The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  At home, I practiced those calls on the horns arrayed on the front-hall table. I vibrated my lips against the mouthpiece until they felt bruised and tasted of metal. I mastered one hundred sit-ups, memorized the Gettysburg Address, balanced my father’s college dictionary on my head. He’d learned to wiggle his ears to catch the eye of the headmaster’s daughter who sat behind him in chapel at school; my sister and brother and I learned to wiggle ours, too. I sifted the detritus that accumulated in the saucerlike base of the brass lamp on his chest of drawers: collar stays, ChapStick, Pep O Mint Life Savers, toothpicks, buttons, Chiclets. In the cabinets that lined the pantry, my parents housed hundreds of glasses. Highball glasses, old-fashioned glasses, martini glasses, shot glasses, brandy snifters, champagne flutes, glasses for white wine, for red, for water. I loved the syncopated swing and thwack of the heavy leaden head of the Tap-Icer, with its flexible red metal handle, as it crushed a cube of ice in my hand. With the sleek martini shaker made of brushed stainless steel, I could produce a martini by age twelve. My father had a silver “tasting cup” on a red and gold ribbon for hanging around one’s neck. It was the badge of membership of one of the two wine-tasting societies to which he belonged. I pictured portly, red-faced men sitting around, spitting wine onto a stained floor. He had a wine cellar in the basement of our house. I vied for the assignment to take the steep wooden staircase into the basement, pass the small room on the right full of firewood, pass the furnace, run my hand along a high shelf for the hidden key, unlock the door to the wine cellar, and slip in. The place was a hive, dark bottles stacked horizontally in diamond-shaped cubbies made from plywood, or arrayed in racks with cradles for their necks. I learned how to pour wine, twisting the bottle at the last moment to shut off the flow without dripping on the polished mahogany surface of the dining-room table. I became a collector of labels and corks. I lined the stained corks on the pantry windowsill to dry. I ran empty wine bottles under hot water in the sink until the labels slid off like shed skin, then dried them on dish towels. I saved them in a shoe box as though they were paper currency from countries I’d never visited or postage stamps from faraway places like the Republic of Upper Volta.

  The year I turned fourteen, we left Ardrossan. A Philadelphia publishing tycoon, appointed ambassador to the United Kingdom by President Richard Nixon, made my father his special assistant at the embassy in London. We moved into a cream-colored town house in Belgravia with a balcony overlooking a garden square. My father took to wearing bespoke suits and striped shirts from the erstwhile shirtmaker to Winston Churchill. He acquired a small-wheeled bicycle that could be collapsed, like a stroller, for stowing on British Rail. He’d ride it from home to Charing Cross Station, take a train to Kent, pedal to Sissinghurst Castle, tour the gardens, return to London for dinner. It was as if he’d been in training since birth for a sojourn in England. My mother, a pianist, took up the serious study of music. She found a piano teacher, enrolled in music school, and retreated to rehearsal rooms attached to a Renaissance-style recital hall where Arthur Rubinstein had performed. When a burglar found the trick drawer in a highboy in her bedroom and plundered her jewelry, she spent the insurance money on a second piano, on which Boris Goldovsky, the Russian conductor, later played Chopin’s Black Key Étude with a grapefruit, rolling it up and down the black keys with his right palm.

  By the time my parents returned from England, my sister and brother and I were out of the house. One after another, we went out into the working world. Newspaper jobs took me from Massachusetts to New Jersey, to California, to New York. The anomalousness of my father’s family’s place, which we’d never reckoned with as children, began, with distance, to come into focus. The place was a curiosity, a marvel, an awkwardness, too. How to explain? Occasionally, asked where I’d grown up, I’d just say on a farm in Pennsylvania, disingenuously leaving it at that. Once, in college, I accepted an offer of a ride home at winter break, from a friend, without thinking it through. He was a brainy, serious-minded, first-generation American. There was a third person in the car, a football player I didn’t know at all. We were approaching my parents’ house, passing a wall of evergreens through which one could catch sight of the fenced fields beyond. “Where are the slave quarters?” my friend asked, teasing, sort of. “Do you have your own police force?”

  I knew the place intimately. I understood it not at all.

  As the twentieth century accelerated toward the millennium, Philadelphia tumbled into the throes of fitful metamorphosis. The old manufacturing industries that had built the city and its suburbs were going or gone. The last traces of the Pennsylvania Railroad had vanished in the biggest bankruptcy ever. Power—economic, political, cultural—was shifting. Across the street from my parents, a trucking tycoon with his own football team had moved in and was landing his private helicopter in one of the fields, with my grandmother’s permission, until my father begged him to stop. On the commuter rail line, Ethiopian immigrants were reverse commuting from the city to housekeeping jobs in medical offices in Radnor. At the farmers’ market in Strafford, where Mennonite women in prayer caps sold lima beans and lamb chops and scrapple, the onetime preponderance of Main Line matrons in pastels and Pappagallo flats was giving way to a somewhat less monochromatic crowd.

