Speaker 1: Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. I
Speaker 1: grew up for the first fourteen years of my life
Speaker 1: on a roughly eight hundred acre British style estate about
Speaker 1: a half hour from Philadelphia. It was an extraordinarily beautiful
Speaker 1: piece of land that had been pieced together by my
Speaker 1: great grandfather in the years leading up to and immediately
Speaker 1: after World War One. It had been farms before, so
Speaker 1: there were old stone farmhouses dating back to the seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: some of them in ruins, stone barns, rolling hills, pasture, cornfield, soybean.
Speaker 1: There was a herd of three hundred Airshire cows, so
Speaker 1: there was a functioning dairy farm. But basically it was
Speaker 1: a sort of British style gentleman's estate, kind of plucked
Speaker 1: from the pages of Jane Austen and Henry James and
Speaker 1: floated across the Atlantic and plunked down in the suburbs
Speaker 1: of Philadelphia. That's Jenny Scott, a longtime journalist for The
Speaker 1: New York Times. Her recent book is the memoir The
Speaker 1: Beneficiary Fortune, Misfortune and the Story of My Father. Often
Speaker 1: we long to unlock the puzzle of our parents, but
Speaker 1: most of us never do. We wonder we posit, we
Speaker 1: have series, and when our parents are gone, there's a
Speaker 1: tinge of regret that we didn't get to know them better,
Speaker 1: that we didn't ask questions or dig deeper while we
Speaker 1: still could. But Jenny's is a story ultimately of literally
Speaker 1: unlocking a puzzle, the puzzle of her father, Robert Montgomery Scott.
Speaker 1: I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
Speaker 1: that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 1: and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I remember there
Speaker 1: was a hill that my father took us to toboggan
Speaker 1: on where he had clearly tobogganed as a child. There
Speaker 1: was a a hollow tree that he had used as
Speaker 1: a kind of fort, which was still, of course hollow
Speaker 1: when we came along, and we were able to use
Speaker 1: it in its slightly decaying state. But mostly it was
Speaker 1: a deeply visceral experience of a wild piece of land
Speaker 1: of extraordinary beauty. It was a degree of rootedness that
Speaker 1: I now see it was kind of unusual in certainly
Speaker 1: in suburban American life, maybe rural American life more so,
Speaker 1: But I wasn't really conscious of that at the time.
Speaker 1: I just experienced it the way a child would. As children,
Speaker 1: we accept our lives as being normal. Whatever they are,
Speaker 1: they're ours, especially back them in pre internet days, there
Speaker 1: was simply no basis for comparison. But later, as a
Speaker 1: young working journalist, Janni was acutely conscious of her family's
Speaker 1: extreme privilege, and she would avoid telling her colleagues about
Speaker 1: her childhood home. She would tell them she and her
Speaker 1: siblings grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania. The estate
Speaker 1: had a name, ar Drassm. This was just outside Philadelphia,
Speaker 1: an area that had been developed in the late nineteenth
Speaker 1: and early twentieth centuries with the wealth that was pouring
Speaker 1: out of the city in its industrial heyday. But among
Speaker 1: the big houses, Ardrassen stood out as an estate that
Speaker 1: had remained in a family spanning one Gilded age to
Speaker 1: the next. It had been built by Janni's father's grandparents,
Speaker 1: his maternal grandparents, and generation after generation raised their families there.
Speaker 1: The summer Jannie turned fourteen, her family moved away to London,
Speaker 1: where her father had been offered a four year political appointment.
Speaker 1: By the time they returned home, she was in college.
Speaker 1: She never lived at Ardrassen again, though she would return
Speaker 1: to it time and again in her mind. Describe your
Speaker 1: mother for me. My mother, it was a very i
Speaker 1: would say, beautiful, redheaded woman from Boston, from a different
Speaker 1: part of the country, but sort of socially in sync
Speaker 1: with the world of my father. In fact, they met
Speaker 1: at a wedding at age eighteen. She was very musical.
