Dead End Gene Pool (8 page)

My great-grandmother tapped the toe of my shoe with her cane. “Mr. Frick’s son once brought a pygmy back from Africa,” she said. “Donan, my mother’s chef, never batted an eye, and cooked him all of his favorite meals.” She knew I was into the Addams.

“What did he eat, Gran?” I asked. I was hoping she’d say missionaries, but she smiled and said, “Rice and vegetables and potatoes, and I believe broiled steak, but no missionaries.” God I loved her for that.

Gran was cozy in a dignified, Victorian way. Whereas my grandfather had the rounded physiognomy of a blue-eyed owl, his mother had creased eyes and a crumply sort of face that managed to look austerely bluestocking, yet warm and amused. She was tall and functionally bosomy, and she wore her snowy hair set in soft waves, and little velvet headband-hats, and the kind of pumps from the forties that made everyone’s ankles look puffy, although hers really were. Gran’s husband had died of leukemia shortly after they were married, so she mostly wore plain black or navy. When she got dressed up for someone’s anniversary dinner or black-tie birthday, she’d simply pin on one of her gigantic Schlumberger brooches and she was good to go.

My other great-grandmother, Nina, was a dud as far as I was concerned. She might have been riveting in her prime, like when she was living in Paris and was publishing poetry, into séances and smoke interpretation and listening to distant tambourines, but now she was ancient and looked like one of those humanized chimpanzees you see on postcards. She wore flowery tea dresses, tiny hats with veils, and ropes of pearls, and to this day I can’t remember a single word she said. One of my least favorite photographs on the desk in my grandmother’s bedroom was of me as a hairless, fat baby, sitting in Nina’s lap. She’s holding me like I’m a two-minute egg that jumped out of its egg cup, which is exactly what I look like.

Nina lived in the apartment building next door to my grandparents, but Gran lived directly underneath us, on the fifth floor. My grandfather had built a spiral staircase to connect the two floors, and hung a big red and black Calder mobile over the top of it. You could almost always find Gran in her football-field living room overlooking Central Park, sitting in a wing-backed chair near the window, knitting sweaters for the blind. She knit the same boxy pattern for as many years as I knew her, and always in the same tiny size, using rough blue yarn that was as charmless as the Atlantic in winter. Not that the color mattered. Upstairs, my grandmother knit the identical pattern with the same yarn, and for a while there I thought blind people only came in one size.

It was appropriate that Gran’s sister, Ruth, died of alcoholism. She was completely wild. The two of them were close, despite being as different as wax and string. Gran, the elder by several years, had never looked at another man after her husband died. Ruth had never looked at a man, period. Referred to as “a handsome outdoor girl,” which back then was a quaint way of saying she was a lesbian, Ruth had lived her life in hedonistic opposition to her sister’s abstemious one. And she had died that way, too—magnificently, if painfully, of full-blown cirrhosis of the liver, while vacationing at the Ritz in Paris.

With the help of a butler, a footman, a French chauffeur named Lucien, a cook, several maids, and a governess, Gran had raised her two sons on her own. Like Gran and Ruth, the two boys could not have been more different. My grandfather studied at Harvard, graduated cum laude in 1927, and went to work on Wall Street as an analyst of the nascent aviation industry. In 1949 he founded the private investment firm of William A. M. Burden and Company. As ambitious as he was civic-minded, he was eager to make his mark on the world, particularly because he didn’t believe in the afterlife. He was on the boards of everything from CBS and Lockheed, to Columbia University, New York Hospital, and the Smithsonian. He collected affiliations and memberships the way I would go on to collect
CREEPY
comics. A 1953 profile of him in
The New Yorker
concluded with: “If you ever wonder what the Brook, the Racquet & Tennis, the River, the Links, the Grolier, and the Century can possibly have in common, the answer is Burden.” By 1964 my grandfather had added the Knickerbocker, the Somerset, the Chevy Chase, the Metropolitan, the Cosmos, 1925 F Street, the Capitol Hill, the Jupiter Island and the Harbor clubs, Buck’s and White’s in London, and the Travellers and the Jockey Club in Paris, as well as Ye Ancient and Honorable Society of Chief Sorcerers and Apprentices, whatever that was.

