Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  “Of course, merci, Madame.”

  Monsieur, who liked to be referred to as the Honorable William A. M. Burden II, but whom everybody called Bill, and his wife called Popsie, had risen much earlier and breakfasted, as always, on scrambled eggs with truffles. And he had already worked out the next two weeks of meals with the chef before departing for work.

  Angelle, the lady’s maid, presented herself as the chef departed. She was a sweet, dimwitted soul who was married to Adolphe, the butler. Informed as to Madame’s choice of the day’s wardrobe—morning, afternoon, and evening—Angelle bustled away to select, press, steam, and polish.

  Finally, the gaunt Swiss housekeeper entered.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Burden,” said Ann Rose in a voice that sounded like she was introducing Tales from the Crypt. She consulted the schedule she had typed out in quadruplicate. “You have a fitting for the Givenchy ball gown in half an hour, and then your usual hair appointment at the Sherry-Netherland. Lunch is at Grenouille with the directors’ wives. The car will then take you to Bergdorf’s to look for a pocketbook and shoes for the two new Mainbocher suits you ordered. You have an appointment back here with the decorator to replace the carpet in the Hobe Sound pool house; then tea with the head of the co-op committee to discuss updating the doormen’s uniforms; then cocktails at the Modern; and then back home for dinner with your guests.”

  “Right-o,” said my grandmother cheerfully, as she penciled in 28 Down in the Times crossword. Like my mother, my grandmother had her own funny roster of words and expressions, and anyone else saying them would have sounded mental. She said things like isn’t she cunning for isn’t she cute, or jazzy and snappy for good-looking. If you were having a good time, you were gay. My brother and I called her Gaga because that’s the name she herself came up with when Will was born, not knowing that before long it would prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  My brothers and I spent at least two weekends a month with our grandparents, something that had been instigated, at their demand, after our father died. During the school year most weekends were spent in New York, sometimes at their country estate forty minutes away in Mount Kisco, but usually in the city, at their apartment on Sixty-third Street and Fifth Avenue. My grandmother especially lingered in bed on Sunday mornings, and when I was really small, I would fetch a picture book from the hallway shelves and climb in with her. I’d wedge myself between her warm quilted side and the bumpy spines of the poodles, the frills of her bed jacket tickling my cheek as she brought Babar or Norman the Doorman to life in her funny old-fashioned accent. Every New Yorker has a version of the city that they love best, and that remains mine—when it was all about going to FAO Schwarz and the zoo, and looking in the windows at Tiffany’s; and the smell of my grandmother’s Chanel No. 5, and the sun filtering through long Belgian linen curtains while we read books and the sea of yellow checker cabs honked pleasantly below.

  My grandfather was a busy man. In addition to heading up the family venture capital company that bore his name, he was an expert aviation consultant to the government, a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, and on the boards of a dozen relevant companies. He was a thoroughly modern man: he collected modern art, he lived in a modern apartment, he weekended and summered in modern houses, and, to his profound satisfaction, he was president of the Museum of Modern Art.

  Accordingly, my grandparents’ apartment looked as if it had been professionally decorated by Dr. Seuss. Against the starkness of the huge rooms, long stripped of their prewar moldings and parquet, the walls bone white and the floors alabaster, art provided animation. Calder mobiles spun from the ceilings. Naked African sculptures posed in corners next to fluid marbles by Arp. What seemed like acres of wall space were hung with abstracts by Klee, Kline, Mondrian, and Miró; and figurative works by Léger, Bacon, Picasso, Matisse, and Seurat. A monolithic Brancusi bronze loomed over a black thirty-foot pond set into the pale marble concourse that ran the length of the apartment. A school of anemic goldfish lapped the pond’s three-inch depths, regularly driven to suicide by the absence of plastic pirate treasure and aqua-colored gravel.

  I sort of liked the place. That is, until I discovered Charles Addams.

  On this particular spring morning my grandmother was still recumbent. She was reading aloud to her late son’s final contribution to the world: my baby brother. At a year old, Edward was happy for anyone’s attention.

