AS SOON AS we figured out that for all intents and purposes we had no parents, Will and I started filling in the gaps with the hired help. At home in Washington, Henrietta and Cassie Diggins assumed virtual parenthood the day our little brother was born, when, following a cursory offering of colostrum, our mother grabbed a couple of bikinis and fled the maternity ward to embark on an open-ended quest for the perfect tan. When she returned three years later, baby Edward was surprised to discover he was not, in fact, the miracle child of a Scottish nanny and an African- American cook.
When we were in Burdenland, which was what our mother called the “goddamn spoiled rotten” world of our grandparents, my brothers and I had at our disposal an extended surrogate family who had known us since we were newborns. The core group, what I liked to consider our immediate family, was based in New York City, and consisted of the chef and his assistant, the butler and his wife, four or five maids, a couple of laundresses, the chauffeur, and the domestic gatekeeper, Ann Rose.
My grandfather may have been avant-garde in his views on culture, but he was strictly Edwardian when it came to his household. In this era of civil rights and bra burnings, he stoically referred to his staff as “the servants.” My grandmother would have preferred to call them nothing at all, but she compromised by calling them the “help,” for which her husband chided her, saying, “Peggy, don’t be absurd. To call the servants the ‘help’ is insultingly euphemistic.”
When it came to hiring, my grandfather referred to a standard formulated during the era of Florham: Butlers were ideally British, and came with a wife. Chefs were French, but could have Swedish or Finnish assistants. Maids were Irish, but ladies’ maids were French, unless they were English because they were married to the butler. Coachmen, footmen, and valets were English or Irish; and the order of preference for the chauffeur’s nationality was first French, then English, then—as a last resort—German. (Clearly George the Nazi was a last resort.) Head gardeners were absolutely always Scottish, as were the under gardeners, although the latter could on occasion be Italian, but only if they were exceptionally talented. Italian was as dark as anyone got.
The most important person in the household was the chef, and there was fierce competition among my grandfather and his Francophile coterie as to who could attain and then hold on to the hottest one. Requisite criteria included a temper more volatile than Idi Amin’s, Swiss or French culinary training begun at the age of two, and documented tenure in the kitchens of de Gaulle, a Rothschild, or, at the very least, Douglas Dillon. Of the dozen or so books my grandfather consumed each week, half of them were on the subject of food or drink. The hallway bookshelves overflowed with the spines of Elizabeth David and Lucullus Beebe, Ali-Bab, Pierre Franey, and A. J. Liebling, and the bedside tables were stacked with wine quarterlies and epicurean almanacs. As he lay pillow-propped in bed at night, waiting for the velvet Seconal hammer, my grandfather did his food reading. He alternated between scribbling pencil notations in a shorthand that only Miss Pou could decipher and pontificating into the mike of a thirty-pound Dictaphone, one of the dozen he had installed, in addition to the one in the car, next to the toilet, the bed, the chair in the library, the indoor swimming pool in Maine, and the tennis court in the country. Within a day, these nocturnal musings (Curnonsky—Never lunches, but is tolerant of those that do. Or Fish are only fresh for a few hours. Or Midnight Supper Idea: Thin sandwiches of very rare, or raw, beef, pepper mill, tiny bottles of cold champagne) would be transposed and typed up in quadruplicate on five-by-seven index cards, to be filed for reference in the kitchens of each house.
If the chef was God, then the butler was Jesus. My grandfather’s favorite had been a white-haired Englishman named Day, whom President Eisenhower had seduced from Buckingham Palace, and whom my grandfather had usurped from Ike. Day had retired, and now there was pink-cheeked Adolphe. He should have been English, but he had been with the embassy in Brussels, and despite his being Belgian, my grandfather had liked him so much that he had conveyed him back to New York along with fifty cases of Burgundy. A combination of Alfred Pennyworth (Batman’s butler) and Mervyn Bunter (the valet of Lord Peter Wimsey), Adolphe was the epitome of protocol, diplomacy, and discretion, with an appropriate amount of attitude. He may have held my grandfather’s underwear for him to step into, but he did it in a morning suit of sartorial perfection, with a ceremonial expression befitting the task. Impeccably turned out as he was—daytime black jacket, gray waistcoat, and pinstripe trousers; evening tailcoat with white gloves and wing collar—Adolphe ensured his master was too, whether in white tie with decorations for a dinner at the White House, a navy Huntsman business suit for the office, or spotless flannel tennis whites for the weekend court. Not a molecule of lint could be found on either man, and this was before the most important invention of the twentieth century: the rolling pet hair remover.
