The Beneficiary

by Janny Scott

  Presumably the way to sustain my egotistic satisfaction would be to build better mouse traps, have people come knocking to my door. Write great novels. Become a great trial lawyer. But is that really what I want.

  I am now twenty-six years old. I live in a beautiful formal house with grounds which I cannot afford to keep on a decaying quasi-baronial demesne of great beauty in an encroaching suburb. I am a graduate of a law school, am paid to practice law by a rather good stuffy law firm, and I am quite mediocre about it. My life is now what many inner suburbanites strive for endlessly. But I am still a virgin. Is that what I want? My mental virginity is probably greater now than seven years ago. I’ll bet there are plenty of girls who’d like to learn that trick. I am married to a charming spoiled wife with whom I have little in common but background. My failure at the tennis court eliminated what she felt to be the sphere in which we would have experiences together, and the result is that we have no common experiences, except our background. We live our background. Our house is our two generations of money flowing into more of culture. This is no way to live.

  But the fault is all in me and not in the environment. There is nothing else I want to do, nowhere else I want to live, no other woman I want to marry, no other background I want to accumulate. No, I must attack my own spirit to find and cure. I cause my own sterility. I make myself into a pompous ass. My own horizons I must expand myself. My garden is smaller than Emily Dickinson’s, although I am not a recluse. Perhaps I should retire to the porch until I no longer shyly shrink from contact, obstinately refuse diversion, stupidly seek escape from what and into what I don’t know. More likely I should practice each day going forth to live.

  For most of my life, my father had seemed at some level unknowable. His final years had made that fact only clearer. Now, after being entombed for decades in the drifts of his late aunt’s love letters, this single, overlooked volume had presented itself to me as a key to use in the decryption. There was nothing tentative about the conclusions my father had drawn about himself. The final entry in the book offered a glimpse of the malaise he’d been treating. The journal seemed to shed a light, albeit a sliver, on something I’d sensed. Was there more?

  It had never occurred to me that my father would have left diaries in the house that now belonged to my mother. He’d walked out, in the thick of an argument. He’d returned six weeks later, with movers, to collect his desk and the contents of his “dressing room,” as we still called it and would go on calling it forever. My mother had stayed on, alone in the cool stillness of the “nine-bathroom house.” Several times a week, a housekeeper came to vacuum the carpets, mop the linoleum floor, water the orchids on the windowsills in the kitchen. The house was silent, immaculate, free of clutter. My mother was the opposite of a pack rat: There were walk-in closets containing nothing more than a perfectly folded blanket and a spare pillow. If my father had left his diaries in the house, I’d always assumed, surely my mother would have known. Now, the single diary fished from the dish box made it clear that I needed to search the entire place. My mother was pretty certain that she’d seen nothing—though it was possible, she said, that there were items in the basement or on the third floor that she’d overlooked.

  I returned three weeks later. I bypassed the first and second floors because I knew them well. I started in the basement, a warren of low-ceilinged rooms that included a onetime laundry with a Ping-Pong table and some industrial-style sinks dating from the 1930s. I searched every room and found nothing.

  The third floor was divided into two autonomous regions. In the front were a large guest room, a bathroom, and a music studio where my mother, then in her late eighties, still practiced and taught, climbing two flights of stairs every day. The back portion, designed as a “service wing,” had a long corridor, two bedrooms, a sitting room, a half dozen closets, and a bathroom with a dormer window and a claw-foot tub. It had been thirty years since the last childhood cook had departed. The rooms in the apartment were mostly empty and unfurnished. In the bedrooms, all I found were cardboard boxes and framed pictures propped against walls. In the sitting room, I found my father’s antique desk. In one closet, a pair of women’s fringed pants, dating from the era of the Twist, dangled, in a dry-cleaning bag, from a wire hanger. I was on the verge of giving up and heading downstairs when I remembered a large walk-in closet that had captivated me as a child. It had been designed as a linen closet when that wing of the house had been built. Once, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, my mother had warned us to stay away from that closet. She must have been using it, we figured, as a staging area for presents. For years afterward, whenever I was passing by, I’d make a point of opening the door and poking around. The closet had never lost its intoxicating whiff of unused stationery and things left untouched for years.