  I was sulking, having been publicly rebuked at dinner the previous evening for divulging my plans to pursue a career in mortuary science. I was seated Indian style in the long book-lined hallway that led from my grandparents’ suite to the back staircase. Dear Dead Days, an Addams compendium of deliciously macabre photographs, lay open across my knees. I count the Addams Family books among the most influential literary and philosophical forces in my life. For one thing, they were an early admission to the intellect of the adult world without having to read more than a sentence or two per page, the most demanding words being blunt instrument or cyanide, and the sentences rarely more complex than “Careful of poison ivy, Lois.” Plus, they made death seem like fun. I’d fortuitously come upon the Addams due to erratic cataloging, Nightcrawlers having been reshelved next to my favorite gross-out book, Life’s Epic of Man.

  I scooted over to look up embalming in the encyclopedia.

  The embalmer washes the body with germicidal soap and replaces the blood with embalming fluid. I snapped the volume shut as I heard someone creep up behind me. It was only Selma. She was about a hundred years old, and it was all she could do to squeeze the orange juice in the morning and exchange the plates on the dining table at lunch and dinner (replacing the cold service plate with a hot soup plate, replacing that with a hot dinner plate, replacing that with a dessert plate and finger bowl, then removing the used finger bowl, then the dessert plate and finally setting down the coffee cup and saucer). Selma could have witnessed me carving up my two brothers for all I cared; her sanity had been seriously in question ever since she’d seen the Virgin Mary outlined in potatoes and carrots. “Right there in me own stew she was, plain as the nose on your face, bless us and save us!”

  Selma proceeded on her way, and I bent back to the book.

  Embalmers may reshape and reconstruct disfigured or maimed bodies using materials such as clay, cotton, plaster of Paris, and wax. Wow. Talk about arts and crafts.

  I had been in this morbid phase for about six months now, though I’m not sure anyone had noticed. On weekends, when I didn’t have to wear a school uniform, I dressed in black button-down cardigans and did my hair in two braids like my soul sister, Wednesday Addams. Gone were the leaping horses I used to doodle on everything; now I drew little memento mori: skulls on the telephone pad, scythes in my school notebooks, dark ravens across my grandfather’s Wall Street Journal and Economic Review. On Santa’s knee at Macy’s I had requested an embalming table, a pony, and a subscription to American Cemetery.

  To reiterate, last night’s dinner had not gone well. My brother Will and I were not usually allowed to eat with the grown-ups, but an exception had been made because a godparent was there. Between the potage St. Germain and the pigeonneau à la diable, there was a lull in the conversation. Personally, I can’t stand a quiet dinner table. “Hey, did you know,” I addressed the elderly dyspeptic on my left, “that up to five hundred different kinds of plankton can be found in the juice that comes out of drowned people’s lungs?” (I had an emerging talent for regurgitating text.)

  “Do have some more of the chicken, dearie,” my grandmother quickly said. “You’re wasting away!”

  “No thank you,” I said. Show me an eight-year-old who likes pigeon.

  The godfather directed his attention to my brother. “Young William,” he called to him across the chrysanthemums and candles and Steuben glass animals crowding the table, “I’ll wager you want to become a financier like your grandfather when you grow up, eh?” My brother stared at him for a moment and then resumed pickin
g at his dinner roll, body language that cued my grandmother to slide her jeweled evening slipper out to the buzzer concealed beneath the table. This she stomped on for a good five seconds. DRINNGG! The electrical jangling pingponged around the dining room, ricocheting off an abstract sculpture of a naked lady and onto a cubist portrait of someone’s three-eyed mistress before skittering aurally across the long, dark green marble table.

  “Well I’m considering a career in mortuary science,” I confided to Will’s godfather. His dewlaps shuddered in disgust.

  “With an emphasis on restorative art,” I added.

  DRINNGGG!! went the buzzer again. Adolphe burst through the door, with Selma and the equally rheumatic Anna trailing in his wake. My grandmother started, surprised (albeit pleasantly) by the appearance of her staff. She believed the communication between dining room and pantry to be telepathic.

  I switched to the dowager on my right. “When I’m in junior high, which I know is not for five years, I can get in on the ground floor with a summer job waxing the hearses and—”

  “That’s enough!” my grandfather shouted.

  I’d then been excused, and glad of it.