Adolphe, in addition to being butler, valet, and avuncular nanny to Will and Edward and me, had the role of the archetypal family priest who must care for his half-witted sisters. In this case, they were the maids, and they needed explicit guidance from the moment their bunioned feet got out of bed to when they said their Hail Marys in the same spot at the close of the day. They flapped around him like Chicken Littles if the papers were late, or the vacuum cleaner belt broke, or the butter curler went missing.
An old Irish maid has the shelf life of Velveeta. Change in the ranks was rare, and only necessary when one of them staggered repeatedly under the weight of the luncheon dishes, or became so stricken with dementia that she carpet-swept a single square foot of the library for hours on end. Even then, out of a sense of loyalty, they were kept on. Incompetence was never a reason to fire a maid, nor, in Selma’s case, was incontinence. Those women knew my brothers and me better than our own mother did, and when I was feeling frustrated in my attempts to have a so-called normal life, I sometimes wished for the predictable routine of the women who occupied the staff wings and basements and attics of my grandparents’ houses. Up at six, squeeze the oranges for juice, walk the poodles, choose the linens for lunch and dinner, have a chin wag with Nelly on ten, serve lunch, polish some silver, cup of tea and the Daily News crossword at four, serve cocktails, serve dinner, telly for an hour, prayers, and bed by nine. Tuesdays off, Mass on Sunday, a fortnight’s holiday in June. They were grounded. They knew what to expect. More importantly, they knew what was expected of them. Nobody expected anything of me, unless you counted my mother expecting me to become thin, blond, and tanned.
There were definite perks to having four or five auntie maids in residence. You never had to make your bed. You could step out of your clothes and leave them puddled right there on the floor, and poof! they would disappear and be back in a few hours, magically washed and pressed and folded away in your drawers like you lived in the clothing department of Best & Co. Red-knuckled hands perpetually wiped and dusted, scrubbed and polished, mopped and waxed, and tidied and organized, putting to rights the everyday messes of we, the Goddamn Spoiled Rotten.
Ann Rose, the gatekeeper, was the liaison between front and back, the settler of petty grievances, the soother of egos, and consequently a nervous wreck. She was a mournful, spaghetti-like thing with dark puffs under her sad brown eyes and deep lines on either side of her disappointed mouth. I liked to pretend she was from the Swiss branch of the Addams family, although really she looked more like she came from the clan of Edward Gorey. Sepulchrally dismal, she was the three-dimensional equivalent of woe.
It was difficult not to take Ann Rose for granted. Even the back elevator operator enjoyed more recognition than she did. She had been an au pair dispatched from Zurich the moment the wet nurses had finished with my grandmother’s fourth and final son, Uncle Ordway. When, in the tradition of his three older brothers—my father, Uncle Bob, and Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham—Ordway was sent to boarding school, Ann Rose the au pair became Ann Rose the household watchdog, and she spent the remainder of her life in bondage to my grandparents.
Ann Rose was grimly reliable. If she said she’d have the poodles groomed in time for my grandmother’s luncheon for Mrs. Astor, you knew the dogs would be posed on the yellow sofa beneath the Monet water lilies in the living room, coiffed and perfumed, when the ladies arrived. And you could always find Ann Rose exactly where you expected her to be, at any given moment, which meant I could ferret around in her office without being disturbed.
Ann Rose’s office was my favorite hunting ground. It was also the most accessible, since she went home to her own apartment at night. The office was in the back corner of the apartment, at the end of the long, red-carpeted, book-lined hallway, next to the spiral staircase that led downstairs to the bedroom Will and I shared. Tall wire-glass windows looked through a fire escape onto a quintessential New York view: a brick wall with a scrap of sky visible above it. Floor-to-ceiling shelves bulged with reference books, and iron-colored file cabinets were squeezed shoulder to shoulder in front of them.
