Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  I always felt calmer after breathing in the order of Ann, and Mary, and Grace, and even Selma. After a few deep breaths I reentered the kitchen just as a tray full of sizzling, buttery, sugary palmiers came out of the oven.

  I was pretty much over the Ann Rose/Santa debacle by the day of the party. A couple of times I’d even had to work myself up just to give her a show of my lingering indignation. Will and I were dressed up, he in a bow tie and blue blazer, and me in a red velvet number that clashed horribly with my red hair and had a crinoline slip that left scars on my knees. Edward, in Henrietta’s arms, was presented in a tiny jacket and a pair of green plaid shorts with suspenders. We were allowed to run free, and did just that, our bloodstreams so charged with Coca-Cola and sugary carbs that flying was a real possibility.

  The warm smell of wine mulled with cloves and cinnamon and raisins and almonds was the first thing that hit people when they walked off the elevators and into the long gallery, where a Viennese orchestra played and the Christmas tree rose in a ridiculous blaze of artificial light over the goldfish pond. (Actually, you could smell the wine even before you got to the sixth floor, because the doormen traditionally began drinking the stuff with the first run of guests and didn’t stop until the last of them had left, eight hours later.) Waiters swam through the currents of guests, proffering caviar and hors d’oeuvres that resembled shiny mosaic tiles. People lined up at the three bars, where it took a team of men to pour champagne from the fifteen-liter bottle of Moët.

  By seven my caffeine quarter had run out. It was exhausting having your cheeks pinched and your hair patted by so many pterodactyls. I was taking a break in my grandparents’ bedroom, now the ladies’ cloakroom, where, to the horror of the attendant maid, I was flinging myself repeatedly onto the bed piled high with the overflow of minks that couldn’t be squeezed onto the teeming coat racks. There must have been fifty of them on the bed alone, in every shade of expensive imaginable. I was interrupted by Mrs. Pell’s call of nature.

  Pyrma Pell was one of my grandmother’s “girlhood friends,” and she was a fixture at the annual party. She had been the Pears soap girl back in the seventeenth century, and supposedly a great beauty. She was tiny, with hair like the stuff they put in Easter baskets, and she had a huge face, sort of like Nancy Reagan’s. At any rate, there was a lot less of it than she was born with because Mrs. Pell had to have been on her fifth face-lift by the time I started remembering her. She could barely close her eyes. Mrs. Pell had initially gotten my attention because she always wore a Glinda the Good Witch dress to the New Year’s party, and this year’s outfit didn’t disappoint; it was right out of a cotton candy spinner.

  Gracing me with a look of intention from the dressing table, Mrs. Pell said, “I understand they’re bringing out dinner now.” She carefully repowdered her powder-caked nose, and then she rose and came over to where I was stretched out, spread-eagle on the fur bed. “Let’s go in together, shall we?” She spoke like she was blowing on a dandelion stem, but I got the point. And I am nothing if not polite under duress, so I struggled to my feet with a dramatic sigh, pulled my party dress into shape, and we went to the dining room together.

  When the cocktail drinkers had left, and the party had calmed down, they brought out the real food. Waiters loaded up the marble table in the dining room with hulking crown roasts of beef and the decorated salmon, game pie and terrines of foie gras, wheels of Brie de Meaux, crisp baguettes of bread, golden potato-petaled cakes of Pommes Anna, wild rice, and white asparagus, and haricots verts, and big wooden salad bowls of sherry vinaigrette-dressed mâche. Afterward came Baked Alaska, and Floating Island, and a Bûche de Noël enveloped with spun sugar and meringue mushrooms, and soaked with so much alcohol it was, by my standards, tragically inedible, so I stuck to the petits fours, which I was filling a plate with when my grandfather stood up to make a toast.

  After the usual New Year and auld lang syne stuff, he said, “Peggy and I would like to publicly acknowledge a few absolutely marvelous members of our staff that we would be hard-pressed to function without.” The chef was trotted out, the butler and his wife, the head waiter who was hired each year for the party, the small, fat, sweaty leader of the Viennese orchestra, my grandfather’s two secretaries, Miss Pou and Heidi, and finally George the Nazi. Everyone clapped in drunken acknowledgment, even Ann Rose, who stood in a corner near the swinging door to the pantry, utterly unacknowledged.