My grandfather and his brother, who, for unknown reasons, was named Shirley, remained the closest of siblings throughout their lives (both remarkably long, as both were remarkably alcoholic). Uncle Shirley never went to college. Instead, he went to Hollywood. He had married Flobelle Fairbanks, Douglas Fairbanks’ niece, and a member of Hollywood royalty, and they lived in the oldest part of sunny, delicious Beverly Hills. We had gone there for Christmas the year before my father died, and from the moment we entered the rambling Spanish-style mansion, I craved from the depths of my five-year-old soul to be a part of that domain. Everything about the place, the things we did, and the way we were treated was tantalizingly foreign. Uncle Shirley was warm, riotously funny, and endearingly irreverent, despite his conversion to Catholicism. Instead of a coffee table display of aviation officials and Republican presidents, film stars and Hollywood producers grinned from the silver frames in Uncle Shirley and Aunt Flobe’s living room. Their shelves and walls were crowded with black-and-white candids of their grandchildren, climbing over their parents, in the arms and on the laps and kissing the wrinkly faces of their adoring relatives; tumbling around in the grass in Connecticut, playing with their innumerable toys and pets and bikes; on the trampoline, in the pool, on ponies, on sailboats, and on skis. There must have been a thousand pictures of them. Back in New York, I looked with new eyes at our grim, formal lineups, the older generation with the retouched visages of dewy teenagers, my brother Will and I like Stepford children, a six-foot-wide stand of lilies beside us and a world renowned Léger painting behind.

For a year after that trip to California I pretended I’d been a victim of mistaken identity and that any day now the hospital would call and announce that they had made a terrible mistake, that my cousin Lore and I had somehow gotten swapped at birth (despite being born a year apart and on different coasts) and that I actually belonged to the fun, happy branch of the family, not the horrible, girl-hating one.

Surprise, that didn’t happen, and here I was, stuck in a car with my direct lineage.

Will was taking impressions of the car door with Silly Putty, and then pulling all the little hairs it had collected from the wool. Nobody was paying any attention because a) he was Will and could do no wrong, and b) Gran was describing all the house parties they’d had at Florham when she was growing up.

“Thirty guests each weekend!” said my grandmother with the tiniest
brfft
. (She was in a car, after all.) “Think of the planning! The staff and the linens and flowers and the
meals
.” She snapped open her pocketbook, the black lizard one I thought was so funny because it had two big gold poodles guarding its portals. She removed her lipstick and, without a mirror, applied it to her upper lip, which she then smacked against the lower one, a routinely hit-and-miss endeavor. My grandmother put on lipstick whenever she truly pondered something.

“Mother adored it,” chuckled Gran. “Entertaining was her life.”

“Well she did have the most superb French chef,” said my grandfather with a reverence he usually reserved for Charles de Gaulle or the Cummings Motor Company. “And Donan had five under him in the kitchen, not to mention a half dozen footmen in the pantry as well.” He sighed longingly.

“Oh, Bill, nobody has footmen nowadays,” chided his mother.

Her son scowled and, with dexterity born of habit, reached across to the bar alcove and poured several fingers of Wild Turkey into a glass without spilling a drop. He tried not to bolt it in front of his teetotaler mother.

My grandfather could never have enough staff. His grandmother Twombly had run her three behemoth houses with the help of two hundred servants, whereas he was forced to make do with a skeleton staff of twenty for his own four. He also could never have enough land. It drove him nuts that his property in Westchester County was only two hundred and fifty acres, whereas Nelson Rockefeller’s weekend retreat covered four thousand in Tarrytown.

