Dead End Gene Pool (37 page)

My mother’s wardrobe was faring just as poorly. She had migrated from leather minis and over-the-knee boots to terry-cloth bikinis and cheap Indian caftans she got from a store near the Harvard Square MBTA stop. With her amulets of ceramic, rock, bead, and bone, and the hand-beaten jewelry she’d begun to create, she was starting to look like a walking museum gift shop.

In time my little brother’s drug addiction became so obvious that even a family like ours had to acknowledge it—if only because there was no Krug left in the wine cellar. I got involved with a couple of the interventions, where we had him secured in a psychiatric holding tank, but Edward always freed himself after the mandatory seventy-two hours were up. He eventually ended up as a long-term patient at the White Plains Psychiatric Hospital. I didn’t visit him there very often because the inmates creeped me out.

“See that girl there?” my brother would say, indicating a normal enough looking brunette with a cast on her arm.

“Yeah?” I would reply.

“They had to put her in the Quiet Room for a while, and she smashed her hand through the window and swung it around all the jagged parts. Almost got to bleed to death. See that guy?”

“Yeah?”

“He got so fucked up one night, he tried freebasing someone’s stick deodorant. See that other guy?”

Technically, Edward had been admitted for his heroin problem, but after a year in the hospital he confessed he was staying on because it was as good a place to live as anywhere. Plus, he really enjoyed all the therapy.

While Edward was in his second year, an art school friend and I decided he should get to have sex with someone since he’d basically only experienced it with a mother figure in her fifties. We fixed him up with her studio assistant. Norah was from New Jersey and had big hair, a big ass, and humongous breasts. We figured on the strength of those features alone, she should be the one to sleep with my brother. That she resembled him in both coloring and physique—they had the same pinky-blond hair and soft, gel-filled bodies—made it seem a little like incest, but when you live at the funny farm you can’t be too choosy.

A few months later, Edward gave up hospital life and moved in with her. Then he began looking around for something to do. He tried a few semesters of college at SUNY, but college life wasn’t able to hold his attention. Managing the assets of his grandparents seemed a good alternative—and he wouldn’t need a degree. In seemingly next to no time, my brother became a partner in William A. M. Burden and Company and went to work all dressed up in Huntsman pinstripe suits and John Lobb shoes. He proved to have an astute and creative financial mind. He became a trustee of his grandmother, and then of Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham, earning a salary for the positions. He oversaw the trembly signing of papers, and he became involved with managing the household staff, and the nurses. Both would scatter like mice when he walked into the room. He seemed like he was in control of himself as well, but he wasn’t. He relapsed, and started back in on heroin, and on painkillers. He had a devil camped full-time on one shoulder, and an angel only part-time on the other.

My grandfather was now in and out of the hospital on a regular basis. Each time he was admitted he made sure he had two things with him: his favorite flashlight (the one packed with miniature airline bottles of hooch) and a copy of his autobiography,
Peggy and I
.

It had taken my grandfather years to dictate his memoirs, and many hired professionals to put it into something resembling a narrative. The book had been privately published, and my grandfather had ordered a first printing of ten thousand copies. He was certain he had a blockbuster on his hands. Not wishing to insult him, Miss Pou had asked what she should do with the remaining nine thousand after she’d sent the book to everyone my grandfather had ever known, and to the few bookstores that would accept a couple.

“Why, Miss Pou,” he had said, “I want you to send a copy to every library, every university, and every college in every city in every state in the United States!” In spite of a full-page ad in
The New York Times Book Review,
maybe three copies were sold.

My grandfather had Miss Pou come to the hospital every day to read to him from his autobiography. He particularly liked to hear the beginning chapters—those extolling his heritage and the past opulence of Florham. He was probably the only one left now who still viewed the Vanderbilt name as one aligned with God, not apocalyptic genetics. He had been born into a societal position that had been ripe with opportunity. Anything, especially for a man with privilege, brains, and money, had been possible. The world had been his Oyster Rockefeller, New York City the epicenter of cool, twentieth-century America.

His life, at once so gilded and so scarred, now had the unpredicted denouement of no worthy successor or dynasty.

Given my grandfather’s limited vocabulary, conversation with him tended to be one-sided. Luckily, Miss Pou had learned to speak Phooey.

“Certainly, Mr. Burden. I’ll schedule the architect to come to the hospital and meet with you. May I ask what for?”

“A swimming pool. But, Mr. Burden, you already have five of them.”

“A swimming pool in your hospital room. I see. Well, Mr. Burden, I don’t think it matters if you are a trustee, and that you did give that bank of elevators; I can’t imagine—”

“Phooey! Phooey, phooey, phooey,
Phooey!!!
”

“No, I don’t want you to fire me, Mr. Burden, but if—”

Eventually my grandfather checked into New York Hospital for what would be his final visit. In his mind, he had always been immortal, but just in case he wasn’t, Miss Pou had been updating his obituary on a regular basis for years. Certainly he had no discernible religion, other than old French vines, the mandate of the mid-sixties Republican Party, and the internal combustion engine. Even though he was terrified of dying, my grandfather begged Miss Pou to help him do it each time she came to see him. The hospital nurses were tired of his craziness and his arrogance. He was tired of the indignity and the painful tests. Necessity had enabled him to add two words to his vocabulary:
no more.
He repeated them over and over.