The long metal desk that squatted beneath the east-facing window looked as utilitarian as a business envelope, but inside it was a candy store. I considered myself the curator of its eight skinny drawers, and I was forever rearranging the green and red felt-tipped pens, the black china markers, the staples and magnifying glasses and fountain pens and ink cartridges and scissors of a dozen shapes and sizes, and bringing everything to regimental order for Ann Rose—who was forever messing with my arrangements. (How anyone could stand to have their office supplies all higgledy-piggledy was a mystery to me.) A constant source of irritation was the locked drawer on the bottom righthand side. I could not jimmy or pick my way into it. Nor could I figure out just what could be so important as to be locked up. Nothing in Burdenland was ever locked. Not the wine cellar, or the silver cabinets, or my grandmother’s jewelry boxes—even after the time when the window washer stole her rectangular-cut, Color-D, Clarity-SI1 10k Cartier diamond engagement ring, which she got back three hours later because the moron tried to pawn it during his lunch break.
Sometimes I began with a perusal of disfiguring diseases in the medical encyclopedia, but usually I just went straight for the files to catch up on current events. In addition to evaluations from Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham’s psychiatrist, Dr. Sharp, and Will’s shrink, Dr. Berman, and secret information on the help, like their references, and what my grandfather had ordered from his tailor in London (forty blue shirts and twenty white), and what my grandfather had ordered for my grandmother from Mainbocher and Givenchy and Balmain and Dior and Balenciaga, there were Will’s and my report cards, which the schools sent because my grandparents paid the tuition. My mother was forever telling me how Will had scored higher on his IQ test than me, so I needed to keep tabs on the situation and reassure myself I was still smarter than him, even if it was the battle of the D+’s over the Ds. I was terrified of having to repeat a grade the way my brother had, and then having to go to boarding school.
I wanted whatever Will had, but not his school. Glayden was a hippie encampment in the woods of Virginia that catered to children with learning disabilities. These ranged from severe dyslexia, like Will had, to headline mental retardation. My mother had sent me to camp there one summer, with disastrous results. After a few days surrounded by the afflicted, it was impossible for me not to speculate that since I didn’t have any learning disabilities, clearly I was there because I was retarded, and this was my family’s way of telling me. The nurse said in twenty-six years of working with the mentally ill she’d never seen anyone have such hysterics.
Because I loved Christmas so much, despite the constant disappointment of it, I almost always concluded a session in Ann Rose’s office with a life-affirming check on the three file cabinets devoted to the seductive paraphernalia of the holidays: the wrapping paper and cards and ribbon and tags and tissue-enclosed stockings.
A kid who can talk herself into believing the Addams Family was inspired by reality can extend faith in the existence of Santa Claus almost indefinitely. Okay, maybe I didn’t actually believe in Santa Claus—I mean I wasn’t stupid enough to think an enormously fat man was going to squeeze down that skinny Philip Johnson fireplace in the living room bearing presents the size of footlockers—but I believed in the eternal optimism and idealism of Christmas, and in the theoretical six degrees of separation as it applied to all grown-ups and Santa Claus.
The first week of December, Ann Rose arranged for the doormen to bring up the world’s tallest artificial tree from the basement, along with an even taller ladder, and the butler set about decorating it. (That a couple owning two hundred and fifty acres littered with real Christmas trees would deck the halls with a fake one remains a mystery.) She called the gardener in Mount Kisco and told him the exact number of paper whites needed for the mantels and coffee tables, and he brought in a few hundred, and enough scarlet poinsettias to line the front hall and fill the pair of six-foot-wide circular planters in the living room.
I would tune the McIntosh stereo to WQXR and position myself in one of the living room windows that overlooked Fifth Avenue. With choral music and carols enfolding me, I’d drop the Addams Family act and think about angels and the baby Jesus and stare out, my forehead against the icy glass, at the darkened park, marveling at how the skaters on Wollman Rink made it look like a star exploding in the galaxy.
The Christmas right after Kennedy was killed, Will and I went to our grandparents in New York as usual. Edward came too, and so did Henrietta, and Obadiah the basset hound. My mother even flew up with us and stayed for a tense twenty-four hours before taking off for the Bahamas. Needless to say, my mother snubbed the help. Since they were my chosen family, I compensated by practically making their beds for them when she was around. I’d squeeze the orange juice and carry the breakfast dishes from the table to the pantry for Anna, and I’d walk the poodles for Selma, which the poodles hated because I hated them.
