The morning of the Rockefeller party, she resolutely reentered the kitchen. This time Selma slopped onto the floor only a little of the gazpacho she was ferrying.

“Now, I want you all to take the night off, and Mr. Burden and I will eat Steak Tartare when we return from cocktails at the Rockefellers’ this evening.”

“
Oui,
Madame,” said Michel.

“Oh, and, Michel,” said my grandmother with an embarrassed little
brrfffttt,
“would you mind dreadfully if we told Mr. Burden that I made the meal?”

Michel smiled and bowed.

Turning to me, she said, “Why don’t you come too? I’m sure there’ll be lots of nice young there.” I knew what “young” meant—anyone in the
Social Register
between the ages of ten and fifty. I said I’d go. I could tell she wanted to show me off, not because I was so great, but because that’s what summer people do with their progeny. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham would have given half of his Hitler memorabilia to go, but my grandfather wasn’t having any of that. He never allowed himself to be seen in public with his third son; it was too humiliating.

And out she went, leaving the staff flummoxed and preparations started for the various things that would have to accompany her masterpiece (including the masterpiece itself): a butter lettuce salad, some French bread, cheese, a crème caramel. The wine needed to be selected, the butter curled, the linens chosen, and the finger bowls set on trays with a leaf of verbena in each. Someone would have to serve the meal, then clear and wash up, and get the Mr. and Mrs. up the three little stairs and into their bedroom and draw their baths and make sure they didn’t drown in them and help them brush their teeth and get them in their pj’s and finally into bed. Night off, indeed.

The three of us were dressed and ready to go at six. My grandfather could barely walk, but that didn’t stop him from driving. He shoved aside my urgent petition and, with a struggle that had me wondering how we were going to pry him out at the other end, managed to get himself behind the wheel of his 6.3-liter 300 SEL Mercedes—a car so powerful it was forever leaving coats of paint in its wake.

The road to Seal Harbor is a twisty one that follows the curves of the shoreline. It was Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride over, but we made it, with my grandmother only shrieking, “Mercy! Bill, you’ll kill us!” twenty-six times. We missed the entrance to the Rockefeller estate because my grandfather was going about ninety, but he remedied that by executing a U-turn into oncoming traffic. (
Shades of Uncle Bob!
I screamed to myself.) As we were thundering up the long gravel driveway, I spotted the Secret Service checkpoint and told my grandfather to slow down, as in “Oh my God! Stop! Stop!” A long table had been placed across the driveway, making it impossible to continue on to the house without verification. Dark-suited agents were looking into all the cars and checking the occupants against a guest list.

My grandfather wasn’t going for it. “Goddamn it!” he raged, spit flying. “This is outrageous, Peggy! Don’t they know who I am?” And he floored it.

“Bi-illl—” my grandmother wailed, covering her eyes with one hand and with the other clawing a long tear in the leather upholstery.

The agents realized what was happening. Quickly, they mobilized themselves in front of the table and withdrew their guns. One of them grabbed a bullhorn and bellowed at us to “HALT!”

My grandfather didn’t hesitate for one second. We flew through the center of the table, smashing it to pieces and sending papers and operatives flying. I could have sworn I heard a couple of shots zing past us, and I started to pray.
Oh God, please don’t let me die from a bullet defending a man who isn’t even vice president yet. I’ll miss orientation week at Cornell, and I’m sorry, Lord, but that’s when I’m intending to lose my virginity. You wouldn’t want me to die a virgin, now would you?

The madman remained unfazed. He peeled around the corner, up a little hill and past a planting of ferns, and finally ground to a halt in a shower of pine needles and chipmunk body parts in front of the house, whereupon he lurched out of the car, and up the steps, and into a bear hug with the future vice president of the United States.

 

 

 

THERE WERE ACTUAL occasions when my grandfather made an attempt to honor me, like the impromptu lunch party he threw for my sixteenth birthday in the jungle-like humidity of the indoor pool in the country, where the menu featured Beluga, lobster, and Dom Perignon, and the guest list consisted of my best friend, the butler, and four of my teenaged cousins. Then there was the dinner dance at the New York apartment for my eighteenth, when my grandfather stood up to toast me and forgot my name.

Another time, he magnanimously offered to bulletproof my car. Seeing as how it was a convertible, there didn’t seem much point, but my grandfather was seriously into bulletproofing. The windows and skylights of the rooms he personally frequented were installed with impenetrable metal blinds that went up and down and across at the touch of a switch. These provided hours of entertainment when we were little, and when we were older they became the ultimate party trick that no one, other than a Rockefeller, suspected. People would start screaming and diving under the Bertoia chairs when the shutters came rumbling down.

When my grandfather’s behavior toward me turned philanthropic, I got nervous. Invariably it began with a call from Miss Pou. At some point my grandfather would interrupt from the extension where he’d been listening and bark out something like,
Ever been to Tahiti?
I’d say no, and he’d say,
Well you’re going!
and I’d say,
Wow, really? When?
And he’d say,
Today
. Then I’d tell him I had school or work or something and couldn’t possibly, and he’d say take it or leave it, and hang up the phone. He offered Hong Kong and an African safari with no forewarning, and always when he knew it was impossible for me to accept.

The invitation to Paris was issued on a bone-chilling, overcast day in March. I was in my sophomore year at Cornell and hating every minute of Ithaca’s so-called spring. The phone was ringing when I walked into the cramped one-bedroom apartment I shared with my pre-law roommate.

“Hi, darlin’,” Miss Pou said. “Your grandfather would like to know if you would like to go to—”

“I’ll take it.”

By the time he died, my grandfather had visited Paris ninety-eight times. It was my grandparents’ favorite city. I was there with them once before, when I was seventeen and doing my gap year at a gonzo finishing school in Florence, Italy, an institution that featured style over education. They had come over to see the spring fashion shows and were staying at the Ritz, where my grandfather retained an entire home-away-from-home wardrobe. My roommate and I were crashing with her sister, a California hippie who ran an American restaurant called Mother Earth’s Lost and Found, a sort of flower power subterranean café that specialized in oversized hamburgers and tabbouleh. I think I had maybe one shower the whole week we were there.

We met up at the Givenchy show, where my grandparents had been justifiably horrified at my reinvention as a Californian free spirit, with frizzed-out hair, frayed bell-bottom jeans, batik coat, and platform boots that had me hitting the six-foot mark. By intermission I had to acknowledge my lapse in fashion judgment, and pledged to henceforth re-reinvent myself as a
jeunesse dorée
and wear navy cashmere cardigans over my shoulders, pale pink lipstick, and Hermès scarves. That idea lasted the twenty-four hours until I left Paris.

When I told my mother that I was going to fly to Paris on the Concorde and get to stay at the American embassy, she was characteristically delighted for me.

“Bitch,” she hissed, and hung up the phone.

She called back a day later:

“Well, I suppose it’s their choice if your decrepit grandparents want to spoil the bejesus out of you and waste thousands taking you to Paris.” I could hear the ice cubes tinkling in her glass. My mother hadn’t been anywhere other than downtown Boston since she’d thrown in her lot with the contractor.

“I’ll bring you back a Chanel suit,” I lied.

“Huh!” she said, and hung up the phone.