“Regardless,” he said, extracting a gold cigarette case from his pocket and selecting a filterless Chesterfield, “Donan was marvelous, brilliantly marvelous.”

My grandfather said “marvelous” the way a character in a Fitzgerald novel would.
Mah-velous
. He said it about a hundred times a day, as if it were the only adjective that could aptly describe the talents of a chef, or the plate of Belon oysters before him, or the Chateau Petrus he was drinking, or how he felt about the overthrow of the Libyan government.

He shook his head at the marvelousness of it all, and fiddled with the cigarette lighter on the door. I rolled my eyes and looked at Will, who rolled his back at me. Unable to make the lighter work, my grandfather began searching his pockets for matches. “Before the first world war,” he continued, “one could easily find Escoffier-trained, top chefs like Donan. But then, stupidly, they all went back to France to fight. And naturally they all died. Why the devil aren’t there any matches?”

“Imagine the havoc that must have wreaked in the great houses of America,” my grandmother observed dryly.

“Peggy, you have no
idea
how difficult it is to procure these fellows nowadays,” her husband retorted.

“Why, Popsie, aren’t you satisfied with our chef?”

“Yes, yes, of course I am,” he replied, patting down the pockets of his Huntsman overcoat for a light. “Only the fellow had no idea the other night that when you serve partridge they must all be from the same hatch. And he seems unable to procure the best terrapin.” He took off his round steel-rimmed glasses and polished them with a monogrammed powder blue handkerchief that matched his shirt exactly. I whispered to Will that he looked kind of like a terrapin himself, but Will didn’t agree. I resolved never to speak to him again.

“Don’t you remember, Momsie,” my grandfather continued, “how marvelous the terrapin was at the luncheon we had for your eightieth at the Pavillon? Donan came out of retirement to prepare it himself. Why in blazes he wouldn’t come work for me—”

“Bill, your language! The children.”

My grandfather harrumphed, and I snorted into the hand-shirred bodice of my dress.

Blazes? Was that even a swear word? I did a quick mental run-through of all the dirty words I knew, starting with fuck, shit, prick, and butthole, while I doodled tombstones across the front page of the
Daily News
. Will was picking a scab on his knuckle and flicking the pieces my way.

My grandmother leaned toward me and said, “That’s a snappy dress you have on, dearie, is it new?” For the outing, I had been coerced into wearing a pale green Belgian party dress that cost as much as a pony.

“No. I got it for Christmas,” I said.

“Well it’s a lovely color. Did Santa give it to you?”

“No, you did. And I look like a mint.”

“A very nice mint, dearie.”

Still without a light, my grandfather told his wife to lower the glass partition so he could speak to George. After she’d fumbled with every other button on her seat arm, sending all the windows open and the grit and wind from the turnpike whooshing through the interior, and turning all the reading lights on and off, and the radio on at full volume, he reached angrily across her and did it himself.

“Dammit, George,” he spluttered, “I’ve asked you repeatedly to always provide matches!”

“Yes, Mr. Burden,” George said in his Gestapo monotone, glancing into the rearview mirror. I whipped around and grinned at him obnoxiously. George handed me a gold book of matches with MLB, my grandmother’s monogram, on the cover.

“Thank you, George,” I said. “Can I light it, Granddaddy?” I started to tear off one of the matches.

“No, no, no! Now, give them here and be quiet.”

He reached forward and snatched them from my hand. Then he lit his cigarette and sat back, exhaling vigorously. I was used to smoke, but I coughed dramatically because I hated the smell of Chesterfields. I already knew I was going to be a Marlboro girl.

I made a mental note to hide all the matches in the apartment when I got back, and added my grandfather’s initials to several tombstones in my drawing.

As Gran’s soft old voice continued:—
a marvel . . . whomever came to visit . . . Chicken á la King for Mrs. Prentice . . . Lobster Lafayette . . . Thomas Edison
—my grandfather picked up the mike to the built-in Dictaphone below his seat and rattled off a memo to his secretary.