It was considered perfectly safe at that time for children to prowl around the city either by themselves or in the company of toy poodles—and that’s what I was doing when I caught sight of Ann Rose scurrying across Fifty-seventh Street with an armful of shopping bags, bobbing her way toward Tiffany’s. Something perverse told me to follow her, and so I ducked into the revolving door, nearly decapitating the dogs, and lingered by the men’s watches while she waited for the special elevator in the corner that went to the Schlumberger department on the second floor. She reappeared ten minutes later with a small Tiffany blue shopping bag and then scuttled out the front door and veered left into Bonwit Teller. After purchasing several pairs of gloves, a couple of wallets, and an ugly costume jewelry necklace, she fought her way to the back of the store and into one of the elevators. I had no trouble staying out of sight because the place was crammed with shoppers, but I was clueless as to what floor she was headed to, though by this point I shouldn’t have been. I took the next elevator, but almost threw up between Ladies’ Sportswear and Ladies’ Lingerie because the white-gloved black lady operating it was throwing the lever so hard she was making the thing bounce up and down like a yo-yo. I got out and dragged the poodles down the stairs, and we waited for Ann Rose behind the Max Factor counter on the ground floor.
When she reemerged, she had a couple of long dress boxes under her arms. I could tell one of them was from the children’s department because I’d seen my share of them. She was out the door and swimming back upstream through the tourists to FAO Schwarz, where I watched her buy three Steiff animals, a Mouse Trap game, an Easy-Bake Oven, a Wham-O Air Blaster, some Slinkys, a couple of trolls, a G.I. Joe doll, and a Tonka toy jeep. She could hardly move she had so many bags, but I sure wasn’t going to help her. I was having that clammy feeling you get when it’s just dawning on you that you’ve discovered something really bad. George the Nazi suddenly appeared with the car, and he bundled her and her thirty-five bags and boxes into the back of the limo, and they headed across Fifty-eighth Street. Back to the North Pole, I thought, with something like pins pricking my eyeballs. The poodles were chattering with frostbite, and so we slogged back up Fifth to Sixty-third, and finally turned under the awning of 820, and I collapsed in the little corner seat in the elevator for the ten-second ride up to the sixth floor.
The light shone late under the door of Ann Rose’s office over the next few days, but when I looked around in the mornings before she had come into work, there was no evidence, other than an extra roll of Scotch tape on the desk, a few tiny triangles of snipped curling ribbon, and the telltale drift of gift card glitter. I couldn’t figure out who to be angry at. Had I really thought my grandparents ran around town getting the zillions of things that Will and I pleaded for, and that they then sat up into the night wrapping them? Yes. Yes, I had.
I was so incensed by the Betrayal that I nearly blurted it out to my mother when she called the next morning from Nassau to tell me that if “Santa” got me the Easy-Bake Oven I had asked for, I was not, repeat NOT, to place anything in it that was a) alive, b) a troll, or c) an item belonging to either of my brothers. Which was her way of saying it was a done deal.
“Thanks for the tip-off,” I said.
“Oh, don’t thank me, Toots, thank Santa,” my mother replied.
“Oh yeah. Santa. Of course. I’ll start my thank-you note to him right now.”
When I let Will in on my discovery, he had little to say, as usual. We were watching The Outer Limits, which always gave me the creeps, right from the moment the Control Voice introduced each broadcast.
There is nothing wrong with your television set . . .
“Guess what,” I said.
Do not attempt to adjust the picture . . .
“What?” said Will.
“ANN ROSE IS SANTA!”
“So?”
“So? Whaddaya mean so? Listen, it’s Ann Rose who goes and buys all the presents and toys and stuff, and then wraps them all up, and then puts them under the tree and in the stockings and everything. I saw her!”
My brother turned and gave me a look that said, You pathetic idealist (or nine-and-a-half-year-old words to that effect), so I had no recourse but to slap him, and then he punched me in the stomach, and the butler had to come and separate us for an hour. And that was the last time I even uttered the word Santa to anyone, until we were unwrapping our presents in the living room in front of the fire, on Christmas Day.