  After devouring way too many palmiers, iced little cakes, and chocolate truffles, I had to lie down for a while. When I felt better, I didn’t want to go back to the party, because everyone was waltzing up a storm and you could get killed just trying to cut your way through them to get a Coke. I decided to go for a restorative snoop in the bathroom that adjoined Ann Rose’s office.

  It was so cool and peaceful in there, I felt instantly better. The narrow, high-ceilinged room had beautiful prewar fixtures: a wide, curvy pedestal sink, a deep, seven-foot-long tub, and a toilet built for the posteriors of yesteryear. On the far wall there was a mirrored, floor-to-ceiling cupboard with the most comprehensive collection of medical paraphernalia any child with an aberrant sense of curiosity could hope for: enema bags and douching equipment and strange rubber bulbs and bedpans, swabs and forceps and tweezers and long needles, and toenail clippers and scissors with peculiar angles to their noses (which I liked to pretend had mistakenly been ordered from a mortuary supply house).

  I was standing there, holding one of the ends of a long, thick, pink tube in each hand, wondering what on earth this wonderful thing could be meant for, when I heard the door to the office click open. I stuffed the tube back in a corner of the cupboard and crept to the doorway to see who it was. It was, of course, Ann Rose, and she was pouring something from a tall, clear bottle into a Dixie cup. She saw me too, and on any other day I’m positive her knee-jerk reaction would have been to quickly stash the vodka, or at least pretend it was water, but not that night. She kept on pouring until the cup was full, and then she bent her head and gulped it down. A lesser sleuth would have missed her whisking a scrap of red and green striped paper under the desk with the toe of her shoe as she refilled the cup.

  Well it was no real surprise to me. Ann Rose may have vigilantly hidden the traces of her Santa-ing, but I’d seen similar bottles, and then some, tucked behind the douche bags and the Time-Life This Fabulous Century series.

  The sorry question I should have asked myself that night in bed, when I was too jacked up on petits fours to sleep, was what did Ann Rose get for all her slavish trouble? For trudging through the slush of holiday-crazed New York to purchase all those trinkets and toys and baubles and gizmos; in short, everything from a Revillon mink to a trick set of squirting nickels? As I’d find out in future years, I’d only witnessed a segment of Ann Rose’s annual shopping odyssey. The day before the poodles and I had followed her, she’d also gone to Hammacher Schlemmer, then across town to Zabar’s, then down to B. Altman, and over to Macy’s, and then through the slush and ice to Verdura, east to the James Robinson Galleries, finishing up in the madness at Bloomingdale’s. And who knows where she’d been the day before that.

  This is what she got in return: a Christmas bonus and a bottle of Ma Griffe.

  And this is what I got for the remainder of Ann Rose’s life: a better stocking than Will’s—even if he still got bigger presents than me.

  Ugly House

  A DECADE BEFORE I was born, my grandparents built a house on Mount Desert Island in Maine. They positioned it on the pink granite rocks at the entrance to Northeast Harbor, making it a beacon to anyone who was traveling by in a boat; and in Maine in the summer that means everyone. Even if you looked the other way, you couldn’t miss it; the sun bounced off the Belgian hand-rolled picture windows like a paparazzi flash off a Harry Winston sparkler. Natives, tourists, and summer residents gawked as they passed by, and commented freely on the design, the artistic delusion, and the obvious moral depravity of both architect and owner.

/>   When the sea was calm, you could hear the shrewd observations of the lobstermen:

  “Jeez, Bert. Thing looks like it got skwashed by a rawk.”

  “Ayeh.”

  “Why’s your house so weird?” the towheaded heirs and heiresses in my sailing class would ask when we had to tack in front of the house all the magazines had labeled Trendsetting! Original! The Last Word! “I don’t know,” I’d say, waving my hand dismissively like I didn’t care, “my GPs are weird.”

  Summer people on Mount Desert traditionally own “cottages.” This is a coy name for the brooding shingled fortresses that populate the island, both the genuine old dinosaurs and the hulking new fabrications that exude the venerable trust fund look parvenus strive for. My grandparents were done with that look; they were hell-bent on the avant-garde. I guess that’s one of the only problems with old money—you get bored with it.

