Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden

  Arturo was also excessively fond of chaudfroid. His kitchen could produce a buffet worthy of depiction by Tiepolo. He was Bob Mackie with a stewing hen; tied up and into the pot she went, and out that bird came to be placed on a jittery stage of aspic, enrobed in gelatinous ivory sateen with intricately stenciled truffles and greenery running up and down her showgirl breasts. Arturo knew how to please the ladies. For my grandmother, a Kon-Tiki enthusiast, he fashioned Tahitian cucumber outriggers with little oars carved out of carrots, filling them with composed salads of lobster or crab or tiny diced vegetables, bound with copious amounts of mayonnaise, aka French luncheon glue. These vessels were set to sail on the table between the dishes of glorified poultry, fish, and pastry-wrapped terrines. “Oh, Arturo!” my grandmother would exclaim. “You are so very talented.” And she’d hum a snatch of “E Le Ka Lei Lei” as she helped herself to one.

  After I’d polished off my pancakes and a dozen strips of bacon, which my mother would have been horrified to witness (Jesus, Toots! How fat do you want to be?), and after I’d checked on my birds, and been forced to bury two of them due to mortification of the flesh so extreme that if left unchecked might lead to olfactory discovery, I returned to the kitchen because I had nothing better to do until we set sail for the picnic later in the morning.

  Arturo and his sous-chef were making tortellini. They were shaping and sealing the delicate spinach dough with the economy of assembly line workers. Arturo asked me if I would like to make one, and he showed me how to do it with unexpected patience. I watched as he caught up a spoonful of the filling, a pink and green mixture of raw veal and fresh herbs, and plopped it on the square of dough. He brushed the edges with water; then deftly folded the square diagonally, then into a sort of croissant shape, sealing the tips together with a tender little pinch. He might have been diapering a baby.

  After a couple of village idiot efforts, I shaped one perfectly. In recognition of my accomplishment, Arturo clapped his hands, threw me up in the air over his head, and soundly bit me on the ass.

  Well, what do you think I did?

  Wailing like a fire engine, I ran from the kitchen, leaving the bewildered chef standing there with his arms stretched out and a ma? on his lips, and ran straight to my grandparents’ bedroom. They were getting changed after their morning tennis game and were, as was their habit, walking around in their underwear, oblivious to anyone who entered the room.

  “Hello, dearie,” said my grandmother. “You’re just in time to hook me up, isn’t she, girls?” The poodles stared blankly from the nest of expensive French linen they had clawed around themselves at the foot of the bed. I began fumbling with my grandmother’s long-line bra/panty/girdle contraption, halting along the way to tuck in the ripples of her soft back.

  “Arturo BIT me,” I told her, exhibiting the spot on my butt and pointedly wiping tears from my face with the hand that was fastening her up.

  “Well, I’m sure he didn’t mean it. Brothers can be like that!”

  “Arturo. The CHEF,” I said.

  “Oh, well that’s different. Thank you, dearie.” She got up with a small brfftt and padded back to her dressing room, humming “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”

  I turned to my grandfather, not my usual ally, but my impatience got the better of me.

  My grandfather was a big man. Once slim, he now had a paunch that cantilevered impressively over his British Y-fronts and the long stick legs below. He looked like an Edward Lear drawing of old secretary bird wading around in a marsh. There was a vulnerability to him when he was seminude, making him look almost cozy.

  I blubbed my story out to him in a stream of snot and vituperative barbs. He stood in front of me idly scratching his white-haired chest as he listened with a bland expression. Midway, I became distracted by the pointy look of his underpants and the consequent thought of his hoary old penis, which caused me to splutter to an end far less intelligently than I would have liked.

  “I feel certain you’ll recover,” said my grandfather with a bemused smile. “Good chefs are hard to find.”

  His tone of voice suggested that it would be more likely for the Cold War to end than for him to let a chef go at the height of the season.

  All I could think of to say was “ERRRAGHH!” as I ran from the room and headed back to our cabin.

  Edward was sitting in the middle of our living room, surrounded by a wall of blocks and basking in his achievement. Henrietta was in the tiny kitchen, out of range, so I knocked the wall over and headed for the telephone next to the stone fireplace. My mother wasn’t home so I didn’t have to lose face with her too. I slammed out the cabin and headed for the dock.