As usual, I had leapt out of bed and thrown open the door to Will’s and my bedroom to find the stockings that “Santa” had conveniently delivered to our door (so that the grown-ups could sleep). They were so overstuffed they spilled little presents onto the red carpet like cornucopias. But the customary thrill turned sour as I remembered it was Ann Rose who had purchased and then wrapped, in papers patterned with splashy patterns, and gumdrops and candy canes and snowmen, each of the dozens of presents she had then stuffed into the toes and heels and ankles and calves and knees (that’s how big they were) of the eight stockings, for my grandparents, my three uncles, my two brothers, and me.
The grown-ups finally emerged and gathered by the fireplace in the living room, my grandparents still in their dressing gowns. Uncle Bob, now the eldest, since my father had died, already had a five o’clock shadow. He had to shave about five times a day in order to not look like a gangster. He resembled the other men in the family in that he was tall and ropey, but his hair, instead of being auburn, was very dark. He had his mother’s beauty, if not her clothes sense. For the Christmas festivities he was dressed in his usual bargain basement clothing—an ill-fitting sports jacket and a pair of worn slacks. Uncle Bob was the genetic mutant of the family—he eschewed any and all luxuries, with the exception of birthday and Christmas presents to us, his brother’s children. At twenty-nine, he still didn’t own a car and lived pretty much like a monk. After graduating from Harvard, Uncle Bob had shocked his family to the core by enlisting in the army. Following a two-year stint, he got a job teaching Greek and physics at a private school in St Louis. Knowing how paltry his son’s teaching salary was, my grandfather sent him a check for five thousand dollars every month; and each month Uncle Bob donated the entire amount to the school.
The second-in-line entered the living room like he was being chased by a bee. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham was clutching a slopping cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in a holder in the other. His shirttails were out, and his Yuletide red tie was as askew as a guy with the social skills of a five-year-old could make it. He had been escorted to the apartment that morning by his “companion,” one of several that lived with him in forty-eight-hour shifts, because that was just about as long as anyone could take it. The guy never stopped talking. If anyone was around, he chattered incessantly, out of either a fear of silence or his substantial chemical imbalance.
There had been a seismic disturbance in the bloodline when the third Burden son was born. For the longest time my grandfather refused to acknowledge there was anything wrong with young Hamilton. He even sent him to Harvard, though he had to pay about a hundred times the tuition. There was lots of additional tutoring, despite the fact that Hamilton was extremely bright, and could answer virtually any question on politics or history, especially if it had to do with the Third Reich. But after a rumored romantic scandal involving another young man, he was pulled out of his freshman year and done with college, and public life in general.
One evening in Maine, when my uncle had been a little over-served in the caffeine department (as in about fifteen cups of coffee and three Cokes), and he had sprayed the powder room with urine and laughed so hard that snot had flown out of his nose and hit the hors d’oeuvres plate of Brie and Triscuits, my grandmother had pulled me aside and told me that although I may not have noticed, my uncle Hamilton was a little different from other people. Will and I laughed our brains out over that later. May not have noticed?
Ordway, the youngest of the three uncles, walked over to the farthest chair and slumped down into it. He was visibly hungover and typically reluctant to be a part of any family activity that involved children. It was clear to Will and me, and probably Edward as well, that he didn’t much like us. Ordway had been somewhat of a surprise to his parents. He had the clean good looks of a late edition, but at nineteen, he was already losing his hair and had a weird thing going on with his part.
All the players now present and accounted for, we ripped into the presents. My grandfather sat in the molded plywood-and-steel Eames side chair he always sat in on Christmas morning, with a plate of butter-soaked English muffins and the thermos of coffee he always was served on a small table before him, extracting presents from his ermine-trimmed stocking with his long, slow fingers, just like he always did. My grandmother was on the purple couch, a poodle on each side, doing the same. They both exhibited genuine surprise as they unwrapped their gifts.
“Popsie! Earrings from Verdura! How divine—”
“Why, Peggy, a Charvet tie—how thoughtful!”
My grandmother, however, had not seemed too surprised by the necklace of red and green millipedes I’d made for her with the Creepy Crawlers set I’d gotten for my eighth birthday the week before. Nor did my grandfather swoon with pleasure over the paint-by-numbers horse head on black velvet I’d given him, intending for him to replace the Klee in the hallway with it. Uncle Ham-Uncle Ham got a six-pack of Coca-Cola I’d swiped from the pantry and decorated with incorrectly drawn red and green swastikas and a couple of ponies. At least he was thrilled, and exclaimed “Very good! Very good!” in between drags on his cigarette and slugs from his cup of coffee. At one point he sidled up to his father like a working dog trying to ingratiate itself to the herdsman. With his eyes on the buttons of his blazer, for he never looked at anyone directly, he held out the book his father (Ann Rose) had given him. “Why, thank you, Dad! Thank you, Dad!” he said. “Göring was an interesting man! Yes, yes, an interesting man!”
