Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  Because I loved Christmas so much, despite the constant disappointment of it, I almost always concluded a session in Ann Rose’s office with a life-affirming check on the three file cabinets devoted to the seductive paraphernalia of the holidays: the wrapping paper and cards and ribbon and tags and tissue-enclosed stockings.

  A kid who can talk herself into believing the Addams Family was inspired by reality can extend faith in the existence of Santa Claus almost indefinitely. Okay, maybe I didn’t actually believe in Santa Claus—I mean I wasn’t stupid enough to think an enormously fat man was going to squeeze down that skinny Philip Johnson fireplace in the living room bearing presents the size of footlockers—but I believed in the eternal optimism and idealism of Christmas, and in the theoretical six degrees of separation as it applied to all grown-ups and Santa Claus.

  The first week of December, Ann Rose arranged for the doormen to bring up the world’s tallest artificial tree from the basement, along with an even taller ladder, and the butler set about decorating it. (That a couple owning two hundred and fifty acres littered with real Christmas trees would deck the halls with a fake one remains a mystery.) She called the gardener in Mount Kisco and told him the exact number of paper whites needed for the mantels and coffee tables, and he brought in a few hundred, and enough scarlet poinsettias to line the front hall and fill the pair of six-foot-wide circular planters in the living room.

  I would tune the McIntosh stereo to WQXR and position myself in one of the living room windows that overlooked Fifth Avenue. With choral music and carols enfolding me, I’d drop the Addams Family act and think about angels and the baby Jesus and stare out, my forehead against the icy glass, at the darkened park, marveling at how the skaters on Wollman Rink made it look like a star exploding in the galaxy.

  The Christmas right after Kennedy was killed, Will and I went to our grandparents in New York as usual. Edward came too, and so did Henrietta, and Obadiah the basset hound. My mother even flew up with us and stayed for a tense twenty-four hours before taking off for the Bahamas. Needless to say, my mother snubbed the help. Since they were my chosen family, I compensated by practically making their beds for them when she was around. I’d squeeze the orange juice and carry the breakfast dishes from the table to the pantry for Anna, and I’d walk the poodles for Selma, which the poodles hated because I hated them.

  It was considered perfectly safe at that time for children to prowl around the city either by themselves or in the company of toy poodles—and that’s what I was doing when I caught sight of Ann Rose scurrying across Fifty-seventh Street with an armful of shopping bags, bobbing her way toward Tiffany’s. Something perverse told me to follow her, and so I ducked into the revolving door, nearly decapitating the dogs, and lingered by the men’s watches while she waited for the special elevator in the corner that went to the Schlumberger department on the second floor. She reappeared ten minutes later with a small Tiffany blue shopping bag and then scuttled out the front door and veered left into Bonwit Teller. After purchasing several pairs of gloves, a couple of wallets, and an ugly costume jewelry necklace, she fought her way to the back of the store and into one of the elevators. I had no trouble staying out of sight because the place was crammed with shoppers, but I was clueless as to what floor she was headed to, though by this point I shouldn’t have been. I took the next elevator, but almost threw up between Ladies’ Sportswear and Ladies’ Lingerie because the white-gloved black lady operating it was throwing the lever so hard she was making the thing bounce up and down like a yo-yo. I got out and dragged the poodles down the stairs, and we waited for Ann Rose behind the Max Factor counter on the ground floor.

  When she reemerged, she had a couple of long dress boxes under her arms. I could tell one of them was from the children’s department because I’d seen my share of them. She was out the door and swimming back upstream through the tourists to FAO Schwarz, where I watched her buy three Steiff animals, a Mouse Trap game, an Easy-Bake Oven, a Wham-O Air Blaster, some Slinkys, a couple of trolls, a G.I. Joe doll, and a Tonka toy jeep. She could hardly move she had so many bags, but I sure wasn’t going to help her. I was having that clammy feeling you get when it’s just dawning on you that you’ve discovered something really bad. George the Nazi suddenly appeared with the car, and he bundled her and her thirty-five bags and boxes into the back of the limo, and they headed across Fifty-eighth Street. Back to the North Pole, I thought, with something like pins pricking my eyeballs. The poodles were chattering with frostbite, and so we slogged back up Fifth to Sixty-third, and finally turned under the awning of 820, and I collapsed in the little corner seat in the elevator for the ten-second ride up to the sixth floor.