Speaker 1: She became ultimately a pianist, teaching and doing some performing,
Speaker 1: not on a large scale, kind, relatively soft spoken, good
Speaker 1: sense of humor, not highly certainly adept socially, but was
Speaker 1: not a hugely gregarious person who loved to be in
Speaker 1: at parties and that sort of thing, you know. A thoughtful,
Speaker 1: well read, musical kind mother and your father. My father,
Speaker 1: um was in some ways a much more seemingly more
Speaker 1: outgoing person. He appeared to be very gregarious, He knew
Speaker 1: a lot of people. I mean, he was out in
Speaker 1: the world more than my mother because she was a
Speaker 1: stay at home mother. For quite a while, my father
Speaker 1: worked as a lawyer, and then when we went to London,
Speaker 1: he worked for the Ambassador to the Court of St.
Speaker 1: James from the United States for four years as in
Speaker 1: special assistant. And then he came back and he became
Speaker 1: increasingly involved in civic and cultural institutions in Philadelphia. He
Speaker 1: ran the Academy of Music for seven years, and then
Speaker 1: he was president and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of
Speaker 1: Art for fourteen years. So he had a very public
Speaker 1: life as a sort of patrician figure in Philadelphia, a
Speaker 1: kind of throwback to an old world which he sort
Speaker 1: of played humorously. He dressed rather well in kind of
Speaker 1: Saville Row suits after we'd been in London. And he
Speaker 1: had a slightly British accent, which was partly just from
Speaker 1: growing up in mainline Philadelphia and partly from and and
Speaker 1: the specifics of his family which was very connected somewhat
Speaker 1: to Britain, but also by living in England. So he
Speaker 1: was a very colorful, well known figure compared to my mother,
Speaker 1: who was more private and um less visible. He was funny,
Speaker 1: extremely charming, you know, a person who seemed gave every
Speaker 1: impression of kind of being born into a rather charmed
Speaker 1: life and living it out just like that. In contrast
Speaker 1: to his gregarious, extroverted personality. Robert Montgomery Scott was an
Speaker 1: inveterate keeper of diaries journals. Jenny had always been aware
Speaker 1: of these journals. They were simply a fact of life.
Speaker 1: Her father always carried around a small loose leaf binder.
Speaker 1: As a child, she never went looking for the diaries,
Speaker 1: something that now surprises her given her repertorial instincts. After all,
Speaker 1: her father was a bit of a mr she longed
Speaker 1: to unlock. But then, in her twenties, at the end
Speaker 1: of a long distance bike trip abroad with her father,
Speaker 1: he turned to her, seemingly out of nowhere, and told
Speaker 1: her that someday she would be the recipient of his journals,
Speaker 1: that he would leave them for her when he died.
Speaker 1: I was fascinated by my father from I think a
Speaker 1: pretty young age. I admired him and um to some
Speaker 1: extent emulated funny things about him, and I wanted his approval.
Speaker 1: And he was somewhat enigmatic, a bit elusive. I don't
Speaker 1: think I could have articulated that as a child, but
Speaker 1: it was as though he were slightly out of reach. UM.
Speaker 1: So the thought that he, out of the blue would
Speaker 1: tell me that I could have his diaries when he died,
Speaker 1: not at some point in the future, but when he died.
Speaker 1: UM was stunning to me, and of course a source
Speaker 1: of great interest. But I also didn't know how to
Speaker 1: take it. And it's in the nature of my relationship
Speaker 1: with my father that for some reason I couldn't interrogate
Speaker 1: him at that moment as to why. So I said, well,
Speaker 1: why me, and he said, you're the writer and just
Speaker 1: tossed it off like that. The conversation ended, um, as
Speaker 1: far as I remember, and I really never dared bring
Speaker 1: it up again, because I was so enticed by the idea.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to run any risks that there was
Speaker 1: that he might withdraw the offer, change his mind. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, that I might somehow seem to be eagerly
Speaker 1: awaiting his demise. And another thing about Robert Montgomery Scott,
Speaker 1: he liked to drink a lot. If someone had told
Speaker 1: me that there were people who didn't drink, it would
Speaker 1: be like saying that there were people who didn't use
Speaker 1: soap um. It just was so common and every event,
Speaker 1: and you know, every funeral involved repairing afterward to drink.
Speaker 1: It was just ubiquitous. And of course it was a
Speaker 1: time in American culture, particularly in that society, that men
Speaker 1: would come home from work and have a bunch of
Speaker 1: drinks and wine with dinner, and so it was just
Speaker 1: a fact of life. Eventually, as a college student, Jenny
Speaker 1: makes a decision not to drink, an unusual decision for
Speaker 1: a college student who isn't in trouble with alcohol. She
Speaker 1: had had a bad experience around freshman year when she
Speaker 1: got very drunk. Can you imagine if every college freshman
Speaker 1: who drank too much one time quit drinking, half the
Speaker 1: bars in the world would probably have to shut down
Speaker 1: for lack of business. I don't know why I stopped.