  I flipped the light switch inside the door. Shelves lined three of the four walls. There were boxes of stationery, Christmas decorations, some books, including an early edition of Winnie the Pooh. Along the back wall there were pewter trophies won by my father’s beagles. The stuffed hare’s head was there, too, long since retired from its station outside the downstairs bathroom. As I was turning to scan the shelves to the right, something unfamiliar caught my eye. Beneath the bottom shelves, a large wooden chest had been pushed into the corner. There were a few cardboard boxes in front of it, obstructing my view. But I could see a combination lock with a steel shackle dangling from the metal latch.

  I moved toward the chest, shoving boxes out of the way. When I reached the lock and gave it a tug, the shackle didn’t budge. Inverting the lock, I could see it had a four-digit combination. In my parents’ households, the combinations were the last four digits of the phone number. For years, the phone number to the house had ended in 4317. But we’d lost that number when we’d moved to London. When my parents moved back into the house four years later, the new phone number ended in 7010. Squatting on the floor, I peered at the dial. It read 8010.

  I ran my right thumb over the bottom of the lock and nudged the first wheel one notch on its rotation, turning the 8 to 7. The shackle popped open. It was impossible, the way the chest was lodged under the shelf, to lift the lid. So I grabbed the handle on one end, hauled the chest into the open, and raised the top. Inside were four extra-large black binders, each four inches thick with loose-leaf pages. They’d been arranged on a bed of white packing paper. In a plastic pocket on each binder’s spine, a white card identified the dates of the entries inside: 1973–1983, 1983–1990, and so on. There was a gray steel strongbox in the chest, too, containing hundreds more pages dating from the 1960s. Manila file dividers separated those pages by year. Whoever had hauled the chest into the closet, lined the bottom with paper, arranged the binders with the strongbox beside them in the chest, closed the lid, maneuvered the chest into the corner, and set the combination lock at 8010 must have known that, sooner or later, one of us would chance upon them or come looking. Surely anyone who’d go to that trouble must have imagined that, one day, the contents would be read.

  I took the binders and the strongbox back to New York.

  Beginning with the earliest entries in the black book from the box in the basement, it seemed that my father believed he suffered from some sort of recurrent depression. Sometimes he used language like “in the doldrums” or “gloomy” or “dark and vacant”; other times he referred matter-of-factly to “my spring depressions.” He believed his moods were seasonal; he traced them back to the year he’d turned fourteen. Like an amateur meteorologist tracking shifts in atmospheric pressure, he mapped their comings and goings. Sometimes, he described symptoms now often associated with anxiety: he felt tense, irritable, wound up. “I was in the doldrums all day, as I had been to some extent for a couple of weeks,” he wrote before his thirtieth birthday. “. . . Most of the day I spent in full introversion, bringing this diary to date and tasting without analyzing a sense of general malaise, distress, nervousness, and displaying
barely restrained bad humor.” That evening, he turned in early, “either to sleep it off or to think about it in bed, guilty.”

  His self-investigations occur frequently during his twenties and early thirties. He finds himself pompous, stuffy, unamusing, self-absorbed, deficient at his work. “Ordinary, busy days at the office marked by recurring realizations of inadequacy and incompetence,” he writes at twenty-eight. At a hospital trustees’ meeting, he reports, he embarrassed himself “by shooting off my ignorant mouth”—an episode that left him “miserable with myself.” He faults himself for what he sees as a hunger for approval: “Commentators and critics frequently point out the Americans’ almost pathetic desire to be liked by foreigners, to be attractive. I have my own private case of the same.” Another young lawyer’s account of having built an addition onto his own house leaves my father criticizing himself for lacking “development and drive.” He finds himself “wanting to be one of the gang (which I am not).” Yet the company of friends sometimes leaves him ill at ease. “I was tired and had terrible complexes, making myself quite unbearable to myself, and, I assume, to everyone else,” he reports. He’s often uncomfortable in the perpetual whirl of cocktail parties, dinner parties, and dances in which he and my mother are swept up. Encountering a man with a taste for solitude, he senses a kindred spirit: “He, too, is uneasy and ill adjusted to the social pattern we belong to,” my father writes.

