by Janny Scott
I thought of the vow that his grandfather, the elder Edgar, had made to himself—to prove himself worthy. I thought of his pledge to be energetic, responsible, faithful, useful. My father’s list reminded me of the resolutions his grandfather had put in writing eight months before shooting himself in the head.
* * *
—
For months following McLean, my father attended AA meetings daily or twice daily. He went from church to church, apparently never comfortable in any particular meeting. He kept a running total, in his diary, of meetings logged. He dropped fifteen pounds, felt his memory recovering. His doctor declared him “an improved specimen.” He began staying up late reading; he found himself able for the first time to write in his diary every night before bed. His entries became longer, more detailed, often focused on the challenges of sobriety. He got through Elliot’s wedding “a little sad that inebriation was no longer a way out.” At my own, three months later, he was “uneasy in my drinkless situation (though not badly so).” Longing for a drink at a friend’s surprise birthday party, it occurred to him that if he had one glass of wine, he’d ending up drinking three bottles. Finally, a full day came and went with “no desire to drink, no resentments, almost normal. My mind and spirit seemed free for a day of all the chains and lacerations of the week before.”
He adds, “I wish it would last.”
As months passed, he rethought the intervention. He began to feel it had been done less out of consideration for him than out of anger and a sense of grievance. Margaret called it “your abduction.” Soon, he would be calling it “a form of battery.” He began to think his drinking had become a scapegoat for other problems in his marriage. He terminated his weekly sessions with the psychiatrist recommended by the social workers at McLean. He began reading a book that made the case that alcoholism was strictly a hereditary biochemical disorder, to be treated medically, and not a product of personality defects. AA, the book argued, mistook the psychological effects of alcoholism for causes. As months passed, my father’s attendance at AA meetings waned. Seven months out, the better part of a week passed without his attending a meeting. Two weeks later, I find, he writes tersely at the end of a short diary entry, “I had some sherry before dinner. Not a good idea.”
Sobriety had done little to resolve the tensions in his domestic life. He took to ruminating about his marriage. He noted that the urge to drink vodka was strongest when he was writing, in his diary, about his wedding anniversary. He elaborated arguments for staying and leaving. Margaret had moved to New England by then, but she and my father remained in close contact. He decided to stay in his marriage “for the time being”—out of respect, he said, for their forty-one years together, the shared life, the houses, the children, and what the psychiatrist had called their “long investment.” He was feeling better, knew he looked better, enjoyed being thinner. He was more energetic, and his memory was working well. He liked having more time in the day. But the most powerful disincentive to returning to drinking was the knowledge that he’d have to give it up again. He couldn’t bear the thought of returning to McLean.
Bent over the diaries on the dining-room table, I watch him teeter on the brink of relapse. “I sneaked some vodka,” he writes a month after the regretted sherry. “A senseless and unsatisfactory thing to do.” A week later, more vodka. “Shame!” His crowded evening calendar, he observes, isn’t ideal for a recovering alcoholic. He returns to AA. He argues with my mother. More vodka—“eased the pain but didn’t help.” In his eleventh month of sobriety, he’s overpowered by “the urge to be full of wine.” He repairs to the hammock in “a happy, sleepy daze.” He attends AA meetings on six consecutive days. Then vodka, rum, gin. In Nantucket with Margaret, he blacks out. He pencils marginalia into his diary: Vodka. Dry. Vodka. Vodka. Dry. On his first anniversary, I find, I telephoned to wish him well. Why celebrate? he asks himself. “Because I haven’t really ‘picked up’ and I remain committed to not drinking,” he writes reassuringly. “At least I have widely avoided the pattern of regular drinking.” Looking back, I calculate that he lasted eight months before beginning his descent into relapse.