Speaker 1: It wasn't precipitated by any kind of crisis. So I
Speaker 1: like to think that somewhere in me, I would like
Speaker 1: to believe that, somewhere in me, I sensed that in
Speaker 1: my family, where drinking was very common. In my father's case,
Speaker 1: I now know he was well long as an alcoholic
Speaker 1: at that point, but it went back generations too. I'd
Speaker 1: like to think that I somehow sensed that this was
Speaker 1: a bad idea and had the good sense to just
Speaker 1: make it all very clear for myself by ruling it out.
Speaker 1: But I don't know that for sure that seems right,
Speaker 1: because why else would a college girl that's without out
Speaker 1: in a huge inciting incident beyond oh, I drank too
Speaker 1: much one night, and I didn't like the way I felt.
Speaker 1: I think the other factor was that I had become
Speaker 1: aware that it was difficult to have conversations with my
Speaker 1: father after you know, six o'clock, and it was maddening
Speaker 1: to me. While he wasn't a nasty drunk, he would
Speaker 1: sometimes say things that were, um inappropriate under the circumstances,
Speaker 1: things that you might have confided to him, he might,
Speaker 1: you know, say in the presence of somebody else. So
Speaker 1: we became, i would say, much more conscious of this
Speaker 1: and attempted to talk to him about it, um completely unsuccessfully.
Speaker 1: A number of time is around the kitchen table after
Speaker 1: dinner when we were all there, and invariably he would
Speaker 1: talk circles around us. He seemed to make the case
Speaker 1: that while he understood that he drank a lot and
Speaker 1: he liked to drink, it was not out of control.
Speaker 1: And thank you very much, and now I'm going off
Speaker 1: to bed. Was your mother in those meetings, Yes, she was,
Speaker 1: And I think she was in a difficult position because, uh,
Speaker 1: my mother's posture with my father for a long time,
Speaker 1: I think had been somewhat to sort of intermediate between
Speaker 1: us and him. She wasn't an apologist for his drinking.
Speaker 1: She clearly understood there was a problem. She was dealing
Speaker 1: with it in her own way, which probably varied over time.
Speaker 1: When I would come home from college and after that,
Speaker 1: UM my father, for whatever reasons, that dynamics between us.
Speaker 1: We would end up having bad arguments about often about
Speaker 1: politics or something like that. And my mother told me
Speaker 1: later that she had come to dread my coming home
Speaker 1: during that period. So I think it began to play
Speaker 1: out in our adult relationships with him in a way
Speaker 1: that it had been submerged when we were children. As
Speaker 1: a child, I thought my parents had a a good
Speaker 1: marriage and that we were a happy family. As an
Speaker 1: adolescent and as a young adult, it became more clear
Speaker 1: to me that there was um tension in the household,
Speaker 1: passive aggressive stuff. Never that I was conscious of knockdown,
Speaker 1: drag out fights, but um just uh an uncomfortable quality
Speaker 1: to some of the time that we spent together. I
Speaker 1: now know that what they had in common was background
Speaker 1: and that he came to feel I now know, although
Speaker 1: I didn't know this then, that that that was an
Speaker 1: insufficient basis for a happy marriage. It was no secret
Speaker 1: from an early on my father. I guess you would
Speaker 1: have said in that world liked women. We knew the
Speaker 1: way children know that he was flirtatious, and whatever that
Speaker 1: implied was not entirely clear. But the notion that he
Speaker 1: was somehow um faithful to his marriage vows, that was
Speaker 1: not a kind of given um. It was just something
Speaker 1: we sensed in the way he interacted with people, and
Speaker 1: and particularly with someone who we knew very well, who
Speaker 1: was a friend of the family. The two families were close.
Speaker 1: It became a kind of private joke between the children
Speaker 1: of the two families that maybe the two families would merge.
