Chapter Nine

The halcyon years of the big house were long past by the time my father dropped anchor in the nursery. His grandfather had been dead nearly fifty years. A quarter century had elapsed since his grandmother, Muz, snowy-haired and frail, had last greeted visitors in the living room at teatime. In the ballroom, a pothole had opened up in the Aubusson carpet. Mothballs, like tiny golf balls, lay scattered across rugs. Damask dangled from the library walls. Shades, yellowed to the color of parchment, were perpetually drawn. On humid afternoons in August, when the sky darkened and thunderstorms rumbled across the fields, rain water burst out of cracked copper downspouts and cascaded down the brick face of the house. Seeping into the masonry, it blistered the plaster in the old playroom on the third floor. Even the immense lawn stretching south from the terrace looked diminished in those days: Brambles, briars, and fallen branches were encroaching on either side. In a small rental apartment over the kitchen, the humming of bees, nesting between the walls, was so loud it was keeping a pair of tenants up at night.

It had never been easy keeping the big house inhabited. As far back as 1970, the death of Muz had left it flush with servants with no one to serve. In pursuit of a replacement, Helen Hope had suggested my parents move into the second floor, and share the ground floor with her and Edgar, for entertaining. After my mother demurred, the family rousted my father’s aunt from her South Carolina redoubt. Charlotte Ives traveled north with a mynah bird, a pair of whippets, a Great Dane, and a cat, in a jeweled collar, named Kitty Miss. They moved into the nursery, which Charlotte Ives remembered fondly from childhood. The second floor, left dormant, was dusted once a month. Even in a wheelchair and reliant upon round-the-clock nursing, Auntie Ives was a sociable soul. In late afternoon, a half dozen regulars would drop in for cocktails. Tea sandwiches and other delicacies arrived in the living room on a three-tiered tray. One niece, back from Europe and savoring what appeared to be a cookie, was brought up short when her aunt turned to her and inquired, eyes twinkling, “Do you like dog biscuits?”

When Charlotte Ives died, Helen Hope talked her eldest grandchild, my cousin Mary, into filling the vacancy. They’d been close since Mary was young. Growing up on her parents’ farm near Delaware, Mary had looked forward to nights spent with her grandmother (whom her mother had bolted the reservation to escape). With her then husband, Mary moved into the second floor of the big house. Helen Hope introduced her to the operations of the dairy. At milking time, they’d meet outside the milk house to eyeball each cow as it sashayed past on its way to its assigned stanchion. Circumambulating cow pies in her red Belgian loafers, Helen Hope would bring refreshments for the men. Later, Mary would become a breeder and trainer of prizewinning bull terriers. She’d also operate a canine obedience school out of the big-house basement and keep a kennel of her own on the edge of the lawn. Upstairs in her apartment, bull terriers lounged on sheepskin-draped sofas. For her pet pig, there was a sty accessorized with a fine mud hole. The pig had the run of the place. Once, as he sauntered past on the front lawn, my father, who by then had moved into the third floor of the house, remarked drily to Mary, “He has such a great ass.” He suggested Mary name the pig after a British friend, Sir Reresby Sitwell. Mary appended the first name.

The dairy herd was nearly three hundred strong in the last decades of the twentieth century. A half dozen farm families still lived and worked on Ardrossan, sending succeeding generations off to college and graduate school, sometimes subsidized by Helen Hope. Cathie Moran, born in Ireland, had been hired in her early twenties as a live-in maid for Charlotte Ives. Ardrossan reminded Cathie of Ireland: Anyone who owned land in Ireland paid their taxes, took care of their houses, and was otherwise broke. The Montgomerys, she figured, must be the same. Yet, in the big house, there were six people waiting on Miss Ives. In the house where Cathie’s sister worked for my father’s uncle Aleck, the employee-to-employer ratio was two to one. There were three maintenance men on Ardrossan, too. Cathie, who also worked the night shift at a nearby nursing home, called the maintenance men the Three Stooges: They arrived in three cars, drove to the hardware store in three cars, and returned to the house in three cars—all to repair a running toilet. “I can remember saying, ‘This is the craziest place,’” she told me years later. “Because there were so many people doing nothing. They kept a culture alive when it should have been dead and gone.”

My father’s initial intention, it seemed, was to carve out a serviceable apartment on the third floor. A few rooms in the old nursery had been rented out before as an unprepossessing flat. There were other rooms up there, too, some filled with furniture, cast-off bathroom fixtures, and heaps of papers (including a collection of pocket-size notebooks in which Uncle Aleck had alphabetized cocktail recipes, one per page). My father took the flat and annexed most of the other rooms. He had floors refinished, casement windows milled, new doorways cut, closets lined with cedar. He had the master bathroom repiped in copper, and he installed recessed stereo speakers. Eventually, his well-appointed quarters comprised a broad front hall, a kitchen, a dining room wallpapered in deep red, a book-lined study, an informal sitting room with a fireplace, a master bedroom suite, a two-bedroom guest suite, and an enormous living room he continued to call the playroom, in deference to its origins. He had the playroom walls papered in midnight blue studded with a thousand gold stars—a decorating choice inspired by a room he’d once admired in a palace in St. Petersburg.

To restore the roof, which had been leaking for decades, he hired a carpenter self-schooled in the mysteries of slate roofs. Unimpressed by the handiwork of professional roofers, the carpenter had taught himself how to surgically replace the rotting copper linings in the valleys where the planes of a roof converge. He spent nine months up on the big-house roof, sixty feet off the ground. He custom-ordered replacement tiles from a Vermont quarry. He repointed chimney flashings, replaced downspouts, reroofed each dormer, rebuilt gutters where birds’ nests had once frozen, cracking the copper. The repairs cost more than the original construction of the entire house, my father liked to say. But he didn’t seem to mind. “The house thanks you,” he’d say cheerfully to the carpenter whenever they met. “And I thank you.”