  The book my grandmother was reading to my brother was Ludwig Bemelmans’s Fifi. Less popular than Madeline (and infinitely more entertaining), it’s a mildly racist tale of a naughty poodle, told in rhyme and child-scary pictures. Lady Fimple Fample is a stout, no-nonsense English woman of middle age who is on her way to visit the dentist in Zanzibar. Fifi, her slathering, beribboned white poodle, escapes to chase a cat (meaning leopard) when the plane stops to refuel. The formidable Lady Fimple Fample sets out to rescue her dog, navigating the jungle in sensible tweeds and long pointy-toed brogues, whacking at the dense undergrowth with her walking stick. The natives who plan to boil up Fifi for supper are scantily clad, with bones in their noses and hair. The women have the apple-breasted figures of supermodels, though genetic mutation has left them without nipples; and they are clearly devious.

  When my grandmother had first read me the book, I’d been concerned that Fifi was entering the stockpot without adequate preparation.

  “How come the natives they don’t skin her? I mean, what about all that dog hair?” I had asked. But my grandmother had only farted—brfffttt! That was as verbal as she got when she chose to pass something by. (My grandmother was enormously flatulent. I know older people tend to be gassy, but she topped the charts. She blasted her way in and out of rooms, down hallways, getting up from or into an armchair, and when she laughed. You would hear a brrffft brrffft brrffft with each step she took. Or a rhythmic squeak. Sometimes, it went ah-hrrrt ah-hrrrt ah-hrrrt in a trumpet toot, especially at night.)

  I sat on the edge of the pink George Jetson chair at my grandmother’s makeup station and stared at my face in the big tabletop mirror as my grandmother pointed out the pictures to Edward. The face that stared back bore the kind of icky pinky flush that goes with red hair. Way too healthy for an Addams. I searched around for something to tone it down to a sickly pallor, sorting through the feminine paraphernalia that took up about six linear feet of the long desk running beneath the windows. My rummaging shook the forest of spiraling jewelry trees grouped around the mirror; the pairs of earrings perched on the coils like garish songbirds of the genuses Schlumberger, Verdura, and (the common) Ciro, and I paused to rearrange them in order according to species, size, and color.

  After she dressed, my grandmother sat down before this mirror each morning to apply foundation, darken her brows, put on lipstick (Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow), and smudge rouge into her cheeks. She’d untangle a fresh hairnet from a tissue envelope and stretch it carefully over her Clairol Ash Blonde hairdo, humming while she worked. (She hummed as much as she farted.) Then she’d select a pair of ear clips, a necklace—always pearls—and one of the heavy gold-and-enamel bracelets that were stacked on a little velvet pole. A suitable wristwatch and gloves completed the toilette. Thus armed and adorned, her grit enriched with a prophylactic nip or two, my grandmother would stride forth into the concrete jungle to negotiate the Avenues, or the chatter and howl of charity luncheons, or the exotic labyrinth of ground-floor shopping at Bergdorf’s.

  “Gaga,” I said, twisting around to face the bed, “don’t you think Granddaddy was a lit-tle hard on me last night?” A small frown creased my grandmother’s brow as she tried to remember what had happened between the hours of six and ten. The children had been at dinner, yes. Popsie had led an erudite discussion, as usual. Dessert had been . . . had been . . . oh, yes—a marvelous coeur à la crème! “I don’t think so, dearie,” she said to me with a smile, and resumed reading to Edward, who was now sucking noisily on a poodle ear (and would, within the hour, require two stitches).

  “Gaga,” I interrupted again, “do you plan to be embalmed with herbs and spices like they used in the olden days, or good old formaldehyde?”

  My grandmother responded with a boouuffft. Words like embalm or suicide found no harbor in her little gray cells. This could have been a by-product of her faith; her father, the celebrated sculptor, and mother, esoteric poetess, had raised their only child to be a Christian Scientist. My grandmother claimed a firm belief in the human spirit’s ability to assuage the body’s physical ills, though you would never have guessed this from the Valley of the Dolls hoard of sedatives and amphetamines in her medicine cabinet.

