by Wendy Burden
Ambassador Hartman was very busy. Either that or he was avoiding us. He finally agreed to squeeze in the briefest of cocktails before fleeing for a state dinner elsewhere. My grandfather utilized the five minutes we sat together in the gilded Louis IV salon to rake the poor man over the coals, criticizing him, his chef, the residence staff, the diplomatic corps, and the entire Carter administration. I could see the pity on the faces of the marines standing guard outside the salon, and inwardly I curled up like a slug hit with salt. Voices were raised as the two men got into an argument, which was quickly resolved when the ambassador leapt to his feet and sprinted to the door, with the briefest of nods to my grandmother and me.
I wanted to tell the ambassador that it wasn’t my grandfather’s fault, that it was the drugs and the alcohol and—wasn’t it obvious—because he wanted to be the ambassador so badly. Wanting to protect my grandmother, I followed Ambassador Hartman to the entrance and began to stammer out excuses, but he cut me short, telling me not to worry. “The old man’s reputation precedes him,” Hartman said with a dry laugh. “Everyone in the Foreign Service knows he did the same to Churchill when they met during the war.”
Further shamed, I returned to the salon. My grandfather was blithering on about the insufferable pardoning of Vietnam draft evaders, and my grandmother was ripping farts and spackling on Cherries in the Snow like a transvestite. The look on her face made me bite back any number of things I was going to say. I resolved to swipe my grandfather’s American Express card and go on a serious shopping expedition with it—until I remembered my grandfather never carried a wallet.
(My grandfather was like the queen. He never carried cash, or even identification. When he had fallen in the street one day after lunch at the “21” Club, blotto and looking like a Bowery bum, he had managed to convince a policeman to escort him to the office. There, Miss Pou had identified him as indeed the man whose name was on the elegant entryway of William A. M. Burden and Company.)
By morning I had grown an anxiety zit the size and color of a pomegranate. I needn’t have worried about my grandmother; she was humming along, happily enjoying the buoyant pleasures a double dosage of Miltown can bring. Juan was the most resourceful—he came down with the flu and took to his bed for the duration of the trip.
On our final evening in Paris we went to an obscure restaurant on the outskirts of Clichy, the favorite auberge of the truly cognizant cognoscenti. On a dark street a single lamppost illuminated what looked like a set from a hard luck scene in an animated Disney movie. Inside, the place was virtually empty; there was nary a gastronome to be found. A labyrinthine staircase led to a simply furnished dining room. Given my grandfather’s physical condition, not to mention my grandmother’s pharmacological one, it took us an hour to reach our table.
The meal was everything whatever panel of experts Miss Pou had been directed to consult had foretold. It was sublime, like eating orgasms. As I was scraping the last molecule of manna from the Sevrès, trying not to actually lick the plate, I noticed my grandfather searching through his jacket pockets.
“Are you looking for matches, Granddaddy?” I said. “There are some right in front of you in the ash—”
“Checkbook,” he grunted. “See here, Peggy, you wouldn’t have any checks in your pocketbook, would you?”
Brffft, said my grandmother, shaking her head. Checkbook? What was that?
Her husband continued to dig around, nearly falling under the table in his slurry efforts. I had no idea what he was up to. The bill had been taken care of in advance by Miss Pou. As a last resort he looked at me, and I could see the lightbulb go on over his head.
“Checkbook,” he demanded.
Whatever he was after, I was certain the hundred and two dollars in my Citibank account was not going to cover it.
My grandfather began snapping the fingers of the hand that still worked. “Gar-sone—I say, Gar-sone!” The waiter approached fearfully; it had been a trying three hours. “Luh proprietor silverplay,” my grandfather said to him loftily.
“Oui, Excellency.”
The owner came trotting up the stairs from the kitchen, rubbing his hands anxiously. “Yes, Your Excellency? Is everything to your satisfaction? Shall I tell the driver you are ready to leave?”
“Everything is marvelous, marvelous,” my grandfather said, waving his hand. “And the Bordeaux was superb, first-rate. There is a problem, however.”
“Excellency?”
“It’s damned inconvenient to climb the stairs. You must have an elevator.”
