The Beneficiary Read online

  In the origin stories, my father’s grandfather was the great progenitor. It was said that he’d fallen from a horse on a hilltop in a section of Radnor Township then called Villa Nova while foxhunting sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. He was knocked unconscious, the story went, but promptly recovered. Coming to, he found himself captivated by the spot, with its three-hundred-sixty-degree views of farmland dotted with houses and barns. He resolved to buy the land and build a house to match the scale of his ambition. He was a young investment banker, present at the birth of a new era in the country’s industrialization; he’d made a propitious marriage to the daughter of a wealthy, well-connected Philadelphia banker. So he hired the go-to architect to plutocrats of the day. He named the estate Ardrossan, after a town and a castle in southwestern Scotland left behind by his ancestors. He installed nine Ayrshire cows, imported from Scotland, in his dairy barn, and seven mares and a prizewinning stallion from Ireland in his broodmare stables. He hired young immigrants newly arrived from Sweden, Ireland, Switzerland, and France to milk his cows, mow his meadows, drive his cars, clean his house, cook and serve meals for his growing family. Annexing surrounding farms, he soon presided over some eight hundred acres. With the help of French governesses, he and his wife brought up four children in the house. Three of the children married, moved into houses on the property, and reared children of their own, who, in turn, followed suit. By the early 1950s, there were four generations of my father’s family living on an estate roughly the size of Central Park, located a half hour’s drive from the center of the fourth largest city in the country. It was a nineteenth-century British estate, plucked from the pages of Jane Austen or Henry James, floated across the Atlantic, and wedged in among swimming pools of John Updike and John Cheever. The place—which is what family members called it, applying the blandest of generics to something increasingly sui generis—comprised dozens of houses, a half dozen barns, stables, carriage houses, garages, silos, an ice house, a root cellar, several swimming pools, tennis courts, a kennel, and a couple of one-room schoolhouses, in one of which my grandfather, an aspiring playwright for a time, had labored over the only play of his that, I’m told, he ever got produced. The run is said to have lasted three nights.

  As a child growing up there, I couldn’t have told you which direction was north. I’d never seen the place on a map or seen an aerial photograph of the patchwork of farms, fields, and woods that stretched away from our house into the distance as far as I could see. I’d never wondered who’d built the stone houses where my grandparents and aunts and uncles lived, or the stone barns where hay bales were stacked to the rafters. I’m sure I never thought to ask who’d come before us in that place—people with names, like Abraham and Sayen, which lived on, attached to a lane or a barn or a quarry, the way words live on in the language long after their original meaning has been forgotten. In the big house, where my widowed great-grandmother still received visitors over tea or cocktails in late afternoon, portraits hung in every room on the ground floor, but I could never make out in those faces any suggestion of ours.

  A portrait of the founding father, my great-grandfather, hung over a fireplace in an oak-paneled living room roughly the size of a modest automobile showroom. Chandeliers hung from a thirteen-foot-high, sculpted-plaster ceiling. A set of French doors opened onto a terrace that led to a broad lawn, fields, a wooded hillside beyond. For his portrait, the patriarch had chosen to wear formal riding habit: scarlet hunting jacket, white vest, stock, cream-colored breeches, knee-high leather boots. In his lap lay a silk top hat, gloves, and a coiled whip. The red jacket leaped from the canvas. His short, dark hair showed signs of graying; his eyebrows were thick and perfectly shaped; a small mustache seemed to hover unusually high above his upper lip. His dark gaze and set jaw suggested a forceful confidence, or perhaps insistence, about his place in the world. The surprise, which slightly softened the impression left by the picture, was a liquid shimmer in his large, dark eyes. Though everyone referred to him, a half century after his death, as the Colonel, I never heard anyone explain why.

  If the scale of the house and its setting had been intended to make a statement about the Colonel’s ambitions, the ubiquitous portraits were surely meant to make a point about the family’s history. A seventeenth-century Scottish baronet in a suit of armor, with a voluminous russet mane enveloping his head and shoulders like a fur hood, was the subject of a portrait in the living room. The nineteenth-century member of Congress—a double-duty forebear, claimed by both the Colonel and his wife, who were second cousins—had top billing in the dining room over the mantel. A woman in a lacy headpiece peered from the wall under the light of the silvered lanterns hanging from the ceiling in the long hall. Two well-fed, eighteenth-century brothers with ponytails and muttonchop sideburns faced each other from either side of the living room’s French doors. Some of the portraits had been inherited; many had been purchased or commissioned. As the rest of the country tumbled and slouched into the Great Depression, the Colonel sought out the biggest names in European portraiture and shipped off each child, in his or her late teens or twenties, to be painted, three of them across the Atlantic.