  As the vacuous Fifi chased after a kitty that grew in size and spots, I rifled idly through the wide birch drawers beneath my grandmother’s desk. Most of them contained seemingly random overstock: dozens of detachable Turnbull and Asser collars, all with embroidered initials and dates, boxed up, brand-new Tag Heuer stopwatches, and piles of foreign stamps on envelope corners awaiting cuttelage and placement in my grandmother’s stamp collection. There were rolls of penny stamps, sealed boxes of 14k gold Cross pens, and a prodigious assortment of magnifying glasses. In one drawer there must have been forty years’ worth of prescription eyeglasses that had never been worn. In another, enough cellophane-wrapped packages of Bicycle playing cards to supply all the summer camps along the Eastern Seaboard. Tucked beneath them were at least twenty unworn full-length kidskin gloves for white-tie dinners, and a holiday collection of miniature sweaters and booties for the poodles. There were newspaper clippings and spent diaries, an assortment of Bibles—leather, paper, vinyl, miniature, micro, large print, French, Italian, illustrated, and Braille—and wondrously fanatical pamphlets that warned of disasters and afflictions, ranging from the Apocalypse and masturbation to anti-Darwinism.

  The drawers on either side of my grandparents’ bed were reserved for their sleeping masks. To facilitate the after-lunch snooze, and to conk out at night, both had to be in a blackout void. Seconal helped, as did curtain liners the weight and density of X-ray-shielding lead aprons, but the masks were crucial. They were little pillowy things shaped like welding goggles; basic black, red plaid for the country, and cobalt blue faux Chinese brocade for festive occasions.

  (One night my brother and I stole into our grandparents’ bedroom because we wanted to see what people looked like when they snored. We just about died laughing because they looked like a couple of sleeping bandits.)

  From time to time the family photos displayed along the desk were refreshed, and on this particular day there were some new additions. There was my brother on his goddamn pony. I removed it from the silver frame and slipped the photograph down my waistband to be mutilated at a more opportune time. And my uncle Ordway in a police car, not sitting in the back like any self-respecting undergraduate would have been in 1964, but in the driver’s seat. Who the hell would go to Harvard and join the campus riot police?

  I put down the Max Factor pancake I was applying to get a closer look at a new color enlargement. My grandmother posed amid a flock of stony African natives, towering over them, a statuesque blue-eyed ageing beauty in a chic dove-colored suit and workaday double-stranded natural pearls. The striped feathers of waving headdresses barely reached
her square chin. The men had tough matte-skinned faces of a color so black it was navy. Their broad noses had flared nostrils, and there were raised, tattooed scars across their sharp cheekbones. The man on my grandmother’s left, presumably the chief, was wearing a sort of bonnet made from dark fur trimmed with a border of white cowrie shells. He held a red beaded spear close to his bare chest. My grandmother held her crocodile pocketbook close to hers. In contrast to the men’s unease, she was smiling away, a smudge of lipstick on her front teeth, like she’d just spent quality time at Bonwit Teller. You could practically smell the Dubonnet on her breath.

  “Unrgdfoo!” said Edward.

  “Aarrrrrr,” snarled the poodle with the wet ear, and it plopped down off the bed to go urinate in a corner of the pink-carpeted bathroom.

  My grandmother had come to my favorite part. Fifi was about to be boiled alive by the natives. As Lady Fimple Fample handed over a few nose bones she kept in her pocketbook expressly for such rescues, I asked about the photograph.

  “Oh, well that, dearie,” she said, removing an eye mask that had somehow fallen onto her head, “that was when Popsie and I were in the Congo.”

  I found that pretty exotic, and told her so.

  “Not as exotic as the worms they found in Daddy’s tummy when we returned home,” she said, laying the book aside and settling back on the enormous floral pillows. “That picture was taken the day I met the king of the Bakubas.”

  I prostrated myself beside her on the bed. “Sounds like the king of the elephants,” I said, because there was Babar, wearing his kelly green suit, on the cover of a book Edward was gnawing on.

  “The jungle was marvelous, but Jiminy Cricket—the transportation!”

  My grandmother, not exactly a North to the Orient kind of girl, was routinely tested just riding in a taxi from East Sixty-third Street to the Met. She was a modern woman only when it came to self-medication—in that field she was a pioneer. Nearly every form of surface travel worried her, although she quite liked first-class Pullman sleeper cars and five-star corner cabins on the Cunard line. When the mood for adventure struck, she took gentle drives in the country (disregarding all road signs) in her ultramarine Studebaker. She found plenty of excitement just window-shopping along Madison Avenue with her skittering animals attached to leashes the weight of fishing line. If you’d seen her, humming and farting and smiling at everybody along her way, you’d have thought she had the IQ of a pull toy.