The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  At boarding school, he was his own harshest critic. In report cards, teachers praised his “powers of imagination, and his lightness of touch, combined with his seriousness of purpose.” They remarked on his “keen interest in philosophical ideas and problems of man’s life.” Yet, writing to his parents, his self-criticism was savage—albeit in humorous, hyperbolic terms. His grades would be “putrid,” he predicted: “I know they’ll stink, or at least radiate a pungent odor.” They never did. He called himself “this x&*!#& lazy oaf of a stinking son of yours.” He castigated himself: “I have been so damned, damned, damned lazy all term, and am furious with myself. I am terribly sorry and will do better next half term.” Maybe he was managing their expectations, or his own. Or perhaps he was more attuned than others to the many ways he imagined he could fall short.

  One relative whose affection he cannot have doubted was his mother’s artistic sister. As a child in their father’s horse-centric household, Mary Binney had taught herself to fall off so she’d be allowed to go back inside to resume doing the things she loved. When the Montgomerys had traveled as a family, she’d packed a portable encyclopedia. She’d studied piano at the Curtis Institute of Music, founded a dance company, worked as a choreographer, and taught dance. Because she was not yet married and longed for children when my father was young, he became, one of her daughters told me, “her first child.” She took him to the orchestra and the art museum. He spent afternoons at her dance studio after school. “She is having him again Saturday a.m., at his request, to watch her class,” his father reported to Helen Hope. “(Is this good for young lads?)” When Mary Binney, as a single woman, adopted the first of her two daughters in the early 1940s, she made my father, age twelve, a godfather. And when Mary Binney died at eighty-eight, my father confessed to her younger daughter that he, too, felt he’d lost the only person who’d always believed he was perfect.

  In the fall of 1943, my father’s brother, Ed, left Groton after his junior year to join the Marines. Because he’d go from the Marines to Harvard to marriage, he was out of his parents’ house at seventeen. In his absence, Helen Hope turned her attention to my father. “Fate having taken one son away from her influence made her think, ‘That’s not going to happen again,’” Ed told me. “‘We’re going to make sure we see a lot of this son.’” She worked hard at becoming close to my father; she also groomed him for the glamorous circles to which she was drawn. “I think she would have been pleased to see him marry a countess,” Ed told me dryly. My father, surely, welcomed his mother’s renewed interest. (“When the light was shining on us, we were very much there. When it wasn’t, we made do.”) He was also endowed by nature, it seems, with the social skills she intended to impart. By the time he graduated from boarding school, he’d aced her tutorial. In his high school yearbook, the story chosen by the editors to illuminate his true self concerned a formal party he’d evidently hosted: An interloper, caught crashing the party, is chagrined to receive a personal invitation from the host to stay.

  “The act was a revelation of the essential Scott,” the editors wrote, “since it involved humor, urbanity, appropriateness, and, above all, society.”

  * * *

  When I was a child, my father’s widowed Ardrossan grandmother, Muz, would disappear from Villanova every winter. Her destination was a plantation near Georgetown, South Carolina. I was too unworldly to question why this birdlike creature, descended from Puritan stock, made her annual migration to a rice plantation in the Deep South. My parents went rarely; even my grandparents made other plans. Only my grandmother’s youngest sister, Charlotte Ives, spent much time in that part of the country; she lived year-round near Georgetown, in a house not far from her mother’s. When Charlotte Ives came north to visit, she materialized in a lumbering black limousine, which rolled like a pirate clipper into the circular driveway in front of the big house, scattering yellow pebbles in its wake. From the limo would emerge a piebald Great Dane, the size of a small horse, its unnerving mouth foaming, and this perplexing auntie who, then in her fifties, appeared to be unable to walk. On the rare occasions when we asked why, my father would say she’d fallen off horses once too often while riding without a hat. Or he’d say she’d been bitten by a mosquito in the cypress swamps of South Carolina, and had come down with something he called cerebral malaria.

