Dead End Gene Pool (9 page)

“Miss Pou, a record of all Vanderbilt houses in Newport and in New York City. Dates and principal residents. On my desk by Monday. And terrapin for lunch in the country this weekend. Must be in season somewhere. Check Australia. Fly them in. Females.” He thought a moment and added, “Send six cases of Mr. & Mrs. T’s Bloody Mary Mix to all houses. And phone Kyoto about the best chrysanthemums for Mount Kisco greenhouse.”

Hmmm, I thought. Weren’t chrysanthemums poisonous?

“We’re
here
!” piped Will. Gran sat up abruptly as, at last, we turned through a pair of towering, elegantly wrought iron gates. The gravel crunched and popped beneath our tires as we drove past smooth lawns and orchards. My grandmother pointed out the farm in the distance, and the dairy with its shingled silo and beautiful, ivy-covered barns. We blinked at the greenhouses repeating their glare in the sun, and at the imposing glass-and-brick orangerie, and the very adult Playhouse, with its central barroom, and separate wings of tennis courts and swimming pool.

The house was the biggest thing I’d ever seen in my life. The Nazi swung the car around the circle and stopped in front, and Will and I tumbled out. We started chasing each other around the wide frontal columns, and clambering over the pair of life-sized marble lions guarding the two-storied portico. My grandfather walked up to the massive front door and touched it with a fingertip. “Not as shiny as it used to be,” he commented.

His mother struggled up the steps to stand beside him. “No,” she admitted, adjusting her hat. “In Mother’s time we employed it as a mirror, to check our appearance before we went in to see her. I suppose the university doesn’t see the need to keep it that polished anymore.”

We were early, so there was no university tour guide waiting to greet us. Gran pushed the door open and we followed her in. We stood for a moment, blinking in the dark coolness of a black-and-white marble hallway that seemed to stretch forever. A massive fireplace faced the entrance, and my brother and I ran to stand inside it.

“Perfect for roasting your victims,” I whispered in awe. I imagined bodies on spits being slowly hand cranked by hunch-backs with leprosy.

“
Hel-lo . . . hel-lo,” called Will up the flue.

“That fireplace is almost twenty feet high. Can you imagine?” said Gran, leaning on her cane. “Father had it copied after the one at Windsor Castle.” She turned in a slow circle, remembering. “Mother’s Sargent portrait used to hang over there.” She pointed to where an aerial map of the buildings and grounds hung crookedly on the wall, and the grown-ups all squinted at it in recollection.

Gran’s mother, Florence, was not only the last surviving grandchild of the Commodore, she was the least attractive. In her portrait by John Singer Sargent, the court painter of his day, she is depicted in the ripest of swirling peach tones, all warts and moles removed. Her eyes are as dark and moist as Hostess cup-cakes, her mouth chastely sensual. Her figure—in actuality, angular and stick-thin—is as luscious and languid as a Boston cream pie. Seated on the edge of a needlepoint Louis XVI foot-stool, she is surrounded by icons of her opulent life: a Barberini tapestry (Apollo and Daphne visible in a discreet state of undress), an exquisite ivory fan, a rich Aubusson carpet. It is the portrait of a wealthy fertility goddess, and nothing remotely like the cross, dried-up, dark little bird I’d seen in all the family albums.

“And remember all the Caesars that lined this hallway on their fluted stands?” my grandmother said with a wave of her gloved hand.

“
Pilasters,
Peggy,” her husband corrected.

“Let’s see,” she continued, counting them out on her fingers, “Tiberius, and Caligula—and Claudius and Nero, Augustus and, and—oh, Galba and Titus, and . . . I can’t remember the others.”
Barfufft!
She subsided, pleased with herself for remembering that many.

Traveling slowly down the hallway, we looked into rooms that had once been the library and the salon, the billiard room and the oak-paneled smoking room. Across from the formal living room was an immense alcove that had held Grandma Twombly’s beloved Aeolian pipe organ, an instrument reportedly larger even than the one at Radio City Music Hall. It had gone on the block with everything else, the massive Louis XV gilt chandeliers from the ballroom and the roomfuls of English furniture, the Chinese porcelain, the beautiful paintings, and books, and carpets and tapestries, all of which had contributed to my grandfather’s inheritance and allowed him to purchase paintings like Francis Bacon’s
Screaming Pope,
which my grandmother had to close her eyes and put a handkerchief to her mouth to walk past.

