WE SHOULD HAVE anticipated a sea change when our mother insisted all three of her children accompany her on a pilgrimage to Plymouth Rock. Taking time out from our fun-filled tour of boarding schools, my mother, Edward, and I met up with Will in Boston and drove south en famille in a rented Plymouth Valiant—the irony of which was lost on our mother.
“It’s time you three started appreciating the other side of your family,” she lectured, hands on the wheel at precisely ten and two as she barreled along down Route 3. Edward and I quarreled in the backseat while Will, who at sixteen was in the throes of silent adolescence, glowered out the window. “All those servants waiting on you hand and foot in Burdenland must have your Colonial ancestors rolling in their graves!”
“It’s not our fault our grandparents are so rich,” I said.
“It’s not our fault our grandparents are so rich . . . ,” she mimicked back. “Well d’you think it’s their fault they didn’t pass some of your father’s money along to help me pay the goddamn bills? They cut me out of the bloody will, for Christ sake!”
We had all heard this story many, many times. Will turned to give her a mutinous look, and I was about to jump in when we were saved by the vision of Plymouth Harbor.
“Look! There it is—” said my mother in campy reverence, and her eyes actually welled up. It was maybe the third time I’d ever seen her cry.
Later, when I caught her whipping out a chisel and mallet from under her yellow and black cape, I tried to stop her, citing the words written on the “Do Not Touch!” signs everywhere, but she only said, “Oh, don’t have a cow. I have a right to some of this. My great-great-great-great . . . great . . . oh, whatever he was, my uncle Myles Standish was one of the first men to land on Plymouth Rock. Besides, they used to sell pieces of this thing as paperweights. My father even has cuff links and a watch fob out of it.” Shouldering me away, she found a foothold for the chisel. “I’m just taking a little souvenir for the Beast House,” she muttered, and with the muted chink of the professional, she clipped off an eight-inch piece from the seaward side of the iconic landmark.
The Beast House, that stunted, eighteenth-century Chinese chest of drawers that housed the artifacts of my mother’s forebears, now stood in a place of honor beside the large fireplace of the very small cottage my mother had recently purchased. We’d all questioned her motives when she’d cashed in her blue chip stocks six months before, but she must have known she would be needing a safe house. The cottage sat directly behind a hedge next to a busy road that led out to the causeway between the Old Town harbor and the ocean—and it had no view. It was the kind of beach house that owners never bother to winterize—a funky, sandy-floored, rundown thing with a kitchen too small to eat in, a bathroom with a rusty metal shower stall, and a well-rotted porch. And this was after the contractor had supposedly been working on it.
Six months later we were in our second semesters at boarding school—seven-year-old Edward at North Country School in upstate New York and fourteen-year-old me at National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Our mother was back in her English prison. A telephone call came on a spring evening just as the lady of the house, wearing nothing but Saran Wrap (another of their favorite outfits), was serving the Lord and Master his dinner. He got up to answer the phone (Beer here) and remained for some time in the hallway, listening intently as a woman on the other end of the overseas line delivered a death sentence.
Ten minutes later the plastic-wrapped Accused, even as she soaped the Dutch oven, was handed a twenty-four-hour eviction notice. My mother hightailed it out of there faster than you can say Tab, leaving everything behind except the dog. I still wonder what became of the contents of my room: all my hippie clothes, childhood books, LPs, posters, letters, and drawings—all my precious, identifying junk.
My mother’s two-timing came as no surprise to me; her appetite was bound to singe a hole through that marriage sooner or later.
That August, before the wronged wife’s call, my mother had been acting disturbingly unlike herself: soft, gooey, and transcendental. I’d seen that look on Maria Schneider’s face in Last Tango in Paris, when my roommate and I had used our fake IDs to see it.
“I’ve made a wonderful new friend,” my mother kept saying every time I passed through the kitchen.
“That’s great! How many legs does it have?” I kept saying in return.
“Don’t you want to know who it is?” she’d simper as I rummaged through the fridge.