  Few, I think, would have described him that way. They’d have said the opposite.

  The summer he turns twenty-seven, he’s on the ferry from Nantucket to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, sitting on deck near the rear of the boat as the island recedes into the distance. Gulls trail the ferry in a loose flock—gliding on the drafts of air, dropping into the churn to snag a scrap of tossed food from the wake, rising again to glide on the currents. His attention alights on a young gull, evidently in its first season. Its coloring is a yellowish gray; it struggles to stay aloft. “It was working hard, beating its wings much more than the other birds, never quite able to spread its wings and glide on the updraft,” my father writes. Several times, the gull seems to tumble toward the water. It pumps its way back up. “For a long time and repeatedly I watched it,” he writes. “And while the trip for the other gulls was a matter of ease, for the young gull it was all work—no relaxing. The parallel between that gull and me was obvious, and reassuring.”

  He interviews a young man for a Harvard scholarship. My father, now in his thirties, is fascinated and moved by the applicant, who’s ten years younger. “He was almost without defenses, the most open and disarming young man,” my father writes. “He was quite frank, obviously sensitive, interesting to look at, and in short order he had me captivated.” The diarist retells the applicant’s life story—fractured family, absent father, mother “a case.” The young man set off for France after high school “because he found America ‘dead.’ By this he means emotional insensitivity, materialism.” He fell in love with a beautiful German woman and bicycled with her around Brittany. He enrolled at the University of Virginia, dropped out, returned to France, nearly married the woman, then decided to complete his education first. “Sensitive, fascinating, inquiring,” my father writes. “He may be a Don Quixote or a Thomas Wolfe or Winston Churchill. . . . Made me realize what a closed corporation I am.”

  A closed corporation, I find, comes from the language of corporate law, my father’s field at the time. It’s a privately held, often family-run, firm.

  As I moved through the diaries, I began to see that he found an antidote to his troubles in drinking. Alcohol allowed him to override his anxieties and inhibitions. At lunch with a friend in Philadelphia, at which he downs “a very naughty vodka martini,” he finds it leaves him “manic at the luncheon table, feeling very witty.” He makes a habit of three or four cocktails before dinner. After a Sunday night supper at the big house, he reports that it was more pleasant than usual “largely because I had three Scotches and soda and, not having had much to eat, became very tight.” Alcohol is his analgesic. At a dinner party given by his mother-in-law in the summer of 1957, he finds himself “sitting there tempted by a cigarette, and contemplating the senselessness of my life and questioning its continuing.” When the guests leave, he and my mother “sat up and poured Scotches down until there was no need for more.”

  The regimen looks exhausting. A dinner party ends at 2:30 A.M.; a dance at 4:00 A.M.; he returns home with my mother as dawn is breaking. On a workday, he rises from bed worn out—“tired after the weekend bacchanalia” and hung over. “Armed with mints and Chiclets, I made it to town,” he writes. Concentration eludes him. He takes an afternoon off work to play hooky, idling over a two-volume book on tea. “A terrible day at the office, full of regrets,” he writes. Aware of the toll his drinking is taking, he finds himself “surly and aggressively disagreeable” at bedtime. He’s “red-faced and swollen-eyed.” His stamina flagging while beagling, he concludes that he’s “paying the price of pumping so much proof into my system.” His assessment of his own conduct when drunk is withering: “Mistold several drunken stories,” spilled beer on a rug, “asserted myself alcoholically,” baited a friend. On a trip to Los Angeles, my mother objects when he turns up at a museum-cafeteria lunch table with a carafe of white wine on his tray. “Imagine what it would have been like,” my father writes, “if she knew I had drunk another one in the cafeteria line.”

