The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  I was padding down the hospital corridor to phone my mother with the news when my cell phone rang. It was a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He’d heard that my father had died. Curious, I asked how he’d gotten word so fast; the not-so-old man had been dead for four minutes. Someone at the paper, he said, had received a tip earlier in the day from an affiliated hospital on the same computer system. The tipster, misreading the electronic record, must have jumped the gun. The reporter didn’t need much from me; he’d written most of the obituary in advance. But I’d anticipated his question. It was going to necessitate a choice between bluntness and discretion. Faced with those options, I’d figured I should go with the technical answer. That way, I’d be factually correct without saying too much. The more complicated answer remained, at that moment, beyond me.

  Could I tell him, the reporter wanted to know, the cause of death?

  Chapter Two

  As a child, I assumed the place had always been as I’d found it. I probably assumed, too, that it would be that way long after we were gone. Cut off from the march of subdivisions, car dealerships, and drive-through banking, it floated in an eddy, outside the whooshing of time. There were fields where my father had tobogganed as a boy, where he took us to discover the rapture of hurtling downhill on the brink of abandon. There was a hollow tree, which would still be standing when I had children of my own. There were ancient initials carved in the bark of beech trees, the letters swollen by the passage of years. Dug into the side of a small hill, there was a root cellar dating from some prehistoric era, ante synthetic refrigerants. Cows had claimed it, paving the dirt floor with dung. A sign nailed to the fence around that pasture warned to beware of a bull. As we passed by on the long driveway, the black mouth of the cellar beckoned. On rare occasions when we dared to slip between the fence rails and venture near, it exhaled dank, cold breath.

  Back then, I experienced the place through the senses. I knew the burning of bare soles on baking macadam, and the clammy coolness of the paving-stone path to the pool in the woods. There was the sour sweetness of Concord grapes on the vines along the rusting iron fence that bounded our backyard, and the soughing of window fans buffeting the humidity around bedrooms at night. Mica glittered in the stone walls; mint grew wild beside the stream banks. Stinging nettles lurked beyond the barn. Later, in another country, I could lie in bed and summon the sensation of coasting down the driveway in my parents’ station wagon in the sweltering stillness of August. For a time, I had a treehouse in an elm in the field beside our house, where you could try to imagine how the place might appear from another angle. But Dutch elm disease took the tree, and the treehouse with it. The site, bouldered and brambled, became a boneyard for hamsters, dogs, and the ashes of my mother’s childless, irascible, out-of-town aunt.

  A map of the area hung on the wall in my parents’ house for years before I examined it closely. It was in a downstairs bathroom—a powder room, if you used that term, which we didn’t. You entered the room from a paneled library, past a stuffed and mounted head of a hare, its incisors visible, stained like a smoker’s. The bathroom had a sink and a toilet but no tub. The wallpaper was dark red in a pattern that suggested overlapping slices of an exotic fruit. There was a tall, narrow closet in the bathroom, used as a liquor cabinet, with shelves that burrowed so deep into the wall, I imagined tunneling into the house’s hidden interstices. The bathroom light fixture was a wooden hand, flesh colored, jutting out from the wall near the pedestal sink, gripping a red, Statue of Liberty–style torch. Idling on the toilet seat, you could reflect on that curious assortment of bathroom accessories or gaze out the window toward a sea of alfalfa. Under the circumstances, I see why I overlooked the map. But it would have been a gate into the story, an opening to ask questions before the narratives ossified into myth.