The owner laughed and spread his hands. “Unfortunately that is not possible.”
“Nonsense, my good man.” Turning to me, he said, “Write a check for two hundred thousand dollars. Miss Pou will wire the funds to your account to cover it.”
To stave off his having a stroke, I did it. He snatched the check from me and presented it to the proprietor, saying, “When I return in the fall, I expect to ride in an elevator instead of taking those infernal stairs.” And with that, he grappled to his feet, and we made our way at a majestic snail’s pace down the affronting staircase and out to the waiting Mercedes. The owner, now joined by his wife and staff, stood in the doorway bowing and scraping and touching their forelocks.
On the way back to New York, I got Jacques Cousteau. He must have been a Concorde regular, because he knew the names of all the flight attendants. JC was way too important to even acknowledge me—until they brought out the caviar. Then he downed three shots of Absolut in as many minutes and came on like a barracuda. After seconds on the caviar, and fifths on the vodka, he began expounding on his theory about the cosmos, which was somehow wrapped up in the linking of constituent universes, love, and transpersonal psychology. Then he took my hand. This gesture gave me the hint that old JC was not talking about a mystical kind of love. I tried not to laugh, and it worked for a while because his Rolex, which was the size of a sea turtle, was slicing into my wrist in a decidedly un-funny way.
The Coulibiac of Salmon was served, and JC still had my hand, only now it was clamped to his thigh and he was asking me to “give in and feel the Power.” Jesus Christ, the guy was maybe eighty. I started to giggle.
The effect on JC was catastrophic. It was as if I had murdered a pod of dolphins on the pull-out tray in front of him. He squinted his eyes and shook his blade of a head in disbelief at my amusement. He returned my suddenly offensive hand and picked up some papers he had been reading.
“God, I didn’t know you took it that seriously. I mean I thought you were sort of kidding.”
“Do not even speak. Poor girl, you are ignorant, that is for certain.”
We landed twenty minutes later and I had to go to my “History and Theory of American Illustration” class with a mother of a developing hangover.
Unfortunately for the proprietor of the auberge, Miss Pou stopped payment on the check as soon as we returned to New York. She also stopped the orders on five Mercedes, and a couple of nympheas paintings by Claude Monet, my grandfather having insisted the single water lily masterpiece he owned was not enough. Then there was that verbal promise to Fauchon for part ownership, in order to ensure that company’s continued production of his favorite Lapsang souchong tea.
Everyone thought I was making it up about Jacques Cousteau except my mother. Knowing she had watched every single episode of Undersea World, I rang her a couple of days after my return. Forgetting my self-imposed rule of never calling past five, I caught her at a bad moment. She was drunk, and crying—something she was beginning to do with disconcerting regularity. One thing for sure made my mother cry: the death of an animal. One of the dogs had been run over in the driveway by the liquor store delivery van. “Thank God it was over quickly,” my mother sniveled. “He didn’t have time to feel much pain.” I could hear the clink of ice as she picked up her drink.
“Oh well,” she said, resuming her chronic practicality, “next one will be a female. I have the litter already picked out.”
/> “Hey, guess who I sat next to on the plane back from Paris.”
“I couldn’t care less, Toots,” said my mother. Clink! Clink! Clink!
“Jacques Cousteau.”
“Cunt.”
“You would have liked him.” I laughed. “He was a total horndog.”
“Mmmm.” The ice cubes tinkled even more excitedly. “I’ll bet he has a huge cock.”
“Stop.”
“Oh well,” my mother said, “I’d better go give the beast a proper funeral,” and she hung up.
Go Fish
AFTER PARIS, THINGS in Burdenland spiraled downward faster than you can say amphetamine psychosis. Turns out my grandfather had been going to four different doctors for his L-dopa. The adverse reactions of a single dose alone would have explained his recent behavior. Hallucinations: check. Thought disorder: check. Wild mood swings: check. Megalomania unseen since the Roman Empire: check. It would also explain his purchase of a hundred ant farms from FAO Schwarz, and his attempts to channel Howard Hughes, insisting Miss Pou wear white gloves when typing all correspondence.
