by Janny Scott
He assigns himself no serious tasks other than not drinking. He applies himself to the tranquilizing rituals of vacation-home ownership. He carries sand up from the beach to line the bottom of the new woodstove. He buys a half cord of firewood, gathers kindling, lights a fire in the new stove. (“What a success!”) He rides his bicycle into town for the paper, takes a long walk on the beach, rides out to the far end of the island, fixes a flat. As the sun slides behind the darkening sea, he cooks: swordfish, asparagus, and fried onions; scrod and okra; an artichoke, creamed spinach, and medallions of lamb. When a neighbor invites him for a drink, he begs off. He’s occupied, he explains, with “a major project.”
The major project is an unqualified success: no withdrawal symptoms, no sleepless nights, no cravings. He thinks about drinking, even misses it, but isn’t tempted. In the absence of what he calls “frustrations imposed by outsiders,” he even finds himself able to relax. When it’s time to leave, he does his laundry, closes up the house, calls a taxi, flies to Philadelphia, drives home from the airport, lets himself in the back door.
“Had drinks,” he writes. “(Tasted rather good.)”
I was moving systematically through the black binders on the dining table in my apartment at night. It was difficult to tolerate more than a couple of hours at a stretch. My mood lurched from low-grade curiosity to boredom to feverish fascination to sadness. I’d flee the apartment with the dog for the diversions of the nighttime streets. There were passages of breathtaking candor, revealing things I was amazed he’d written down. There were revelations that I’ve chosen not to report, confessions that deserve to remain private. After a few months’ immersion in the diaries, I paid another visit to Ed, my father’s brother, on his farm near Delaware. I read him some passages from the journals and from the autobiographical essay my father had written at McLean. My uncle said he was dumbfounded. “Not the fellow I thought I knew,” he said quietly. “Really not.” When I asked him in what ways, he said, “All that inner dissatisfaction and self-doubt were not apparent to me.” A day later, he sent me an email. He floated the idea that my father was “writing for a readership and projecting an image that he wanted seen, not really exposing his view of himself.” I gave it some thought. Perhaps that might be said of the autobiographical essay, a command performance to appease his jailers. But the tone of the diarist in his twenties and thirties seemed too consistent to be a pose. Why would a person offer such a pitiless self-examination unless on some level he believed it?
The diaries, I began to think, were my father’s sole confidant and confessor. He’d found something therapeutic in his solitary exercise of self-examination and self-expression. Ill at ease at a cocktail party, he’s “delighted when the time came to go home so I could return to this diary.” At a dinner party, he might let drop some private secret to an agreeable-looking woman seated next to him. But for the most part he offered only glimpses of his feelings about himself. His method was self-deprecating humor; his timing was good—he invariably got a laugh. But in the lull that followed, it had occurred to me that he believed what he’d just said.
Once, on a biking trip in Ireland, he and I encountered a woman from Texas pushing a bicycle up a mountain road outside the town of Dingle. We’d passed her the day before, bent into a headwind, twenty miles beyond Dingle in the other direction. Now, as we filled our water bottles at a spring, the three of us struck up a conversation. She asked when we’d arrived in Ireland. My father, jovial as usual, told her we’d landed the previous morning. What airport? she asked. Shannon, he said. In the silence that followed, I could see her calculating cumulative mileage in her head: one hundred miles from Shannon, forty more that afternoon, now a four-mile climb to fifteen hundred feet. Her eyes widened. “You must do a lot of cycling,” she said. For whatever reason, my father had lapsed into silence. I was left to explain, belatedly: A taxi had ferried us and our bikes from the airport to Dingle. It was an admission: Neither of us was that tough (though we wouldn’t have minded her thinking we were). We said good-bye to the lone cyclist and pressed on up the mountain. Once we were out of earshot, I admitted I hadn’t known whether to own up.
“That’s the sort of thing I expect you to tell and me not to,” he said.
“So, what does it mean that I’m wondering if I should have?” I asked.
