The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  * * *

  —

  At the “cottage” in Maine, a shadow fell over the summer of 1941. War was raging in Europe and Asia. The United States would soon join. My father’s uncle Warwick had joined the Naval Reserve and was now a naval intelligence officer in the Pacific, deputy to the director of the port at Manila. Maisie Scott, the Scott family matriarch, was unwell. On the advice of a doctor, she departed from Chiltern in midseason, leaving her eldest daughter in tears. Back in Pennsylvania, a surgeon found, in Maisie’s intestines, a cancer so advanced, he simply took note of it, then stitched her back up. “Don’t bring me back to any half-life,” she’d instructed him in advance. When she died that fall, at sixty-nine, the town of Bar Harbor shut down for the afternoon of the funeral. The selectmen turned out to pay their respects. My grandfather and his sisters carried their mother’s ashes to the top of Newport Mountain, then scattered them on the rocky slopes where she’d hiked, her voice slicing the still air as she called to her dogs.

  Manila fell to the Japanese that winter. With the rest of the naval forces, Warwick retreated to Corregidor, the largest of the fortified islands protecting Manila Bay. American and Filipino soldiers held out there for four months against Japanese bombing and shelling. “I note one thing,” Warwick wrote to his family, two months in. “—that I love you all very much. Don’t ever forget that! I note another thing—that this existence being unguessable from day to day and not free from danger, does not inspire me to write you great things about life and death or to memorialize myself in some poetic effort about self giving his all in distant Asiatic sea or shore or wherever it is I am.” On May 6, 1942, the commander of Allied forces in the Philippines, Lt. Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright, surrendered. “There is a limit to human endurance, and that point has long been passed,” he radioed to President Roosevelt. Taken prisoner along with seven thousand other Americans, Warwick was listed as missing in action.

  Human endurance was to be tested further.

  For nearly a year, the family received no word of Warwick. My grandfather, courteous by temperament and training, tapped his connections in the military, politics, and the press in pursuit of news of his brother. (“Dear Cabot,” he writes to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.) At one point, he was told that Warwick was a prisoner in a camp in Japan—“the model Japanese prison camp,” someone assured him. But letters to that camp were returned. Later, word came that Warwick was in a camp in the Philippines. A series of small, regulation-style, fill-in-the-blank postcards from him trickled in, bearing the minimal news permitted. Then communication ceased again, in late 1944, as the Allied campaign to take back the Philippines, the bloodiest campaign in the Pacific War, commenced. As the Allies retook the country, news of liberated prisoners trickled home; family friends hovered near their radios, in shifts, recording names. “They have, as I expected, no news on Warwick and no suggestions how to get any,” my grandfather wrote after visiting the offices of the Committee on Relief for Americans in the Philippines. “But they . . . say we can have good confidence Warwick is alive if we have not been officially notified of the contrary.”

  One month earlier, however, with Manila under American aerial bombardment, the Japanese had herded some sixteen hundred American and Allied prisoners onto a transport ship headed to Japan. Nearly all the prisoners were survivors of the defense of Corregidor, Bataan, and Mindanao; many were emaciated and weak. At bayonet’s point, they were crammed into the airless hold. The ship, its decks studded with anti-aircraft guns, left Manila on the night of December 13, 1944. With no markings to indicate that it carried prisoners, it came under heavy fire from United States Navy planes. For a day and a half, the United States strafed and bombed it. Amid detonations and the groans of the dying, the blood of the Japanese gun crews ran in rivulets from the decks into the hold. In the blackness, men slid into madness. Crouched naked in temperatures estimated to have risen as high as one hundred thirty degrees, dozens are believed to have suffocated. On December 15, the ship burned to the waterline and began to sink in Subic Bay. More than three hundred of the sixteen hundred prisoners died. Warwick Scott, at forty-three, is thought either to have died from lack of oxygen or to have been killed when an American bomb hit the ship’s stern directly above where he huddled. His body has never been recovered.