  He knew early on, I realized, that he had a drinking problem. He understood before the rest of us did. Decades later, he’d concede just about nothing when we raised the subject; but it turns out that he was onto himself all along. He knew something, too, it turns out, about his family history. “My bloodlines show an interest in liquor which is less than healthy,” he writes in his twenties. He describes his maternal grandmother, Muz, as “for years insensible by dinner’s end”; his grandfather, the Colonel, “bored sick . . . drinking himself into a daily stupor”; his uncle, “a poor miserable man who can’t fill the gap he drinks to fill.” At twenty-eight, he refers bluntly to his own “drinking problem,” saying, “I drink more than I should, both in quantity and in duration.” He regularly reports on his consumption. “Drank too much Dubonnet and gin, and being exhausted turned green at the dinner table, had to collapse in bed for a half hour, returned feebly,” he writes. Or, “I drowned my sorrows in a very large quantity of Canada Dry Bourbon and a 1957 Graves Chateau Magence. I was gone.”

  At thirty, he plunges into a three-part series on alcohol and alcoholism in The New Yorker. I call up a copy, to see what he might have learned. “All current bedrock definitions of alcoholism stress its compulsive character,” the author, Berton Roueché, writes in the third installment, quoting from a medical paper. “A patient suffers from chronic alcoholism if he uses alcohol to such an extent that it interferes with a successful life (including physical, personality, and social aspects), and he is either not able to recognize this effect or is not able to control his alcohol consumption, although he knows its disastrous results.” Alcoholism is “too dark and prickly” to be explained simply, Roueché writes. But it cannot develop in the absence of “some mental or emotional disability.” It also requires a “suitable social climate”—a culture in which drinking to excess is tolerated. It’s incurable but not hopeless, Roueché writes. Alcoholics need all the help they can get—medical and psychiatric, and “sensible encouragement.”

  My father never voluntarily sought medical or psychiatric help for his drinking, as far as I can tell. Once, a psychiatrist whom he’d agreed to see in connection with his marriage raised the matter of his alcohol intake. My father suggested four causes: a “social environment where much liquor flows”; a fondness for the taste of wine; “unrest at home”; and, he writes vaguely, “deeper emotional reasons—release, etc.” The doctor then advised him to consider what effects he obtained from drinking. My father listed eight in his diary. High on the list is “easiness with people.” Others include releas
e, laughter, satiety, courage to speak his mind, and “distance from emotion.” After the last, he writes cryptically, “Find out why.”

  To my surprise, I find he tried repeatedly to cut back. “Yes, it is time for a reformation,” he tells himself in his late twenties. But reformation leaves him “wholly unable to concentrate and grossly irritable as to my wife, my secretary and the telephone.” He tries substituting chilled burgundy for cocktails, hoping to avoid being incapacitated for the entire night. But chilled burgundy lacks the “rapid pickup effect of four cocktails before dinner.” Soon he’s back on martinis; then he’s on the wagon; then he’s off. He tries giving up smoking, only to discover that it sharpens the compulsion to drink. “I’m nervous from not smoking, and very much under-exercised, and so lie in bed like a bowstring,” he writes. At a party, “my very first deed was to plunge to a Parliament, then for a Scotch and soda, and only afterwards to meet the guests.” Plus, quitting cigarettes lands him in a nasty mood (“not improved by a bottle of white Beaujolais”). Tackling one vice sends him fleeing to the other. “My fine resolutions about smoking went out the window with the first taste of Bourbon,” he writes. His New Year’s resolutions: Avoid drinking too much, don’t smoke, don’t be tense, take an interest in others, read more, don’t put on airs. “Not that I will have the fortitude to keep them,” he writes—then goes home, downs two martinis, and smokes a cigar.

  Before his fifty-fourth birthday, he flies to Nantucket for a long weekend alone in early spring. He writes out his agenda: Try out the new wood-burning stove; approve a reupholstered sofa; try a weekend of “no drink, not even wine.” He was drinking mostly wine, “in large quantities,” in those years, he writes. For fourteen years, he’d had wine at lunch and dinner as often as not. He can scarcely remember an evening since sophomore year in college when he didn’t drink, usually a lot, “unless sick or repentant or both.” The weekend of attempted sobriety isn’t his first self-imposed therapeutic rustication; twice, he’s retreated to Nantucket to give up smoking—an effort that left him shaking so badly he had to struggle to mount the baskets on his bike. Peering at the prospect of a sober weekend, he wonders if he’ll have withdrawal symptoms. Will his face become less blotchy? Will he be able to work or think?