The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  Young Edgar, my grandfather, was close to his mother. “Tremendously intimate and companionable,” his father called them. Confined to bed for a time at age ten, he received from his mother everything he needed to pursue his youthful passion for binding books. She harvested lining paper, from bureau drawers, for him to cut into pages; and she supplied him with hundreds of lines of poetry, aphorisms, and quotations—an adage for each day of the year—with which he filled every page. After her death, my grandfather had the handmade book reprinted and gave away copies. He was impressed, he said, by how much of his mother’s spirit—her religious faith, her delight in lyric poetry, her ethics, her feeling for children—lived on in that book. When I came upon a copy, it was hard to miss one recurrent theme—the dangers of excessive leisure. Blessed are the horny hands of toil. No one is so weary as the man who does nothing. Procrastination is the thief of time. And,

  Stretched on the rack of a too easy chair,

  And heard thy everlasting yawn confess

  The pains and perils of idleness.

  Maisie, it seems, intended to steer her eldest son toward a life unlike that of his father. She was the Model T of helicopter mothers. My grandfather’s name hit the Groton waiting list the day he was born. When he turned twelve, Maisie arranged for him to skip the first year, saying it would be “better for his character” and would keep him from developing “loafing habits.” Six months before he was to enroll, she told the school that he was fluent in French, spoke adequate German, and was reading Caesar in Latin. Should he know algebra? she inquired, as the family headed off to Europe. What history should he study? She hired a tutor, to travel with the family, with what she considered top-notch credentials—a Bostonian with a Harvard degree. Later, she’d track the monthly academic averages of both of her sons. “I am distressed about Edgar’s Greek,” she’d write to the Groton headmaster. “I hoped that he would be a really good classical scholar.”

  His separation from his mother was rocky. In humorously melodramatic letters to “dear Mamma,” he pleaded for deliverance. “If you don’t come soon, I shall curse some teacher, and get expelled, even if it is a disgrace, I would do it just to see you!” he wrote. He was insolent to the mathematics master, the headmaster reported. He engaged in roughhousing—explicitly forbidden—and used “foul language” with other boys. The headmaster, Endicott Peabody, suspected “an aversion to effort,” or “a lack of moral perception,” or both. Sentenced to spend an afternoon copying passages, Edgar instead satirized his plight by writing “The Divine Tragedy”—then, when busted, failed to appreciate the gravity of his crimes. In time, however, he found his niche. On Edgar’s sixteenth birthday, Peabody wrote approvingly of his student’s “unusual ability.” He’d become an editor of the literary magazine, an actor in school plays. An underclassman would remember him years later as “the Noel Coward of Groton.”

  My mind wanders to the subject of sons and mothers, fathers and daughters. My grandfather, named for his father, was closer to his mother; my grandmother, named for her mother, was close to her father. Rightly or wrongly, she’d say she’d been his favorite. I, too, was named after my mother’s side of our family, but was thought to take after my father. My parents were scrupulous, I was sure, in avoiding the appearance of preferences. But after I finished a draft of this book and gave a copy to my brother, he said, “Don’t you think you should say that you were his favorite?”

  There was a time in my thirties when I wrestled with an aversion to marriage. I took the matter to a psychotherapist in Santa Monica, whom my future husband took to calling Joan Lightbody, though that wasn’t her name. Joan Lightbody steered her conversations with me around to my father: Was something about my relationship with him getting in the way? In giving that hypothesis some thought, I found myself reflecting on my father’s relationship with his mother. There was a quality to their oft-stated mutual admiration that I couldn’t define. That got me thinking about my grandmother and the Colonel. Were there patterns in relationships between certain parents and certain children that reproduced themselves from one generation to the next?