  In the months after my father turned sixteen, his father and his aunts pieced together, from the recollections of survivors, an account of the final months of their brother’s life. “If Warwick knew, as he must have, that the situation was hopeless, he never permitted his knowledge to affect his good cheer, consideration for others, and enthusiasm,” a fellow officer wrote. During the long siege of Corregidor, Warwick had built, equipped, and staffed three machine gun outposts, then directed anti-aircraft fire against the Japanese, for which he would posthumously be awarded the Bronze Star. In the prison camps, he was said to have cut an unforgettable figure—gaunt but dignified, in epaulets till the end. He’d taught lessons in conversational French; he’d delivered a lecture on French wines. With a concealed radio assembled from stolen parts, he’d gathered news of the outside world, reporting his findings to fellow prisoners in a news conference at night. There’s a story that he staged a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; a nephew remembers hearing that Warwick had written home for clarification on some fine point in act two. I found no mention of such a production in survivors’ letters, though perhaps it had been mounted in the months before the fall of Manila.

  In Warwick’s absence, the house in Maine languished. With their mother dead and their brother at war, my grandfather and his sisters had neither the heart nor the money to carry on opening Chiltern each summer. As years came and went, it sat uninhabited, its garden gone to seed. Only the black-eyed Susans and other perennials persisted. Other families put their “cottages” on the market and migrated to smaller houses in other towns, where men could arrive for the summer without having packed a tuxedo. “Bar Harbor is finished,” my grandfather had declared. But he and his sisters resolved to do nothing about the fate of Chiltern until after Warwick’s return. Maybe he’d dreamed of the house while he was away, they thought; maybe he’d want to recuperate there. In which case, they’d open the house one last time. They’d give their brother, back from hell, one final, heavenly summer.

  In June 1945, word came that Warwick was believed dead. My grandfather forwarded the Navy’s letter to relatives and friends. “Here is some sad news about Warwick,” he wrote in a brief note, poignant in its restraint. “A miracle could still happen and he might come back to us, but there is nothing to do but accept the report of the Bureau of Naval Personnel. We are very proud of him.” My father, at sixteen, spent part of that summer with his aunt and cousins in Maine, helping dismantle the house that his grandfather had built and that his widowed grandmother had dedicated herself to keeping. For weeks, my father assisted in the dusting of books, the sorting of furniture, and the deciding of who would take what. His father had waived any claim to the house, turning over his share to his sisters.

  For himself, my father laid claim to his grandfather’s favorite Morris chair, and to a French antique desk made of mahogany that gleamed like a horse chestnut fresh off the branch. The desk had a galleried marble top and a pullout writing surface inset with leather. For years it stood in a corner of my parents’ library. My father’s paperwork drifted there in tidy heaps. The desk, with a bowed lid that opened to reveal its fitted interior, had certain advantages. If you tugged the lid from its raised position, it would rumble down a curving track and snap shut, like a garage door, hiding behind its handsome, polished exterior whatever confusion lay unattended inside.

  The family emptied the summer palace and put it up for sale. But demand for mansions in those years was not robust. The real estate market in Bar Harbor was awash in oversized “cottages” that their owners were itching to unload. Forty-five years after that first summer at Chiltern, half the family was dead, and th
e survivors were left to tear down their father’s dream. A team of laborers embarked upon an exhausting process of demolition. My father’s brother, Ed, on a boat out of Bar Harbor that summer, vowed he wouldn’t look in the direction of Chiltern, according to a story one of his cousins remembers Ed telling. But Ed couldn’t resist. Turning, he glimpsed the lawn sloping down toward the crescent-shaped beach. He saw the house being dismantled. For years afterward, he’d say, he regretted that final look. Not long after, the family transferred the land to a corporation, which later declared bankruptcy and eventually was able to sell the property, in pieces, and cover unpaid back taxes.