Speaker 1: But later, you know, when we were out of the house. Um,
Speaker 1: I now know, and I guess I sensed it at
Speaker 1: the time that there were other women too that he
Speaker 1: was involved with. In fact, a moment when I was
Speaker 1: just about to graduate from college and I went to
Speaker 1: with a friend, my then boyfriend, to the island of
Speaker 1: Nantucket where my parents had a house. Um, this is
Speaker 1: during must have been in the late spring, and I
Speaker 1: called my parents to say I'd like to go, and
Speaker 1: my mother said, oh, you'll encounter your father there. He's
Speaker 1: there with a friend, you know, go ahead. When we
Speaker 1: got there, I called the house and he answered the
Speaker 1: phone and he said, well, where are you? And I said, oh,
Speaker 1: we just got off the ferry, and he said, I'm
Speaker 1: not alone, and of course, you know, endlessly obedient said, oh,
Speaker 1: don't worry, we'll we'll stay in a motel and and
Speaker 1: he said no, no, um, come on, come on back.
Speaker 1: And so we were going to go get some breakfast.
Speaker 1: We go to get some breakfast, and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden he emerges in the restaurant, red faced and very
Speaker 1: bluntly says, her name is Linda. And we proceeded to
Speaker 1: spend the weekend with my father and Linda. Did that
Speaker 1: put you in a position of them keeping a secret
Speaker 1: from your mother? I believe it did. Um. My father
Speaker 1: never asked me to keep the secret from my mother,
Speaker 1: but I don't know how I would have told her. Yes,
Speaker 1: I became a colluder, an unwitting or unintentional colluder, uh
Speaker 1: in my father's um complex extramarital life. But it isn't
Speaker 1: only her father's affairs that require collusion. It's also his drinking.
Speaker 1: I think one of the precipitating things that led us
Speaker 1: to take the problem more seriously and get organized to
Speaker 1: try and get him into treatment was that my brother
Speaker 1: and I went on a trip with him, a biking
Speaker 1: trip with him. I was in my very early thirties.
Speaker 1: We went to New Zealand with him with a group
Speaker 1: biking trip, and for two and a half weeks or
Speaker 1: so we biked very hard, um long distances. It was
Speaker 1: a fantastic trip. My father was great fun and he
Speaker 1: took us and um we we loved the daytime part
Speaker 1: enormously and New Zealand was of course spectacular. And then
Speaker 1: at night he would drink heavily and get so drunk
Speaker 1: that on like night number two or three, a complete
Speaker 1: stranger on the trip came to us and said, why
Speaker 1: haven't you helped him? It was a sort of shocking moment.
Speaker 1: Um what could we say, Well, we've tried ineptly, um,
Speaker 1: but I think we were kind of shamed into or
Speaker 1: jolted into acting. So then we returned back to Pennsylvania
Speaker 1: and we we both wrote him letters about what we'd
Speaker 1: witnessed and how we felt about it, and how we
Speaker 1: loved him and wanted him to take it seriously. And
Speaker 1: in the letters responding to us, he particularly to my
Speaker 1: brother who did drink uh, and he assumed my brother
Speaker 1: would understand better than I would. I think he never
Speaker 1: thought I could understand what he was talking about. He
Speaker 1: explained how much he enjoyed drinking, how much of a
Speaker 1: part of his life it was, And I also know
Speaker 1: from other things that he said to other people that
Speaker 1: he felt he was a total bore when he did drink,
Speaker 1: and that it was somehow this sort of magic elixir
Speaker 1: that made life tolerable. And now I never thought my
Speaker 1: father's life would have been intolerable. But I also know
Speaker 1: that at a very young age he had had a
Speaker 1: dream um in which he dreamt of some red potion.
Speaker 1: This was that, like I think he said, he was
Speaker 1: like five years old, and it was a recurrent dream
Speaker 1: of this sort of magic potion that made him feel
Speaker 1: differently and behave differently. So whatever it was that made
Speaker 1: him love it so much, it was very deep seated,
Speaker 1: but we didn't understand at the time what that was.
Speaker 1: So Jenny's father manages to white knuckle it for a while.