He’d been in the apartment a year when his mother quite unexpectedly died. Despite two artificial hips, the champagne-cork injury to one eye, and other greater and lesser misfortunes, Helen Hope had appeared, at ninety, to be striding briskly toward her centennial. Seven days a week, she was up early, downing a soft-boiled egg and instant coffee at the kitchen table. She was on the phone with the herd manager at 8:30 A.M., the horse-show chairman at 9:15. She was behind the wheel of her Jeep Wagoneer by 10:00, home for lunch, at the dairy in the afternoon, then back home to dress for dinner after exercising her dog. Once a week, she still made a point of going out to dinner with friends, even after my grandfather was no longer able. Once a month, she gave dinner parties at home. “If I don’t see my friends, they’ll forget me,” she explained to her young property manager, who thought that seemed unlikely. Eighteen months before her death, three hundred people showed up to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of her marriage to Edgar. Her ninetieth birthday party was a black-tie gala that raised ninety thousand dollars for the Bryn Mawr Hospital, her favorite cause. The weekend of the fall that killed her, she’d been at the dairy, communing with the cows. She told the property manager he needn’t return to bring her donkeys in from the field late Sunday. She’d do it herself.

It was Cathie Moran who found her. Many years earlier, she’d heard Helen Hope complaining, in her brother’s kitchen, about an unsatisfactory haircut. Cathie, who’d volunteered to fix it, had ended up cutting Helen Hope’s hair for twenty years. During the busy ten days of the Devon Horse Show, Helen Hope would bring scissors and meet Cathie in the turf club bathroom for a trim. When Cathie became engaged, Helen Hope and Edgar hosted a party at their house for Cathie and her future husband. “Everything Hope said was surprising,” Cathie said to me. “She’d have you on the floor laughing.” On that balmy Sunday afternoon in January, Cathie had dropped by to do the monthly haircut, which she always did as a favor, for free, even when she no longer worked on Ardrossan. Outside on the driveway, she heard a voice calling for help. Helen Hope was on the ground, unable to get up. Cathie, who’d been trained as a nurse, noticed a swelling on the back of her head. “I said, ‘You’re going straight to the hospital,’” she told me years later. “She said, ‘No, I’m not. I have people coming over for a drink.’” Helen Hope refused to accept any help getting up off the ground until Cathie had found the two donkeys Helen Hope had been leading back to the stable when she’d fallen. Back inside, she insisted Cathie cut her hair, as planned. Two more times, she refused to be taken to the hospital. She even forbade Cathie from alerting my father. “She was very, very strong,” Cathie told me. “She knew what she wanted and how she wanted things done.”

My father was one of the people his mother was expecting that evening. He stopped by regularly, checking in, bringing news, regaling her and his father with stories. If there were complicated feelings left over from the wintry period of his childhood, he’d sealed them up, decades earlier, in some impenetrable interior vault. It was clear to everyone that he adored his parents, and that the feeling was mutual. Arriving at their house that evening, he found his father in his chair in the living room, his mother not yet downstairs. Upstairs, he found her on the bathroom floor, barely conscious. Her last conscious act, he’d say later, was to reach for his hand and pull it to her lips. She was airlifted that evening to a hospital in Philadelphia, where she died the following day. Death by donkey, everyone seemed to think, had its merits: She’d gone quickly, doing what she loved. Her obituary on the front page of the Inquirer dwarfed the lead story, which was on the Russian leveling of the capital of Chechnya.

The task of choosing Helen Hope’s burial attire fell to Mary, the eldest and closest grandchild. Mary was familiar with the filing system in her grandmother’s closets: clothes for hunting, clothes for New York, clothes for dinner in town, et cetera, all hung by category. Mary settled on a stylish blue suit and the well-worn red Belgian loafers. Like an ancient Egyptian entombed with the essentials for the afterlife, Helen Hope was placed in her coffin with a purse into which Mary had slipped a few photos. One, taken in her thirties, found her flanked by her two young sons; in a couple of others—Polaroids apparently taken by Edgar—she was, in her early seventies, smiling bewitchingly at the camera while posing naked.

Outside the church where the funeral was held, television reporters prowled the parking lot, trawling for sound bites. Inside, mourners overflowed the nave, spilled into the choir loft, and jammed the entrance. Latecomers, turned away at the door, made a beeline for the first-floor windows, which were open because the day was uncommonly warm. As late arrivals leaned in to listen, people inside handed hymnals out through the windows. From the book of epigrams my grandfather had bound as a boy, my father’s brother, Ed, read a quotation from the Scottish evangelist Henry Drummond: “To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever.”

In the aftermath of his mother’s death, endings rained upon my father. His aunt Mary Binney died three months later, at eighty-eight, having spent much of the last third of her life traveling in India and Sri Lanka, creating nine thousand photographic images of bodhisattvas, cave monasteries, monks and mendicants, erotic sculpture, nomads, wrestling, worship, and other features of life in South Asia. The University of Pennsylvania, which later acquired the photographs, would call her “the last in a long line of ‘romantic’ artistic and literary travelers, true adventurers of the human spirit seeking to discover and unlock the mystique of faraway lands.” On the day of her death, she’d delivered a slide lecture to a sold-out benefit at her house. When the talk was over and the audience had departed, she suffered a heart attack and died. Her life had been a remarkable run—performance as a soloist at Carnegie Hall; a love affair with Leopold Stokowski, in two installments; the founding and running of a dance company; two adoptions, as an unmarried woman; fourteen trips to South Asia. Still, the opening sentence of at least one obituary identified her as “the sister of the late Hope Montgomery Scott.”