  The map came from an atlas, one in a series published around the turn of the twentieth century, tracking the buying and selling of land along the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Main Line. The railroad company had acquired, from the state, a line known as the “Main Line of Public Works,” and had turned in the 1870s to developing land on either side of the tracks. The company built a two-hundred-fifty-room resort hotel in Bryn Mawr for prosperous denizens of Philadelphia, one of the great industrial powerhouses of that age, which was busily spitting out new fortunes made in iron, steel, locomotives, banking, department stores, and shipping, the way Silicon Valley churns out tech fortunes today. Philadelphians took to summering at the hotel, and tycoons began buying farmland for country estates. They built fortresses with crenelated walls, stone-mullioned windows, porte cocheres, banquet halls, gargoyles, buttresses, peaked roofs. By the late nineteenth century, the railroad was running dozens of trains a day between seventeen stations along the Main Line, many of them named after Welsh towns, Welsh counties, Welsh saints. In Lower Merion, an iron and steel magnate erected an Elizabethan manor with seventy-five rooms, on five hundred forty acres landscaped by the Olmsted brothers. Sixteenth-century tapestries, imported from England, hung on the walls. Every five to ten years, a new edition of the Atlas of Properties on Main Line Pennsylvania Railroad from Overbrook to Paoli took stock of the rollout of what was becoming the country’s archetypal ribbon of railroad suburbs. In doing so, the atlases also traced Robert Leaming Montgomery’s conquest of Villanova.

  A week before Christmas 1910, I now know, newspapers reported the sale of two hundred ten acres in Radnor, in what was said to be one of the largest real estate deals ever in that part of the Main Line. The land had a pedigree of a sort the buyer would have approved. It had been part of a grant made by William Penn, the founder of Philadelphia and the Province of Pennsylvania, to a family of Welsh Quakers. The mother of a Revolutionary War general, Anthony Wayne, had been born on the property. An outpost of the Continental Army had camped there during the winter of 1777 to 1778, when George Washington was at Valley Forge. The newspapers, for whom high-priced land deals on the Main Line must have been becoming more dog-bites-man than the reverse, saw no need to spell out what the buyer, Robert L. Montgomery, had in mind. They reported simply that he intended to “erect a handsome country residence for his occupancy”—a turn of phrase that I began to see, as I foraged in his correspondence, could have come from the aspiring laird himself.

  Six years after my father’s death, I began piecing together the story of Robert L. Montgomery—known as the Colonel from World War I on, for reasons that I now suspect had been discreetly forgotten. In my apartment in New York, I’d become interested for the first time in the inventory that had turned up after my father’s death. I took to leaving the apartment as the sun was rising against the city skyline, and walking north on Broadway to the garage, passing a man in rags whose permanent home I knew to be the doorstep of Victoria’s Secret as I made my way toward the fifty-room ancestral manse. I’d leave the city, drive south on the New Jersey Turnpike, and cross into Pennsylvania, scudding past shopping malls and storage units. Sometimes, approaching my father’s family’s place, I’d try to see it the way a stranger might if he were catching sight of it for the first time—the way, after years in Southern California, I could still conjure how a certain bend in the Hollywood Freeway had first struck me. In Pennsylvania, I couldn’t do it. I’d lived away from the place for forty-four years. But my sense of it was too deeply ingrained to allow even a momentary override.

  I’d park in a small gravel parking area behind the big house and enter the silent kitchen with its smell of polished linoleum and dark-stained wood. I’d cross what had once been the servants’ dining room and climb the back staircase that my father had used until his legs had failed him, after which he’d ridden the clanking elevator, incarcerating himself behind its gate. On the landing between the second and third floors, I’d turn right into a narrow corridor leading into what had once been the servants’ wing. Inside the ironing room, cardboard file boxes lined the shelves. Albums and scrapbooks filled the drawers. Dust swirled in the
light from a single dormer window. The only furniture was a stepladder and a child’s desk. I’d haul a box off a shelf onto the desk, remove a stack of papers, sit on the stepladder, and read.

  The truth is, I suffer from an almost promiscuous inquisitiveness. It’s an occupational hazard, I suppose. Though I can’t say whether the occupation or the inclination came first: Maybe newspapers were chicken and egg. In this instance, I had no idea, when I got started, where my digging might lead me. I knew only that there was a vein of paper to be mined. Arranging a heap before me, I’d angle myself over the pint-size worktable; by the time I’d look up, hours would have passed. By the following spring, I’d begun to sense a story taking shape—a narrative unwinding over multiple generations and one hundred years; spilling from the paneled chambers of the big house to the rice plantations of South Carolina and the palatial “cottages” of Mount Desert Island, Maine; tossing up its characters, from time to time, near the gurge of the historical moment; and leading me toward an answer to the question I couldn’t shake.