Speaker 1: He goes for stretches of time without alcohol, including weddings
Speaker 1: and large gatherings where he certainly would have been drinking,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't last. Finally, at the two year mark um,
Speaker 1: when it was clear that he was fully back to
Speaker 1: drinking and we were not around. My mother had a
Speaker 1: confrontation and with him and said, you know, I want
Speaker 1: you to go back into treatment, and he walked out
Speaker 1: of the house and never returned. After a brief stay
Speaker 1: in a hotel, he decides to move back to our
Speaker 1: dressing into a different house, what was called the Big House,
Speaker 1: the one his grandparents had first built. The fifty room
Speaker 1: house is at this point largely uninhabited. Jenny's cousin lives
Speaker 1: on the second floor and is raising prize winning bull
Speaker 1: terriers in a kennel on the lawn. Jenny's father decides
Speaker 1: to move into what had been the nursery where his
Speaker 1: mother had been raised, and turned the nursery into an
Speaker 1: apartment for himself. He moved into the top floor of
Speaker 1: that house and embarked upon rather remarkable restoration of the
Speaker 1: top floor that then spread to the ground floor, and
Speaker 1: over the next decade he restored every one of the
Speaker 1: public rooms on the ground floor to men condition for
Speaker 1: and including replacing the roof of the house for millions
Speaker 1: of dollars. This was a house that he didn't own,
Speaker 1: but the house also had for him all sorts of
Speaker 1: emotional resonance, Having you know, known his grandparents and grown
Speaker 1: up there and knowing what it meant to his mother,
Speaker 1: and so the whole exercise was very, i would say,
Speaker 1: emotionally complex. My father would have these fantastic Thanksgiving dinners
Speaker 1: the day after Thanksgiving, not to interfere with anybody else's,
Speaker 1: in which he would invite every family member and all
Speaker 1: sorts of other people, and the cast would rise to
Speaker 1: close to a hundred by the time that he finally died.
Speaker 1: What do you think that was about those last years
Speaker 1: in regard to both the restoration and your father wanting
Speaker 1: to have these huge gatherings have everybody come to this
Speaker 1: restored home. His parents had just died after very long lives,
Speaker 1: his marriage just ended, and he had resigned or retired
Speaker 1: from his his job, possibly under some pressure. Um so
Speaker 1: everything had changed. He had grown up in this world
Speaker 1: of big houses, some of which had fallen by the wayside.
Speaker 1: One was a ruin where his father had grown up
Speaker 1: in Landsdown, Pennsylvania. One had been a so called cottage
Speaker 1: in bar Harbor in the period when bar Harbor was
Speaker 1: sort of like Newport that ultimately had been torn down,
Speaker 1: a place he'd gone every year as a child and ultimately,
Speaker 1: the family couldn't unload it after the war, after the
Speaker 1: depression and the war, and had to basically dismantle it.
Speaker 1: So he'd seen this sort of grand life and he'd
Speaker 1: seen its decay. I think he thought that if he
Speaker 1: could make the house what had once been, because it
Speaker 1: was really pretty much the only one of those huge
Speaker 1: Bourbon Philadelphia Manson's that was still occupied by the original
Speaker 1: family and had all the original stuff in it, if
Speaker 1: he could make that into something a house, museum, or
Speaker 1: something that could become somewhat self supporting, maybe some of
Speaker 1: the land would be preserved too. So I think it
Speaker 1: was an act of duty and loyalty and love and
Speaker 1: also hope for preservation. And finally it fed something in
Speaker 1: the way he had come to see himself, perhaps what
Speaker 1: he had been bred even to do. And he was
Speaker 1: constantly being written about in the restoration of the house
Speaker 1: as sort of the lord of the manor, which he
Speaker 1: was ironic about that, but he was willing to play
Speaker 1: that role. It's ironic too, or or poetic maybe that
Speaker 1: as he's creating this or attempting to preserve this, this
Speaker 1: monument to history, he's also decaying himself. He is self destructing,
Speaker 1: and doctors are saying to him, if you keep this up,
Speaker 1: you're going to die. Yeah, and and he can't stop.
Speaker 1: That's right, yeah about you know, just a few years
Speaker 1: into this process, he clearly did not look well, and
Speaker 1: we persuaded him to see a new doctor because his
Speaker 1: longtime doctor had been telling him he was the picture
Speaker 1: of health. One summer, the thing that sort of precipitated
Speaker 1: this was seeing him on the beach and Nantucket with
Speaker 1: his his belly distended. He was not a fat man,
Speaker 1: but something had gone awry and it was like a
Speaker 1: basketball And so he finally agreed to go to a
Speaker 1: different doctor who had understood alcoholism and also understood the
Speaker 1: world that my father was from, because he was somewhat
Speaker 1: from it himself. And he diagnosed him very quickly as
Speaker 1: having cirrhosis of the liver, and while he wasn't willing
Speaker 1: to say how long he would last, he referred him
Speaker 1: to a specialist who said, you've got two to four years,
Speaker 1: so you can either stop where you can be dead
Speaker 1: in two to four years. And he didn't stop. No,
Speaker 1: he didn't, despite argumentation from me and others. He um
Speaker 1: felt that at that point he no longer had a
Speaker 1: job that he had to hold down, and he was
Speaker 1: not married. He was living with a woman who apparently
Speaker 1: tolerated it, and he said sort of felt like, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm in my um early seventies and I'll I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do what i want. Now, people who know a
Speaker 1: lot about alcoholism would say, well, that's not a choice.