  Of particular interest to me here is the Colonel’s spirited, willful eldest—the captivating character who, more than anyone else, left her imprint, I now see, in the impressionable clay of the child I’d later know as my father. In another time and place, Helen Hope Montgomery might have been one of those outsize women politicians from a place like, say, Texas. She was charming, flirtatious, disciplined, competitive, driven. The only thing she feared, my father once said, was failure. Her formal education, at a girls’ boarding school in Virginia that admitted horses along with their owners, had been fleeting; she’d been raised for other things, as she readily acknowledged, like succeeding at parties and marrying well. If there’d been SATs in those subjects, my father’s mother would have been a National Merit Scholar. In one evening, at one party, at the age of eighteen, she’s said to have fielded (and tossed back) four marriage proposals. A year later, she married the urbane, literary-minded, theater-besotted grandson of a nineteenth-century railroad baron who’d given a young protégé named Andrew Carnegie his start. She went on to become an accomplished horsewoman, able to checkmate even the most highly strung of chargers. She rebuilt her father’s declining dairy herd into the highest-producing Ayrshire herd of its size in the country. A connoisseur of filthy jokes and racy stories, she once bought a horse from a friend for a pound of caviar and a dirty story every week for a year. Society columnists and feature writers, whose care and feeding she’d mastered, stopped by regularly to burnish her image. They’d stagger back to their keyboards enchanted, professing amazement at how approachable, how down-to-earth, how earthy she was. By the 1950s, my grandmother—whom I knew, improbably, as Granny—shared her father’s estate with her widowed mother, her brother, her sons, and various nieces and nephews. But in the local imagination, the place belonged to her.

  Her celebrity, and that’s what it was, arose in part from her connection to the 1939 Broadway play that had revived the languishing career of Katharine Hepburn and turned into one of the most celebrated Hollywood movies of the century. In a playwriting class at Harvard, whose alumni included Eugene O’Neill and S. N. Behrman, my grandfather had met Philip Barry, the Yale-educated son of a marble and tile contractor from Rochester, who would become one of the most successful playwrights of his generation. Barry was, as Brendan Gill, the longtime writer for The New Yorker, once put it, “drawn to the rich and well born. To their astonishment, he found them interesting and therefore to be cultivated.” When Barry married in the summer of 1922, my rich, well-born grandfather, Edgar Scott, was an usher. Barry and his wife, Ellen, became regular visitors to Ardrossan. And when Barry’s sixteenth Broadway play opened in New York in 1939, with Hepburn starring as a spoiled Main Line heiress, Tracy Lord, the dedication page of the book, The Philadelphia Story, read, “To Hope and Edgar
Scott.” The movie, released the following year, won six Academy Award nominations, two Academy Awards, and a place on the American Film Institute’s list of the top hundred American movies ever made. By the 1980s, my father’s mother was rarely mentioned in print without it being said that she was the model or the inspiration for Tracy Lord. When she died in 1995, her obituary was stripped across the top of the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Main Line Socialite Hope Montgomery Scott Dies at 90,” read the headline, in very large type. The death of Pope John Paul II some years later got only marginally better play.

  A framed photograph of Helen Hope in her midforties resided on a table in the ballroom of the big house. In the photograph, taken by the fashion photographer Horst P. Horst for Vogue, she stands in the same ballroom, to the right of her portrait. She’s wearing a Dior evening dress with a strapless bodice, a tulip skirt, and a stylishly uneven hem positioned to allow an unobstructed view of her left calf. A greyhound, on a leather leash held in her left hand, presses against her. A choker made of four strands of small pearls rings her neck; a matching bracelet rings one wrist. Her bare shoulders and arms are those of a woman two decades younger. Her dark hair, worn with bangs in the tomboy style she favored, frames a heart-shaped face, turned slightly away from the camera, eyebrows raised, lips parted in a smile. She appears to be listening in rapt attention to someone just outside the frame. It’s an expression I remember—an alertness to the possibility of fun. To anyone on the receiving end, it was flattering: She could count on you, of all people, to give her a laugh. It was also intimidating: What if you bombed? Once, after I’d regaled her with the details of an unplanned escapade of my own involving a college-visiting trip, a detour to a boys’ school, and a scandalized housemaster at 2:00 A.M., she rewarded me with the roaring-laughter equivalent of a standing ovation. She’d been caught, two generations earlier, in a rumble seat, she said, with the grandfather of my accomplice.