  In October 1947, smoke was spotted rising near a cranberry bog on Mount Desert Island. A protracted drought had left conditions on the island the driest on record. The fire smoldered for days before the wind picked up and changed direction, herding flames toward Bar Harbor. The blaze, becoming an inferno propelled by what were said to have been gale-force winds, traversed six miles in three hours. Reaching the town, it barreled down West Street, known then as Millionaires’ Row. By the time the conflagration was over, sixty-seven summer estates had burned, along with one hundred seventy year-round homes. For some, the disaster was a blessing in disguise: Many of the burned cottages, unoccupied for years, had been scheduled for demolition. “Even those who suffered extreme losses now admit that Bar Harbor cottage life was on the way out long before the fire, and that the fire was merely the coup de grace,” Cleveland Amory wrote later. My grandfather had seen it coming. Bar Harbor—that is, his father’s Bar Harbor—was finished.

  Nearly sixty years later, I made an impromptu detour to the town. After five days in a cabin in the woods at the farthest reach of the Maine coast, I was driving south with my beloved when he suggested we see if we could find any trace of the house that my great-grandparents had built and their offspring had razed. Googling the name of the house some months earlier, I’d noticed the existence of a bed-and-breakfast in Bar Harbor with Chiltern in its name. Guests were shelling out upwards of two hundred dollars a night to stay in an inn said to have been “lovingly designed from the carriage house of an ambassador’s estate.” When we pulled into downtown Bar Harbor on a weekday morning in mid-September, flocks of senior citizens, in fall-colored fleece finery, were emerging from tour buses, flooding sidewalks, and spilling into streets. A short distance from the center of town, we parked in front of a two-and-a-half-story, gray-shingled building. One of the owners obligingly showed us around the inn. He even produced what he said were the original blueprints: twelve stalls, a carriage room, a harness room, a cleaning room, a toolroom, lockers, hay and straw chutes, and two car-wash-like “wash stands” for cleaning horses and carriages. The bed-and-breakfast had a sauna, a theater, and an indoor lap pool. In a guest bedroom, towels had been folded, origami-style, into swans, paddling on the surface of the king-size bed.

  The owner pointed us up the street to the place where the putative ambassador’s residence had once stood. Where there had once been a single house, we found four. Three generations of the family that had bought the land in the 1950s now had summer houses there. The original garden, greenhouses, and tennis court were gone. Trees had recolonized much of the clearing. A landscaping crew was hacking at brush that was blocking access to the crescent-shaped beach. One of the only clues to who or what had once occupied the property was a rusting street sign at the entrance to a narrow cul-de-sac, called Scotts Lane. The other lay largely buried, obscured by grass and dirt, at the foot of a house on the site of the original. If you ran the toe of your shoe back and forth, you could expose a sliver of one of those enormous, squared blocks of granite, cut from a local quarry and put in place by thirty masons, which had inspired an awestruck reporter, back when, to liken Chiltern to “a modern fort”—indestructible and destined to last far into an unimagined but no doubt glorious future.

  Chapter Six

  The stuffed hare dated back to my father’s twenty-sixth year. He was a young lawyer then, employed in his great-uncle’s firm, commuting on his great-grandfather’s railroad, living next door to his parents on his grandparents’ place. On the last day of 1953, my mother had given birth to their first child, my sister, the latest link in the long chain of firstborn Hopes. On a cold Sunday in January, my father drove west from the house to where one- and two-acre lots gave way to horse farms and open country. A pack of beagles was scheduled to hunt there that afternoon, and he was new to the sport. He’d met a man with a pack of hounds and a hardy band of followers devoted to passing autumn and winter afternoons traipsing around the countryside in search of some hapless cottontail rabbit or a hare. After lunch on Sundays, he’d taken to setting off, returning at nightfall, ruddy-faced, with mud pasted to his white canvas sneakers. From an account he wrote at the time, and from all the hours my sister and brother and I spent as children following him and his hounds, I can picture that January day. The wind was blowing in gusts, and the sky was a smudgy gray. A few dozen enthusiasts had turned out, parking on the grassy shoulder of the road, warming their hands with their breath. A tall man with flagpole posture stood in their midst, dressed in a green hunting coat and black velvet cap. He was the master of hounds. There was a liveried huntsman, too, and several “whippers-in,” each equipped with a kennel whip with a braided thong. My father slipped in among the followers. Then, as the hounds set off, the huntsman unexpectedly tossed him a whip.