Speaker 1: It's you know, it's an illness, and that's he may
Speaker 1: have phrased it that way, but it wasn't a choice.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. Janny's father dies at the age
Speaker 1: of seventies six, and in the aftermath of his death,
Speaker 1: Jenny looks around for his diaries. They aren't in his apartment,
Speaker 1: and at this point, as a working journalist and mother
Speaker 1: of young children, she's not in a position to really
Speaker 1: go digging for them. It's been decades since his promise
Speaker 1: on the bike trip that he would preserve safe and
Speaker 1: leave them to her and only her, and of course
Speaker 1: she's never forgotten, but now they're nowhere to be found.
Speaker 1: She asks his girlfriend, who says she'll take a look.
Speaker 1: A couple of weeks later, his girlfriend calls Janny and
Speaker 1: says she found a few, but when Janny sees them.
Speaker 1: They're not what she'd been looking for, just four slim volumes,
Speaker 1: more like the kind of journal he kept on trips,
Speaker 1: not revealing, not clues as to the mystery of her
Speaker 1: father and his demons, not the real deal. Jenny wonders
Speaker 1: if perhaps the lifetime of journals had been destroyed. But
Speaker 1: then she happens to be in her mother's basement, the
Speaker 1: house her father had left two decades earlier. At this point,
Speaker 1: she isn't looking for anything. After all, her father wouldn't
Speaker 1: have left his personal papers in the home of the
Speaker 1: woman he had left twenty years earlier, would he have.
Speaker 1: My mother said, you might want to just see if
Speaker 1: there's anything. So my daughter, who was there, and I
Speaker 1: started digging through the letters, and at the very bottom
Speaker 1: we came upon this one single black volume, dating from
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, when my father was in his mid twenties.
Speaker 1: And I took it back to New York and read it,
Speaker 1: and it was extraordinary and the most revelatory thing I'd
Speaker 1: pretty much ever seen about my father, and certainly coming
Speaker 1: from his own hand. And I realized I had to
Speaker 1: go back and search my mother's entire house. So I
Speaker 1: went back and did that, and in the pretty much
Speaker 1: the last place I looked in this quite large house,
Speaker 1: and in a walk in closet, a large walk in
Speaker 1: closet in the back area of the third floor, I
Speaker 1: noticed a wooden chest with a padlock on it that
Speaker 1: I didn't recall ever having seen before, And it was
Speaker 1: kind of boxed in with some cardboard boxes. And when
Speaker 1: I approached it, I could see that the padlock had
Speaker 1: been left at one digit off from the last four
Speaker 1: digits of my parents phone number, the number they always
Speaker 1: used for combination locks. So it's kind of apparent what
Speaker 1: to do. I turned it the one notch and the
Speaker 1: locks sprung open, and I hauled the chest out, and um.
Speaker 1: There were forty years of diaries in identical black three
Speaker 1: ring binders, all organized chronologically, seemingly waiting to be discovered.
Speaker 1: The journals that Jenny's father meant to leave in her
Speaker 1: care and then, perhaps ravaged by his alcoholism, forgot about,
Speaker 1: are extraordinarily beautifully written, not just the command of language
Speaker 1: and structure, but the deep, deep insight into himself, the thinking,
Speaker 1: the feeling, just how well he knew himself and his circumstances.