It’s amazing how resourceful an addict can be. In the midst of all this self-medicated madness, my grandfather invented and patented the Tippler’s Bathroom. Fed up with broken bones and telltale bruises, he designed a john that was entirely padded. The prototype was installed beside his dressing room in the country house in Mount Kisco. Everything in it—the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the shower, the toilet, the toilet handle, the toilet paper holder, the towel racks, the tub, the sink, the faucets on the tub and the sink, the lights around the mirror, and the light switches on the wall—everything was covered with a two-inch-thick layer of spray-on foam and twenty coats of Benjamin Moore Chalk White enamel. With no discernible edges and everything a glossy, arctic whiteout, it looked like something from the Futurama exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair. You could bounce around dead drunk in the shower and never hurt yourself, and if you chose to bathe instead, there were ropes with big knots in them hanging above the edge of the tub so you could haul your Lafite-soaked hiney out of the water without having to call for assistance.
It was a sign of my grandfather’s self-absorption that he didn’t have one constructed for my grandmother, who bravely and consistently wore the black and blue (and green, and yellow) badge of Dubonnet and withstood all four of her slippery, sharp-angled bathrooms like the Christian she was. She might as well have just kept herself packed in ice. Modernism is such an inhospitable décor scheme for drinkers; there’s a reason the classic English drawing room has remained soft and downy throughout the ages.
As my grandfather’s drinking worsened, his brain rewarded him by undergoing a series of strokes that deprived him of his two favorite diversions: speech and taste. He continued to consume food and wine as if his senses were unaltered, but dining with him was a different experience. One could now voice an opinion—on anything: thermonuclear war, the amount of coke being done in the Studio 54 bathroom, genital mutilation, mixed marriages, civil libertarianism, Super Tampax versus Regular. The only word he could get out was a relatively harmless “phooey.” Except one time, when we were discussing my cousin Connie’s upcoming nuptials to a man named Rosengarten, he began to splutter and thrash around in his wheelchair, and finally managed to choke out, “J . . . J . . . J . . . JEW! JEW! JEW-WWWW!!!” He continued to call the word out throughout the rest of the meal, and was put to bed still repeating it. Luckily, by the next morning he was back to good old “phooey.”
It was a dark day in Burdenland when Miss Pou was forced to sign on round-the-clock nurses. This event coincided with my little brother’s horizontal consideration of suicide. Poor Edward, he had been to so many schools by now that no one was completely sure what grade he was in. I rarely saw him, and when I did I had to get a recap on his history as if he were a long lost roommate who had moved to the West Coast. Recently, Edward and his grandfather had latched on to each other in what could have been called destiny, but more likely was a last-ditch effort for the patriarch to locate a successor among the family rubble. The upshot was that Edward, like his father, was sent to Milton Academy—where he was now an immensely unhappy ninth grader. One beautiful Indian summer day in October he decided he wouldn’t get out of his dorm room bunk bed and that he would lie there until he died. Nobody would have paid much attention to this, indeed they would have hauled his ass out of bed and thrown him in a cold shower, but for the fact that at the same age, and in the same school, our father had tried to kill himself.
It was around this time that Edward began to suspect he was the reincarnation of our father. Since that made my brother my father, my brother his own father, and—creepiest of all—my brother our mother’s husband, I found, and still find, the whole thing extremely unsettling. (Edward maintains I will come to accept it in time.)
For some reason it was me who got pulled out of school and dispatched northward to deal with the situation. I guess I was as close to my brother as anyone was, which wasn’t saying much. I talked to Edward for a while as he lay there in bed. I don’t remember much of what I said, maybe lame platitudes like You have a wonderful future ahead of you and Think of the pain and anguish you would cause everyone, but probably I said something like Why don’t you put suicide on hold because the pharmaceutical companies are making incredible inroads with new antidepressants. Edward just grunted catatonically back at me, so after a while I gave up trying to reason with him. What did I know about depression? I was a girl. I didn’t get stuck with our family’s male strand of DNA. Recalling that there’s nothing better than underage drinking to set things right, I suggested we go out for a beer, whereupon my brother got dressed and we went to a cheesy lunch spot in town and had burgers and Heinekens. The latter made us both feel better, and when I dropped him off at his dorm a couple of hours later, he seemed like he was going to be okay. That’s what I told his dorm master anyway.
