Free Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden Page A

grandfather’s initials to several tombstones in my drawing.
    As Gran’s soft old voice continued:— a marvel . . . whomever came to visit . . . Chicken á la King for Mrs. Prentice . . . Lobster Lafayette . . . Thomas Edison —my grandfather picked up the mike to the built-in Dictaphone below his seat and rattled off a memo to his secretary.
    “Miss Pou, a record of all Vanderbilt houses in Newport and in New York City. Dates and principal residents. On my desk by Monday. And terrapin for lunch in the country this weekend. Must be in season somewhere. Check Australia. Fly them in. Females.” He thought a moment and added, “Send six cases of Mr. & Mrs. T’s Bloody Mary Mix to all houses. And phone Kyoto about the best chrysanthemums for Mount Kisco greenhouse.”
    Hmmm, I thought. Weren’t chrysanthemums poisonous?
    “We’re here !” piped Will. Gran sat up abruptly as, at last, we turned through a pair of towering, elegantly wrought iron gates. The gravel crunched and popped beneath our tires as we drove past smooth lawns and orchards. My grandmother pointed out the farm in the distance, and the dairy with its shingled silo and beautiful, ivy-covered barns. We blinked at the greenhouses repeating their glare in the sun, and at the imposing glass-and-brick orangerie, and the very adult Playhouse, with its central barroom, and separate wings of tennis courts and swimming pool.
    The house was the biggest thing I’d ever seen in my life. The Nazi swung the car around the circle and stopped in front, and Will and I tumbled out. We started chasing each other around the wide frontal columns, and clambering over the pair of life-sized marble lions guarding the two-storied portico. My grandfather walked up to the massive front door and touched it with a fingertip. “Not as shiny as it used to be,” he commented.
    His mother struggled up the steps to stand beside him. “No,” she admitted, adjusting her hat. “In Mother’s time we employed it as a mirror, to check our appearance before we went in to see her. I suppose the university doesn’t see the need to keep it that polished anymore.”
    We were early, so there was no university tour guide waiting to greet us. Gran pushed the door open and we followed her in. We stood for a moment, blinking in the dark coolness of a black-and-white marble hallway that seemed to stretch forever. A massive fireplace faced the entrance, and my brother and I ran to stand inside it.
    “Perfect for roasting your victims,” I whispered in awe. I imagined bodies on spits being slowly hand cranked by hunch-backs with leprosy.
    “ Hel-lo . . . hel-lo,” called Will up the flue.
    “That fireplace is almost twenty feet high. Can you imagine?” said Gran, leaning on her cane. “Father had it copied after the one at Windsor Castle.” She turned in a slow circle, remembering. “Mother’s Sargent portrait used to hang over there.” She pointed to where an aerial map of the buildings and grounds hung crookedly on the wall, and the grown-ups all squinted at it in recollection.
    Gran’s mother, Florence, was not only the last surviving grandchild of the Commodore, she was the least attractive. In her portrait by John Singer Sargent, the court painter of his day, she is depicted in the ripest of swirling peach tones, all warts and moles removed. Her eyes are as dark and moist as Hostess cup-cakes, her mouth chastely sensual. Her figure—in actuality, angular and stick-thin—is as luscious and languid as a Boston cream pie. Seated on the edge of a needlepoint Louis XVI foot-stool, she is surrounded by icons of her opulent life: a Barberini tapestry (Apollo and Daphne visible in a discreet state of undress), an exquisite ivory fan, a rich Aubusson carpet. It is the portrait of a wealthy fertility goddess, and nothing remotely like the cross, dried-up, dark little bird I’d seen in all the family albums.
    “And remember all the Caesars that lined this hallway on their fluted