Edgar was next. He died in May, at ninety-six. His brother-in-law Aleck was now the sole surviving child of the Colonel and Muz. After the death of his third wife, he’d stayed on alone in his big stone and stucco house, in the care of his housekeeper and cook. There, the two women kept him alive by bringing meals to him in his bed and diluting his drinks, dispensed via a delivery system constructed by a man who’d become something of a surrogate son. An intervention, years earlier, had bombed for the usual reasons; its target had announced he had everything under control. Increasingly deaf, and cut off from social contact, Aleck had carried on. His collections were gone. In bankruptcy, he’d even sold his share of the portraits and other paintings in the big house to his sisters. When kidney failure finally killed him, neither of his children spoke at his funeral. The eulogizing fell to their spouses and the local police chief. Aleck’s housekeeper, too distraught to attend, sent her nephew. “You wouldn’t have believed it,” he’s said to have reported back. “They had professional mourners!”

With Helen Hope gone, the family moved swiftly to halt the outflow of cash through the dairy. Within two weeks, they announced it would close. The jobs, health insurance, and free housing for the farmers would terminate at the end of the year. An orthopedic surgeon with a ranch in Colorado and a herd of Ayrshires agreed to buy the cows—along with the “semen inventory” and some storage tanks for an extra ten thousand dollars. The arrangement looked promising. The orthopedic surgeon viewed the Ardrossan cows, he told me later, as “the Los Angeles Lakers of the dairy world.” My uncle Ed, in a letter sealing the deal, expressed confidence that he was “doing the right thing by my mother’s cattle.”

Over the course of the summer of 1995, the cows headed west, one truckload at a time. Every one was a lineal descendant of the Colonel’s original nine. By the time the final trucks pulled out of the main dairy complex in September, the herd manager had decided to go along. The milking barn fell silent; grass grew high in the pastures; equipment idled in the sheds. It sometimes seemed as though the barns and silos, devoid of life, had aged a half century overnight. For the first time in eighty years, the pastures sat empty, apart from the presence of a handful of elderly cows kept on as pets. Mary Binney’s daughter Joanie, who’d spent much of her life on Ardrossan, told me later that the day the last cows departed was one of the most painful of her life.

The dairy operations weren’t all that Helen Hope had been keeping afloat. She’d sent monthly checks to beloved former employees, subsidized capital improvements, even paid health-insurance premiums for one of the last surviving employees of her parents at Mansfield. She’d funded those activities with income she received from trusts set up by her parents. “Regrettably, this will be the last check sent to you,” read a letter to recipients of her largesse, sent a month or two after her death. That she’d been squandering money to keep the dairy going had been clear ever since Ed’s examination of the books. My father would profess later not to have cared. “Never bothered me at all,” would say the man who’d go on to do something similar himself. She was “trying to keep something so anachronistic alive because it was so beautiful. . . . She was treasuring something that was going, gone.”

The pileup of losses weighed on my father. He blamed himself for the separation from my mother—“probably of my causing but certainly not of my planning,” he wrote in a letter. On top of that loss and displacement, his parents were gone, too. “It is all very sad indeed,” he wrote. Vanity Fair assigned a magazine writer, steeped in Philadelphia, to write about Helen Hope, whom the magazine called “the unofficial queen of Philadelphia’s Wasp oligarchy.” The article was humorous, elegiac, and tinged with melancholy—a mood that also seemed to emanate, in that period, from my father. In one of the photographs published with the article, he’s decked out in a tuxedo, seated in a threadbare armchair in his grandparents’ library, the damask wall covering peeling in the yellow light of a sconce. He’d served champagne to the photography crew. “I didn’t realize how depressing it would be,” he told the writer, speaking of his divorce, his mother’s death, and reaching the age of retirement. “. . . It’s the death of a portion of me. This is the portion of my life that has no promise of resurrection.”

Then came the news of his impending retirement as the museum’s president. Announcing his plans to the museum staff, he appeared close to tears. The standing ovation rumbled on and on until he finally cut it off. In the days that followed, the reviews of his fourteen-year tenure were admiring. Membership had soared; the endowment had ballooned; galleries had been renovated. He’d presided over a turnaround in operations. Major collections had been reinstalled. The job had been no picnic, an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer observed: It was “more like a bone-jarring ride down the Rocky steps on his treasured black bicycle.” A columnist for another publication lavished praise on the outgoing president, calling him a traitor to his class—the rare Philadelphia patrician for whom the “anti-leadership vaccine” identified by E. Digby Baltzell, the University of Pennsylvania sociologist of the once ruling elite, had failed to take.

Rather vaguely, my father attributed his upcoming retirement to feeling older and “less elastic.” He’d be sixty-seven, past retirement age, by the time he stepped down at the end of that year. A few reporters speculated that testy relations with the mayor’s office might have been a factor. They didn’t dwell on the fact that his successor would be the strong-willed director, long thought to be eager to run the museum solo. For a decade and a half, they’d been equals: She’d run the art side; he’d overseen the operations. They’d given every outward appearance of working well as a team. But in private, he’d complained about her, even occasionally to her curator husband. At McLean, he’d claimed that his frustration with her sometimes drove him to drink. Now the board was giving her the whole show. To Margaret, he said he’d seen it coming: The director wanted the top job, and some board members wanted him out. To my mother, he said, “I don’t know how much you know about what happened at the museum at the end?” Very little, she said. All she remembered him saying was, “It was pretty grisly.”