  The light shone late under the door of Ann Rose’s office over the next few days, but when I looked around in the mornings before she had come into work, there was no evidence, other than an extra roll of Scotch tape on the desk, a few tiny triangles of snipped curling ribbon, and the telltale drift of gift card glitter. I couldn’t figure out who to be angry at. Had I really thought my grandparents ran around town getting the zillions of things that Will and I pleaded for, and that they then sat up into the night wrapping them? Yes. Yes, I had.

  I was so incensed by the Betrayal that I nearly blurted it out to my mother when she called the next morning from Nassau to tell me that if “Santa” got me the Easy-Bake Oven I had asked for, I was not, repeat NOT, to place anything in it that was a) alive, b) a troll, or c) an item belonging to either of my brothers. Which was her way of saying it was a done deal.

  “Thanks for the tip-off,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t thank me, Toots, thank Santa,” my mother replied.

  “Oh yeah. Santa. Of course. I’ll start my thank-you note to him right now.”

  When I let Will in on my discovery, he had little to say, as usual. We were watching The Outer Limits, which always gave me the creeps, right from the moment the Control Voice introduced each broadcast.

  There is nothing wrong with your television set . . .

  “Guess what,” I said.

  Do not attempt to adjust the picture . . .

  “What?” said Will.

  “ANN ROSE IS SANTA!”

  “So?”

  “So? Whaddaya mean so? Listen, it’s Ann Rose who goes and buys all the presents and toys and stuff, and then wraps them all up, and then puts them under the tree and in the stockings and everything. I saw her!”

  My brother turned and gave me a look that said, You pathetic idealist (or nine-and-a-half-year-old words to that effect), so I had no recourse but to slap him, and then he punched me in the stomach, and the butler had to come and separate us for an hour. And that was the last time I even uttered the word Santa to anyone, until we were unwrapping our presents in the living room in front of the fire, on Christmas Day.

  As usual, I had leapt out of bed and thrown open the door to Will’s and my bedroom to find the stockings that “Santa” had conveniently delivered to our door (so that the grown-ups could sleep). They were so overstuffed they spilled little presents onto the red carpet like cornucopias. But the customary thrill turned sour as I remembered it was Ann Rose who had purchased and then wrapped, in papers patterned with splashy patterns, and gumdrops and candy canes and snowmen, each of the dozens of presents she had then stuffed into the toes and heels and ankles and calves and knees (that’s how big they were) of the eight stockings, for my grandparents, my three uncles, my two brothers, and me.

  The grown-ups finally emerged and gathered by the fireplace in the living room, my grandparents still in their dressing gowns. Uncle Bob, now the eldest, since my father had died, already had a five o’clock shadow. He had to shave about five times a day in order to not look like a gangster. He resembled the other men in the family in that he was tall and ropey, but his hair, instead of being auburn, was very dark. He had his mother’s beauty, if not her clothes sense. For the Christmas festivities he was dressed in his usual bargain basement clothing—an ill-fitting sports jac
ket and a pair of worn slacks. Uncle Bob was the genetic mutant of the family—he eschewed any and all luxuries, with the exception of birthday and Christmas presents to us, his brother’s children. At twenty-nine, he still didn’t own a car and lived pretty much like a monk. After graduating from Harvard, Uncle Bob had shocked his family to the core by enlisting in the army. Following a two-year stint, he got a job teaching Greek and physics at a private school in St Louis. Knowing how paltry his son’s teaching salary was, my grandfather sent him a check for five thousand dollars every month; and each month Uncle Bob donated the entire amount to the school.

  The second-in-line entered the living room like he was being chased by a bee. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham was clutching a slopping cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in a holder in the other. His shirttails were out, and his Yuletide red tie was as askew as a guy with the social skills of a five-year-old could make it. He had been escorted to the apartment that morning by his “companion,” one of several that lived with him in forty-eight-hour shifts, because that was just about as long as anyone could take it. The guy never stopped talking. If anyone was around, he chattered incessantly, out of either a fear of silence or his substantial chemical imbalance.