“Friendships are so fun when they’re kept secret.” How stupid did she think I was? My mother didn’t have friends.
One Sunday morning she couldn’t hold back any longer. When I came into the kitchen to make toast, she was waiting to ambush me. I busied myself with the kettle, keeping my back pointedly toward her, but she continued from where she’d left off the night before, as if we were actually having a conversation about this. “He lives in Marblehead—”
She might as well have said: Okay, so I’ve been screwing the contractor I hired to fix some stuff on that beach house I bought back in the States, and I forgot what it’s like to be all infatuated and horny for someone, and so what if he’s married, only now I’m back over here in this miserable little house with that sodomizing S.O.B. and I’m all moony over the contractor, and I really want to tell someone about it, but since I don’t have any friends, I’m going to unload it on YOU, Toots.
When I was young and nosy, and all I wanted were answers, I couldn’t get anything out of her. Now that I was older and didn’t want to know anything, I couldn’t get her to shut up.
A British Airways flight from Heathrow to Logan brought the Accused back to the land of her forebears; more specifically, the New England town of Marblehead, where her grandfather had summered, and where the Spirit of ’76, that emblematic portrait of young America, hangs in the town hall. My mother moved into her tiny one-bedroom beach house. When news spread that the ex-pat home wrecker had moved to Marblehead, the contractor’s wife kicked him out, and he and his Labrador, Mac, moved in with my mother. For all of her trouble, the wife then got cancer and died.
My mother threw herself into the role of wicked adulteress. She streaked her hair platinum and didn’t get out of a bikini all summer. She sold off Kodak stock and bought herself a red Fiat convertible and drove around town with the top down, plying her fake English accent on anyone who would listen, like the checkout girl at Schube’s liquor store. In the beginning the contractor, whose name was Gil, tried to get us to like him. And we were prepared to—anything would be better than Hitler’s littermate—but we just couldn’t. For one thing, he was old. He had gray hair and a gray beard, and he was barrel-chested and bowlegged and tubby, and had the kind of hands that only look comfortable holding a can of beer or a hammer. He tried the Dad thing by palling around with Edward, who wasn’t having anything to do with tossing a football back and forth or building a shoe box, and he tried to be cool bumming cigarettes and mixing Will and me drinks and trying to smoke pot, but he wasn’t cool because he was still old. The first time I went to visit (armed with three girlfriends for moral support), my mother and the ancient boy toy gave us the bedroom, and they slept in a tent in the scraggly backyard. You could hear them doing it all night, what with the tent bouncing around like its stakes were going to pop out of the ground every time one of them climaxed.
“You do know that Gil went to Williams,” my mother kept saying, whenever she thought we were brushing him off.
“Uh huh,” I’d answer, thinking, So fucking what.
“And he’s a member of the Eastern Yacht Club, which is very snooty.”
“Wow.”
“So I really don’t understand why you can’t treat him with a little more respect!”
“Well, he is a contractor,” I’d fake-joke, like that was the real reason, and I was just the worst snob ever.
Going “home” became a necessarily brief, annual event. And with the three of us spread up and down the Eastern Seaboard in boarding schools, we were able to keep it that way.
Through the miracle of Island Divorce (and it will come as no surprise that the island was Haiti), my mother and the contractor became man and wife. They moved from the one-bedroom beach house into a one-and-a-half-bedroom beach house next door. The new house had even more of a transient feel to it than the old, despite their proud makeover of the bathroom, which boasted a plastic all-in-one tub-shower-and-tile unit that looked like it was pressed out by a Mattel Vac-U-Form. The living room had my mother’s signature hard couch, and a couple of small, square armchairs that were as comfy as bleachers, and all the furniture was covered with old sheets to protect it from the dogs. The rear of the house had two enormous sliding glass doors that led onto a deck and provided, at last, a wide view over the marsh to the sea.