Years later, I came upon a letter sent to him a month before the news broke. It came from a man who’d known him in the law office when they were young. They’d been friends. The man, Alan McFarland, had admired him for his style, humor, and intelligence; he’d remember my father later in bow tie and suspenders, seated in an antique corner chair. In January 1996, McFarland, who’d become an investment banker in New York, had found himself at a dinner at the big house. It was in honor of a few dozen supporters of a small museum in Philadelphia, and my father had agreed to host. McFarland had been pleased to see him again. His old friend appeared to have ascended to the role for which McFarland had imagined him destined. “I find your current status as lord of the manor one for which you must have certainly been intended since your earliest hours,” McFarland had written to him after the dinner. “. . . You’re as good at it as even the most rigorous casting director could ever have arranged.” But the letter had ended on a cloudier note. McFarland hoped my father would find that role fulfilling. “I worry, even from my position way down below the salt in your life,” he’d written, “that there will be a price, harder to pay than you deserve.”

Reading the letter twenty years later, I was startled by McFarland’s presentiment. He’d encountered my father only rarely in later life. Yet, when I reached him, he remembered the evening and the letter. My father, he said, had done many things well; he’d ended up where McFarland had imagined he would. Yet McFarland sensed that something was amiss: His old friend didn’t seem happy. McFarland knew that my father’s marriage had ended; he wondered about his health. Whatever the causes, McFarland said, he detected a certain sadness. “We make choices, all of us do,” he told me. “And we’re measured by our choices. But we don’t always pay attention to the cost of our choices—and the devil is in there somewhere.”

In the years that followed, the lord of the manor inhabited his part. He transformed his mother’s nursery into his late-in-life home. In his sitting room, he hung one of the Augustus John portraits of Helen Hope. Beneath it, he positioned the antique desk he’d inherited from his paternal grandfather’s vanished house in Maine. On a library table in the hallway, he arranged other artifacts—the framed photograph of his parents at the foot of the gangway to the Île de France in 1938 and the hooves of his mother’s pony and of the Colonel’s Irish stallion—stuffed, mounted, and trimmed with engraved silver. On visits to the apartment, I’d pass that table and think of all the disembodied animal parts that had hung from the walls in my great-grandparents’, grandparents’, and parents’ homes.

My children, young then, were fascinated by their grandfather in his aerie. He kept a rocking llama, with flowing hair and big enough to carry a grown man, in his book-lined study. He’d brought it from his office at the museum, where it had been christened “the President.” Above the staircase to the third floor, he’d hung a full-length portrait of himself. I’d never try to make the case that it did him justice—though you’d have to assume, since he’d hung it there, that he liked it well enough. My daughter, Mia, who would turn thirteen the year her grandfather died, would be left with an indelible memory of his presence. In his company, she once told me, she felt as though she belonged to some exclusive club. Perhaps it was the house, she said, or the portrait or the way he walked. He left her with an impression of power. She respected him, and sensed that he respected her. There was something protective in his interest, even on those occasions when he affected a certain humorous irascibility. On a visit late in his life, we found him in his wheelchair in the playroom at the far end of the long hall. My son, Owen, six or seven, hovered nearby, uncertain how to proceed. My father, at his most Churchillian, turned and growled at the curly-headed boy, “Kiss me, goddammit.”

After a couple of years in the nursery, he turned his attention to other parts of the house. To the surprise of some of his cousins, he began planning to restore the first floor. That seemed odd because, as I’ve mentioned, the house didn’t belong to him: It was held in a trust that wasn’t set to expire until he was almost ninety, and he was just one of its six beneficiaries. Not long after he vacated his office at the museum, a document arrived in the big-house mail. It came from the interior decorator who’d helped him redo the apartment. Titled “Revised Preliminary Budget Estimates, Phase 1,” it listed dozens of proposed purchases for the downstairs ballroom—from drapery fabric ($15,120) to armchair trim ($10) to plaster-restoration and wall-paint labor ($28,660). The estimated total price for restoring the ballroom alone was $98,357 (not including $3,643.40 for shipping the carpet to England for repairs). A year later, an updated version of the “Phase 1” plans arrived. By then, they’d expanded to include the first-floor library, living room, dining room, front hall, study, and powder room. The document was eleven pages long. The estimated cost of the project was $478,590—for decoration alone.

Once, an architect friend told me something I hadn’t considered. A renovation, she said, is a difficult thing to stop. Once you restore one room, the one next to it looks shabby; so you renovate that one, too. And on and on it goes. My father’s apartment wasn’t, of course, next to the first floor. But he was intimately familiar with how the downstairs looked. He knew what it had been like when he was young; he’d seen it age; he’d used it for parties and charitable events. “You could put a million dollars into this place and it wouldn’t even show,” one guest had remarked in the presence of a reporter, who’d then tossed the line into the newspaper. My father, it began to seem in those years, had set out to test that premise.

In the library, he had sofas and armchairs dismantled down to the frames, rebuilt, and reupholstered. He had new silk damask wall covering woven to order in France. Portraits were taken away and cleaned; decorative fixtures were restored and reinstalled. In the dining room, he had his grandmother’s needlepoint seat covers removed, refurbished, and reapplied to all thirty chairs. He had the oak paneling treated. He had wood carvings renewed, porcelain cleaned, silver touched up. In the ballroom, original textiles were meticulously copied, and draperies were reproduced. Furniture was reconstructed. Needlepoint sofa covers were removed, cleaned, stabilized, and returned to the sofas from which they’d come. In the long hall, the lanterns were taken down, carted away, cleaned, and rewired. For the living room, my father had a carpet custom-made, copying one that had caught his eye at the Wallace Collection in London. He’d liked it so much, he had it reproduced for three downstairs rooms.