  A story, of course, begins where the teller chooses to begin it. I’m starting this one with the making of a middling American fortune—a fortune that would pale by comparison to many, like those of Rockefellers or Carnegies or Kochs, but one sufficient, if shrewdly managed, to subsidize a generation or two or more to come. This story ends in the final years of my father’s life nearly one hundred years later—in his meticulous restoration of a mansion he didn’t own, and in his simultaneous self-destruction. The world that the Colonel constructed, and set to spinning on its axis, had shaped the lives of all who’d followed. His aspirations had marked his children, their children, their children’s children. If I could piece together the story of the inception of Ardrossan, and some of what followed, maybe I’d begin to see how my father’s charmed life had arrived at such a perplexing end.

  A word of caution. In my father’s family, Ardrossan wasn’t the only thing that was passed down. Names rolled from great-grandparent to grandparent to parent to child: four Edgars, three Roberts, three Hopes, multiple Marys, Charlottes, Alexanders, and Warwicks—all of those in just four generations. For that reason, it might help a reader to know that there will be three central figures in this saga—the Colonel; his daughter Helen Hope; and her son Robert, my father. My paternal grandfather and great-grandfather will be important, too. While others will come and go, no reader need keep them all straight, hauling them around, as if in some overstuffed mental roll-aboard, from one chapter to the next.

  My father’s forebears were not “the sort of people who leave few traces,” to borrow the words of Patrick Modiano, the Nobel Prize–winning French novelist who puzzles over questions of identity, gathering remnants of a buried past. The Colonel alone had left behind boxloads of correspondence, invoices, and other detritus that for some reason, or no reason, neither he nor anyone had seen fit to toss. There were communiqués to architects, landscapers, business associates, friends. There were letters drumming up support for a favorite cause, the repeal of Prohibition. Downstairs, in a corner of the library, his wife’s drop-front desk sat largely untouched since her death forty years earlier. In it were letters dating from early in her marriage, written by her young banker husband as he crossed the country negotiating financing deals—letters tinged with homesickness and dislocation as he peered into an unfamiliar American future. “I am greatly interested in the Pacific Coast in the way of its development, but the people you see are certainly queer,” he wrote from the Palace Hotel in San Francisco four years after the 1906 earthquake wiped out most of the city. “This is a very large hotel, one of the very largest in the country, yet you see the women come in quite dressed up and not a man in a dress suit.”

  To me, the Colonel was a figure out of ancient history when I was young. He’d died just six years before I was born. But if you’d asked me, as a child, when my father’s grandfather had lived, I might have guessed around the time of Lincoln. He was the personage in the portrait, a figure in a fairy tale, a name invoked in toasts on Christmas Eve. When my grandmother occasionally mentioned her Dad, it threw me: I couldn’t reconcile the everydayness of the name with that legendary creature, monumental and remote. My aunt once described for me her first audience with him, which had occurred not long before she married my father’s brother. The Colonel, ailing, was scheduled to arrive at the Bryn Mawr train station, returning in a private railroad car from his plantation in South Carolina. An ambulance idled near the platform. The train rumbled into view, braked, shrieked to a halt. Then the great man, outsize and prostrate, his chest heaving, emerged on a stretcher, threaded through a train-car window, a camel through the eye of a needle.

  Robert L. Montgomery

  Robert L. Montgomery was a proud, ambitious man. In his choice of spouse and business partners, he was strategic or fortunate or both. In his taste in architecture, art, costume, hobbies, sports, he leaned eastward toward Britain. He spent extravagantly but scrutinized every bill. He was capable of generosity, employing some of his less successful half siblings, but philanthropy appears not to have played a large part in his life. As the Depression dragged on, he railed increasingly against government spending. He complained that the township was making life difficult for the owners of big estates. As I pored over his papers, it seemed he’d carried on at times like a cartoon fat cat—not all that different from the present-day private-equity titans whose excesses I’d been contemplating with distaste.