  In my thirties, I found myself in South Carolina for the first time. The strongest and costliest hurricane in the state’s history had made landfall a few weeks earlier at a shrimping town south of Georgetown. I was a reporter in California, visiting a friend a few hours’ drive from Georgetown. On a whim, we decided to find out what had become of the Montgomerys’ plantation, which I knew had been sold, after the death of Muz, to an engineer who’d helped design the interstate highway system. On the outskirts of Georgetown, we found the entrance to the driveway—an unpaved road that ran for two miles through piney woods, strewn with fallen branches, before turning into what had once been a handsome avenue of live oaks. Tumbledown wooden cabins, some dating from before abolition, lined what was called, in that willfully nondescript plantation terminology, “the street.” The driveway came to a stop in front of an unprepossessing white plantation house. Its lawns were littered with branches and debris. The impression left was one of unimpeded decay.

  An elderly African American couple emerged from one of the slave cabins. They’d worked on the plantation, they told me, in the Colonel’s time. They’d stayed on in the cabin after the plantation was sold, receiving a small pension from Helen Hope. Inside their house, aqua-colored walls were partially covered in fading snapshots. Peering at the round face of a pale-skinned, curly-haired woman on horseback in one of the pictures, I recognized Auntie Ives. The big house in Villanova loomed behind her. She was young—the wild child in the portrait in the ballroom, who’d ridden show jumpers for people with names like Guggenheim before whatever terrible thing that had happened to her had set in.

  On the field trip that day was the man I’d marry a few years later. He had no reason for sentimentality about this moody, decrepit outpost with its murky connection to my father. He’d spent his life in Southern California, the shimmering land of insistent novelty, the starkest of contrasts to this Southern Gothic rot. Yet the abandoned rice fields, the mangled trees, the devoted couple seized his imagination. An irrational impulse—to rescue, to restore, to reclaim—washed over even him. Encountering my grandmother some months later, he announced gallantly that, if he ever had money, he’d buy back the plantation, rejuvenate it, and return it to her family—in whose possession he imagined, for whatever reason, it belonged.

  A look of irritation crossed my grandmother’s face.

  “That’s a terrible idea,” she snapped, with a sharpness that took me aback.

  Then she added, in a line that lodged itself deep in some recess in my head, “People went down there and drank themselves to death.”

  Georgetown, I now know, was once the heart of one of the most productive rice-growing regions of the world. Because of the surrounding area’s climate and terrain, and because of the exploitation of staggering numbers of enslaved people, South Carolina low-country landowners became, in the first half of the nineteenth century, among the richest people in the United States. After the Civil War, emancipation helped put an end to large-scale rice growing in the region. Abandoned rice fields became vacation homes for hundreds of thousands of overwintering birds. Land prices plunged, opening the door eventually to rich Northerners eager to spend some trivial fraction of their wealth on plantations for use as hunting retreats. In the early twentieth century, there were Vanderbilts, du Ponts, and Huntingtons spending the winter months on plantations in the Georgetown area, along with Bernard Baruch, the financier and an adviser to Woodrow Wilson, and Isaac Emerson, the inventor of Bromo-Seltzer. Visiting a friend near Georgetown in the second year of the Depression, Colonel Montgomery saw a seven-hundred-eighty-acre plantation, called Mansfield. H
e made a lowball offer. Confident that it would be rejected, he and Muz left for the West Indies—only to discover, upon returning home, that Mansfield was theirs. Muz is said to have had grave misgivings.