Combing through the paper trail he left behind, I was reminded of the Colonel’s rodent exterminator from the Ritz-Carlton. The extravagance of my father’s undertaking was puzzling. The man who’d taken pride in driving his green Chevy Nova for twenty years was now spending $17,419.54 for a custom-made front-hall rug. He’d dropped $13,320 to clean gutters and power wash the roof, $6,853 to reupholster a chair, $3,360 for fourteen “double crisscross tassel tiebacks,” $925.50 for “lampshade tassels,” $400 for a monogrammed bathroom rug. I suppose some of the expenses couldn’t have been avoided. But were there others he came to regret—for example, the ten thousand dollars he spent on an unsuccessful effort to clean a couple of limestone walls? Once in a while, he objected to bills for unapproved items. At least once, he scaled back his plans. “Not for now,” he scribbled next to a proposal for guest room number three. But for the most part, it was as if money was no object. Had he resolved to do a museum-quality restoration of the house, regardless of the price? Or had he started off wanting a comfortable place to live, then gotten seriously carried away?

He had the exterior trim of the house scraped, scaled, sanded, caulked, primed, and painted. He had the driveways repaved and potholes filled. He had the turning circle spread with eighteen tons of decorative stone, and the mile-long wall treated with sixty gallons of silicone sealer. Damaged storm drains and broken water pipes worked again. Water flowed into the pond beside the back driveway for the first time in years. Tree crews planted zelkovas, sweet gums, oaks, locusts, sugar maples. Where the driveway turned sharply and headed uphill to the house, overgrown rhododendron bushes disappeared. White dogwoods bloomed beside the road to the pool. Tree crews came and went, racking up bills of eight to ten thousand dollars each time. Bothered by the sight of empty fields, my father made arrangements for them to be used for fattening beef cattle before they went off to be slaughtered.

I’d never thought of my father as especially cavalier about money. In fact, I’d seen him occasionally be quite frugal. Early in their marriage, he and my mother had made a point of trying to hold the cost of dinner at home to one dollar a night. Once, I’d watched him squander an hour over lunch trying to repair a cheese grater he could have replaced for $3.99. Now, I can only conclude that his attitude toward money had gradually changed. After returning from England, my parents had bought two unpretentious, reliable 1973 and 1974 Chevrolet Novas. But, in the late eighties, my father had taken my mother’s Nova in for a modest overhaul, which turned into the automotive equivalent of a month-long rest cure at a medical spa in the Alps. Six weeks in, my mother began to wonder what was up with her car. Dropping by the body shop my father had chosen, she discovered it specialized in restoring antiques. On the day of her visit, all that remained of the 1973 Nova was its chassis: The body and the engine were off being rebuilt; the trim had been sent off for replating; even the upholstery was being redone. By the time the car came home a few months later, its sanded, primed, and painted body had the feel of exquisite enamel. Its chrome parts gleamed like mirrors. For years afterward, gas station attendants would sidle over to admire it whenever she went to fill up. The bill had come to twenty thousand dollars—more than the price of a new car.

Now that I think about it, my father had never disdained extravagance, even when he couldn’t afford it himself. He’d admired grand houses and grand gestures by those who had the wherewithal to pay. He was generous: He took pleasure in giving other people a good time, and he gave liberally to institutions (though, truth be told, the money was sometimes my mother’s). At sixty-six, the deaths of his parents had left him flusher than he’d been. Though the trust that owned the big house shared the cost of exterior repairs, he paid for the rest. His restoration project was an act of vanity, surely. You don’t pour a million dollars into a rental, as my brother, Elliot, put it crisply—especially when it stands a chance of being demolished. But my father chose to think of it as a decade-long exercise in historic preservation. In the process, he came to imagine he might save the land from developers and the house from destruction.

Not everyone shared his enthusiasm. Around the time the “Revised Preliminary Budget Estimates” first landed, at least one cousin of his made clear her reservations. She lived on Ardrossan, but she chose to raise the issue in a typewritten letter. She was taken aback by the scale of his undertaking: She’d had no idea, she said, that he intended to restore the ground floor. She asked him to hold off until the other members of his generation could meet with him, since the project could limit the family’s longer-term options for the house. My father, she told me years later, didn’t answer her letter. Other relatives, bobbing between puzzlement and bemusement, observed the goings-on from a distance. “This was just something he chose to do and was doing,” his brother, Ed, told me. “I thought it was certainly something I wouldn’t have done. But it was something he wanted to do.” Cathie Moran believed she’d seen that sort of thing before. “They don’t want to let go,” she theorized later. “They don’t want to see something deteriorate. But sometimes you have to let go. It’s like putting money into the fire, because you’re never going to get it back. And they do it over and over again. It’s craziness.”

It seemed also to be making my father happy. It was surely a diversion from the gloomy contemplation of aging and loss. If he had reservations about the colossal expenditures of cash, they were outweighed by the pleasure and pride he took in seeing the place transformed. Feature writers and photographers turned up to marvel at the progress, and to profile the self-appointed steward in the usual absurdist style—“the benign lord of Ardrossan, the squire of the farm, the last defender of the realm,” as one put it, casting aside all restraint. Always obliging, his lordship played along—escorting all comers around the house, discoursing wryly on the provenance of objects and the quirks of his forebears. That’s a portrait of a suit with my uncle in it. . . . Somewhere around, there’s a full set of Kipling. . . . Charming, wonderful, soft-spoken, flirtatious—even with me. . . . She was a marvelous hostess. Ran a very good household—if you didn’t care what you ate. . . .