Now my mother requisitioned the boxes she had stored when we’d moved to England. In a when-in-Rome celebration of her Colonial roots, she savored her trove of ancestral leavings: the Federal candlesticks, the tarnished sterling Queen Anne tea set, the various pewter soup tureens and chargers, the blue and white creamware, and mismatched plates by Spode, and Copeland, and Wedgwood. There must have been fifty christening mugs alone, many of them dating back to the early 1600s and passed down so many times the 1900 babies had to have their names inscribed in a jumble on the bottom. Out of their shallow wooden graves came portraits of long-dead Pilgrims—huge oils of large-eyed men and women in oddly modern, stark gold frames, and miniatures of their mothers and sisters and children. A long brown paper box revealed the wedding shawl of one Mary Lane of Bedford, Massachusetts, a kinsman known for a habit of picking off Indians with a shotgun from her upstairs bedroom window. There were enough domestic artifacts to start a museum, what with all the tortoiseshell hair combs, needle-pointed purses, cross-stitched patriotic slogans, golden thimbles, buttonhole scissors, pillowcases packed with yards of hundred-year-old lace, and frayed linen envelopes containing scraps of clothing purportedly belonging to everyone from the aforementioned Myles Standish to Bonnie Prince Charlie. On the mantel my mother proudly placed her favorite relic of all: the hallmarked family silver mug made by Paul Revere. (Which, of course, the Chosen One would get when she died.)
After they were settled in to the new house, my mother and the contractor settled themselves into a pattern of drinking and arguing, and fawning over their out-of-control Rhodesian ridgebacks—huge, insane dogs that took up every inch of space in that tiny house. You see local stories on TV about the raiding of the homes of weirdos harboring hundreds of animals living in a sea of their own feces. Visiting my mother’s house was beginning to feel dangerously close to this. It might only be a matter of months before the floors became carpeted with a two-inch-thick layer of dog stool. There would be no money to heat the house, but the larder would be stocked with Iams and booze. My mother would be forced to pawn her leather outfits, and would trail around in winter wearing layers of filthy, hooded, zip-up terry-cloth robes. When summer came, the single raggedy bikini she was down to would expose a body covered with bruises from the happy, beating tails of her dogs.
When you leave home, you instinctually modify the passage of time so that you, the child, develop at a normal rate, while your parents, and in my case my grandparents, age at about ten times that. I had seen little of my grandparents over the last few years and was unprepared for their sudden decline. Either that or I was able to see them for the first time with a modicum of objectivity. Between my grandmother’s Dubonnet and Percocetcoated perception of reality and my grandfather’s diminishing control over his limbs, and increase in drinking, they were a mess.
When they were courting, my grandmother, who had been ingrained with a love of art by her parents, was surprised at how little my grandfather knew or even cared about painting or sculpture. She set about educating him and took him to her father’s studio, and the Metropolitan Museum, and the Frick. My grandfather took it upon himself to tutor his future bride in his area of expertise—the art of drinking—and every night they went to parties and speakeasies to increase her knowledge of wine and other libations. Who knows whether she would have found her way to alcoholism without his guidance, but she was as much an expert as he was now.
For as long as I could remember, my grandfather always began his day’s drinking well before noon. Wherever he was—Hobe Sound, Mount Kisco, Northeast Harbor, New York—he would abruptly launch himself, like a wet rag fired from a sling-shot, and make his way to one of the cabinet bars located throughout his homes and his office. Selecting a Baccarat highball glass, he would fill it to the brim with Wild Turkey and drink it off in one go while standing there. Then he would replace the glass exactly where it had been and return to his seat. This routine was so, well, routine, you only took notice when he was staggering.
Oddly enough, alcoholism suited him. My grandfather was a part of that urbane, if self-impressed, counterestablishment that never stopped thinking, or drinking. He was also from a long, proud line of drinkers. In the same way the royal French Bourbon nose was said to denote enormous sexual appetite, the VanderBurden nose, less protuberant and infinitely more refined, prophesies an insatiable appetite for drink. Alcoholism never suited my grandmother, though. Whereas her husband, when over-served, would simply pass out in situ, my grandmother would dance among the goldfish or crash to the floor in a maelstrom of Dior, pearls, and poodles. In the morning she would explain her bruises by saying she had stumbled over an eye mask on her way to the bathroom.