  There had been a seismic disturbance in the bloodline when the third Burden son was born. For the longest time my grandfather refused to acknowledge there was anything wrong with young Hamilton. He even sent him to Harvard, though he had to pay about a hundred times the tuition. There was lots of additional tutoring, despite the fact that Hamilton was extremely bright, and could answer virtually any question on politics or history, especially if it had to do with the Third Reich. But after a rumored romantic scandal involving another young man, he was pulled out of his freshman year and done with college, and public life in general.

  One evening in Maine, when my uncle had been a little over-served in the caffeine department (as in about fifteen cups of coffee and three Cokes), and he had sprayed the powder room with urine and laughed so hard that snot had flown out of his nose and hit the hors d’oeuvres plate of Brie and Triscuits, my grandmother had pulled me aside and told me that although I may not have noticed, my uncle Hamilton was a little different from other people. Will and I laughed our brains out over that later. May not have noticed?

  Ordway, the youngest of the three uncles, walked over to the farthest chair and slumped down into it. He was visibly hungover and typically reluctant to be a part of any family activity that involved children. It was clear to Will and me, and probably Edward as well, that he didn’t much like us. Ordway had been somewhat of a surprise to his parents. He had the clean good looks of a late edition, but at nineteen, he was already losing his hair and had a weird thing going on with his part.

  All the players now present and accounted for, we ripped into the presents. My grandfather sat in the molded plywood-and-steel Eames side chair he always sat in on Christmas morning, with a plate of butter-soaked English muffins and the thermos of coffee he always was served on a small table before him, extracting presents from his ermine-trimmed stocking with his long, slow fingers, just like he always did. My grandmother was on the purple couch, a poodle on each side, doing the same. They both exhibited genuine surprise as they unwrapped their gifts.

  “Popsie! Earrings from Verdura! How divine—”

  “Why, Peggy, a Charvet tie—how thoughtful!”

  My grandmother, however, had not seemed too surprised by the necklace of red and green millipedes I’d made for her with the Creepy Crawlers set I’d gotten for my eighth birthday the week before. Nor did my grandfather swoon with pleasure over the paint-by-numbers horse head on black velvet I’d given him, intending for him to replace the Klee in the hallway with it. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham got a six-pack of Coca-Cola I’d swiped from the pantry and decorated with incorrectly drawn red and green swastikas and a couple of ponies. At least he was thrilled, and exclaimed “Very good! Very good!” in between drags on his cigarette and slugs from his cup of coffee. At one point he sidled up to his father like a working dog trying to ingratiate itself to the herdsman. With his eyes on the buttons of his blazer, for he never looked at anyone directly, he held out the book his father (Ann Rose) had given him. “Why, thank you, Dad! Thank you, Dad!” he said. “Göring was an interesting man! Yes, yes, an interesting man!”

  His father brusquely waved him away. I had never seen my grandfather speak to his son, and I never would.

  Will had yet to unwrap his Ken doll cadaver, autopsy-ready with cut here lines drawn across its abdomen with a red Magic Marker. Edward didn’t get anything because what do you get a one-year-old? I was nice to him for an hour, though.

  I got the Easy-Bake Oven all right (it practically screamed, Crematorium!) and some games and books and Barbies and trolls, as well as the usual fussy clothes in long tissued boxes from Best & Co., the annual Hermès scarf, and cashmere cardigan with appliquéd horse heads. My uncle Bob gave me a pair of flower-shaped ruby and pink sapphire earrings from Firestone and Parsons, which I happened to be staring at in disbelief, when Ann Rose asked who they were from. She had been hovering with pencil and yellow legal pad over Will’s and my shoulders in order to properly record who had sent what to whom, so that all could receive an arduous thank-you note in return.

  “Well, you oughta know since you picked them out,” I said, pitching the earrings into a pile of mangled wrapping paper.

  “I think you are mistaken,” Ann Rose said, retrieving the dark velvet box and tenderly brushing it off. “Oh, but these are lovely.” She didn’t bat an eye as she neatly recorded the present that would have made any female other than an eight-year-old cry with pleasure, next to my name.