  Had I known anything back then about my grandfather’s parents, I might’ve wondered, too, about the relationship between father and son—the sportive, leisured man with his sailboats and coach horses and racquets, and his literary-minded, soon-to-be-aspiring-playwright son. What role, if any, did a yearning for filial bonding play in the decisions that the son and the father each made to travel together to the battlefields of World War I? Later, my grandfather must have looked back over all the pain that flowed from those decisions. Was he unable to avoid dwelling upon his inadvertent role?

  If I hadn’t discovered an identification card issued to my grandfather the year he graduated from high school, I might have missed that chapter of his life completely. The card identified Edgar Scott, at seventeen, as a member of an ambulance service in France in the summer of 1916. A passport-size photo showed him on the cusp of adulthood, hair combed back off his forehead, his cheeks not yet visibly acquainted with a razor. The card led me to the Manhattan offices of an international exchange organization that grew out of an ambulance service formed in Paris in the early months of World War I. In the archive of the American Field Service, I found a photograph of fourteen men reclining on an overgrown lawn behind a large house in Paris that long-ago summer. They were dressed in the field service uniform: belted military-style tunic, breeches, leather leggings, boots, visor cap. My grandfather was among them. He’d served at the field service’s headquarters that summer, I’d learned from a roster of volunteers.

  In the spring of 1916, Endicott Peabody received a letter from a supporter of the American Ambulance Field Service in France. Would Groton raise money, the writer asked, to pay for an ambulance to be used to assist the French? The United States still had a policy of neutrality toward the war. But after the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, three volunteer ambulance corps had formed, including the American Ambulance Field Service, as it was then called, which had grown out of a small hospital maintained by Americans living in France. By late 1915, the field service had become essential to the French army. All three ambulance corps recruited heavily from what George Plimpton, in the foreword to a book on the subject, called the “upper-class gentry.” Hundreds of students from boarding schools and Ivy League colleges volunteered, many of them raised to revere French culture. Some felt a sense of national indebtedness because of France’s support in the Revolutionary War. Others went for the adventure. By the time the United States entered the war in 1917, more than three thousand, five hundred Americans had served in the ambulance corps, playing a role in almost every major battle. They’d also helped sway American public opinion in favor of declaring war.

  The request appealed to Peabody. Soon, the Groton vehicle was in the field. In late June, my grandfather and three other Groton students sailed for France to volunteer. Too young to drive an ambulance, Edgar was assigned to the field service’s headquarters on the Right Bank, where the service had been given the use of an eighteenth-century mansion “surrounded by acres of romantic and deserted gardens,” as the inspector general of the service described it. Balzac had lived across the street. Rousseau, Voltaire, and Zola had idled in the gardens. My young, literary-minded grandfather worked as a mechanic’s apprentice; he also unpacked and transported Ford chassis, arriving from the United States, from Bordeaux to Paris. Less than two hundred miles away from the compound in Paris, the Battle of Verdun raged on the western front, leaving some seven hundred thousand French and German soldiers dead, wounded, or missing. A month after my grandfather left Paris for Harvard, a German shell landed a few feet in front of a field service ambulance near the front, killing another young volunteer from Philadelphia.

  Back from Paris and ensconced in Cambridge, young Edgar plotted his return to France. His father and mother were leery. Edgar the elder had attended a voluntary preenlistment training program organi
zed by private citizens in Plattsburgh, New York. But Edgar the younger had to appeal to his old headmaster to make the case to his parents that he should be permitted to go. Peabody said he couldn’t “take responsibility” in a matter of such gravity. So young Edgar not only made the case to his parents for himself—he proposed that his father go, too.

  “I want to have you let me go, of course—but, as I’ve told you, it would be wonderful for you, too,” my grandfather wrote to his father in January 1917. “It would be awfully hard to say goodbye to the family for so long, and that part of it would be darn unpleasant. But after you got back you’d never be sorry you’d gone away.—Really. And I bet Ma sees it that way,—although I don’t know: I haven’t mentioned it seriously.”