  The street

  The resuscitation of that neglected remnant of the age of slavery gave the Colonel a project—just as the extravagant resuscitation of the Colonel’s Edwardian estate to the north would give his grandson, my father, a project sixty years later. The Colonel converted the plantation house’s freestanding kitchen and its school building into two-story guesthouses. He built a third guesthouse from scratch. To the main house, he added a basement kitchen with an oyster bar where his houseguests could congregate before lunch to gorge on oysters and another local delicacy, the tiny crabs that lived in the oysters’ gills. He modernized the slave cabins, adding several more, to house his employees. He restored a historic rice-threshing mill. For navigating the rivers, lagoons, and bays, he bought a small fleet of motor cruisers. He installed a boathouse, dredged a canal to the Pee Dee River, and erected a glass pavilion as a picnic destination. Soon there were stables, kennels, an autogiro hangar, and an airstrip—used for, among other things, flying in lettuce from the greenhouse in Villanova. He tried his hand at growing rice—until it proved to be costing him twenty times what he would have paid to buy the same amount. After that, he flooded one of his rice fields, making a large, shallow lake, ideal for unsuspecting ducks. With a rich friend from the North, he’s said to have sent the owner of a Georgetown fish house to Russia for a crash course in caviar preparation—an approach the man then used to produce caviar from the Atlantic sturgeon that swam in the Great Pee Dee River and Winyah Bay. For years, homegrown caviar, packed in mason jars and shipped north by the case, arrived at houses on Ardrossan. My parents stored theirs beside the Popsicles in the freezer. Jars would be taken out and thawed for special occasions, when the caviar would be spread, like grape jelly, on toasted rectangles of Arnold Hearth Stone white, to be circulated on platters to guests.

  The operation of Mansfield, like Ardrossan, depended on labor. There was a full-time foreman, a team of laborers, and a roster of local women who could be called up for duty in the kitchen and the houses at a moment’s notice. Maids, butlers, and the chauffeur from Villanova would make the trek south. The “inside tipping list,” used as a guide for guests, enumerated eleven hardworking souls. In the depths of the Depression, the arrival of a new employer near Georgetown didn’t go unnoticed. The purchase of Mansfield was front-page news in the Georgetown Times. Men, desperate for employment, wrote to the new owner, begging for work or financial assistance. (“Coming to the point instantly, I need a job,” one letter began.) Though the Colonel turned down requests from strangers for money, he did help employees by, for example, fending off a mortgage foreclosure or posting bail. But in the spring of 1933, having cut the wages of his Pennsylvania employees by 20 percent, he did the same at Mansfield. By the midthirties, some of his unskilled laborers were taking home just forty cents a day. In a letter to the president of the power company, the Colonel expressed a suspicion that the families in his cabins were squandering electricity. Each cabin had a four-lightbulb allotment. “If the darkies have been imposing on me, I will cut the power off and use it only in the hangar and laundry,” the irritated Northerner wrote. When his loyal foreman asked that the pay cuts be lifted in 1936, he received a dismissive response from the Colonel’s secretary. “He would be very sorry to have you go,” the secretary wrote, “but it is altogether all right if you want to.”

  The foreman, I assume, knew nothing of the Colonel’s haberdashery budget. It appears from the evidence that, though the stock market crash and the Depression may have dented the Colonel’s wealth, they had not yet cramped his personal style. In a cardboard box in the ironing room, I found a heap of receipts dating from a mid-Depression shopping spree in London. Why the records were kept, I cannot know. Did someone anticipate that they’d be of interest? More likely, no one saw a reason to throw them out. As a result, I now know that on July 4, 1936, the Colonel and Muz settled in at Claridge’s, the London hotel, which was doing double duty as a refuge for European royalty in Mayfair. At least one purpose of the trip, it seems, was to replenish the squire’s wardrobe and inventory of hunting paraphernalia. Over a ten-day period, his purchases included, but weren’t limited to, five double-breasted suits, four pairs of jodhpurs, three riding coats, a dozen neckties, nine bow ties, a dinner coat, a “smoking suit,” patent leather pumps, seven foulard stocks (whatever those are), a pair of string gloves, three hats (deerstalker, Shetland fishing, Donegal), a silk muffler, suspenders, twelve pairs of silk and lambs’ wool socks, and thirty-three shirts. Also acquired in the same ten-day period: a pair of Chippendale mirrors, a Chippendale settee, a pair of mahogany chairs, one hundred twenty-five yards of chintz, two cases of thirty-year-old brandy, one hundred clay birds, four monogrammed pigskin cartridge bags, and a twelve-bore shotgun.

  How to square the four-lightbulb allotment with one hundred twenty-five yards of chintz?

