Dead End Gene Pool (5 page)

I can’t remember who made the initial overture, but we agreed to settle it at the alligator graveyard in my backyard. Behind our house, a long grassy triangle ran down a steep hill to a stand of three tall maples. At their base was a collection of tiny pebble-marked graves containing the curled-up corpses of a dozen baby alligators. I had spent a lot of time organizing the little cemetery, and I kept it raked and ordered, and solemnly decorated with pansies from my mother’s straggly flower bed up the hill. The most recent inductee had arrived from Miami with my name on its box, and only three legs. It had quickly succumbed to crippledom, though Will’s alligator was still alive (of course), so it had to endure bath time twice each night in 120-degree water, with Mr. Bubbles, to compensate for its continued good health. It would be in the ground in another week.

The ugly girl and I went at each other in the flattened dirt, name calling and swinging misses and clawing the air. The boys ringed us, yelling and egging us on, and I felt like an Indian princess warrior. We were getting absolutely nowhere, when suddenly my opponent grabbed my hair and pulled out a massive chunk. I couldn’t believe my scalp had betrayed me like that. We both stood there in disbelief, she with a nine-inch-long ponytail in her thin fist, me with a reddening bald spot over my brow. Now I was mad. My hair was just starting to be a big deal to me, and I had spent the night before trying to deconstruct the mystery of Spoolies. I lunged for her, grabbing her sleeveless cotton shirt and ripping it off her sunken torso, revealing inverted nipples and a strawberry birthmark that looked like the head of one of the dogs that had bitten her.

The ugly girl ran home mortified, and I was cheered by the boys, including some of the ten-year-olds. Even after I was forced to apologize to the ugly girl and her mother, who was always dressed in a fancy ruffled dressing gown, no matter what the time of day, I had the sharp, delicious taste of victory on my tongue.

For weeks I glowed. I finally
mattered
.

That revelatory feeling even carried me through the birth of my brother Edward, a few months later, and my unceremonious demotion from the status of youngest child. The question of whether my mother even knew she was harboring a two-inch embryo when she received the call from the city morgue remains a mystery.

We stayed on in the house on Forty-second Street for another year. The week before we moved, I was up in the attic after school one afternoon, languidly poking around in some cardboard boxes. When my father’s youngest brother, Ordway, used to stay with us on weekend leave from boarding school, he always brought a hoard of
Playboy
magazines, and I was trying to find his leftover stash. I was pretty sure they were well hidden after the last time I had uncovered them (and planted one in my brother’s room, open to Miss December), but I kept up the search.

Over by the south-facing window there were some cardboard file boxes sealed up with tape and string. Tape and string means one thing to a busybody:
Open me.

The first box was boring: just a bunch of files, checkbooks, and gun magazines. The second box was all gun magazines, and so I almost didn’t open the third, but I did. On top of a pile of manila folders, positioned squarely in the center, was a newspaper clipping. The headline, in heavy italics read:

I sat back on my heels and tried to absorb this piece of information. I knew what suicide meant, but because it said
shot in the head,
it sounded like someone else had done the shooting.

I skimmed the rest, anxious I might be caught, because surely this was way worse than looking at centerfolds. My eye focused on the end:
a son, William, 7, and a daughter, Wendy, 6
.

The very last word was my name! And ha ha ha, I wasn’t six anymore, I was seven and a half. I threw the clipping back in the box, slammed down the flaps, resticking the tape as best I could, and raced for the stairs. I had to tell someone my name was in the papers!

 

 

 

THE FORMER MARGARET Livingston Partridge was listed in the Social Register of 1963 as Mrs. William A. M. Burden II, mother of three surviving sons and two grandchildren, member of several prominent clubs, and chatelaine of four impeccably located residences, as well as one yacht. The long list of her charitable and social affiliations conjured up a woman of ceaseless energy, but in truth, my grandmother was never happier than when recumbent.

Before she faced her day in the ruthless jungle of Manhattan, my grandmother had her breakfast served to her in bed. At seven the butler carried in the newspapers and a tray table set with starched, floral Porthault linens, white Limoges china, and a silver Hermès thermos of Colombian coffee. The menu never varied: three stewed prunes and a bowl of All-Bran. As the butler retreated, he powered up the big RCA television across from the bed and tuned it to
The Today Show
.

At seven-thirty a maid collected the twin toy poodles to walk them around the block, and my grandmother began her day.

The chef appeared first, notebook in hand. He was received in bed.

“
Bonjour,
Madame.”

“
Bonjour,
Chef.

“
Aujourd’hui,
Madame, I ’ave some nice haricots verts from the con-tree.”

“Lovely.”

“An some feegs from California.”

“Very nice.”

“Pear-aps tonight some ’alibut,
oui
?”

“Marvelous. We’ll be six, and Monsieur will choose the wine.”

“Of course,
merci,
Madame.”

Monsieur, who liked to be referred to as the Honorable William A. M. Burden II, but whom everybody called Bill, and his wife called Popsie, had risen much earlier and breakfasted, as always, on scrambled eggs with truffles. And he had already worked out the next two weeks of meals with the chef before departing for work.