  It was considered déclassé to have a pretentious yacht if you were a summertime Downeaster. Ours was a pumped-up version of a lobster boat. Her name was Spindrift, and she was comfortably broad, with an ample rear for entertaining, a large but simple galley, and enough sleeping bunks below to overnight six. Due to my grandfather’s love of speed, she had a big BMW engine and could make thirty knots in a following sea.

  Captain Closson was the ex-navy man who ran my grandfather’s boats in summer. Every day during the summer season, Captain drove over from Southwest Harbor, rowed a dinghy out to where our boat was moored in Northeast Harbor, and brought her over to tie up at our dock and await orders. You could be as sure of finding him down there at nine o’clock, dressed in his khaki uniform, black knit tie, and thick-soled black lace-up shoes, as you could of waking up in the morning.

  Captain was a big man with a face the color of the salt pork he liked to use in his chowders. He parted his thinning gray hair with a twenty-nine-cent comb and a handful of Vitalis, and you could see his freckled scalp through the furrows the teeth made. His arms and hands were scarred from bear traps, knives, and fishhooks, and he could catch anything in the sea—cod, bluefish, mackerel, flounder, stripers, haddock, shark, pollack, and even the odd lobster. He had the strength to pull a forty-pound cod up on a deep-sea line with one hand, while holding your feet and dunking your bratty little head in the ocean with the other.

  When Captain was in the war, he caught two bullets from the Japs. One went through his throat, which gave him a weird dent there, and the other lodged in his privates, or so it was said. He talked about the war when he took us cruising a couple of times each summer. It would be five or six completely torquedup kids and him. We’d moor up Somes Sound by Treasure Island, or in Burnt Cove Harbor next to Swan’s, and in the morning we’d wake up and there he’d be at the stove in the galley, frying up bacon and sausages, unshaven and groggy from staying up all night telling dirty jokes and ghost stories.

  Confidant, prankster, philosopher, Captain was the patriarchal pinch hitter. I’d adored him since before I could speak. When I was at camp earlier in the summer, about an hour away from my grandparents’ place, Captain would come visit every couple of weeks. He’d arrive in his station wagon, a seagoing vessel itself, and after a half hour joking and giggling with all the girls in my cabin, he would take me out for lunch at the local Tastee Freez. On the way back he liked to pull to the side of the road to “cuddle.” He’d slide me over beside him on the front bench seat and start kissing me on the lips. I’d try to wriggle away with an “Oh my God I’m going to be late,” but he’d say, “Let’s just sit here a little longer.” Then he’d drive me back to camp.

  This is how stupid I was: I tried to talk to my mother about it. As for a lot of eight-year-olds, it was excruciatingly awkward for me to discuss anything sexual with an adult, but she really helped me deal with it.

  “Honestly, Toots,” she laughed, “I don’t know why you’re having such a cow over it. Let an old man have some fun! Anyway, he got his nuts shot off in the war, so it’s not like he can really do anything.”

  I forgave him. Anything to keep the family together.

  Forward, in between the bow and the anchor storage, there was a rumble seat cut into the deck of the Spindrift, which was where my brother and I
sat on the way to the picnic, bumping up and down with the waves, the saline wind whipping through our hair when we popped our heads up to scan the ocean for dolphins. I had given myself a singularly unattractive haircut at camp earlier that summer, the kind of blunt bob that is too short to contain and too long to stay out of your eyes. My hair was lacerating my eyeballs and my head looked like a whipped-up bale of straw, so I huddled back down against the warm red leather seat and curled my bare toes over the lip of the deck.

  We began playing the Would You Rather? game. Or rather, Will did. He loved the game, and it was about the only time he broke out of his monosyllabic pattern. I was still seething from the morning’s crime, and preoccupied with planning revenge.

  “Would you rather sneeze dog shit or vomit rubber cement?” Will asked.

  “Neither.”

  “Okay, would you rather go to the bathroom through your eyeballs or smell stuff with your butt.”