He flashed his big white incisors.
“Shades of your fraudulent father.”
I wasn’t surprised, reading the diaries, to find that my parents’ marriage wasn’t happy. But I was taken aback by the impression he left of the frequency and bitterness of their combat. Repeatedly, he describes my mother in states of anger I’ve never seen and can’t imagine; he uses phrases like “in a towering rage” and “blue with rage.” He writes, the year I turned four, “Fought all day long.” On another occasion, “Long fight with Gay.” Some accounts are little more than shorthand: “Gin. Fight. Tears.” Whatever their underlying differences, the trigger was often his drinking. On other occasions, it was women. They drift in and out of the diary entries—women I’ve never heard of, a few I half remember, and one or two I eventually knew.
The love affair with the glamorous family friend is largely missing. My father makes it clear in a later entry that he threw out several years’ worth of pages to destroy the evidence. After the diary resumes, however, I find he’s restarted the affair after having called it off. At the gym, he finds himself face-to-face with a man who’s asked the glamorous woman, now widowed, to marry him. In the man’s expression, my father recognizes what he describes as a look he once saw in the face of the woman’s husband before he died—“jealousy, repugnance, fear, curiosity.” Surreptitiously, he shuttles between our household and hers. To avoid alerting her children, they meet at the end of her driveway. “Feeling unbelievably in love and overcome with the relief and the laughter and the warmth and the knowledge of where I must be,” he writes on one such occasion. He then returns to our house. “Dinner at home, alone with Gay and the children,” he writes.
I give some thought to the word “alone.” I turned eleven that year.
During those months with the diaries, I came to believe it had been my father who’d made the decision to warehouse them in the closet. My mother had seemed as surprised as I was that they’d turned up. Had he kept that wooden chest jammed into the corner of that closet for years, slipping quietly up the back staircase and snapping his latest pages into one of the binders, leaving the lock set at 8010 for easy access for himself? Or maybe he’d stashed the binders somewhere else, then bought the wooden chest and carted it and the binders up to the closet around the time he moved out. The final entries in those binders dated from the end of the year before he’d decamped. In his subsequent exile, did he occasionally think about his secrets lying there unnoticed, in their pine box, waiting to be discovered? I wondered if he’d ever changed his mind about wanting me to have them. Did he fear that one of us would read them while he was still around to be questioned? Could he have wanted my mother to find them? That seemed unlikely. But why take the risk of leaving them in her house?
The fact was, I’d never have expected to read his journals. But once he’d dangled them before me, I hadn’t had it in me to put them out of my mind. I’d been flattered—which, now that I think about it, he’d probably anticipated. I’d been curious, too. He’d offered a door to his unsearchable self. Now that I’d blundered through it, I realized I’d never thought about what I might find. Nor had I thought how that might change my memories of my father. Nor had I considered how it might force me to rethink the story I was telling—not to mention the role of the teller. At times, I felt like I was committing an invasion of privacy—though an invasion by invitation of the invaded. At times, it occurred to me that I might be involved in an act of aggression—though it wasn’t necessarily clear which of us was the aggressor. Little of what I was reading was inconsistent with what I’d known or intuited. What was shockin
g was how much he’d committed to writing. There was some satisfaction in finally understanding what he’d hidden. But it was disturbing to contemplate his distress. The diaries, I began to think, were an inheritance of sorts—unanticipated, undeserved, a stroke of fortune. But, like an inheritance, they came at a cost.
Land, houses, money: Wealth had tumbled in my father’s family from one generation to the next. Each new descendant arrived as an unwitting conduit for its transmission. You had a right to enjoy it, an obligation to protect it, a duty to pass it on to your own unsuspecting children. It was a stroke of good fortune, of course. But what you could never know, starting out, was how those things would influence decisions you’d make over a lifetime. You might resolve to live as though that wealth didn’t exist, but sooner or later it would probably insinuate itself into your thinking about jobs, profession, marriage, children. Some beneficiaries flourished. Some didn’t. For some, the impact of all that good fortune appeared to have been mixed. My father, I began to think, had sensed the conundrum early on. In that earliest diary, he’d glimpsed the snare at his feet. But by then, he’d already taken his place in his great-grandfather’s profession, in his great-uncle’s firm, on his grandparents’ estate.
