Free Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden Page B

stands?” my grandmother said with a wave of her gloved hand.
    “ Pilasters, Peggy,” her husband corrected.
    “Let’s see,” she continued, counting them out on her fingers, “Tiberius, and Caligula—and Claudius and Nero, Augustus and, and—oh, Galba and Titus, and . . . I can’t remember the others.” Barfufft! She subsided, pleased with herself for remembering that many.
    Traveling slowly down the hallway, we looked into rooms that had once been the library and the salon, the billiard room and the oak-paneled smoking room. Across from the formal living room was an immense alcove that had held Grandma Twombly’s beloved Aeolian pipe organ, an instrument reportedly larger even than the one at Radio City Music Hall. It had gone on the block with everything else, the massive Louis XV gilt chandeliers from the ballroom and the roomfuls of English furniture, the Chinese porcelain, the beautiful paintings, and books, and carpets and tapestries, all of which had contributed to my grandfather’s inheritance and allowed him to purchase paintings like Francis Bacon’s Screaming Pope, which my grandmother had to close her eyes and put a handkerchief to her mouth to walk past.
    The grown-ups kept going on and on about how things used to be and what was gone and who had died, and I felt badly for my great-grandmother. As much as I loved the idea of dead people, I couldn’t imagine being the only one from my generation left alive. Then my grandfather started reminiscing about Phillip, everyone’s favorite footman, and how he would bring them their breakfast in bed—hothouse Marshall strawberries with morning dew on them—although how something grown inside could have dew on it was beyond me.
    In the nick of time a university official came hurrying apologetically down the hallway, and Will and I escaped up the marble staircase to the second floor. We counted thirty-six bedrooms, now dull, utilitarian offices, albeit with fancy plasterwork and marble bathrooms en suite with fireplaces. There were still the original brass holders on the doors, where the names of the guests, written out in copperplate, would be inserted for their stay. Up a lesser staircase we found another twenty or so bedrooms, and we ran dizzily in and out of them until we burst in on a large lady in a dusty little office, manning a mimeograph machine that smelt of vanilla. She shooed us out with lavender-stained fingers, but as we retreated, I puffed myself up self-importantly and hollered, “Hey! This is my great-grandmother’s house, you know!” Like she cared.
    We ate our picnic lunch outside on the wide stone terrace, though it was hardly a picnic since my grandfather insisted a table be brought out. The grown-ups sat at it and ate egg salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and cold roast chicken, and Camembert with huge dusty black grapes, the kind you practically need to cut in half and pit like a plum. Will and I straddled the stone balustrade next to them and drank Cokes and gnawed on drumsticks, and when we got bored with eating, we stood up and balanced on the balustrade and tried to jinx each other into falling into the bushes below. After a bottle and a half of Meursault, my grandfather was waxing even more nostalgic for Chef Donan and carrying on about his marvelous ness like a tent revivalist.
    After lunch that day, I think I knew every dish in Donan’s repertoire. Turns out he was famous not only for his food, but because he was the highest paid chef in the country. In Donan’s New Yorker profile, he got five pages. My grandfather’s was only three.
    “Tell me about the breakfast-es you used to have,” said Will. Breakfast was his favorite meal. He could eat eggs and pancakes and Little Jones fried sausages all day long. Gran told him how breakfast had been served between seven and eight, either on trays in the guest rooms, or in the breakfast room, and how every morning there had been eggs of every description, and all kinds