A few years into the restoration, the house became the stage set for the first of my father’s Thanksgiving extravaganzas. His idea was to invite everyone to a feast on the day after. Invitations went out by word of mouth. He seemed barely interested in the head count. Cousins, nieces, nephews, children, grandchildren, great-nieces, great-nephews, and friends would turn up, from as far away as California and Maine. Minivans and station wagons would sail into the turning circle, scattering the new decorative pebbles in their wake. Elderly aunts and babies in arms would cross the threshold. Margaret would be in attendance; so would my mother. Not to mention the deposed “King of Wall Street,” John Gutfreund, forced out of Salomon Brothers in a bond-trading scandal. He and his socialite wife and my father had become friends. Now the Gutfreunds had rented the stone and stucco house where my father’s uncle Aleck had, not long before, whiled away his golden years in bed. Sometimes in those years, I’d encounter the Gutfreunds strolling down the driveway at Ardrossan, attired in their country-house finery and in the company of houseguests like Valentino.

Thanksgiving-dinner turnout soared into the nineties. The dining-room table at the big house, fully extended, would be draped in white linen, set with crystal, china, and silver. Smaller, round tables spilled from the dining room into the breakfast room next door. There were place cards for everyone, toddlers included. The cooking and serving fell, naturally, to the catering company whose founding father had served as bootlegger to the Colonel. Waiters would glide through the newly restored rooms, circulating cheese sticks and party dogs on silver platters. At the appointed hour, the bagpiper would herd the guests toward their tables. The menu hewed to tradition: turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy, green beans, pureed sweet potatoes, pies, et cetera. Glasses would be raised, toasts delivered to those no longer able to be with us. Small children, their party finery rumpled, would disappear under tables. After my father’s death, my children were destined to find all Thanksgivings anticlimactic. No holiday meal could compete with a cast of thousands, a kilted bagpiper, and cheese sticks on silver platters.

There had been, of course, a few casualties of my father’s addiction. Among them was his relationship with Elliot’s then wife. On the occasion of our father’s seventy-third birthday, civil discourse between the two of them had abruptly snapped. On that evening, he’d arranged a celebratory dinner in the dining room of a starchy men’s club on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. He’d invited Margaret, the three of us, our spouses, and some of his oldest friends. He’d had plenty to drink by the time he made the fateful decision to seat my sister-in-law to his left. Sometime toward the end of the first course, an argument erupted between them. Angry fire was exchanged. Later, my father would concede to me, if not to her, that he’d lost his temper—“not entirely, but I did.” He’d even admit to being ashamed of himself. But the blowup at the table took place in such muffled tones, perhaps an accommodation to club decorum, that I, sitting just two seats away, remained oblivious. By the time I turned toward my father’s end of the table halfway through dinner, my sister-in-law had bailed. She was driving home to Scarsdale, vowing never to be in the same room with my father again.

She kept her promise until what would turn out to be his final day-after-Thanksgiving dinner. In the weeks leading up to it, word reached her that the host was hoping she’d attend. She polled a few of us on the question of what to do. My suggestion was that she learn to dissemble, like the rest of us, and go for the sake of her children, if not him. Which she did, to her credit. That evening, when she entered the big house through the heavy front doors, her erstwhile antagonist was in a wheelchair, becalmed amid his guests on the oceanic living-room rug. Entering the room through the milling crowd, she headed in his direction, kissed him hello, and concluded that she’d done her bit.

He’d been released from the hospital a day or two before, having gone in for treatment for a collapsed lung. A gallon of fluid had been drained from his chest. His spectral aspect that evening, with his hair mussed and his gaze uncharacteristically vacant, seemed to provoke some sotto voce speculation.

“It was his mother,” one of his cousins theorized about possible root causes of his troubles. “And he believed his grandmother never liked him. You must have heard her famous line, ‘Bobby never walks into a room: He makes an entrance.’ She got him completely—but she could never accept him.”

At dinner, I made a small toast to him, thanking him for his generosity and close-hauling between the shoals of hypocrisy and excessive obedience to fact. I couldn’t tell how the salute went down: How could I put the squeeze on some distant cousin for an honest appraisal when levity was expected to be on tap? Later, I somehow landed the assignment of wheeling him out of the dining room and upstairs to his apartment. As we circumnavigated the kitchen, he snagged a fistful of cookies in the hand not occupied by a glass of red wine. On the third-floor hall, the wheelchair kept getting jammed on the edge of the carpet. In his bedroom, I helped him out of his clothes and into bed. His face on the pillow, pink and round, reminded me fleetingly of my children and, at the same time, a sadly distorted version of himself.

His health was failing, that was clear. In the summer of 2001, on the beach below the house on Nantucket, his belly was a basketball, fully inflated, belly button angrily protruding. Even he must have been alarmed. That fall, he acceded to pressure from the rest of us to ditch his longtime doctor, author of effusive testimonials to his patient’s superior health, and try someone else. The new internist came highly recommended as a wise soul with charm, wit, and a certain social cred assumed to be a prerequisite to winning the confidence of the patient in question. He’d known alcoholics intimately, too. In the unsettled days after 9/11, when the conversations of stunned New Yorkers kept veering toward flight, my first trip out of the city was to meet my father and Margaret at the office of the new doctor. The diagnosis, we learned that day, was cirrhosis. The damage done to my father’s liver couldn’t be reversed. Continuing to drink would kill him. The doctor declined to venture a guess as to how soon. But a liver specialist, to whom he referred my father, didn’t hold back. Two to four years.

The internist put him on an antidepressant to raise the level of serotonin in his brain, and a second drug to reverse the buildup of fluid in his abdomen, a complication of cirrhosis. There was talk of his seeing a psychiatrist, returning to AA, going into rehab, this time at a different sort of place, like the Betty Ford Center in California. But the patient stalled. To me, he said he was thinking. To Margaret, he said there was no way he was going. A routine colonoscopy, requiring the removal of a few polyps, landed him in the emergency room with uncontrolled bleeding, another complication of cirrhosis. On a trip to Paris, he fell, gashing his head, and was hospitalized with bleeding from his liver. He began falling regularly—a problem attributed in part to shrinking muscle mass because of disease. He stopped drinking at breakfast. He had other problems, too—arthritis, spinal stenosis, a pinched nerve—unrelated to his illness. Then came vertebral compression fractures, from a fall, leaving him in a corset and on painkillers for weeks. He began using a walker. Fluid built up in his abdominal cavity, causing an umbilical hernia. He was back in the hospital. This time, doctors siphoned off eight to ten quarts of fluid.