  The Colonel was not entirely satisfied with his purchases. He complained to his shirtmaker, Edouard & Butler, that he’d been overcharged. The store’s managing director, with a mannered solicitousness barely disguising his disdain, called the colonial’s bluff. “We are very sorry to learn that such a longstanding and valued customer should be in any way dissatisfied with our prices,” he wrote, “but would point out that the materials we supply are the best it is possible to procure, as also are our cut and workmanship. If however you should acquire cheaper materials we could of course obtain them, but naturally in our class of business it is our policy to supply only the best unless specifically asked to the contrary.”

  The Colonel, it seems, didn’t take up the offer.

  Life on the plantation was quiet in the extreme. My father’s brother, Ed, who was packed off by his parents to Mansfield for three months while recovering from bronchitis at age nine, remembered it as “very comfortable, very beautiful, really dull.” He recalled having seen not one child of his age during his recuperation—though once, after the call went out for roast pork for dinner, he saw a decapitated pig running in circles. In an album, I find a photo of my father, by himself at about the same age, balancing on a joggling board under a canopy of Spanish moss. From Mansfield, his mother had written to his father, several years earlier, “Really this place bores me stiff.” The antidote was houseguests. Acquaintances traveling by motor yacht were invited to dinner; friends and relatives arrived from the North by overnight train or made the two-day trip by car. On a set of typed driving directions, I happen upon this admonition: “Do not ask Negroes for directions. Always ask White People, preferably a woman.”

  There were boat trips, picnics, duck hunting, socializing with neighbors. Charlotte Ives, the youngest Montgomery, whose taste in potential husbands cannot have escaped her father’s judgment, finally eloped, at thirty, with an unsuitable South Carolinian about whom all details have been erased, except that he may have been a stable hand.

  How long were they married? I asked my uncle.

  A week? he ventured.

  “I was told it happened,” he said. “Everybody was aghast. And then it un-happened.”

  In the Georgetown County Judicial Center, a clerk directs me to a rack of red leather-bound volumes listing marriage licenses by year. In a volume labeled “White,” I find a listing for the marriage of Charlotte Ives Montgomery and Edward Mitchell. No one seems to remember, or be willing to say, why the union soured. Whatever happened, and it cannot have been good, the bride’s mother came hastily to her daughter’s rescue. In the big house, I find a flurry of letters between lawyers for the family in the immediate aftermath of the elopement, full of cryptic references to “the unexpected marriage” and the need to put certain property in trust. There’s later correspondence, too, referring to a car accident and the near impossibility of insuring Charlotte Ives in the event o
f an accident such as a fall downstairs. There are vague allusions to “her present condition” and the “undesirable risk” she presents for insurers. Her mother reports that Ives “hobbles a bit further” each day but that “it is very painful and aches most of the time.” She is happy with her animals and her house, her mother writes, but “if she lost those there would be very little in life for her.” Later, in her mother’s letters, there are mentions of difficulties with balance, and a reference to her being on the wagon.

  Food and drink occupied much of the day at Mansfield. For houseguests, there was the option of an early breakfast before being paddled out onto the lake for duck hunting at dawn. A full breakfast, including eggs and grits, awaited them upon return. Midday: oysters, cocktails, lunch. An afternoon nap, tea, more cocktails, dinner, bed. In the Colonel’s papers, I find he’s kept his orders for bourbon, cognac, Jamaica rum. “You know my weakness,” he writes to a friend in Georgetown. “. . . There is nothing more delightful than Johnnie Walker Black Label.”

  The lifestyle took a toll on the host’s health. The Colonel, who’d given up foxhunting after a heart attack possibly precipitated by his having ridden two point-to-point races in one day, slid into an increasingly sedentary state. He ate, drank, gained weight. In the winter of 1935, a Georgetown doctor, alarmed by the Colonel’s blood pressure, ordered him to bed. The patient resisted, insisting the condition was a passing result of excessive entertaining and drinking—a problem he’d be unable to address until he got home. Back in Pennsylvania, he went to bed for a week in his second-floor bedroom, uninterrupted by social obligations. His blood pressure dropped to close to normal. The Georgetown doctor was informed of the good news. With what seems like a surplus of deference, the medical professional wrote back to his wealthy patient, “I can see my mistake in trying to rest you at Mansfield. It is impossible, and I think the few days you tried it made you worse instead of helping you.”