My parents’ household survived another twenty months. Then, in the throes of one last argument not long before Thanksgiving, my father walked out the back door and into the blackness of that night. From a room in a hotel in Rittenhouse Square, where he’d pitched camp, he ceded the house to my mother. He arranged to relocate to what had been his mother’s nursery in the big house. In the lead-up to moving day, an ice storm encased the city and the suburbs in ice. Branches, sheathed in shimmering glass, snapped from trees. There was a forty-car collision on a bridge over the Schuylkill River. Holed up in his hotel room and unable to reach the museum, he ventured out only for dinner. Encountering a friend, he said he was too depressed to join him. Later that month, as he was stepping into the hotel lobby in white tie and tails, the tendon connecting his thigh muscles to his kneecap snapped, producing a popping sound so loud that the doorman shuddered to attention. Upstairs, as the muscle contracted into a fist, he took a tablet of Alka-Seltzer. After a surgeon repaired the tendon and reattached the muscle, my father would still be recovering six months later—though he got some mileage out of the story.
On moving day, my mother left the house early, by prior arrangement. My father arrived at nine, packed a few belongings, and waited for the movers. An age seemed to creep by. Then their work went slowly—a process he’d later say he found infinitely depressing. While he waited, he thought back on the day he’d moved in. My mother had been away then, too; her father had been ill. Now they’d lived there together for forty years. Maybe he’d anticipated the possibility that his marriage might end, but I doubt he’d thought of himself leaving and my mother staying. His presence would remain imprinted in every room of the house. While he sat there numbly in the muffled silence, the movers went about their business. They emptied his dressing room of every piece of furniture—the twin bed, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, a bedside table, the wing chair where I’d idled in my school uniform while he dressed for work. From the library downstairs, the movers took only his grandfather’s antique cylinder desk, a desk chair upholstered in green leather, and the lamp that had always sat on the galleried marble top of the desk. Other than those few items, my father left behind nearly everything else—furniture, rugs, paintings, photographs, records, CDs, books, cookware, glassware—as it had always been.
A mile away, the movers arrived in the driveway at the big house. They hauled the furniture and boxes into the broad transverse hallway; up the winding, carpeted front stairs; across the second-floor corridor; and on up the second staircase to the empty apartment on the third floor. By the end of the day, the dressing-room furniture had been rearranged in what would be my father’s bedroom, which he pronounced presentable. The rest of the rooms, by contrast, looked barren. “It also felt very strange and lonely,” he wrote. He left and drove to his parents’ house. It was his father’s ninety-fifth birthday. Helen Hope had organized a small celebration. My father found his father looking unwell. There was an awkward exchange with my mother. When the celebration was over, my father drove back to the hotel in Philadelphia—grateful for dinner alone, away from what he called “the horrors and dreariness of the day.”
A week or two later, I stopped by to visit.
“Thank you for coming to visit me in my Ardrossan rooms,” he wrote to me afterward. “You looked mildly skeptical as to the possibilities of their being comfortably attractive but I remain hopeful. It will however take a bit of doing.”
The house my father left behind
Chapter Nine
The halcyon years of the big house were long past by the time my father dropped anchor in the nursery. His grandfather had been dead nearly fifty years. A quarter century had elapsed since his grandmother, Muz, snowy-haired and frail, had last greeted visitors in the living room at teatime. In the ballroom, a pothole
had opened up in the Aubusson carpet. Mothballs, like tiny golf balls, lay scattered across rugs. Damask dangled from the library walls. Shades, yellowed to the color of parchment, were perpetually drawn. On humid afternoons in August, when the sky darkened and thunderstorms rumbled across the fields, rain water burst out of cracked copper downspouts and cascaded down the brick face of the house. Seeping into the masonry, it blistered the plaster in the old playroom on the third floor. Even the immense lawn stretching south from the terrace looked diminished in those days: Brambles, briars, and fallen branches were encroaching on either side. In a small rental apartment over the kitchen, the humming of bees, nesting between the walls, was so loud it was keeping a pair of tenants up at night.