  By late April, it had been decided. The son would take a year’s leave of absence from Harvard, and would return to France to enlist with an ambulance corps. The father, twice the age of most volunteers and with no battle experience, would go along, too.

  Edgar the elder, the railroad man’s indulged scion, prepared to set sail for Paris late that spring buoyed by an unfamiliar sense of purpose. He had a deep affection for France, rooted in his childhood and in the earliest years of his marriage. What was more, it had been his eldest son and namesake who’d urged him to go along. “I quite realize I have never been a father of boys before, and I am reveling in it,” he’d written two years earlier, on a father-son trip to the West Coast with his two boys. “Father and Son to Enlist,” a headline in the Philadelphia Bulletin announced. The article stated that the father had become “enthused” by his son’s accounts of his work in Paris the previous summer; by volunteering, the father hoped to free up a younger man for military service. Thomas Scott’s pleasure-loving heir, it seems, had come to regret some of his past choices. “Well, my sons are going to work,” he’d taken to saying—a declaration in which it’s difficult not to detect some personal dissatisfaction. In a letter to Peabody several years earlier, he’d written, “Life indeed does seem to be terribly short especially to one who begins to realize how much time has been wasted.”

  Sixteen summers had passed since Edgar Thomson Scott and Maisie had been photographed on the steps at Chiltern. Now, in the spring of 1917, a photographer arrived at the house in Lansdowne. Maisie, forty-five and graying, settled on one end of a heavy sofa, a tapestry on the wall behind as a backdrop. Her second son, Warwick, sixteen, pressed close to her on her left. My grandfather, two years older, sat with Anna, age ten, in his lap. Susie, age eight, balanced on the knee of her father, who was seated in a chair to Maisie’s right, slightly apart. His left elbow rested on the couch behind Maisie. Their marriage had not been easy.

  “Your grandfather was the most attractive man I’ve ever known—when he was sober,” one of his grandsons remembers hearing from an older cousin. The duties of Edgar T. Scott’s valet included bundling him discreetly into his “dressing room” after nights of carousing. “They were trying to hold things together,” a granddaughter, Maisie Adamson, told me. “They were hoping it was going to be all right.” There’s evidence of tenderness in the portrait taken that day—a feeling you might miss if you didn’t linger over it, half-conscious of the trauma to follow. It’s in their expressions and the language of their bodies—an arm curled across a shoulder, a hand in another’s lap, the angle at which one leans toward the next. To his wife, the father is said to have vowed in a letter from France months later, “When I come back, it’s all going to be different.”

  On the back of the photograph, in my grandfather’s writing: “Just before the 2 E’s sailed to war.”

  They arrived in Paris in early June. In an unorthodox route to the battlefield, they alighted first at the Hotel Meurice, opposite the Jardin des Tuileries with easy access to the Louvre. Paris was changed, though not entirely. There were alarms and zeppelin scares; restaurants closed at 9:30 P.M. Hotel rooms had a single light, and hot water once a week. A room and bath at the Plaza Athénée went for fifteen francs. Yet, theaters were open. “Saw Edgar several times and went to the theater with him and several others,” his nephew and former classmate, Hugh Scott, the Sagamore diarist, wrote of the elder Edgar in a letter home. “On Sunday I stopped to see him and he had been ‘tite’ the night before at a goodbye dinner.” There were chance encounters with friends. In a letter to Peabody, the younger Edgar reported having run into another Groton graduate: “Among his present friends is a young lion cub which he keeps at the Ritz.”

  My young grandfather went to work, as planned, as an ambulance driver attached to the French army at the front, working twenty-four hours on, forty-eight off. “To date, I have narrowly missed being killed once, been under fire twice, visited the front lines once,” he wrote cheerfully from an orchard where his ambulance section had camped. “. . . If I can only take part in the evacuation behind some real attack, I promise you a less ‘dry’ letter.” To his disappointment, however, his section was replaced in mid-October, after the United States forces militarized the ambulance corps. “We all stood in front of our camp in the evening watching the big shells land,” he wrote. “. . . That was the night before we left—you can imagine our disgust that they didn’t let us stay till after the attack!” From there, he went to work as driver, mechanic, and secretary for his cousin Hugh, the field director for the American Red Cross at Chaumont. And before returning to Harvard the following summer, he spent several months at the front as a canteen officer in the French army zone, having been given the rank of second lieutenant.