  My grandparents’ annual New Year’s Day party was an all-out extravaganza that everyone from Upper East Side hoi polloi to Bowery pop artists showed up for. Preparations began the minute after Christmas. Extra help was brought in, and the maids ran around like chickens with their heads cut off. The kitchen and pantries became congested with the steady arrival of deliveries: linens and stemware brought up from storage in the basement, cheese and oysters flown in from France, wooden crates of vegetables, meats and poultry and game, silvery forty-pound salmon, a suckling pig, orchids and chrysanthemums driven in from the country. And there was wine—cases and magnums and jeroboams and Methuselahs of Burgundy and Bordeaux, and two standing lamp-sized Nebuchadnezzars of champagne.

  The kitchen was a scene of harnessed insanity. I was allowed to watch, sitting on the tall metal stepstool in a corner, as long as I didn’t open my mouth other than to taste whatever the chef demanded of me, even if it was parboiled toenails. French cuisine during the sixties was about as labor-intensive as food can get, and that was reflected in the hubbub of stocks simmering, chickens roasting, sugar caramelizing, cleavers and knives chopping vegetables and mincing herbs and filleting fish and deboning meat, hands kneading flour, and pink-faced voices laughing and cursing and barking orders. Baking sheets with tartlets and barquettes waiting to be baked, or cooled and filled, covered the long central worktable. The chef, Joseph, might spend an entire day piping various mixtures in muslin bags through choking silver tips into tiny circles and squares and oblongs of pastry. I’d ask to taste what looked like mocha frosting, and he’d smile and pipe a star onto my fingertip. Nine times out of ten it was some aquatic bird’s mashed up liver, and I’d have swallow it holding my nose.

  If I got bored, I played the bones game. I pretended that the leg and rib and neck bones roasting in the oven for stock were not from a cow but from whomever was on my hate list. Usually it was my brother Will boiling away in the stockpot with all the vegetables, on his way to being reduced, through indescribable suffering, to a syrupy essence of just rewards.

  On bad days, Will got the duck press. The first time I saw the chef use it I just about had puppies. It was the quintessential Addams Family kitchen appliance. Joseph had explained the reasoning behind the torture machine, remarking that it was not very popular in America. “In my c
ountry,” he’d said, “we like to have the blood and the insides of the animal in the sauce.” Whereupon I’d leaned in next to him, breathing heavily in my rapture. Joseph had given me a rare smile, mistaking my enthusiasm for a burgeoning love of the culinary arts. Ha. I was imagining that those merrily crunching bones and that rosy emulsion trickling out the spout were my brother’s macerated brains and skull. I saw myself rising from the dinner table to make a little announcement: “That sauce you’re eating with the meat? It’s my brother.” Mrs. Astor would blanch. Nelson Rockefeller would choke and die. Andy Warhol would ask for seconds. My grandmother would say, “That’s nice, dearie, I wondered where that rascal was.” BUUURRRRRUUUFFFFTT!

  When I saw Ann Rose enter the kitchen to speak to the chef, I quickly substituted her head in the duck press for Will’s. When she saw me over in the corner and waved, I glared guiltily back at her and then clattered down from the stool, and was through the lineup of white-coated kitchen assistants and out into the help’s dining room before anyone could read my evil thoughts. Skirting the table, now set and awaiting lunch for fifteen, I slipped into the warren of tiny bedrooms and skinny, old-fashioned bathrooms that was home to the maids. I liked to sneak back there sometimes, mostly just to scrutinize their lives. The rooms were painfully humble; each had a chair, a small desk, a painted bureau with a mirror on top (now decorated with sentimental cards from relatives back in the Motherland), and a narrow bed made up so skintight you could dribble a rosary across it. On one wall there invariably hung a crucifix bearing an anorexic Jesus, or a picture of the Virgin Mary, looking all forgiving. In Selma’s room there were many of both. Taped to her vanity mirror was an ancient, misshapen Pepperidge Farm cookie that Selma swore “on a stack of blue Bibles” was the image of St. Rita, the patroness of all things terrible for females, like tumors and faithless husbands. Selma had shown the face to me, pointing out St. Rita’s festering forehead wound, but try as I might I could never see it as anything other than a moldy Milano.