“I cause my own sterility,” he’d written. “My own horizons I must expand myself.”
I’d noticed long before that he’d never encouraged us to follow in his tracks. He’d never pressed us to return to Pennsylvania after college or to enter the law or to raise our children on the place. The career advice we received from our parents consisted of a single imperative: Find out what you love, then go out and do it. It made so much sense, I’d never asked how he’d arrived at that position. Once, though, I used a newspaper assignment as cover to explore his views on filial duty. The assignment was an essay, for a special section, on relationships between grown children and parents. I’d witnessed my father’s loyal, late-afternoon visits to his parents. I knew he’d spent most of his life a field or two away. I, on the other hand, had moved from Cambridge to New Jersey to California to New York. He and I hadn’t spoken in two months. So I took a tape recorder with me to his apartment in the old nursery in the big house. What did he expect of me? I asked.
All he wanted, he said, was that I not be unhappy. “I feel it’s your game now,” he said. “I want you not to have more misery than the game ordinarily implies.”
The tone of the diaries shifts with the move to London, which liberated him from the practice of law. His entries become less confessional and less self-critical. Perhaps, in his forties, he was able to cut himself some slack. Or perhaps there was less time in those days for self-examination. Maybe he was being circumspect: At a State Department orientation, my parents had been warned to keep diaries minimal for security reasons. For that reason, my mother’s hewed strictly to the facts. My father’s were stuffed with concise accounts of trips with the ambassador, meetings, receptions, house parties, dinner parties, dishes consumed, terribly attractive women, and hundreds and hundreds of names, recorded with a diplomat’s concern for retention. Children’s ages were listed, friends’ servants identified by name. “Butler: Cornish; Cook: Mrs. Cornish.”
Back in Philadelphia, his professional life became busier and his personal life more complicated than ever. On the one hand, by the early 1980s, he was living with my mother in the house on the estate where he’d spent nearly all of his life. He commuted in and out of town by bicycle, train, and car to and from his job as president and chief executive of the museum. At the same time, the diaries make clear, he’d developed what can only be described as a parallel life. He was in love with Margaret, who ran another arts organization in Philadelphia and lived in the apartment building that had replaced the Rittenhouse Square mansion of the railroad baron. My father, who I doubt was oblivious to the Scott connection, was more than a frequent visitor to the apartment. He contributed furnishings, stocked the refrigerator with groceries, laid on bottles of champagne. At Christmas, he distributed holiday tips to the building staff.
His double life appears not to have been much of a secret. He dined with Margaret at popular Philadelphia restaurants. They spent weekends together in the house on Nantucket. They had rendezvous in New York and London and occasionally stayed together in my parents’ house when my mother was out of town. Not surprisingly, wires crossed. A bill for flowers delivered to Margaret’s apartment materialized in my mother’s mail. An interior decorator’s invoice for curtains for Margaret turned up on a table at home. The route to my mother’s piano lessons took her past Rittenhouse Square, where it was hard to miss my father’s dark green 1974 Chevy Nova parked in front of Margaret’s building.
From the diaries, I learn that he shuttled dutifully between the house on Ardrossan, the apartment in Philadelphia, and the museum. He’d wake up in one household and spend the night in the other. He’d eat lunch on Saturday in the kitchen with my mother, say he was going to the museum, spend the afternoon with Margaret, stop in his office, then head home for dinner. One Christmas Day, when Hopie and Elliot and I had all gathered, he slipped away after the ritual exchange of presents saying he needed to replace a tire, drove into Philadelphia, spent a half hour with Margaret, and drove back out to the Main Line in time to roast a leg of lamb for all of us for dinner.