One day when Miss Pou went to visit, she found my grandfather alone, sitting in his wheelchair, naked from the waist down, covered in his own shit. It was caked all over him, the chair, and the floor. The bank of elevators with his name on it was only twenty feet away.

I went to see him the day before he died. I stood toward the rear of the room, as far away as I could get while still managing to convey a sense of compassion. My grandfather was as shriveled as a freeze-dried apple, and his glasses were enormous on his face. A feeding tube was stuck in the side of his neck, and he had lines and wires traversing his body like an old-fashioned switchboard. He saw me flinching uncontrollably, and it embarrassed both of us.

A nurse was standing by the bed, holding on to my grandfather’s exposed foot with the intimate familiarity of a woman holding on to her lover’s cock. To think it had come down to this—my arch nemesis, lying wretchedly in a hospital bed, his bare foot being fondled by a Filipino immigrant who had no clue of who he had once been; and could not have cared less if she had.

Talk about feeling conflicted. Standing in that room of imminent death, I was still mad at him for something that had happened years earlier, before he had lost his speech. My grandfather had just returned to the apartment after one of his first stays in the hospital. When he had been settled by the nurses, I had gone into my grandparents’ bedroom and welcomed him home. He had looked at me coldly and said, “It’s
my
home. Not yours.”

I thought of my favorite picture of my grandparents, a black-and-white press photo taken when they were newly married. They’re walking down Fifth Avenue in front of St. Thomas Church in the Easter Parade. He’s in a top hat and spats and is looking at the photographer with an expression of mingled surprise, both at having his picture taken and at his extraordinary good fortune. She’s in a gray fox coat with padded shoulders and a huge corsage. They are young and vibrant, cultured and entitled. He is rich and she is beautiful, and they are the envy of the city.

I thought of the packet of love letters and telegrams I had found deep in an old Vuitton trunk in the Mount Kisco barn. They had been sent from my grandfather to my grandmother during the summer of 1930, when they were at the peak of their courtship. My grandfather had been abroad, and the envelopes bore the postmarks of far-off places like the Panama Canal and Brazil. The scribe referred to his sweetheart as Goldilocks, and himself as Big Bear, and the pages were covered with funny little drawings of a bear doing silly things, and missing his Goldilocks, and getting up to no good, and even though it was a little dopey, it was achingly cute. There was also a stapled sheaf of telegrams (the Twitter of yore), sent from a couple of lovelorn weeks aboard the SS
Bremen
. My grandfather, so remote, so parsimonious, declared his adoration for my grandmother with obtuse, pasted-on dispatches like
True Blue Love
and
Phone interruption frightful at sea but connection perfect in forest
. I remember watching my grandparents unfold as people I’d never imagined, as, like a compassionate spy, I read my way through their summer.

That night, as he had done for a week, Edward maintained a solemn vigil, lying on the floor beside our grandfather’s bed. He had insisted that the nurses wake him if he fell asleep, because he did not want to miss the exact moment when his grandfather reunited with Eisenhower and Pompidou. (Whereas I am merely morbid, Edward likes to witness the crossing.)

The old man kicked the bucket in the night, and his grand-son slumbered on. The nurses sniggered behind their latex gloves as they stepped soundlessly over him, unhooking catheters and monitors, and quietly removing the body. Like grandfather, like son. They were tired of being ordered around by the rich.

Edward was inconsolable.

As we filed out of St. Thomas Church, a light rain had begun to fall. I stood at the top of the steps, looking down on Fifth Avenue. My mother stood beside me, looking like the cat that ate the canary. There was the hearse, a long lineup of dark limousines, and a police motorcade. Nixon came out of the church and scanned the cortege for his vehicle, while a Secret Service man struggled to open a massive golf umbrella.

Seeing me standing there, Nixon smiled and said, “Your grandfather and I had something very important in common.”

I smiled back, but didn’t say anything.

“Matthew,” he said.

“Matthew?”

“Our barber.” He sighed fondly. “Now
there
was a great man.”

Leaning on the arm of the agent, he limped down the puddled steps, past the mildly interested passersby, to his waiting car.

Edward would be smarter the next time; when our grandmother tottered on the brink, he pretty much moved in with her and waited for her to die. Nobody was going to take this one from him.

 

 

 

OKAY, SO MAYBE I didn’t know where the ten-thousand-dollar Russian bribe money was hidden in the bomb shelter, but I knew where just about everything else was in Burdenland. Like how many English shooting bags were in the basement cupboards in the country (five), or how many pairs of Sperry tennis shoes were in the dressing rooms of the indoor tennis court (twenty-one—thirteen men’s and eight ladies’). I knew that at any given time there were between four and six Indian nickels in the tray on my grandmother’s vanity in New York City, and that in the third drawer down in the fifth file cabinet to the left of the door on the second floor of the garage in Maine were twenty-three copperplate-signed checks from Grandpa Twombly to McKim, Mead and White Architects.