His father brusquely waved him away. I had never seen my grandfather speak to his son, and I never would.
Will had yet to unwrap his Ken doll cadaver, autopsy-ready with cut here lines drawn across its abdomen with a red Magic Marker. Edward didn’t get anything because what do you get a one-year-old? I was nice to him for an hour, though.
I got the Easy-Bake Oven all right (it practically screamed, Crematorium!) and some games and books and Barbies and trolls, as well as the usual fussy clothes in long tissued boxes from Best & Co., the annual Hermès scarf, and cashmere cardigan with appliquéd horse heads. My uncle Bob gave me a pair of flower-shaped ruby and pink sapphire earrings from Firestone and Parsons, which I happened to be staring at in disbelief, when Ann Rose asked who they were from. She had been hovering with pencil and yellow legal pad over Will’s and my shoulders in order to properly record who had sent what to whom, so that all could receive an arduous thank-you note in return.
“Well, you oughta know since you picked them out,” I said, pitching the earrings into a pile of mangled wrapping paper.
“I think you are mistaken,” Ann Rose said, retrieving the dark velvet box and tenderly brushing it off. “Oh, but these are lovely.” She didn’t bat an eye as she neatly recorded the present that would have made any female other than an eight-year-old cry with pleasure, next to my name.
My grandparents’ annual New Year’s Day party was an all-out extravaganza that everyone from Upper East Side hoi polloi to Bowery pop artists showed up for. Preparations began the minute after Christmas. Extra help was brought in, and the maids ran around like chickens with their heads cut off. The kitchen and pantries became congested with the steady arrival of deliveries: linens and stemware brought up from storage in the basement, cheese and oysters flown in from France, wooden crates of vegetables, meats and poultry and game, silvery forty-pound salmon, a suckling pig, orchids and chrysanthemums driven in from the country. And there was wine—cases and magnums and jeroboams and Methuselahs of Burgundy and Bordeaux, and two standing lamp-sized Nebuchadnezzars of champagne.
The kitchen was a scene of harnessed insanity. I was allowed to watch, sitting on the tall metal stepstool in a corner, as long as I didn’t open my mouth other than to taste whatever the chef demanded of me, even if it was parboiled toenails. French cuisine during the sixties was about as labor-intensive as food can get, and that was reflected in the hubbub of stocks simmering, chickens roasting, sugar caramelizing, cleavers and knives chopping vegetables and mincing herbs and filleting fish and deboning meat, hands kneading flour, and pink-faced voices laughing and cursing and barking orders. Baking sheets with tartlets and barquettes waiting to be baked, or cooled and filled, covered the long central worktable. The chef, Joseph, might spend an entire day piping various mixtures in muslin bags through choking silver tips into tiny circles and squares and oblongs of pastry. I’d ask to taste what looked like mocha frosting, and he’d smile and pipe a star onto my fingertip. Nine times out of ten it was some aquatic bird’s mashed up liver, and I’d have swallow it holding my nose.
If I got bored, I played the bones game. I pretended that the leg and rib and neck bones roasting in the oven for stock were not from a cow but from whomever was on my hate list. Usually it was my brother Will boiling away in the stockpot with all the vegetables, on his way to being reduced, through indescribable suffering, to a syrupy essence of just rewards.
On bad days, Will got the duck press. The first time I saw the chef use it I just about had puppies. It was the quintessential Addams Family kitchen appliance. Joseph had explained the reasoning behind the torture machine, remarking that it was not very popular in America. “In my country,” he’d said, “we like to have the blood and the insides of the animal in the sauce.” Whereupon I’d leaned in next to him, breathing heavily in my rapture. Joseph had given me a rare smile, mistaking my enthusiasm for a burgeoning love of the culinary arts. Ha. I was imagining that those merrily crunching bones and that rosy emulsion trickling out the spout were my brother’s macerated brains and skull. I saw myself rising from the dinner table to make a little announcement: “That sauce you’re eating with the meat? It’s my brother.” Mrs. Astor would blanch. Nelson Rockefeller would choke and die. Andy Warhol would ask for seconds. My grandmother would say, “That’s nice, dearie, I wondered where that rascal was.” BUUURRRRRUUUFFFFTT!