The grown-ups kept going on and on about how things used to be and what was gone and who had died, and I felt badly for my great-grandmother. As much as I loved the idea of dead people, I couldn’t imagine being the only one from my generation left alive. Then my grandfather started reminiscing about Phillip, everyone’s favorite footman, and how he would bring them their breakfast in bed—hothouse Marshall strawberries with morning dew on them—although how something grown inside could have dew on it was beyond me.

In the nick of time a university official came hurrying apologetically down the hallway, and Will and I escaped up the marble staircase to the second floor. We counted thirty-six bedrooms, now dull, utilitarian offices, albeit with fancy plasterwork and marble bathrooms en suite with fireplaces. There were still the original brass holders on the doors, where the names of the guests, written out in copperplate, would be inserted for their stay. Up a lesser staircase we found another twenty or so bedrooms, and we ran dizzily in and out of them until we burst in on a large lady in a dusty little office, manning a mimeograph machine that smelt of vanilla. She shooed us out with lavender-stained fingers, but as we retreated, I puffed myself up self-importantly and hollered, “Hey! This is my great-grandmother’s house, you know!” Like she cared.

We ate our picnic lunch outside on the wide stone terrace, though it was hardly a picnic since my grandfather insisted a table be brought out. The grown-ups sat at it and ate egg salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and cold roast chicken, and Camembert with huge dusty black grapes, the kind you practically need to cut in half and pit like a plum. Will and I straddled the stone balustrade next to them and drank Cokes and gnawed on drumsticks, and when we got bored with eating, we stood up and balanced on the balustrade and tried to jinx each other into falling into the bushes below. After a bottle and a half of Meursault, my grandfather was waxing even more nostalgic for Chef Donan and carrying on about his
marvelous
ness like a tent revivalist.

After lunch that day, I think I knew every dish in Donan’s repertoire. Turns out he was famous not only for his food, but because he was the highest paid chef in the country. In Donan’s
New Yorker
profile, he got five pages. My grandfather’s was only three.

“Tell me about the breakfast-es you used to have,” said Will. Breakfast was his favorite meal. He could eat eggs and pancakes and Little Jones fried sausages all day long. Gran told him how breakfast had been served between seven and eight, either on trays in the guest rooms, or in the breakfast room, and how every morning there had been eggs of every description, and all kinds of fruits from the hothouses, and Donan’s famous croissants, which he was credited with introducing to America, and hot muffins and toasts and brioches and biscuits, and cooked or dry cereals, and different cheeses, and chicken hash, and creamed hash and brown hash, and fish balls, and sausages, and bacon, and ham, and any kind of juice you could want, and strong hot coffee, or French chocolate, or China tea. And that was just breakfast.

I only interrupted twice, once to gag at the fish balls, and the other to tell my grandmother there was a bee drowning in her wine, but she ignored me and drank it down on the next gulp. I then had to project potential allergic reactions for her, and spent the next ten minutes worrying that her throat might swell to the point of suffocation and she would die.

“What was Grandma Twombly’s favorite?” my grandmother asked, her voice disappointingly normal. God, what a boring last question to be remembered by, I thought.

“Well, Mother adored soufflés,” Gran said. “In fact, her very last meal was a chicken soufflé.”

That started my grandfather off on a long recourse about egg courses, which I knew would lead to fish courses, and then meat courses, and then caviar and turtles and lobster and pheasant, so I shut my eyes and concentrated on what my own last meal might be. Obviously it would be dependent on what my crime was, as well as how I was going to be martyred. The most important factor to consider was what I’d want the contents of my stomach to be in the hereafter. I wouldn’t want to be too gassy for the embalmer, though I knew that was unavoidable, due to the metabolism of my intestinal bacteria. Lobster, maybe? Or would that just sit like a lump in my stomach for months, years even, before the worms broke it down? Perhaps something lighter, like popovers soaked in butter. Or a bacon cheeseburger from the Chevy Chase Club?
That’s
it
,
I thought.