  The Colonel’s place, however, seemed barely to change. The cows, all direct descendants of the original Scottish transplants, still arrived like clockwork at the barn at milking time, sauntering in from the pastures, udders swaying, in languid procession. Helen Hope would be there, too, on most days, giving every cow the once-over. Around the holidays, she distributed turkeys to the farm families, just as her father had done. My father still commuted to work in Philadelphia, sometimes by bike, the lower legs of his suit pants bicycle-clipped to his ankles. On summer nights when I visited, we’d eat outside on the terrace, fireflies flickering in the fading light.

  I know now, but didn’t then, that the dairy operation was hemorrhaging money. Helen Hope, it seems, had been covering the losses with income from trusts her parents had set up decades before. Sometime around the early 1990s, she asked her eldest son, my father’s brother, to examine the books, ostensibly to diagnose the dairy’s condition and suggest a cure. Ed was the stockbroker in his generation. Decades earlier, he’d bailed out of Ardrossan and moved an hour away—not long after his mother had delivered to Ed’s young wife four pages of instructions on the proper handling of servants. Ed had risen to the top of the brokerage firm in Philadelphia that his father and grandfather had started in the months leading up to the stock market crash in 1929. Now, summoned by his mother, he spent hours going methodically through spreadsheets and bills. When he finished, he’d remember later, he turned to his mother and delivered the bad news.

  “Well, Mum,” he said. “It looks to me as though it’s costing you three dollars to sell a dollar’s worth of milk.”

  His mother looked uncharacteristically grave.

  “If I get it down to two fifty,” she asked, “can I keep going?”

  It wasn’t a question. It was her final offer.

  A lifetime on horseback had left Helen Hope with steel and plastic replacement joints. A champagne cork, achieving escape velocity, had done serious damage to one of her eyes. A surgeon had managed to repair that, too, as had been done with the other parts. My grandmother didn’t worry about dying, she once told me; what she dreaded was outliving. Blessed from birth with every conceivable advantage, she imagined her long-lived self incarcerated at the end in a cradle—snapping, like a disagreeable baby, at passersby. A month after her ninetieth birthday, she was in a horse-show ring on the back of a longhorn steer, a barrel of muscle on four legs, with a pair of horns like the wingspan of a condor. In a photo taken of her that day, she’s wearing form-fitting slacks and a black knit shirt, her physique shown to advantage. Around that time, a nephew of hers, living in a house next to one of the dairy barns on Ardrossan, encountered her touring the barn with the ope
rations manager for the farm. Helen Hope had a bandage on her forehead and a black eye. Because she didn’t mention it, her nephew didn’t either. But after she’d rumbled off in her Jeep Wagoneer, he asked the farm manager what had happened. Oh, that, the manager said. She’d stopped by one of the barns on her way to a cocktail party in a tight skirt and had taken a header while vaulting a sewage pit.

  It was surprising, then, that Helen Hope was one of the first of her generation to go. My grandfather, five years older, appeared to be in worse shape. He passed his days in a yellow-slipcovered armchair near a bay window in the house—memories, in improbable combinations, clattering in his head like old newsreel footage in an ancient projector. Sometimes he was in a grand hotel in Paris where the service, regrettably, was slipping; no one at the front desk was picking up. Sometimes he was certain some French cousins were arriving in Philadelphia any moment; he needed to meet their boat—the Mauretania. My grandmother, by contrast, showed few signs of flagging. The day before she died, in January 1995, her young property manager had arrived early and led her horses and donkeys from her stable to her fields. He’d carried the Sunday newspapers from the driveway into the house, where he’d found Helen Hope in the kitchen, standing beside the stainless-steel-topped table, gazing out the bay window as the temperature rose above freezing. He’d offered to return in the afternoon to bring the animals back into the barn.

  “No,” he’d remember her telling him. “It’s a beautiful day. I’d like to bring them in.”

  One day later, Helen Hope was dead. Her sister followed her by three months, and Edgar one month after that.

  What happened next is the thing I’ve found hardest to fathom. My father had been the beneficiary of extraordinary good fortune. It wasn’t only the privileged life into which he and the rest of us had been born; he’d found work that he loved and for which he was treasured. He’d had the company of his parents for sixty-five years. One might have imagined he’d carry on cheerfully for another thirty, then fade out in midflashback, like his father, at ninety-six, or pop off briskly, like his mother, at ninety, after perhaps a fall from his bicycle and a timely blow to the head. But that wasn’t how it went. In the ten years that followed their deaths, my father’s marriage dissolved, his job ended, and his health imploded. He spent so much money restoring the big house, which he didn’t own, that, when he died at seventy-six, the former trusts and estates lawyer left his estate in something of a shambles. He passed his final days in an intensive care unit, too sick to be transported fifteen minutes home, where he’d hoped to die. His life ended up twenty years shorter than his father’s, fourteen shorter than his mother’s. Even his grandmother—born the year of the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and middle-aged before the invention of vaccines—had lasted longer than her grandson. I admit I had a selfish interest—a child’s interest—in his survival. But I couldn’t help feeling he’d made a choice to lop twenty years off his life, and that he’d done it for reasons I’d never understand.