My transatlantic homecoming had not been an entirely welcome one to my grandfather. Alas, he got to see a lot of me, because when I wasn’t in a dorm room, I was in Burdenland. We muddled through, mostly by adhering to a strict regime of ignoring each other. And if things like my grandparents’ decision to attend my brother’s high school graduation and not mine hurt my feelings, I’d take them to the grave rather than admit it.
Nineteen seventy-four was the annus horribillis. In June, my uncle Bob was killed while making a U-turn in his rented green AMC Gremlin. He was forty years old and had never been married. There was talk of suicide, but it was never confirmed. For my grandmother, the gloves were now off; she began drinking in earnest. Uncle Bob had been her favorite.
My grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and he did not take it well. The pharmacological effect of the experimental drug he began taking, L-dopa, combined with his daily fifth of bourbon, two to three bottles of Bordeaux, and a handful of sedatives was a disastrous one. Despite her grief over another son’s death, my grandmother continued to wear her usual armor of denial, but around her husband, she was walking on eggshells. She was desperate to help him, but he was making himself inaccessible with his misery.
That mid-summer before I started college, I drove up to Maine, arriving late in the afternoon after a ten-hour drive in my windfall Porsche 911 T, a car that had adventitiously found its way to me after yet another suicide. The year before, my maternal grandfather, the Colonel, had shot himself when his doctor informed him he had cancer. Thankful to have made it without the cantankerous engine erupting on I-95, I pulled up to the small parking area behind the bomb shelter, only to find it entirely taken up by my uncle Ordway’s Greyhound bus. A police car of indistinct origin was parked beside it. Fearful of flying, and unable to drive himself (due to alcohol and drug dependencies plus an acute case of agoraphobia which had, at one point, prevented him from leaving his apartment in New York for an entire year), Uncle Ordway transported his entourage from Point A to Point B in his very own tour bus and satellite squad car.
Of the youngest of our father’s brothers, Uncle Ordway had at one point been enigmatic to my brothers and me. When he was in his prime, and girlishly handsome, he had gone through a series of pretty women and hip cars that falsely foretold success. Now thirty, Ordway was bloated and gray-skinned, and a recent hair transplant (that appeared to have been harvested from his pelvic area) had left his head looking like that of a cheap doll, with plug marks marching in regimental rows across his scalp. He should have stuck with the toupees.
At least I didn’t have to worry about running into him; I knew he was holed up in the third cabin, up near the dock, and would stay there, maybe even through dinner if I was lucky. I parked the Porsche under the sappy pines near my own cabin and made my grand entrance into the main house at what was traditionally teatime, only to find my grandmother with a half-empty glass of Dubonnet instead of the usual four o’clock cup of Constant Comment.
“Hello, dearie,” she said in greeting, not rising from her chair. One poodle was on her lap, and the other was feebly trying to scale its way into it. I kissed my grandmother’s soft, squooshy cheek and breathed in the usual aroma of Joy and hair spray and face powder.
“No tea?” I said.
“Oh—well, uh, Popsie and I have already had ours, but I’ll ring for some right away, won’t we, girls?” Brfffftt. My grandmother grappled with the buzzer, which turned out to be the TV remote. Phil Donahue came booming onto the Sony embedded in the bookcase.
“Don’t worry, I’ll go ask for some,” I told her, replacing the remote on the table beside her. I bumped smack into Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham slipping out of the pantry with a six-pack of Coke. “Oh, hullo! Hullo!” he tooted, eyes on the floor, and flew past me to the powder room.
Note to self: don’t go in there for a while. And take a deep, deep breath: seems the whole family would be together for a few days. Out the big picture window I could see my little brother, Edward, burning something gratuitously nasty on the rocky beach. I decided to skip tea and went out to join him.