  “Quit. I don’t want to play,” I told him sharply. I needed to concentrate. I was thinking rat poison in the Wild Turkey bottle. More interesting than the old liquid-nicotine-in-the-aftershave trick, it would provide a cripplingly painful death. Any self-respecting soul sister of Wednesday Addams knew the effects of rat poison on a person. According to the encyclopedia of poisons I’d found on the bomb shelter bookshelf, all it would take was one gram of barium chloride; that was a fatal dose.

  But how to do Arturo . . .

  “All right, all right,” said Will, “would you rather have to listen to Petula Clark sing ‘Downtown’ all day long for the rest of your life or leave a trail of calamine lotion wherever you go?”

  As Captain Closson slowed the boat to pass into the cove of Placentia Island, where we would go ashore for the picnic, snatches of conversation floated forward from the stern.

  “. . . And if LBJ even thinks about backing down from those slit-eyed pinkos—”

  “. . . Honestly, darling, Paris is overrun with the things!”

  “A ha ha ha! You don’t mean he sold it at a dollar ten a share, the muddleheaded bastard . . .”

  They were the tones of self-confident, self-satisfied, unabashedly tipsy grown-ups. Getting them to shore for a picnic would be tricky.

  The first rowboat carried precious cargo: the bar and, even more essential, the shaker of drinks—the butler. Adolphe wore formal attire even when presiding over an al fresco event such as this. Adolphe had never learned to swim. Still, he maintained the dignity of a wrongly sentenced monarch as he suffered himself to be transported, sitting stiffly upright like a pasha in the bow of the dinghy. When Captain plowed its nose into the sand and leapt out, painter in hand, Adolphe scampered with surprising agility ashore and onto higher ground to take up his critical station, shaking up martinis and daiquiris and sours.

  Will and I leapt off the boat and swam like maniacs through the icy water to shore. We lingered over the beach, ripe with the pleasant stink of things washed up from the sea, and popped seaweed pustules at each other. As they arrived, the grown-ups made their way to the picnic spot with varying degrees of dexterity. I prayed my grandfather would trip over a granite boulder and break his head open, but he made it okay despite practically needing a walker. By the time everyone gathered, a smoky drift-wood fire was ablaze, keeping the mosquitoes at bay, and the picnic hampers had been opened. The party perched on logs and boulders while the help passed out cups of chilled gazpacho and vichyssoise, glasses of cold white Burgundy (as if they needed it), and plates piled with the sandwiches made by the slut and the pedophile that morning. (Which I did not touch.)

  I was working my way through each ruffly papered compartment of the assortment box of Pepperidge Farm cookies, envisioning Arturo lashed to one of the buoys out the Western Way (the ones that have dead men clinging to them below the water-line, in various stages of decomposition), when my grandmother came up to me. Her hairnet was escaping off to one side, and her piped wool blazer sported a smear of Brie.

  “Here, dearie,” she said with alcohol-sweet breath as she pressed a packet of Wash’n Dri on me. “Are you feeling all right? You’re unusually quiet today.”

  My sweet grandmother. She tried so hard to make everything right, even without the tools. She purposefully had no memory of what I’d told her this morning. She was wasted, and it would take Captain and his mate to get her back to the rowboat and then up the ladder onto the Sprindrift, where she could hopefully snooze it off in a deck chair all the way home, in time for a nice bath before getting dressed for the cocktail hour at six.

  I was the first off the boat when we tied up to our dock, pleading an urgent desire for my own john. In truth I needed to check on Number Twelve, who had that morning begun to exhibit a major larva infestation that needed further documentation.

  I ran smack into Arturo. He was bouncing down the back path from the dock where he often went fishing during his break. His toque was in place, wobbling away on top of his oily head. His sleeves were rolled up over his Popeye forearms, and the double-breasted jacket of his kitchen whites was unbuttoned at the top so that a flap hung down to one side, revealing a lurid hedge of the thick dark hair that undoubtedly covered all unseen parts of his body. A small ray hung on the end of his line; its white belly caught the light as it slowly spun, like a dead man on a rope. I tried to scurry past, but Arturo blocked my path. Clacking like a windup set of dentures, he gestured at me, including me in his merry game. He held out the ray. From his jacket he took a knife and dropped it, blade first, into the ray’s pocket of a mouth.

  “Sick,” I said.