It had never been easy keeping the big house inhabited. As far back as 1970, the death of Muz had left it flush with servants with no one to serve. In pursuit of a replacement, Helen Hope had suggested my parents move into the second floor, and share the ground floor with her and Edgar, for entertaining. After my mother demurred, the family rousted my father’s aunt from her South Carolina redoubt. Charlotte Ives traveled north with a mynah bird, a pair of whippets, a Great Dane, and a cat, in a jeweled collar, named Kitty Miss. They moved into the nursery, which Charlotte Ives remembered fondly from childhood. The second floor, left dormant, was dusted once a month. Even in a wheelchair and reliant upon round-the-clock nursing, Auntie Ives was a sociable soul. In late afternoon, a half dozen regulars would drop in for cocktails. Tea sandwiches and other delicacies arrived in the living room on a three-tiered tray. One niece, back from Europe and savoring what appeared to be a cookie, was brought up short when her aunt turned to her and inquired, eyes twinkling, “Do you like dog biscuits?”
When Charlotte Ives died, Helen Hope talked her eldest grandchild, my cousin Mary, into filling the vacancy. They’d been close since Mary was young. Growing up on her parents’ farm near Delaware, Mary had looked forward to nights spent with her grandmother (whom her mother had bolted the reservation to escape). With her then husband, Mary moved into the second floor of the big house. Helen Hope introduced her to the operations of the dairy. At milking time, they’d meet outside the milk house to eyeball each cow as it sashayed past on its way to its assigned stanchion. Circumambulating cow pies in her red Belgian loafers, Helen Hope would bring refreshments for the men. Later, Mary would become a breeder and trainer of prizewinning bull terriers. She’d also operate a canine obedience school out of the big-house basement and keep a kennel of her own on the edge of the lawn. Upstairs in her apartment, bull terriers lounged on sheepskin-draped sofas. For her pet pig, there was a sty accessorized with a fine mud hole. The pig had the run of the place. Once, as he sauntered past on the front lawn, my father, who by then had moved into the third floor of the house, remarked drily to Mary, “He has such a great ass.” He suggested Mary name the pig after a British friend, Sir Reresby Sitwell. Mary appended the first name.
The dairy herd was nearly three hundred strong in the last decades of the twentieth century. A half dozen farm families still lived and worked on Ardrossan, sending succeeding generations off to college and graduate school, sometimes subsidized by Helen Hope. Cathie Moran, born in Ireland, had been hired in her early twenties as a live-in maid for Charlotte Ives. Ardrossan reminded Cathie of Ireland: Anyone who owned land in Ireland paid their taxes, took care of their houses, and was otherwise broke. The Montgomerys, she figured, must be the same. Yet, in the big house, there were six people waiting on Miss Ives. In the house where Cathie’s sister worked for my father’s uncle Aleck, the employee-to-employer ratio was two to one. There were three maintenance men on Ardrossan, too. Cathie, who also worked the night shift at a nearby nursing home, called the maintenance men the Three Stooges: They arrived in three cars, drove to the hardware store in three cars, and returned to the house in three cars—all to repair a running toilet. “I can remember saying, ‘This is the craziest place,’” she told me years later. “Because there were so many people doing nothing. They kept a culture alive when it should have been dead and gone.”
My father’s initial intention, it seemed, was to carve out a serviceable apartment on the third floor. A few rooms in the old nursery had been rented out before as an unprepossessing flat. There were other rooms up there, too, some filled with furniture, cast-off bathroom fixtures, and heaps of papers (including a collection of pocket-size notebooks in which Uncle Aleck had alphabetized cocktail recipes, one per page). My father took the flat and annexed most of the other rooms. He had floors refinished, casement windows milled, new doorways cut, closets lined with cedar. He had the master bathroom repiped in copper, and he installed recessed stereo speakers. Eventually, his well-appointed quarters comprised a broad front hall, a kitchen, a dining room wallpapered in deep red, a book-lined study, an informal sitting room with a fireplace, a master bedroom suite, a two-bedroom guest suite, and an enormous living room he continued to call the playroom, in deference to its origins. He had the playroom walls papered in midnight blue studded with a thousand gold stars—a decorating choice inspired by a room he’d once admired in a palace in St. Petersburg.