When I saw Ann Rose enter the kitchen to speak to the chef, I quickly substituted her head in the duck press for Will’s. When she saw me over in the corner and waved, I glared guiltily back at her and then clattered down from the stool, and was through the lineup of white-coated kitchen assistants and out into the help’s dining room before anyone could read my evil thoughts. Skirting the table, now set and awaiting lunch for fifteen, I slipped into the warren of tiny bedrooms and skinny, old-fashioned bathrooms that was home to the maids. I liked to sneak back there sometimes, mostly just to scrutinize their lives. The rooms were painfully humble; each had a chair, a small desk, a painted bureau with a mirror on top (now decorated with sentimental cards from relatives back in the Motherland), and a narrow bed made up so skintight you could dribble a rosary across it. On one wall there invariably hung a crucifix bearing an anorexic Jesus, or a picture of the Virgin Mary, looking all forgiving. In Selma’s room there were many of both. Taped to her vanity mirror was an ancient, misshapen Pepperidge Farm cookie that Selma swore “on a stack of blue Bibles” was the image of St. Rita, the patroness of all things terrible for females, like tumors and faithless husbands. Selma had shown the face to me, pointing out St. Rita’s festering forehead wound, but try as I might I could never see it as anything other than a moldy Milano.
I always felt calmer after breathing in the order of Ann, and Mary, and Grace, and even Selma. After a few deep breaths I reentered the kitchen just as a tray full of sizzling, buttery, sugary palmiers came out of the oven.
I was pretty much over the Ann Rose/Santa debacle by the day of the party. A couple of times I’d even had to work myself up just to give her a show of my lingering indignation. Will and I were dressed up, he in a bow tie and blue blazer, and me in a red velvet number that clashed horribly with my red hair and had a crinoline slip that left scars on my knees. Edward, in Henrietta’s arms, was presented in a tiny jacket and a pair of green plaid shorts with suspenders. We were allowed to run free, and did just that, our bloodstreams so charged with Coca-Cola and sugary carbs that flying was a real possibility.
The warm smell of wine mulled with cloves and cinnamon and raisins and almonds was the first thing that hit people when they walked off the elevators and into the long gallery, where a Viennese orchestra played and the Christmas tree rose in a ridiculous blaze of artificial light over the goldfish pond. (Actually, you could smell the wine even before you got to the sixth floor, because the doormen traditionally began drinking the stuff with the first run of guests and didn’t stop until the last of them had left, eight hours later.) Waiters swam through the currents of guests, proffering caviar and hors d’oeuvres that resembled shiny mosaic tiles. People lined up at the three bars, where it took a team of men to pour champagne from the fifteen-liter bottle of Moët.
By seven my caffeine quarter had run out. It was exhausting having your cheeks pinched and your hair patted by so many pterodactyls. I was taking a break in my grandparents’ bedroom, now the ladies’ cloakroom, where, to the horror of the attendant maid, I was flinging myself repeatedly onto the bed piled high with the overflow of minks that couldn’t be squeezed onto the teeming coat racks. There must have been fifty of them on the bed alone, in every shade of expensive imaginable. I was interrupted by Mrs. Pell’s call of nature.
Pyrma Pell was one of my grandmother’s “girlhood friends,” and she was a fixture at the annual party. She had been the Pears soap girl back in the seventeenth century, and supposedly a great beauty. She was tiny, with hair like the stuff they put in Easter baskets, and she had a huge face, sort of like Nancy Reagan’s. At any rate, there was a lot less of it than she was born with because Mrs. Pell had to have been on her fifth face-lift by the time I started remembering her. She could barely close her eyes. Mrs. Pell had initially gotten my attention because she always wore a Glinda the Good Witch dress to the New Year’s party, and this year’s outfit didn’t disappoint; it was right out of a cotton candy spinner.