  I suppose he was trying to get me to laugh, maybe in some sort of completely weird expression of regret for the morning’s wrongdoing. When it didn’t work, Arturo shrugged his shoulders skyward and trotted off to the kitchen, proudly holding out the grotesque nature morte for all to see.

  That evening Will and I were allowed to sit with our grandparents and their guests before they had dinner. We drank Coca-Colas with crushed ice that the maids, in their formal black-and-white uniforms, so at odds with the primal rock and sea, offered us from a silver tray. Relaxing a little, I inhaled the scent of ocean and lilies and mold.

  The living-dining area was a curved, open-plan space that was divided by a strip of earth planted with baby spruce trees and neon green moss. Normally, Will and I spent the cocktail hour leaping through the trees, from the elevated dining area down to the living room and back up again. When we tired of that, and when our grandparents were focused on Walter Cronkite, we climbed to the top of the bookcases that rose fifteen feet above the length of the built-in sofa, and plopped repeatedly down on to the feathered cushions below. But now I was being momentarily held hostage by a florid man wearing a yellow ascot with crabs on it. He was interrogating me about the upcoming fourth-grade syllabus when Obadiah shambled in. His timing always was impeccable.

  Obadiah was the adorable puppy with Dumbo ears that my mother had snatched out of a pet shop window, only to have him grow up to be a basset hound. Animal lover though she was, every chance she got she packed him off with us to visit our grandparents. He was fat, engulfed in his own saliva, and endearingly bent on parasuicide. En vacances in Maine he was fond of casting himself into the ocean, typically between the boat and the dock so that he could be crushed between them as he drowned. You’d think this would be a safe bet; as each wave passed by, Obadiah would get sucked under and slammed against the struts of the float and the wooden hull. Slightly less dramatic were his attempts to run away from home. I’m pretty sure the idea was to either starve or get run over by at least one automobile along the way. As he set off at a snail’s plod, you could almost see the miniature hobo sack swaying on a pole over his shoulder.

  The main reason Obadiah never succeeded in completing his mission was that he required an audience. He would lumber down and heave himself off the dock only when there was a crowd of people to watch. Invariably someone dragged him out by his collar, usually falling in as well from the sodden effort of t
he recovery. Likewise, when Obadiah decamped for parts unknown, he would alert everyone by standing at the top of the driveway for about an hour, staring at the house for a misty-eyed final look. Sighing heavily, he would eventually set off. The way out to the world at large was half a mile long. Whoever saw him during the two hours it took Obadiah to reach the main road would alert a rescue squad, who in turn had plenty of time to repot a dozen begonias, read The New Yorker cover to cover, or prepare a Baked Alaska before hopping in the car to go pick him up.

  I’m convinced Obadiah was welcomed into my grandparents’ house not because they were particularly fond of him but because he looked remarkably chic licking his privates under the Milton Avery landscapes or snoring on his back on the Bertoia furniture. Obadiah was photographed frequently beneath the boomerang-shaped Noguchi dining table, a layered inverted pyramid of honey-colored maple that might have come from a scrapped NASA project. In many of the pictures he is caught gazing balefully into the camera lens with an empty Baccarat goblet next to his elephantine splayed feet. As clumsy as the dog was, he knew how to treat the stemware with respect.

  Now Obadiah traveled slowly across the living room to pose beside my grandfather, who was conversing with a deeply tanned West Coast sort who leaned toward him attentively, popping macadamia nuts in his mouth every two seconds from the hors d’oeuvres tray. Obadiah fixed his runny eyes on the trajectory between the man’s mouth and the tray. Freed from my cross-examination, I was studying my grandfather as he talked, as he smiled his dry smile and emphasized his points with languid gestures. He recrossed his legs with the help of his hands and, draining his glass, signaled Adolphe for another. Telepathically I signaled to him that he had one last chance to apologize, and to fire Arturo so that we could get on with the rest of the summer. I gave him exactly seven minutes, while I sipped my Coke, pretending to leaf through Paris Match. During those seven minutes, my grandfather and Mr. Hollywood covered the topics of post-World War Two Brazilian aeronautics, the disappointing fledgling ’63 California vintage, and the shocking trend of Harvard’s anticipated diversification, but my grandfather did not apologize.