Not every transition, it appears, was seamless. Recriminations erupted on either end. Sometimes, he awoke in a state of dread.
At the museum, there were financial tensions and a perpetual need to raise money. There were struggles with the city, nearly broke, over funding. The mayor might unexpectedly announce a plan to eliminate all one hundred forty-three city-funded museum positions. There were strikes of city workers. Along with other members of the management team, my father spent a night at the museum as a substitute security guard, dozing on his office floor. Then there were all those galas and benefits and out-of-town trips to cultivate donors. There were museum conferences, groundbreakings, dedications, award ceremonies, speeches, and meetings of bank boards and foundation boards and committees and who knows what else. In light of his demanding domestic arrangements, I marvel at how well he carried off his public life.
Not surprisingly, all of this appears to have taken a physical toll. Psoriasis is not generally improved by alcohol and stress. Now he came down with hives, too, as well as an alarming condition called esophageal spasm, which caused bouts of uncontrollable gagging. It tended to come over him just as we were sitting down to a holiday meal he’d spent the day preparing. My mother would rush him to the emergency room, leaving the rest of us, and some aunts and uncles and cousins, to carry festively on. They’d return several hours later after the table had been cleared, my father pale, clutching a handkerchief, and visibly drained.
Nine months before our intervention, I discover from the journals, the glamorous family friend executed a private one of her own. She invited my father to a picnic lunch on a grassy slope beside the museum and informed him kindly that his behavior at a recent dinner had been a disgrace. She presented him with material on treatment programs and urged him to enlist before he did himself in. “Don’t break my heart again,” she said. In his account of the episode, which was detailed and factual, he wrote that he’d listened “much saddened, knowing, of course, that there was so much in what she said.” Nevertheless, he “recognized that I was not ready to commit myself.” Only he could make that decision, he assured himself. Then he thanked his old friend warmly, returned to his office, telephoned Margaret, and reported what had gone down. “She was as upset and disagreed,” he writes. “I was upset and didn’t disagree.”
The diary contains no account of our intervention or the month in rehab. I found only a few McLean handouts, some weekly “therapeutic contract updates,” and an “aftercare plan,” including an ominous statement of his intention to return to “the life I have previously lived.” In light of what would follow, I’m struck by how, upon returning to that life, he struggled to rema
in sober and shore up his resolve. Several weeks after returning home, he took out a sheet of loose-leaf paper. “This is an exercise,” he wrote. Since leaving McLean, he’d come to think that his drinking hadn’t been, after all, as bad as it had been painted. Wine-drinking friends, as he called them, had told him they had no idea it had been a problem. Margaret had said the condemnation of his behavior had been cruelly overdone. (In my father’s file at McLean, I’d find a passing reference to the patient’s “mistress,” as the hospital called her: “She’s never seen patient drunk.”) Evidently torn, my father wrote, “This list is designed to remind me of why I reached the decision I have and why I must stick to it.” He then set about listing the reasons he’d believed his drinking was a growing danger.
My father’s list included admissions I’d heard during the visit to McLean—that he’d been drunk every night for forty years; the forgotten dinners and nights, the after-dinner speeches he’d drunkenly delivered; the three liters of wine consumed daily; the urge to drink in the morning; the perpetual lining up of the supply in advance, certain that no quantity was ever enough; the knowledge that he should not have been driving at night; the effects on his blood pressure, memory, complexion, weight. But there was more—especially painful to read. He’d gone to church, year after year, “asking for help with the drink, and then forgetting the request.” He’d suffered from an “almost chemical longing.” He wrote of his “withdrawal into myself when drinking or looking for it,” and an “estrangement from others, except at work or when drinking”—though the purpose of the drinking wasn’t camaraderie, it was “taking care of a need.” There was a question, too, about the effect of his drinking on my mother: “Why continue to make Gay’s life so miserable with the drink and give her the cause to be so?”