Usually we sat in the library chatting. I was often there when Maryanne made her daily phone call to check in. After answering, Gam covered the receiver and said to me, “It’s Maryanne,” then, to her daughter, “Guess who’s here? Mary.” She paused, I guess to give Maryanne a chance to say something such as “Tell her I say hi,” but she never did.
Sometimes we went to eat at a local restaurant. One of Gam’s favorite places to have lunch was the Sly Fox Inn, a low-key pub directly across the street from the grocery store parking lot where she’d been mugged. We never talked about Dad much, but one day she seemed particularly nostalgic. She reminisced about the trouble he and Billy Drake used to get into, how easily Dad had made her laugh. She went quiet after the waiter came to take our plates. When he asked if we wanted the check Gam didn’t answer, so I nodded.
“Mary, he was so sick.”
“I know, Gam,” I said, assuming she meant his drinking.
“I didn’t know what to do.”
I thought she was going to cry and said, uselessly, “Gam, it’s okay.”
“Those last few weeks”—she took a deep breath—“he couldn’t get out of bed.”
“The day I came by—” I started to ask.
The waiter brought the check.
“Didn’t he go to the doctor?” I asked. “I mean, if he was that sick.”
“He felt so bad when he heard you’d come to see him.”
I waited for her to say something else, but Gam opened her purse. She always paid for lunch. I drove her home in silence.
In 1987, I had spent my junior year abroad in Germany, a place for which I had no affinity, but I’d thought it might please my grandfather since it was the country of his parents’ birth. (It didn’t.) I had planned to come home for Christmas, and I called my grandparents to ask if I could stay with them.
I’d stood at the pay phone in the hallway of my dorm with a handful of five-mark coins and called the House. “Hi, Grandpa. It’s Mary,” I’d said when he answered.
“Yes,” he had replied.
I explained why I was calling.
“Why can’t you stay with your mother?” he had asked.
“I’m allergic to the cats, and I’m afraid I might have an asthma attack.”
“Then tell her to get rid of the cats.”
It was so much easier being the “nice lady” now.
I saw firsthand how difficult living with my grandfather had become for Gam. My grandfather’s odd behavior had started with small things, such as hiding her checkbook. When she confronted him, he accused her of trying to bankrupt him. When she tried to reason with him, he became enraged, leaving her feeling shaken and unsafe. He worried constantly about money, terrified that his fortune was disappearing. My grandfather had never been poor a day in his life, but poverty became his sole preoccupation; he was tortured by the prospect of it.
My grandfather’s moods eventually evened out, and the problem for Gam became the repetition. After getting home from the office in the evening, he’d go upstairs to change, often coming back downstairs wearing a fresh dress shirt and tie but no pants, just his boxers, socks, and dress shoes. “So how is everybody? Okay? Okay. Good night, Toots,” he’d say, and head back upstairs, only to descend again a few minutes later.
One evening as Gam and I sat together in the library, my grandfather came in and asked, “Hey, Toots, what’s for dinner?”
After she answered, he walked out. A few moments later, he returned. “What’s for dinner?” She answered again. He left and returned ten, twelve, fifteen times. With decreasing amounts of patience, she told him “Roast beef and potatoes” every time.
Eventually she lashed out at him. “For God’s sake, Fred, stop it! I’ve already told you.”
“Okay, okay, Toots,” he said with a nervous laugh, hands raised against her as he bounced up on his toes. “Well, that’s that,” he said, tucking his thumbs under his suspenders, as though we had just finished a conversation. The gestures were the same as they’d always been, but the glint in his eyes had become dully benign.
He left the room, only to wander in a few minutes later to ask, “What’s for dinner?”
Gam pulled me onto the porch—an uninviting square of cement on the side of the House just off the library that decades earlier had been used for family barbecues. It had been so long neglected that I often forgot it existed.
“I swear, Mary,” she told me, “he’s going to drive me mad.” The chairs that had been left out there and long forgotten were so littered with twigs and dead leaves that we remained standing.
“You need to get help,” I said. “You should talk to someone.”
“I can’t leave him.” She was close to tears.
“I would have liked to go home again,” she once told me wistfully. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t go back to Scotland, but she adamantly refused to do anything that might look selfish.
On weekends, if they weren’t at Mar-a-Lago, my grandparents would drive to one of their other children’s country homes: Robert’s in Millbrook, New York; Elizabeth’s in Southampton; or Maryanne’s in Sparta, New Jersey. They would plan to