  What had drawn him to beagling, I can’t say for sure. It was simply this thing that he did; and, as far back as I remember, Hopie and Elliot and I were either eager or expected to go along—or some mixture of both. When I was five, the straight-backed master of hounds, who’d been hunting hare since the year my father was born, decided he’d aged out of the role. A housing development was about to swallow his kennel; access to water and cesspool had been cut off. So he transferred to my father, for one dollar, twenty-four hounds and the right to hunt in the stretch of countryside assigned, by the national beagling elders, to his pack. Each hound had its own mellifluous, bisyllabic name—Bugler, Burgess, Dainty, Dulcie, Madcap, Matchless, and so on—each new litter having been named in alphabetical order. To house them, my father envisioned a kennel in our backyard. My mother did not. So he had one built less than a mile away in a cow pasture downwind of the big house. The kennel had running water, indoor and outdoor pens, a giant drum full of dry dog food, a long wooden trough for feeding. It was more practical than lavish—a Hampton Inn for hounds. On Saturday mornings, he’d exercise his pack close to home, surfacing on lawns as family members went about their weekend routines. On Sunday afternoons in fall and winter, he’d hunt the more distant territory passed on to him by the previous master. Afterward, some hospitable beagler would invite everyone for tea, which sometimes segued seamlessly into cocktails, which sometimes segued into a handful of rosy-faced die-hards drinking into the night.

  The pack had been moving only minutes, that Sunday in January, when a hare sprang up between the hounds and my father. He’d positioned himself along one flank, jogging between the beagles and the road. He called out the sighting and soon the hounds were scrambling after the hare in clamorous pursuit. It crossed the field, rounded a pond, raced uphill. The pack lost the scent, made several false starts, picked it up again, and was off in full cry. The dogs worked the line of scent alongside a stream, crossed a road, circled a dry pond. My father, reaching the pond early, watched the pack cast through high grass. A field away, someone called out a second sighting: The hare was back on the run. The hounds found the line and followed it into the next pasture, chasing the animal back across the field to a farmhouse. There, in an apple orchard, they lost their way. While they were working the ground under the apple trees, the hare jumped up in front of them. They lurched after it, following by sight. They reached a house, veered onto a road, proceeded methodically down one side. An elderly man with binoculars confirmed what the huntsman already suspected: The hare was running on only three legs.

&nb
sp; Blood was never the attraction of beagling for my father. Not that he was opposed on principle to killing animals. He kept a shotgun behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica in a bookcase in the library, which he occasionally put to use picking off the grackles that roosted noisily outside his bedroom. Once, I watched him pluck a runt, with poor life prospects, from a litter of beagle puppies; cradle it in the crook of one elbow as he walked to a nearby stream; descend to the stream bank like a priest at a baptism; and hold the creature underwater until it had drowned. He did not, however, hunt with guns. Rabbits and hares rarely died at the mercy of his hounds. Once, after twenty years of beagling, he said he couldn’t remember the last time they’d killed. The fact is, there weren’t many rabbits left in the area. More than once, he ordered a shipment of Kansas jackrabbits by mail, intending to release them into the exurban veldt in the hope that they’d survive long enough to settle in and be chased. By the time they arrived by plane at the Philadelphia airport, incarcerated in long, wood-and-chicken-wire crates, many or most were moribund or dead. Once, carting a bag of garbage out to the trash cans in the backyard, my mother lifted a lid and found herself face-to-face with a jackrabbit, kidnapped from the Great Plains and expiring in a trash can on the Main Line.