  My father was the second of Hope and Edgar’s two sons. They named him Robert Montgomery Scott, after the Colonel, who was Robert Leaming Montgomery. He grew up in his parents’ farmhouse on his grandparents’ place, surrounded by pastures studded with apple trees, and approached by a honeysuckle-lined driveway. He attended the school that his maternal great-grandfather had attended. He followed his father and brother and paternal grandfather to a boarding school in Massachusetts and to Harvard. He graduated from the law school that had trained his great-grandfather and took his place in the law firm that his great-uncle had cofounded. He entrusted his money to the stockbrokerage that his grandfather and father had started. And, after marrying within days of graduating from college, he moved with his Boston-bred wife to his family’s compound. They settled into a tiny springhouse beside a brook and in a grove of willows, one field away from the house where he’d grown up—just as his mother had settled, twenty-five years earlier, into her farmhouse a mile from the big house and her parents. When my parents outgrew their little house, they moved into a bigger house one field away. My father rode the commuter train into Philadelphia every weekday morning and out in the evenings, often dropping by for a drink with his parents or his widowed grandmother before returning home. When his grandmother died at eighty-nine, leaving the big house empty, he floated the idea of moving in. My mother—already in a three-story house with ten bedrooms, two wine cellars, a cedar closet, three terraces, gardens, a four-car garage with an apartment above it, et cetera—told him that if that was his plan, he’d be moving there alone.

  My parents’ house stood on the edge of the property like a handsome doorstop on a curling corner of an antique carpet. It had been built from stone that you could imagine being taken many years earlier from the meadows around it. A barely legible date stone suggested that some house, if not exactly the one we lived in, had stood on that spot since the 1700s. Ours dated from the 1820s, with a kitchen wing added by the Colonel’s architect a hundred years later. The house had shutters painted a dark green verging on black, a gabled roof, and a symmetrical, ivy-covered facade. We weren’t alone in finding it the most beautiful house on the place. In keeping with family tradition, my parents made no down payment, took out no mortgage, paid neither a security deposit nor rent. Just as my great-grandparents had paid my grandparents’ rent—collected to help cover the operating costs of the estate—my grandparents covered my parents’. The rent the month they moved in, in 1955, was fifty-five dollars. For the humblest of houses in that area, which was one of the more desirable suburban zones on the East Coast, that price would have been a steal. It was inconceivable for a “nine-bathroom house,” which was the shorthand we used years later, after my mother had become its sole inhabitant, to signal that we weren’t oblivious to the absurdity of things.

  From a southwest-facing dormer window on the third floor, a child could survey the landscape spilling uninterrupted into the distance. Flagstone terraces on two sides of the house led to a lawn framed by a post-and-rail fence and an L-shaped field. Every summer, corn shot up in the field, walling in the lawn and the house with an impenetrable, green palisade. On windless nights, dance music from a country club a few miles away drifted in, along with the distant roar of the occasional car accelerating down a certain long, straight road. Beyond the cornfield stood a stone barn and the springhouse where my parents had lived in the first years of their marriage. Beyond that were pastures and my grandparents’ house; beyond that, more fields, woods, streams, stone houses, stone walls, stone bridges, the big house, dairy barns, the ruins of an ice-skating rink, and an abandoned quarry where we sometimes backed up a borrowed pickup truck and sent some obsolete household appliance somersaulting to the bottom. Up until the last years of the twentieth century, it was possible to ramble the mile-and-a-half distance from one end of Ardrossan to the other—through open fields, up and down hills, across streams, through woods—and cross just one public road. On the byways that traced the meandering periphery of the property, the occasional tractor, driven by one of the farmers, slowed rush-hour and carpool-minivan traffic to a crawl.