Gracing me with a look of intention from the dressing table, Mrs. Pell said, “I understand they’re bringing out dinner now.” She carefully repowdered her powder-caked nose, and then she rose and came over to where I was stretched out, spread-eagle on the fur bed. “Let’s go in together, shall we?” She spoke like she was blowing on a dandelion stem, but I got the point. And I am nothing if not polite under duress, so I struggled to my feet with a dramatic sigh, pulled my party dress into shape, and we went to the dining room together.
When the cocktail drinkers had left, and the party had calmed down, they brought out the real food. Waiters loaded up the marble table in the dining room with hulking crown roasts of beef and the decorated salmon, game pie and terrines of foie gras, wheels of Brie de Meaux, crisp baguettes of bread, golden potato-petaled cakes of Pommes Anna, wild rice, and white asparagus, and haricots verts, and big wooden salad bowls of sherry vinaigrette-dressed mâche. Afterward came Baked Alaska, and Floating Island, and a Bûche de Noël enveloped with spun sugar and meringue mushrooms, and soaked with so much alcohol it was, by my standards, tragically inedible, so I stuck to the petits fours, which I was filling a plate with when my grandfather stood up to make a toast.
After the usual New Year and auld lang syne stuff, he said, “Peggy and I would like to publicly acknowledge a few absolutely marvelous members of our staff that we would be hard-pressed to function without.” The chef was trotted out, the butler and his wife, the head waiter who was hired each year for the party, the small, fat, sweaty leader of the Viennese orchestra, my grandfather’s two secretaries, Miss Pou and Heidi, and finally George the Nazi. Everyone clapped in drunken acknowledgment, even Ann Rose, who stood in a corner near the swinging door to the pantry, utterly unacknowledged.
After devouring way too many palmiers, iced little cakes, and chocolate truffles, I had to lie down for a while. When I felt better, I didn’t want to go back to the party, because everyone was waltzing up a storm and you could get killed just trying to cut your way through them to get a Coke. I decided to go for a restorative snoop in the bathroom that adjoined Ann Rose’s office.
It was so cool and peaceful in there, I felt instantly better. The narrow, high-ceilinged room had beautiful prewar fixtures: a wide, curvy pedestal sink, a deep, seven-foot-long tub, and a toilet built for the posteriors of yesteryear. On the far wall there was a mirrored, floor-to-ceiling cupboard with the most comprehensive collection of medical paraphernalia any child with an aberrant sense of curiosity could hope for: enema bags and douching equipment and strange rubber bulbs and bedpans, swabs and forceps and tweezers and long needles, and toenail clippers and scissors with peculiar angles to their noses (which I liked to pretend had mistakenly been ordered from a mortuary supply house).
I was standing there, holding one of the ends of a long, thick, pink tube in each hand, wondering what on earth this wonderful thing could be meant for, when I heard the door to the office click open. I stuffed the tube back in a corner of the cupboard and crept to the doorway to see who it was. It was, of course, Ann Rose, and she was pouring something from a tall, clear bottle into a Dixie cup. She saw me too, and on any other day I’m positive her knee-jerk reaction would have been to quickly stash the vodka, or at least pretend it was water, but not that night. She kept on pouring until the cup was full, and then she bent her head and gulped it down. A lesser sleuth would have missed her whisking a scrap of red and green striped paper under the desk with the toe of her shoe as she refilled the cup.
Well it was no real surprise to me. Ann Rose may have vigilantly hidden the traces of her Santa-ing, but I’d seen similar bottles, and then some, tucked behind the douche bags and the Time-Life This Fabulous Century series.
The sorry question I should have asked myself that night in bed, when I was too jacked up on petits fours to sleep, was what did Ann Rose get for all her slavish trouble? For trudging through the slush of holiday-crazed New York to purchase all those trinkets and toys and baubles and gizmos; in short, everything from a Revillon mink to a trick set of squirting nickels? As I’d find out in future years, I’d only witnessed a segment of Ann Rose’s annual shopping odyssey. The day before the poodles and I had followed her, she’d also gone to Hammacher Schlemmer, then across town to Zabar’s, then down to B. Altman, and over to Macy’s, and then through the slush and ice to Verdura, east to the James Robinson Galleries, finishing up in the madness at Bloomingdale’s. And who knows where she’d been the day before that.
This is what she got in return: a Christmas bonus and a bottle of Ma Griffe.
And this is what I got for the remainder of Ann Rose’s life: a better stocking than Will’s—even if he still got bigger presents than me.