I wonder now whether I honestly imagined he could be persuaded to stop. He seemed barely willing to acknowledge his diagnosis: He talked of his symptoms as though they were mysterious, unrelated to any underlying cause. In the hospital in Philadelphia, he had bottles of wine delivered to him in a padded cooler. The hospital in Paris thoughtfully served wine with meals. At home, bottles piled up in the recycling. On visits to the doctor, the patient sometimes showed up loaded. I asked for the advice of his cousin, the recovering alcoholic working as an alcohol and drug abuse counselor. “It’s a low-grade suicide,” he said. The most effective way of maneuvering a recalcitrant alcoholic into treatment, he told me, was to do something I couldn’t imagine: tell him that if he didn’t go, he’d never see his grandchildren again.

I call my father to check in. He tells me he’s decided against “going to California”—a euphemism, apparently, for what I’d have called going back into treatment. He’s feeling cornered by the pressure, he says. It’s a nasty feeling: It leaves him unwilling to “run into the cage that’s been prepared in the corner.” In a couple of weeks, he’ll be seventy-three. “Is that really what I want to do?” he asks. The question, evidently rhetorical, goes unanswered but silently answered. He’s been thinking about how to explain all this—“why not to do it just now—or why not to do it at all”—to me and Hopie and Elliot and the doctor. It’s especially difficult, he says, to make me understand why he enjoys drinking. In case I’m too obtuse to get his point, he likens the challenge to, say, my “trying to explain about fucking” to my six-year-old son.

“It doesn’t mean that I’m intent on drowning,” he says, by way of fatherly reassurance.

Doesn’t it? I ask.

“I said, ‘It doesn’t mean that I’m intent on drowning.’ That doesn’t mean that I won’t drown.”

Eventually, I gave up playing lifeguard. The swimmer showed no interest in staying close to shore. My campaign seemed to be having the opposite of the desired effect: My quixotic incursions only annoyed my father. What’s more, I’d begun to question my motives. Was I driven more by anger than kindness? Maybe I wanted to prove to him that I’d been right. Or maybe I couldn’t accept that I wasn’t, after all, an irresistible argument for going on living. A year or two before his death, we talked about his drinking for the last time. We were sitting in a pair of slipcovered armchairs in the sitting room of his apartment—like President Nixon and Mao Tse-tung. Except that I’d been sobbing, probably more in rage than sorrow. There was a table between us, scattered with books and newspapers. We were barely looking at each other. Appearing unmoved, he restated his position: He no longer had things he needed to get done; he had the right to decide how he wanted to live. He loved us all but he had no intention of giving up drinking. He was asking—he said this with a jocular air—that I fuck off.

It seemed the wiser course.

Meanwhile, the question of the long-term fate of the house and the land hung over his generation. The trusts that held the property would expire in the decades to come. If he and his brother and four Montgomery cousins couldn’t come up with a plan for the disposition of the land and buildings, how would the next generation, with seventeen members, decide anything when the problem landed in its lap? In the late nineties, the older generation and the trustees had agreed twice to go ahead and sell some buildings and land for low-density development. A man who’d made a fortune in supply-chain software was now living in the Colonel’s onetime stable. A Big Pharma heir and his family were in my grandparents’ house. Rolling fields were studded with self-consciously tasteful McMansions, each with its own swimming pool and four-car garage. It wasn’t easy to love what the place was becoming, though there was no denying it could have been much worse. And there were three hundred thirty more acres awaiting a decision. So when two local women put up a notice in the last independent bookstore in the area, proposing a conservancy to save open land, Bob Scott was the first to call.

He was no longer walking by the time the fledgling conservancy and two other land organizations held a four-day workshop at the big house in the spring of 2005. The objective was to come up with ideas for preserving what remained of Ardrossan. Traditional approaches were out: The land couldn’t simply be donated to some nonprofit because the trustees were required, under the original terms of the trusts, to get something like fair market value. So the three organizations invited nine experts in land conservation and historic preservation to come for a visit and throw out some ideas. They arrived from as far away as London; toured the house and the farm; immersed themselves in local history, regional demographics, the economy; and sat in on panel discussions on possible cultural, agricultural, and public uses. By early June, they’d come up with a proposal. The family could form a nonprofit to serve as steward of the land and the buildings in future. The big house could be used by a research institution or become a “premium entertainment venue.” The farm could be converted to community-supported agriculture. The township could buy some of the land for open space. Easements would protect much of the rest of the land. And a corner of the property could be sold, if necessary to provide the required financial return, for residential development.

It was a possible starting point, nothing more than that. It was going to take time, commitment, and money in amounts that family members may or may not have felt they had. They’d need a business consultant, a master plan, a strategic plan, a land-use plan, a house-conservation plan, an operating budget. But it wasn’t impossible, the conservancies believed. How the various family members felt about the exercise was less clear. Some seemed curious. But another round of land sales with limited development—big houses, big lots—would be simpler and would generate more cash. My father, I’m told, was elated. The outsiders who took part were touched by his passion for the place. He was delighted to be showing it off to people who appreciated it in all its facets—as landscape, as architecture, as open space, as an opportunity for historic preservation. Because many of the visiting experts ran other historic properties, they knew what was possible; others, who didn’t, could glimpse the potential through the experts’ eyes. I don’t know whether my father believed Ardrossan would be saved. But he seems to have intended to give it a shot. If he couldn’t finish the job, someone else might.