My grandfather, who had now finished a second bottle of wine, was expounding on
Terrapin à la Florham
to Will, who was vacantly pulling all the hairs out of his left eyebrow, one by one. It felt like we had been eating lunch for three days.

“—and every night it was in season, terrapin was served at Grandma Twombly’s dinner table. It was superb, brilliantly superb.”

Will started in on his other eyebrow.

It was a forgone conclusion that any outing involving my grandfather and me would end in mishap. An hour later I was lurking behind the limousine, hanging on to one of the twin flags that were attached to the fenders, eavesdropping on the grown-ups. I was straining so hard to hear what was being said about so-and-so’s
terminal illness
and
imminent death
(both huge trigger terms for me) that I didn’t realize I had the flag-pole practically bent in two, and it had not been exactly flexible to begin with.

Just when they were getting to the most interesting part—
and the doctors had to insert a
—and I was almost able to hear what they were saying, I started grasping the flag tighter—
but since she insisted on an open casket
—tighter—
and Campbell’s said they wouldn’t
—until SNAP!

My grandfather made me sit up front with the Nazi, on the other side of the bulletproof glass partition. I tried to make conversation with him for a while, but it didn’t go well:

“So. Selma tells me you’re redecorating the apartment over the garage.”

“Anyone I know?”

Between the on-ramp to the Turnpike and the toll booth at the Lincoln Tunnel, I plotted retaliation against my grandfather, my brother, the Nazi, my geography teacher, and the male race in general. When I had mentally sealed their fate with an ingenious plot I’d heard about, where a woman killed her husband by putting nicotine from liquefied cigarettes into his aftershave, which snuffed him in about an hour, I was over it.

I couldn’t bear not being a part of the conversation. As we entered the gloom of the tunnel, I took advantage of George’s momentary blindness to flip the switch for the partition so I could hear what everybody was saying. I shouldn’t have bothered. My grandfather was talking about cheese. I was about to put the window back up when I heard the distinctive sound of his cigarette case clicking shut. Then I heard him ask if Will would do him the honor of lighting his cigarette.

Just as my brother leaned over, proudly intent on his task, I put my arm through the partition and pinched the back of his neck so hard he squealed like a hamster and dropped the flaming match on my grandfather’s knee. A tiny smoky hole appeared in the exquisite Savile Row wool. The owner of the knee exploded, and so did Will.

“She pinched me!” he screeched, and lunged through the partition. I was struggling to get the window up as expeditiously as possible, and leaning all over the Nazi to do it, which caused him to swerve and nearly sideswipe a delivery truck. It was all terribly exciting, depending on whose view you saw it from.

When we got back to the apartment, I dove headfirst for the corner seat in the elevator, beating my brother to it and daring, with practically twirling eyeballs,
anyone
to say a word about it. I tore off my prissy dress, stomping up and down on it before stuffing it into a mothball-filled garment bag at the back of the closet. I pulled on a pair of the Y-front boys’ underwear my grandmother had actually bought for me, then a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and my PF Flyers.

Rudely awakening them from their slumber beneath a forty-watt-lightbulb sun, I scooped up my brother’s three brand-new turtles from their plastic oasis, scurried up the spiral staircase, and made a beeline to the kitchen. It was almost four, and no one was around. I had maybe fifteen minutes before the chef started getting the help’s dinner ready. I placed the tiny reptiles on top of the rolled steel worktable, whereupon they instantly retreated into their silver-dollar-sized carapaces. I managed to get down a big soup pot from the overhead rack, and filled it with water. It took me half a dozen matches to get the burner on the big black Garland going, but I did it. I lugged the pot from the sink to the stove, spilling most of it, and then I carefully placed the turtles in the water, using a big spoon the way the chef did when he was poaching eggs. I turned the flame up as high as it would go and sat down on the counter to watch.