  “What was he like, as a father?” a writer whom I’d admired asked me once, when we first met, having stunned me with the news that he’d known my father in college. My father had been dead a few years at that time. I was out of the habit of bumping into people eager to report that they’d known him, curious to see where that led. There was something unsettling and touching about its happening now, a feeling I associated with awaking out of the rare dream in which he’d made a cameo appearance. I can’t recall the words the writer used to describe what he’d observed back then, but I was left with an image of my father roistering in the diffused light of a streetlamp in the small hours, outside one of those private clubs that men who arrive at Harvard from prep schools seem to feel compelled to join for reasons I’ll never understand. The writer appeared to have been more acquaintance than friend, but he’d absorbed an impression that hadn’t faded in fifty-five years. Because he showed no surprise at my account of the circumstances of my father’s death, I wondered whether he’d glimpsed something premonitory back then. Perhaps not. My father caught people’s attention. He had qualities they tended not to forget.

  I’d once imagined there was something distinctly American about his looks. I now suspect that was a distortion of the sort that led medieval cartographers to inflate their own continents on early maps. He was good-looking enough. I think of him at six feet tall, though the Pennsylvania driver’s license in the pocket-polished leather wallet I salvaged from his possessions states unambiguously that he was two inches shorter. To people from other parts of the country, his accent would have sounded British; to some of his antagonists at city hall in Philadelphia, it stunk of privilege. There was something of the perpetual undergraduate in his face. The angles were soft. He was blue-eyed, pink-skinned, buffed. There was nothing exotic or intimidating about his appearance. Strangers occasionally believed he was someone they already knew—a phenomenon he’d attribute to “
my lowest-common-denominator face.” We had a pet, a plus-size beagle, with an unusual inherited trait: Caught in the act of pretty much anything forbidden, her upper lip recoiled in a disarming, canine version of a shit-eating grin. Even the tone of a mild reprimand, in the absence of any misdemeanor, would set it off. My father did a good imitation of that smile, possibly because the dog’s and his had attributes in common. His grin—a flash of big, well-cared-for incisors—was punctuation, ingratiation, a beat for comic effect. He professed to be shy, which I always found curious; if it was true, he certainly seemed to have perfected a convincing imitation of gregariousness and affability. Also odd was his prediction, more than once when I was young, that he’d be dead by fifty. His parents, well past fifty, were showing no signs of slowing. I should mention, too, that he, like his mum, was flirtatious. He flirted with other people’s wives, younger women, babysitters, our childhood friends. The sanctity of marriage was not for him. The unspoken message that we absorbed early was that marital fidelity was an option, not an absolute. It was an option he seemed not to have chosen.

  But as a father? the writer had asked. An answer wriggled to the surface of a heap of emotional odds and ends: Not like others, that would be safe to say. No watching sports, no tinkering in the basement. In his twenties and thirties, he kept four polished copper hunting horns marshaled in formation on our front-hall table. He had a pack of beagles—as many as three or four dozen—housed in a whitewashed cinder-block kennel near the main dairy. On Sunday afternoons when leaves were turning and the stubble fields teemed with migrating Canada geese, he put on white shorts and dark green wool socks to his knees, a white shirt and a knit tie, a dark green hunting jacket with brass buttons engraved with the image of a hare, and a black velvet cap. At the kennel, he and a handful of like-minded souls loaded a couple dozen dogs into a two-wheeled trailer, hitched it to a Jeep, and towed it to the open countryside to the west. There was an association of people willing to pay modest annual dues for the opportunity to be out in the countryside, get some exercise, and watch hounds hunt. Dozens showed up. In the tussocky fields around places like Chadds Ford, my father was the huntsman, assisted by a team of whip-cracking subalterns to keep the hounds working as a pack. The rest of us followed in a less disciplined pack of our own. The protocol formalized the natural order of things in our family: my father, master of hounds, jogging into the distance, hunting horn in hand, high socks burred, knees bleeding from thorns; the rest of us trudging, milling, chattering, trotting to keep up, left to interpret the horn calls for clues as to what he’d be up to next. A rapid series of pulsating doubled notes—urgent, exhilarating—announced that some unsuspecting rabbit had bolted from its covert into the open, sending the hounds barreling and yelping in pursuit. A long, tremulous, single note marked the moment the creature finally outwitted the hounds by going to ground. The call played at the end of the day, as the sky was turning indigo and the cold was descending, was a mournful wail of longing and regret.