  Once, many years earlier, he’d astounded me by promising a rare open window into himself. He told me he intended to leave me his journals when he died. It was no secret that he kept them; he’d once said that my mother’s discovery of one of them had precipitated an early marital crisis. When he traveled, he carried with him a notebook and a tin of loose tea; he’d catch up on his diary over cups of China Yunnan. My brother and I, in our twenties, occasionally accompanied him on bicycle trips. The offer of the journals came at the end of one of those. “Why me?” I asked him. “Because you’re the writer,” he answered tersely. His explanation felt like a verbal shrug. In the decades that followed, neither he nor I raised the subject of the diaries again. Maybe he’d forgotten the earlier conversation. I never did. I couldn’t figure out how to make clear my interest without seeming to be counting the days. So the offer hung before me, like a bribe: I was conscious that he could take it back, though I doubt he’d intended it that way. Years after his death, I asked his girlfriend for the journals. After some weeks, she produced a half dozen slim volumes; they were, she said, all she could find. Since they dated from a seemingly random assortment of periods, I couldn’t imagine why he’d have kept only those—or why she’d have withheld all the others. Maybe he’d remembered his offer and ditched the rest out of spite. God knows I’d infuriated him sufficiently, in the years leading up to his death, for him to have changed his mind.

  He’d been dead about nine months when a manila envelope arrived in my mailbox in New York. I sliced it open with my front-door key before the elevator arrived at my floor. Inside was a nineteen-page list of a thousand items—an inventory, between vinyl covers, of family flotsam and jetsam that, it seemed, had come to rest in an ironing room in the back of the big house. My father’s secretary and his girlfriend had inventoried the items. The list enumerated photo albums, scrapbooks, journals, birth certificates, wills, poems written for family occasions, bills from the Ritz-Carlton in 1915, and letters from Andrew Carnegie and Tallulah Bankhead, among others. There was also, it appeared, an extensive record of the original conception of the estate, including bills and correspondence dating from the construction of the house. There was a record of the restoration a century later. I slid the inventory into a desk drawer. When I rediscovered it five years later, the ironing room seemed like as good a place as any to start.

  Maybe all fathers are unknowable. Maybe all families are mysterious. If we’re lucky, we get interested in ours before it’s too late. Memories silt over, lives are cut short. By the time we’ve come up with the questions, there’s no one left to answer.

  The world exemplified by my father’s grandparents had slid beyond the memory of almost anyone living. Yet a new version of that moment was being born. Technological change had unleashed a new industrial revolution—just as it had a century and a half before. Regulations that had been intended to rein in the excesses of earlier generations were being lifted. In hedge funds, investment banking, and private equity, new fortunes were being amassed. A bumper crop of billionaires was bringing about a new age of disparity and excess. Now they were erecting monster houses and nailing down the class position of their children, like another generation had done a century before. Did they ever wonder how the wealth and position they’d manage to amass would play out in the lives of the generations that would follow?

  My great-grandparents’ place had survived against the odds from one gilded age into the next. It had persisted, long after others had been dismantled, as a result of wily tax planning, ego, and a romantic attachment to the Colonel’s vision. In the wake of its lavish restoration, it had now, in my father’s absence, resumed its decline. The heirs to the founders had begun selling off land and houses. The fate of the big house and its trappings remained anyone’s guess—its worth in the twenty-first century having been variously estimated at anywhere from priceless to “negative value.” Wasn’t there some Russian oligarch who might want it? one or two family members wondered in the countdown toward the termination of the trusts. Had anyone considered a business in artisanal cheese? In the aftermath of the making of a moderately sized American fortune lay a parable for others embarking upon that cycle again. For better or worse, the Colonel’s fancy had shaped four generations in my father’s family. If I could unearth that story, maybe I’d understand what had happened to him.

  In my father’s final week, his doctors had run out of tricks. He’d been in the intensive care unit for days. His advance directive was unambiguous: no heroic measures. Decisions now fell to his girlfriend and my sister and brother and me. We’d met in a conference room with a social worker and a doctor. We’d agreed he should be disconnected from life support. His bed had been wheeled into an unoccupied room in a sleepy wing of the hospital. My sister and I sat in that room, on plastic chairs, uncertain what to do. Touching had not been part of the language he’d ever used with us. So that simple source of solace felt awkward if not exactly off-limits. His breathing beca
me like groaning, as though he were in pain. A cousin, who was a physician, stopped by and seemed mildly alarmed. She spoke with the nurses, who made adjustments. After that, his breathing slowed. A nurse checked in. All was well, she assured us. Minutes later, his breathing stopped.