Angelle, the lady’s maid, presented herself as the chef departed. She was a sweet, dimwitted soul who was married to Adolphe, the butler. Informed as to Madame’s choice of the day’s wardrobe—morning, afternoon, and evening—Angelle bustled away to select, press, steam, and polish.

Finally, the gaunt Swiss housekeeper entered.

“Good morning, Mrs. Burden,” said Ann Rose in a voice that sounded like she was introducing
Tales from the Crypt
. She consulted the schedule she had typed out in quadruplicate. “You have a fitting for the Givenchy ball gown in half an hour, and then your usual hair appointment at the Sherry-Netherland. Lunch is at Grenouille with the directors’ wives. The car will then take you to Bergdorf’s to look for a pocketbook and shoes for the two new Mainbocher suits you ordered. You have an appointment back here with the decorator to replace the carpet in the Hobe Sound pool house; then tea with the head of the co-op committee to discuss updating the doormen’s uniforms; then cocktails at the Modern; and then back home for dinner with your guests.”

“Right-o,” said my grandmother cheerfully, as she penciled in 28 Down in the
Times
crossword. Like my mother, my grandmother had her own funny roster of words and expressions, and anyone else saying them would have sounded mental. She said things like
isn’t she cunning
for isn’t she cute, or
jazzy
and
snappy
for good-looking. If you were having a good time, you were
gay
. My brother and I called her Gaga because that’s the name she herself came up with when Will was born, not knowing that before long it would prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My brothers and I spent at least two weekends a month with our grandparents, something that had been instigated, at their demand, after our father died. During the school year most weekends were spent in New York, sometimes at their country estate forty minutes away in Mount Kisco, but usually in the city, at their apartment on Sixty-third Street and Fifth Avenue. My grandmother especially lingered in bed on Sunday mornings, and when I was really small, I would fetch a picture book from the hallway shelves and climb in with her. I’d wedge myself between her warm quilted side and the bumpy spines of the poodles, the frills of her bed jacket tickling my cheek as she brought
Babar
or
Norman the Doorman
to life in her funny old-fashioned accent. Every New Yorker has a version of the city that they love best, and that remains mine—when it was all about going to FAO Schwarz and the zoo, and looking in the windows at Tiffany’s; and the smell of my grandmother’s Chanel No. 5, and the sun filtering through long Belgian linen curtains while we read books and the sea of yellow checker cabs honked pleasantly below.

My grandfather was a busy man. In addition to heading up the family venture capital company that bore his name, he was an expert aviation consultant to the government, a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, and on the boards of a dozen relevant companies. He was a thoroughly modern man: he collected modern art, he lived in a modern apartment, he weekended and summered in modern houses, and, to his profound satisfaction, he was president of the Museum of Modern Art.

Accordingly, my grandparents’ apartment looked as if it had been professionally decorated by Dr. Seuss. Against the starkness of the huge rooms, long stripped of their prewar moldings and parquet, the walls bone white and the floors alabaster, art provided animation. Calder mobiles spun from the ceilings. Naked African sculptures posed in corners next to fluid marbles by Arp. What seemed like acres of wall space were hung with abstracts by Klee, Kline, Mondrian, and Miró; and figurative works by Léger, Bacon, Picasso, Matisse, and Seurat. A monolithic Brancusi bronze loomed over a black thirty-foot pond set into the pale marble concourse that ran the length of the apartment. A school of anemic goldfish lapped the pond’s three-inch depths, regularly driven to suicide by the absence of plastic pirate treasure and aqua-colored gravel.

I sort of liked the place. That is, until I discovered Charles Addams.

On this particular spring morning my grandmother was still recumbent. She was reading aloud to her late son’s final contribution to the world: my baby brother. At a year old, Edward was happy for anyone’s attention.

I was sulking, having been publicly rebuked at dinner the previous evening for divulging my plans to pursue a career in mortuary science. I was seated Indian style in the long book-lined hallway that led from my grandparents’ suite to the back staircase.
Dear Dead Days,
an Addams compendium of deliciously macabre photographs
,
lay open across my knees. I count the Addams Family books among the most influential literary and philosophical forces in my life. For one thing, they were an early admission to the intellect of the adult world without having to read more than a sentence or two per page, the most demanding words being
blunt instrument
or
cyanide,
and the sentences rarely more complex than
“Careful of poison ivy, Lois.”
Plus, they made death seem like fun. I’d fortuitously come upon the Addams due to erratic cataloging,
Nightcrawlers
having been reshelved next to my favorite gross-out book,
Life’s Epic of Man
.

I scooted over to look up
embalming
in the encyclopedia.

The embalmer washes the body with germicidal soap and replaces the blood with embalming fluid.
I snapped the volume shut as I heard someone creep up behind me. It was only Selma. She was about a hundred years old, and it was all she could do to squeeze the orange juice in the morning and exchange the plates on the dining table at lunch and dinner (replacing the cold service plate with a hot soup plate, replacing that with a hot dinner plate, replacing that with a dessert plate and finger bowl, then removing the used finger bowl, then the dessert plate and finally setting down the coffee cup and saucer). Selma could have witnessed me carving up my two brothers for all I cared; her sanity had been seriously in question ever since she’d seen the Virgin Mary outlined in potatoes and carrots. “Right there in me own stew she was, plain as the nose on your face, bless us and save us!”