“Man, what a weird night,” I said to Will the next morning. “Have the GPs lost it or what?” By the time we’d all sat down to my welcome home lobster dinner, my grandfather had soiled himself, and my grandmother had five stitches and a bag of frozen peas taped across her swollen left temple. We had tried to play a game of Hearts after dinner, but in the middle of the second hand, a Gremlin commercial had come on and my grandmother had burst into tears and sloshed her drink all over the cards. Turning on her husband, she had demanded that he call CBS at once and tell them to stop running those godforsaken ads. Then she excused herself, headed for the bar in the hallway, refilled her glass, and retired for the night.
Will and I were lying on the long built-in sofa in the living room, listening to Todd Rundgren. After a brief stint at Hampshire College, Will had given up any further attempts at higher education and was now living full-time in one of the cabins and having a go at sculpture. He had made the classic WASP mistake of remaining in a summer place after Labor Day, and, faster than you can say substance abuse, he had joined forces with the ranks of Maine’s full-time drug abusers and alcoholics. Unless I was in Maine, I hardly saw him anymore because he never went off-island. I only saw my younger brother in Maine too, it seemed.
“I guess,” grunted my brother. He was critically hungover. His hair was as thick and unruly as a hay field, and his glasses needed some serious updating.
“Don’t you think we should do something? I don’t give a shit about Granddaddy, but Gaga’s going to break her neck.”
“They’ll be fine,” said Will, closing his eyes.
The new butler, who was disconcertingly young, good-looking, and Basque, abruptly materialized with a silver tray. He set it down between us on the sofa and, after asking our permission, poured out thick black coffee into two perfectly white Limoges cups. Assured there was nothing more required, he left as quietly as he’d come in.
“Anyway,” Will said, through a mouthful of English muffin, “they’ll be going in the hospital after Labor Day, as usual. Pass me the marmalade.”
Before there was the Betty Ford Center or Promises, there was good old New York Hospital. That’s where my grandparents went once a year to dry out. They took a room together and lay in their beds with private nurses bustling around them and IV drips in their arms as if they were afflicted with an entirely different disease. They planned their detox around the chef’s vacation and had all their meals catered by their favorite restaurants—La Caravelle, Le Cygne, the Four Seasons, and La Grenouille. When they got out of the hospital, clear-eyed and healthy, they took up right where they had left off the week before.
My grandmother seemed resigned to her general deterioration. She stayed in bed longer in the mornings, watching television, munching on her All-Bran, sipping from her thermos of coffee, an old pink bed jacket around her shoulders and a fire crackling away. Instead of who would be her doubles’ partner, her greatest concern now was who would be attending which meal.
“Will you be in for lunch?” she’d ask, when we popped our heads in to say good morning.
“How many for dinner?” she’d call out anxiously as we ran through the living room later in the day.
A lifetime spent monitoring the comings and goings of family and friends, household and staff, and this was what it had come down to.
I voiced my concern after stopping in to see her one picture-perfect morning when the sky was sapphire and the breeze fresh. She seemed genuinely taken aback.
“But, dearie, I’m always up and out for my ladies’ game by nine!”
“Then you’re an hour late,” I pointed out.
“Ah. Well, that’s because I’m having my hair done this afternoon.” She nibbled on the end of her pencil and went back to studying the Ellsworth American crossword puzzle. “I simply cannot get twenty-three across—Bennie and the blank. Four letters, ends in S.”
“Jets.”
“The jets?”
“It’s a song. Would you like to come for a little hike with me?”
“Well aren’t you clever!” Ignoring my question, she penciled in the answer.
After she’d asked me what meals my brothers and I would be in for, I left her sipping the last of her coffee with a small frown on her face.
Half an hour later, I heard the soles of her Belgian flats come squeaking down the hall. She was humming one of her favorite hymns of fortitude: And it holds, my anchor holds: Blow your wildest, then, O gale . . . The kitchen door swung open, and there stood my grandmother, battle-ready in yellow linen slacks and her favorite black cardigan with the yellow velvet piping and the appliquéd bumblebees around the neckline. She had her face on and her hair pinned together as best she could.