  His father, meanwhile, appeared initially to flounder. He worked in the office of one of the ambulance corps, then went off on an assignment for the Red Cross liaison with the French army. “Edgar senior is a wonder at wiggling out of one thing into another,” Hugh wrote home to his wife. For months, Edgar was, as Hugh put it, “more or less on the bum”—waiting for a job as an interpreter and “losing confidence in himself and everything.” Hugh offered help, but the elder Edgar declined it. He was too fussy, Hugh concluded. Finally, the job he’d been waiting for came through: In January 1918, he was hired as an interpreter and aide to the inspector general for the American Expeditionary Forces. Commissioned as a first lieutenant, he was quickly promoted to major. Even Hugh was impressed. My grandfather’s pride in his father is touching. “He’s been working terribly hard,” he wrote to his brother, before leaving France that summer. “And, by George, I wish you could see him, and be with him, and hear his talk. He’s the peach of peaches now; wide awake, and in the game heart and soul, for the best motives.”

  The two Edgars in France

  Edgar Thomson Scott, it seems, had glimpsed the possibility of salvation. In an envelope labeled in his wife’s handwriting, “To be destroyed unopened” (which, by the time I came upon it, had been opened), I would find, nearly a century later, a single sheet of French hotel stationery, dated February 3, 1918. On it was a pledge, in black ink, made by the elder Edgar to himself: “My object in life at present is—,” he began. First, “to serve my country in this war to the best of my ability, to be absolutely faithful to General B., to develop myself in every way in order to be energetic and in the job and useful to him when he wants me. To learn all I possibly can about the administration of the Army, to keep my mind and body lithe and active for the purposes of the service, and to gain the General’s confidence and trust, and to be worthy of them. To do my best for the war.” Secondly, “to develop a sense of responsibility, and a desire to assume it. To concentrate and absolutely master the thing before me.”

  The third object concerned his family:

  “To make myself worthy to take my place at the head of my family if I return to America,” the wayward husband and father had written. “To keep in loving touch with all of them, and to be worthy to be loved by them.”

  I find myself lingering over the multiple repetitions of the word “worthy.” The word reads to me like one uttered in prayer. Consumed by the con
viction that he’s unworthy, the man vows to prove the opposite to his commanding officer, his family, himself. How could the pampered heir to a railroad fortune ever have felt worthy in the absence of work? Were racquet sports expected to help? Was he to have derived a sense of his own value and purpose from commissioning palaces for himself, using money made by the father he’d barely known? I’m speculating here, but it seems likely that Edgar Thomson Scott wasn’t unacquainted with the feeling of shame. He’d failed in school and in college, twice. His friend had died pointlessly on their grand tour. He’d held just one job in his entire adult life—for just two years. It’s telling that the leisured scion had pledged that his own sons would work. It’s telling, too, that he’d confessed to his old headmaster, looking back, that he’d come “to realize how much time has been wasted.”

  Now, it seems, the prodigal son may have believed he had a shot at redemption. Did he fear, at forty-six, that it might be his last? He wasn’t blind to his shortcomings: The virtues he aspires to, in the letter, are the flip side of the vices he knows too well. He’ll be absolutely faithful, energetic, responsible, useful, he promises. He’ll concentrate, master, serve. He’ll develop a sense of responsibility, and a desire to assume it. It’s not clear that he believes he can pull it all off. Why would such a letter—the resolutions of a despairing man who’d found himself suddenly with the possibility of hope—end up preserved in an envelope marked “to be destroyed unopened”?