I continued around Route 128 and up to Marblehead to give a progress report to my mother. She was convinced that Edward was predestined to kill himself and that there was nothing anybody could do, and so she was washing her hands of the whole thing. I knew she was just saying that; she was as worried about him as the school was. She had been dating my father in the ninth grade.
“Those fucking Burdens,” she ranted. “I swear, they’ve spoiled all of you rotten, and when you have to deal with something even vaguely unpleasant, like getting up in the goddamn morning, you fall apart! Edward should have never been sent to Milton. He doesn’t fit in there. He’s not athletic, and he’s . . . well, I don’t think he’s equipped to deal with the academics because of his dyslexia and all, and . . . and—” She fizzled there, but took a breath, and a gulp of her diet iced tea, and picked up the thread of her tirade. “And your good-for-nothing brother Will is so goddamned coddled, he’s living off the fat of Burdenland and drinking the wine cellar in Maine dry! No one is keeping an eye on him, I mean I’m all the way down here, and frankly I’m worried that he’s going to do something birdbrained too, like—”
Zinggg!!! The egg timer buzzed, and my mother leapt up from the kitchen table to pluck a suspicious loaf from the oven.
“That’s not your famous Velveeta Cheese Bread, is it?” I knew I’d smelled bad nostalgia when I walked in the door.
“I thought I’d make you something,” said my mother. “You used to gobble this down like a little piggy.” She wafted a porcupine-shaped pot holder over a pan that contained what looked like a steaming, squashed basketball. Inside, as I well knew, were hidden globs of molten orange cheese food. Glancing at the clock on the stove, she said, “I figured if I make my rotten children food they like, maybe they’ll come visit more. Is it drink time yet?”
One of the many reasons I rarely went to visit my mother was because she spent most of the time complaining that I never came to visit. She would go on about how it wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have houses and servants like my grandparents, which would inevitably lead t
o a diatribe on how they had taken everything away from her when my father died, leaving her virtually penniless, and then tried to get custody of her children—her children, hers—and on and on. It was enough to make me hanker for the good old days when she pretended she was childless.
Slouched in a high-backed Hitchcock chair at the drop-leaf kitchen table, I was watching more than listening. My mother’s figure had taken on that melting candle wax effect women get in their fifties, when the soft parts begin oozing downward. She had given up her extreme dietary vigilance when she’d married a man that could drink with her. The calories of undisguised boozing, and a more sedentary lifestyle, had taken their toll. Unbelievably, she now had a stomach that no amount of sucking in could invert. I would have been overjoyed to witness the decay of her famous physique if it hadn’t brought so much fallout on me. Ever the competitor, it drove her crazy that I was young and that my skin still had elasticity.
“Have some,” she said, putting the bread down on the counter. “You can work it off with all that sex I’m sure you’re enjoying.” She moved closer. (Warning signal.) “Goodness, Toots. I never had wrinkles like that at your age.”
We were saved by the entry of the contractor. “Sun’s over the yardarm,” he said, reaching for the scotch.
My mother was right about the perks of Burdenland. They were pretty great.
On the second of January each year, my grandparents headed south to Hobe Sound. Over Presidents’ Weekend, I opted to take a break from New York’s kick-ass winter and flew down for a visit. I had issues with the Jupiter Island Club, starting with the dress code. All that Lilly Pulitzer, plus the frogs and whales and Nantucket red pants and kelly green everything, the Sperry Top-Siders and the Pappagallo shoes, the bleeding madras jackets and upturned Lacoste collars—they all made me queasy. It also bothered me that nothing bad could happen to you there (other than alcohol poisoning), and that the speed limit was ten miles an hour, and that if you exceeded it, one of the invisible policemen patrolling the tiny enclave would spring from the sea grape bushes, pull you over, and ask you whose house you were staying at. Then they’d let you go, even if you were doing ninety. I hated it that the worst thing you could do was to write penis in a sand trap on the golf course, or swim in the ocean when the red flag was up, or not attend the tea dances. And I loved it that when you were being snubbed, you received a black sweater on your doorstep. Try as I might, I could never get one.