  Positioned as we were at the mouth of the harbor, and within shouting distance of a picturesque island replete with calendar-worthy lighthouses, tour boats passed by our house all day long. They teemed with sightseers—all cameras and binoculars and lobster T-shirts—who paid to ogle the moneyed piles lining the shore. You could hear the collective intake of breath when they putt-putted round the headland to confront the shock of the new.

  “Now this heeah is what we call one of our Down East un-attractions, folks!” the smart-ass tour guide would boom on his PA system. “Had the fella that did the Yoo-nited Nations Building in New Yawk do it for him. Godfrey mighty, if they ain’t got his ’n’ her privies with a hole in the wall above the soap so’s they can talk to each other through the wahl when they’re takin’ a bath!”

  Click, click, click would go all the Polaroids.

  “Ayeh—slick as a smelt, this one is. Drives a cah can take you to Ellsworth and back in an hour, and that’s the truth.”

  On cue, my brother Will and I would rush out and wag our butts, dancing around for the tourists like the predictably demented offspring of a wealthy eccentric.

  On the morning of the day my grandparents’ chef bit me, I hurried down the gravel path from the cottage my brothers and me and our governess, Henrietta, slept in. The sun scattered diamonds across the ocean in a path to the rocky beach that circled our point. I was halfway to the kitchen when—THWACK!—a seagull smacked into the colossal living room window. “Number Fourteen,” I noted aloud, and ran back outside. By the time the screen door slammed behind me, this one was dead, a tiny smudge on the thick glass and a drifting feather the only signs of recent mortality. I picked the bird up, and it felt as weighty and warm and limp as the newborn baby someone had once mistakenly tried to get me to hold. Breakfast could wait; I hopped off the terrace onto the immaculate lawn that ran between the beach and the west side of the main house, and, skirting the wall but scrupulously avoiding the panoramic windows of my grandparents’ bedroom, I ran to the kitchen garden. At the far end I had a little summer project going.

  Along with snooping, collecting is another of my genetically coded destinies. My cousin Carter Burden spoke for the entire family when he said, Collecting is in my blood. It never stops. It just keeps getting more expensive. My grandparents were into modern art and French wines and first edition novels and Schlumberger jewelry (and sleeping masks and prescribed barbiturates). My mother was into tans acquired in different parts of the world, and anything shaped like a turtle. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham hoarded Nazi relics. Uncle Ordway had already amassed an exhaustive stockpile of pornographic literature and would go on to curate the authoritative collection of Brooke Shields memorabilia. My initial foray into this family arena had been eraser rubbings. The summer after kindergarten, I went through a case of Eberhard HBs to get about a quart’s worth of shredded pink filings. This summer I was concentrating on a dead bird collection. To be specific, I was chronicling (meticulously) mortification of the flesh—specifically, seagull flesh. I had my own little morgue going behind the English cucumbers, which, owing to the latitude of Northeast Harbor, no one had as yet gotten wind of.

  Ten minutes later I was in the kitchen (hands washed) sitting on the red Formica counter and banging my sneakers against the white painted cabinets below. Three perfect circles of batter sizzled on the griddle of the massive black range, awaiting consummation by yours truly. A plate stacked high with flat, crispy bacon was keeping warm on the shelf above, and I stole a piece, cramming it into my mouth like a stick of Juicy Fruit.

  “You know, I don ’ave all the day to cook for you.” Arturo, the new chef, winked as he flipped the pancakes over. We were at the zenith of the houseguest season (plane met at Bar Harbor airport twenty-six times, sheets in the guest cottages changed forty-nine times, signature lobster dinner prepared and served nineteen times). He turned back to his preparations on the worktable: an elaborate picnic lunch he and one of the kitchen girls were in the process of assembling and packing into creaky wicker suitcases. Gloria, a sluggish native with a showcase bosom and bountiful rear, simpered at him. Arturo was the most exotic piece of Mediterranean manhood she had ever seen outside of the Bar Harbor Criterion movie theater. Arturo rewarded her with a grin and a clack of his long white chops, something he was unfortunately prone to doing. A drop of oil slid down the forelock he vainly positioned each morning to escape the hold of his toque.