“Good morning, all!” she said. Then, clearing her throat, my grandmother announced that she wanted to make dinner.
The chef ran his knife straight through the squab he was disjointing; Selma let go of a pitcher of orange juice and it exploded as it hit the pantry floor; Juan, the new butler, audibly sucked in a breath. Madame only appeared to comment on the success of dinner or to forage for a nightcap.
I happened to be in there. My favorite spot was still up on the counter with my heels banging, bugging Michel, the chef, and stealing bacon from the pile on the shelf over the stove. Captain Closson leaned beside the screen door, drinking Sanka while he waited for Selma to finish packing up a wicker picnic basket he would then carry down for lunch on the boat. It was taking Selma forever, because now she really was about a hundred.
After an awkward moment, everyone started saying good morning back, and nodding, and shuffling their feet, unsure of what to do next.
“You want to do what?” I said in disbelief.
“Well, dearie, I thought I might try cooking Popsie’s dinner one night when the help are off.”
My grandmother could not even boil water. I’d seen her make a cup of tea—just once—using tap water. The idea of her operating the twelve-burner Garland was enough to jolt Michel out of his stupor. “Oui, Madame!” he blurted. “Yes, of course. You have something particular in mind?”
“I would like you to teach me how to make Steak Tartare,” said my grandmother, visibly brightening.
There was a collective sigh of relief. Steak Tartare is served raw.
News travels fast in an overstaffed household. Suddenly the kitchen was filled with all kinds of people busily intent on doing next to nothing. My grandmother accepted a fresh apron from Michel and tied it over her bee ensemble. Then, while he nervously minced an onion, she stood eyeballing the mound of hamburger meat someone had placed on the table before her.
“You’re supposed to squeeze it around like Play-Doh,” I told her.
“Right-o—like this?” Marshaling her courage, she picked some up and patted it with her hands. This wasn’t so bad. Emboldened, she picked up another bright red handful. “Oh!” she cried, surprised by the squelchy sound of it going through her fingers. Everyone laughed, and my grandmother giggled a little herself. Before long her manicure was smeared with fat and tissue, and her big diamond flashed through the globs as she squished and squeezed and hummed and mooshed the meat around like a two-year-old making gory mud pies. As Michel instructed her, she added the onions, capers, Worcestershire sauce, parsley, some mustard, and an egg, and then smoothed it all into the shape of a loaf before etching decorative crosses over the top with a butter knife.
“There!” She beamed. (And farted the tiniest of tinies in her pleasure.) She smiled at everyone around the room, and everyone smiled back at her. We knew she would as soon repeat this exercise on her own as she would apply for a job at Dairy Queen.
On the evening of August 8, my brothers and I sat with our grandparents in the big, curved living room and watched Nixon give his resignation speech. Tears streamed down my grandfather’s face as he slumped in his yellow Saarinen chair, a dark Rorschach stain spreading across his lap. It was as if the entire carpet of his world had been pulled out from under him. Nixon had been my grandfather’s last ticket to diplomatic fruition. Through favors and donations, my grandfather had long been greasing the conduit to what he wanted most in the world: the ambassadorship to France.
A couple of weeks later there was a cocktail party at Nelson Rockefeller’s place in Seal Harbor. My grandfather and Nelson were good friends. Both were from wealthy families, and both had the ambition to govern. They shared other passions: France, art, food and wine, and (surprise) the Republican Party. Their summer houses had been designed by Wallace Harrison, the architect of Rockefeller Center and the United Nations. Each was a past president of the Museum of Modern Art (Nelson’s mother had founded it), and philanthropy was of paramount importance to both. The difference was, Nelson was the real thing; he was not only substantially richer, he was far better at being rich. He was from one of the contemporary world’s wealthiest families, whereas the financial glory days of the Burdens and the Vanderbilts was his-tor-ee. Career-wise, Nelson had it going on too. He was a professional politician who won elections (even if his campaigns were heavily self-funded), not a diplomat who had to win appointments. Now, to cap off a perfectly ghastly summer, President Ford had nominated Nelson for the vice presidency.