  The Colonel, before he was the Colonel, set out early to make a fortune. A great-grandfather of his had invested in property in New Orleans in the late eighteenth century, the value of which had skyrocketed after the Louisiana Purchase. The resulting windfall had benefited several generations but was drying up by the time of Robert Montgomery’s birth in 1879. His mother died when the boy was not yet two years old. His father, suddenly a widowed father of three, imported from the young state of Nebraska the daughter of an Episcopalian chaplain in Fort Omaha to serve as governess, then married her and fathered eight more. The blending wasn’t flawless. For the only photograph known to have been taken of the whole clan, dating from 1907, Robert’s father and stepmother gathered all eleven offspring on their summer farm and lined them up in descending order against the trunk of a fallen tree. The photograph that resulted, known as “The Family Tree,” is said to have marked the last time the entire family was together.

  Growing up in his father’s increasingly populous household in Radnor, where his maternal grandmother would come and go in a carriage with a liveried coachman, the young Montgomery is said to have been conscious of the strain on his father’s resources. At sixteen, he left school and went to work as a stock clerk at a merchant bank, a branch of the House of Morgan. By twenty-seven, he’d started his own firm along with two well-chosen partners—a wealthy banker’s son, married to a granddaughter of a multimillionaire transit mogul and financier, and a son of one of the founders of the Philadelphia department store Strawbridge & Clothier. Together, the three partners had what it would take to flourish in the clubby world of early-twentieth-century investment banking—social standing and connections. The new firm opened seven months before the Panic of 1907. Soon, it was “buying and selling businesses with good prospects but little success—often very quickly and with enormous profit,” a half brother of the Colonel wrote later in a memoir. Robert Montgomery became a millionaire “almost overnight.”

  “It was almost as though he belonged to another family—a cousin rather than a brother,” the half brother, Horace, wrote. “To my proud, wealthy and aristocratic half-sister and half-brothers, it was who you are and not what you are that counted most. One’s family was the all-important criterion. You could be undistinguished, dull, silly, even poor provided you came from or were related to a family that ‘belonged’.”

  Charlotte Hope B. T. Montgomery

  The Colonel’s talents in finance weren’t the sole source o
f his wealth. At twenty-two, he’d married Charlotte Hope Binney Tyler, the daughter of a Philadelphia businessman and bank cofounder. The latest in a long line of nearly a dozen firstborn Hopes, she was beguiling, stylish, and artistic. Her father served on the boards of corporations his ambitious son-in-law might hope to cultivate as clients; and, Hope’s mother having died, her father had married the daughter of a man whose serial successes in produce, oil refining, and transit had made him far richer even than Tyler père. On their first wedding anniversary, the young Montgomerys dined at the White House; Hope’s cousin Edith was President Theodore Roosevelt’s second wife. Soon, Robert Montgomery and his brother-in-law were in business together. Not long after that, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. joined them. All in all, it was an auspicious union. Asked years later how the Colonel made the money to pull together Ardrossan, a lawyer for the family is said to have answered, “He married Miss Tyler.”

  The Colonel was thirty-one when he bought his first two hundred ten acres in Radnor. By the time the 1913 Atlas of Properties came out, he’d annexed ninety-nine more. By 1920, he owned five hundred forty-two; in 1926, he had seven hundred forty-two. His name arced like a necklace across a full third of Plate 22 in the atlas published that year; his holdings included manor houses, farm buildings, orchards, and three tributaries of Darby Creek. On the next plate, his latest acquisitions extended across Newtown Road and three-quarters of a mile north. By the time his shopping spree ended, his fiefdom encompassed some eight hundred acres, with frontage on four and a half miles of public roads. He was the biggest individual taxpayer in Delaware County. When a real estate broker wrote to him in 1930, offering to sell him a one-hundred-ninety-acre farm and a stone house near West Chester, all suitable for what the broker referred to as a “Gentlemen’s Country Estate,” the gentleman answered haughtily, “I am already owner of a vast estate in Villa Nova.”