  It had taken a leap of faith for my grandfather to hire a non-Gaul, and it never would have happened but for the publication of Elizabeth David’s Italian Food. Arturo had exploded onto our domestic scene only a few months earlier, all springing black hair and ion-charged machismo.

  “I think they’re ready,” I announced to him, jumping down from the counter to see what was more important than my blueberry pancakes.

  Arturo turned the pancakes onto a warm plate and left me to get the butter and syrup myself.

  “I gotta get the peek-neek ready so you must do for youself,” he said, pouring a stream of smooth red gazpacho into a steel thermos. He wedged it into one of the baskets, beside a corpulent slice of Brie and a stack of cream-colored Bakelite cups. “’Ay! Not so theeck!” He admonished Gloria, who was slathering sandwich bread with egg salad. Arturo politely moved her aside. He added some chervil and a stick of soft butter to the bowl, and then demonstrated to his devotee how to smooth a thin layer of the mixture onto the pieces of brown and white bread; and how to cut off the crusts just so, and then the square into triangles, so what you were left with was an elegant little sandwich with the caloric testosterone of a Big Mac. “You finish this, then you do the ros bif. And theen, theen, theen! Not fat like your kine a san-wich!” Gloria’s response was to bat her chalky blue eyelids and squeeze her elbows together so that her breasts struggled to leap out from her pink uniform.

  As the summer progressed, the menus my grandfather planned became increasingly elaborate as more and more houseguests arrived on the shuttle from Boston. He began each day by ringing his secretary in New York.

  “Miss Pou,” he would pronounce into the telephone, lying in his bed with a crackling morning fire, gazing out the window at yachts and sailboats and Boston Whalers coming through the Western Way.

  The William A. M. Burden Company was at Rockefeller Center, where the titanic bronze Atlas struggled under planet Earth at the entrance to the building, and upstairs, on the thirty-second floor, Miss Pou struggled under my grandfather. She had been hired during his ambassadorship to Belgium and would remain until his death, which she would fervently wish for throughout the last ten years of his life. The offices took up the whole of the floor and had killer views from every window of the modern, hard-edged space. The carpeting was a shocking yellow, the leather chairs and sofas black, and the built-in desks smooth white Formica. Workers moved discreetly past paintings and sculptures by Léger and Arp and Diebenkorn and Warhol and Brancusi.

  There were only two people on my grandfather’s payroll to whom my mother was civil, and one of them was his secretary. Miss Pou’s first name was Mildred, which cracked Will and me up almost
as much as her pee-you last, and her daily recommended vitamin C intake came from whiskey sours, which is probably the biggest reason my mother liked her. She was from Shreveport, Louisiana, and had once dated Elvis (“Nothin’ but a wet kisser, darlin’ ”). She changed her hair color once a month, but my favorite thing about her was that she had no belly button because the surgeon had forgotten to put it back after her tummy tuck.

  “Miss Pou, the president of M.I.T. is arriving tomorrow at three and I would like to serve grouse for dinner.”

  “Certainly, sir. Though I believe it may be a bit early—”

  “Miss Pou. My food calendar states that mid- August is the season for grouse, so I am certain you’ll find a resource.”

  “Yes, Mr. Burden. I suppose I can call Scotland.”

  “Marvelous. Bring twelve. Catch the eight-thirty flight. Good-bye.”

  After dressing for his ten o’clock doubles game at the Harbor Club, my grandfather held a morning consultation with Arturo in the living room, seated beside the floor-to-ceiling window that faced the ocean, in his favorite bright yellow Eero Saarinen chair, a Chesterfield smoldering in the ashtray beside him and a pencil poised above his customary brown spiral notebook. “Arturo,” he would begin, adjusting his steel-rimmed glasses and signaling with his long fingers for the chef to take a seat. “This Wednesday I’m hosting a luncheon for some important people from Washington . . .”

  My grandfather was a devotee of chaudfroid. This is the culinary technique whereby ordinary foodstuffs such as poultry and fish are transformed into gleaming, elaborately decorated objets that seem hardly edible. A lot of white sauce and rubbery aspic is involved, fortified to cementing capability with abundant amounts of gelatin. It stands to reason that chaudfroid has gone the way of pillbox hats and employing leeches to bring down a fever.