I saw little of him that summer. In the years since the divorce, my parents had both continued to use the house on Nantucket. My mother would be there in July, my father in August. I’d straddle the transition, spending time with each. My children took it as unremarkable that their grandfather drank orange juice and champagne in bed first thing in the morning. Later, they’d be at his elbow in the kitchen while he concocted a dessert he’d discovered in England, made from stewed berries and slabs of bread. But after his diagnosis, his attachment to the island had seemed to wane. The house wasn’t easy to get around; nearly every inside doorway involved an unexpected step up or down for no apparent reason. The place hadn’t changed in the thirty-five years since my mother had bought it. Nor had the expanse of beach grass and poison ivy on which it sat—except that the value of the land, being waterfront property, was on an upward trajectory toward Pluto. Which may have had something to do with why my father proposed to my mother that they sell it—the half that still belonged to her, and the half she’d given him for a dollar. She wasn’t interested, so it never happened. But, on the advice of her lawyer, she made sure her half of the house would be out of her estate when she died. My father, the former estates lawyer, did nothing. As his condition worsened, the most valuable asset in his possession had undergone a thirtyfold capital gain.

That last summer, he and Margaret relocated for several months to Vermont. She had a farmhouse on the side of a hill with a view across half of New Hampshire. They passed the weeks reading and moving between the terrace and a first-floor bedroom they’d added for when he’d no longer be able to climb stairs. At midsummer, I stopped by for lunch. My father sat at the kitchen table, his face looking ravaged, as though badly burned. Dark red blotches stained his cheeks. His eyes were watery. He was unmistakably in pain, though he never said so. It occurred to me that he’d acquired an alternate family in those final years. Margaret had become his de facto wife. Tommy Dowlin, his property manager, was a surrogate son; the two of them would sometimes have lunch together at my father’s club in Philadelphia. When Margaret was out of town, Tommy would cook lamb chops in the nursery kitchen while his wife sat with my father. Then the three of them would sit down at the dining-room table to eat.

“It sometimes struck me that you and Margaret had become his family,” I said to Tommy, years later.

“I think that probably is accurate,” he said.

He and I had never talked much about his experiences with my father until that day, seven years after my father’s death. Tommy had gone on to become the property manager for the family who owned the building that had been the Colonel’s stables. We were sitting in the renovated clock tower; outside, gravel paths crisscrossed a broad green lawn. Tommy seemed to make no judgment about my father’s precipitous decline—something perhaps I should have been better able to do. He’d respected my father. He’d appreciated having the job and an employer who cared about him. “The more I got to know him, the more I liked him,” he told me. “I would have liked to have seen him live a lot longer. I think he still had a lot to give and a lot to do and I just think it was unfortunate.”

“Did you understand what was wrong?” I asked.

He hesitated.

“I think he had a drinking problem,” he said simply.

Yes, I agreed. “He drank himself to death.”

“I know,” Tommy said. “I just didn’t want to say that.”

The end came on schedule, just like the liver specialist had predicted. By early autumn, my father was in the hospital in Pennsylvania. In a manila folder labeled “RMS Health,” in a file drawer in my desk, I find pages torn from reporter’s notebooks, covered in notes scribbled during phone calls with various doctors in those final weeks.

“If bowel looks viable, will put back in abdomen and sew up.”

“Lung in bad shape. If not do anything, toxic fluid will kill him.”

“What can do is operate on liver. Might take care of things. But 2 risks.

“1—operation kill.

“2—might → dementia.

“Should they operate or send home to die?”

I was at my desk in New York when word reached me that his doctors were out of options. By the time Hopie and Elliot and I arrived in Pennsylvania, our father was in intensive care. We sat in his curtained enclosure as people dropped in to say good-bye—his brother, Ed; the housekeeper’s family; the museum director. She’d brought her husband, the curator, and a poster-size image of a painting of a woman, which the museum had just acquired. With humorous fanfare, she unfurled the poster, like a hawker displaying a pinup. My father tried to grin, chuckling weakly. Then, in an expression of love and forgiveness I wish I’d been able to match, she and her husband leaned across the bedrail, before the flashing green blips on the monitors, and softly told their old friend how much they were going to miss him.

The unwinding, I learned later, had taken him by surprise. A decade after his death, Margaret and I were in my apartment in New York. I was asking her questions that can only have made her unhappy. She seemed to be doing her best to answer.

Did you understand he was killing himself? I’d asked.

“In the hospital, when the doctor said he was dying, I didn’t believe it,” she said. “I didn’t realize it was going to be so soon. . . . When the doctor said, ‘He’s dying,’ I said, ‘I had no idea.’”

And my father?

“Honestly, I don’t think he knew,” she said. Because, she said, after the doctor had broken the news, my father had turned to her and asked sadly, “How did this happen?”

The day after his death, I emailed the internist to tell him. My father had eluded him, I’d learned, in the last year or two of his life. Perhaps the patient preferred the specialists: They concerned themselves with his complications, not his underlying disease. Whatever the reason, I felt badly about my father’s circumventions. The internist had gone to superhuman lengths. “We may not crack this nut,” he once let me know, kindly. He must have intuited that from the start, but he hadn’t given up. So I sent him an email telling him that DOD was dead. That’s the name, Dear Old Dad, the internist had sometimes used. I thanked him for everything he’d done, and said I was sorry about how unsatisfactorily it had ended between them.

His answer came back a day later.

Sic transit gloria mundi, he’d typed in the subject field.

“I loved him too,” the internist wrote. “And he knew it. We had a truce. It’s all OK.”