To restore the roof, which had been leaking for decades, he hired a carpenter self-schooled in the mysteries of slate roofs. Unimpressed by the handiwork of professional roofers, the carpenter had taught himself how to surgically replace the rotting copper linings in the valleys where the planes of a roof converge. He spent nine months up on the big-house roof, sixty feet off the ground. He custom-ordered replacement tiles from a Vermont quarry. He repointed chimney flashings, replaced downspouts, reroofed each dormer, rebuilt gutters where birds’ nests had once frozen, cracking the copper. The repairs cost more than the original construction of the entire house, my father liked to say. But he didn’t seem to mind. “The house thanks you,” he’d say cheerfully to the carpenter whenever they met. “And I thank you.”
He’d been in the apartment a year when his mother quite unexpectedly died. Despite two artificial hips, the champagne-cork injury to one eye, and other greater and lesser misfortunes, Helen Hope had appeared, at ninety, to be striding briskly toward her centennial. Seven days a week, she was up early, downing a soft-boiled egg and instant coffee at the kitchen table. She was on the phone with the herd manager at 8:30 A.M., the horse-show chairman at 9:15. She was behind the wheel of her Jeep Wagoneer by 10:00, home for lunch, at the dairy in the afternoon, then back home to dress for dinner after exercising her dog. Once a week, she still made a point of going out to dinner with friends, even after my grandfather was no longer able. Once a month, she gave dinner parties at home. “If I don’t see my friends, they’ll forget me,” she explained to her young property manager, who thought that seemed unlikely. Eighteen months before her death, three hundred people showed up to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of her marriage to Edgar. Her ninetieth birthday party was a black-tie gala that raised ninety thousand dollars for the Bryn Mawr Hospital, her favorite cause. The weekend of the fall that killed her, she’d been at the dairy, communing with the cows. She told the property manager he needn’t return to bring her donkeys in from the field late Sunday. She’d do it herself.
It was Cathie Moran who found her. Many years earlier, she’d heard Helen Hope complaining, in her brother’s kitchen, about an unsatisfactory haircut. Cathie, who’d volunteered to fix it, had ended up cutting Helen Hope’s hair for twenty years. During the busy ten days of the Devon Horse Show, Helen Hope would bring scissors and meet Cathie in the turf club bathroom for a trim. When Cathie became engaged, Helen Hope and Edgar hosted a party at their house for Cathie and her future husband. “Everything Hope said was surprising,” Cathie said to me. “She’d have you on the floor laughing.” On that balmy Sunday afternoon in January, Cathie had dropped by to do the monthly haircut, which she always did as a favor, for free, even when she no longer worked on Ardrossan. Outside on the driveway, she heard a voice calling for help. Helen Hope was on the ground, unable to get up. Ca
thie, who’d been trained as a nurse, noticed a swelling on the back of her head. “I said, ‘You’re going straight to the hospital,’” she told me years later. “She said, ‘No, I’m not. I have people coming over for a drink.’” Helen Hope refused to accept any help getting up off the ground until Cathie had found the two donkeys Helen Hope had been leading back to the stable when she’d fallen. Back inside, she insisted Cathie cut her hair, as planned. Two more times, she refused to be taken to the hospital. She even forbade Cathie from alerting my father. “She was very, very strong,” Cathie told me. “She knew what she wanted and how she wanted things done.”
My father was one of the people his mother was expecting that evening. He stopped by regularly, checking in, bringing news, regaling her and his father with stories. If there were complicated feelings left over from the wintry period of his childhood, he’d sealed them up, decades earlier, in some impenetrable interior vault. It was clear to everyone that he adored his parents, and that the feeling was mutual. Arriving at their house that evening, he found his father in his chair in the living room, his mother not yet downstairs. Upstairs, he found her on the bathroom floor, barely conscious. Her last conscious act, he’d say later, was to reach for his hand and pull it to her lips. She was airlifted that evening to a hospital in Philadelphia, where she died the following day. Death by donkey, everyone seemed to think, had its merits: She’d gone quickly, doing what she loved. Her obituary on the front page of the Inquirer dwarfed the lead story, which was on the Russian leveling of the capital of Chechnya.