My grandmother was desperate to make her husband feel better. She figured it was high time she made Popsie that cozy dinner, or at least pretended she had. The morning of the Rockefeller party, she resolutely reentered the kitchen. This time Selma slopped onto the floor only a little of the gazpacho she was ferrying.
“Now, I want you all to take the night off, and Mr. Burden and I will eat Steak Tartare when we return from cocktails at the Rockefellers’ this evening.”
“Oui, Madame,” said Michel.
“Oh, and, Michel,” said my grandmother with an embarrassed little brrfffttt, “would you mind dreadfully if we told Mr. Burden that I made the meal?”
Michel smiled and bowed.
Turning to me, she said, “Why don’t you come too? I’m sure there’ll be lots of nice young there.” I knew what “young” meant—anyone in the Social Register between the ages of ten and fifty. I said I’d go. I could tell she wanted to show me off, not because I was so great, but because that’s what summer people do with their progeny. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham would have given half of his Hitler memorabilia to go, but my grandfather wasn’t having any of that. He never allowed himself to be seen in public with his third son; it was too humiliating.
And out she went, leaving the staff flummoxed and preparations started for the various things that would have to accompany her masterpiece (including the masterpiece itself): a butter lettuce salad, some French bread, cheese, a crème caramel. The wine needed to be selected, the butter curled, the linens chosen, and the finger bowls set on trays with a leaf of verbena in each. Someone would have to serve the meal, then clear and wash up, and get the Mr. and Mrs. up the three little stairs and into their bedroom and draw their baths and make sure they didn’t drown in them and help them brush their teeth and get them in their pj’s and finally into bed. Night off, indeed.
The three of us were dressed and ready to go at six. My grandfather could barely walk, but that didn’t stop him from driving. He shoved aside my urgent petition and, with a struggle that had me wondering how we were going to pry him out at the other end, managed to get himself behind the wheel of his 6.3-liter 300 SEL Mercedes—a car so powerful it was forever leaving coats of paint in its wake.
The road to Seal Harbor is a twisty one that follows the curves of the shoreline. It was Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride over, but we made it, with my grandmother only shrieking, “Mercy! Bill, you’ll kill us!” twenty-six times. We missed the entrance to the Rockefeller estate because my grandfather was going about ninety, but he remedied that by executing a U-turn into oncoming traffic. (Shades of Uncle Bob! I screamed to myself.) As we were thundering up the long gravel driveway, I spotted the Secret Service checkpoint and told my grandfather to slow down, as in “Oh my God! Stop! Stop!” A long table had been placed across the driveway, making it impossible to continue on to the house without verification. Dark-suited agents were looking into all the cars and checking the occupants against a guest list.
My grandfather wasn’t going for it. “Goddamn it!” he raged, spit flying. “This is outrageous, Peggy! Don’t they know who I am?” And he floored it.
“Bi-illl—” my grandmother wailed, covering her eyes with one hand and with the other clawing a long tear in the leather upholstery.
The agents realized what was happening. Quickly, they mobilized themselves in front of the table and withdrew their guns. One of them grabbed a bullhorn and bellowed at us to “HALT!”
My grandfather didn’t hesitate for one second. We flew through the center of the table, smashing it to pieces and sending papers and operatives flying. I could have sworn I heard a couple of shots zing past us, and I started to pray. Oh God, please don’t let me die from a bullet defending a man who isn’t even vice president yet. I’ll miss orientation week at Cornell, and I’m sorry, Lord, but that’s when I’m intending to lose my virginity. You wouldn’t want me to die a virgin, now would you?
The madman remained unfazed. He peeled around the corner, up a little hill and past a planting of ferns, and finally ground to a halt in a shower of pine needles and chipmunk body parts in front of the house, whereupon he lurched out of the car, and up the steps, and into a bear hug with the future vice president of the United States.