Speaker 1: He wrote, I am now twenty six years old. I
Speaker 1: live in a beautiful formal house with grounds which I
Speaker 1: cannot afford to keep on a decaying quasi baronial domain
Speaker 1: of great beauty in an encroaching suburb. I am married
Speaker 1: to a charming wife with whom I have little in
Speaker 1: common but background. We live our background. This is no
Speaker 1: way to live. Have truer words ever been spoken? We
Speaker 1: live our background. We do this, that is, unless we
Speaker 1: break free, or in the words of Carl Jung, until
Speaker 1: you make the unconscious conscious. It will direct your life,
Speaker 1: and you will call it fate. He describes there and
Speaker 1: in many subsequent entries Um fluctuations in his moods that
Speaker 1: date back to I think he said third grade, some
Speaker 1: periods of depression a word used, although he also sometimes
Speaker 1: used other words like you know, euphemisms for depression, and
Speaker 1: also periods of elation and heightened creativity. Uh. And so
Speaker 1: he tracks these moods, particularly in that period and in
Speaker 1: his thirties, UM with a real attention to what what's happening.
Speaker 1: At the same time, he made it clear from very
Speaker 1: early on in his twenties that he was conscious that
Speaker 1: he had a drinking problem and that he perceived it
Speaker 1: to be a problem, and that he used the drinking
Speaker 1: two I would say, mitigate the effects of what he
Speaker 1: would refer to as the mood fluctuations. Um that somehow
Speaker 1: the drinking enabled him to get through all sorts of things,
Speaker 1: including social events, the very kinds of parties, and things
Speaker 1: where he seemed to be so much in his element.
Speaker 1: He found those intolerable without drinking. So there was the acute,
Speaker 1: acute examination of his own sort of soul and mental state. Eight.
Speaker 1: Jenny's father's recurring dream about the red potion he'd had
Speaker 1: since he was a child a searing, painful example of
Speaker 1: the ways that deep down we know our own demons.
Speaker 1: We know them even though we can't speak them, and
Speaker 1: so we keep some secret out of shame or simply
Speaker 1: because we think we can't live without them. But eventually,
Speaker 1: even if it couldn't be resolved or fixed within his lifetime,
Speaker 1: Jenny now knows so much more of her father's inner world,
Speaker 1: mainly what I came away with it from. It took
Speaker 1: me months to read them. Um was this painful sense
Speaker 1: of his awareness of his mental state, his struggle with it,
Speaker 1: his consciousness about his drinking, and the way it led
Speaker 1: him to basically lie to us about something that he
Speaker 1: was wrestling with privately himself. So in in reading these journals,
Speaker 1: and I mean to know your father in this different
Speaker 1: way after his life, that self knowledge, you know, that
Speaker 1: self deprecation, that awareness of his own struggle. Is that
Speaker 1: something that you're glad that you know. I'm very glad
Speaker 1: that I know this. I'm you know, trained as a journalist. Um,
Speaker 1: So I pathologically curious. And he was a puzzle for
Speaker 1: me from a very young age. And I don't begin
Speaker 1: to think that I fully fathomed him or that I
Speaker 1: understand him completely, but I definitely understand things from reading
Speaker 1: that that I would never have have gotten before. And
Speaker 1: the puzzle to me is why did he do it
Speaker 1: in that way? Why did he tell me in my
Speaker 1: twenties he wanted me to have the journals when he
Speaker 1: was dead. Why did it have to be when he
Speaker 1: was dead? Was he unwilling to have any kind of
Speaker 1: conversation which would have been unavoidable while he was alive
Speaker 1: on these topics? Um? Did he change his mind? When
Speaker 1: did he put them up there under with the padlock?
Speaker 1: Was it? Did he leave it obvious so that one
Speaker 1: of us would open it? Or was it just that
Speaker 1: that's the way he used to take the pages up
Speaker 1: and he kind of left it in midstream. It's all
Speaker 1: a kind of interesting, you know, posthumous puzzle for me
Speaker 1: to try to understand what it means. Let's end with
Speaker 1: Jenny reading just a bit from the Beneficiary, a moment
Speaker 1: when the whole family is together visiting her father during
Speaker 1: a stint at McClean Hospital on the outskirts of Boston.
Speaker 1: The air that afternoon at McClean was loud with the
Speaker 1: din of cicadas. The five of us embarked awkwardly on
Speaker 1: a stroll along a path that wound through a wood
Speaker 1: on the hospital grounds. We fell into the old order
Speaker 1: of march, my father in the lead, my mother's scurrying
Speaker 1: to keep pace, three of us dawdling at the rear.
Speaker 1: At one point I caught up with my father to
Speaker 1: break the silence. I asked what he'd been reading. I'd
Speaker 1: sent him a package of magazines and books the morning
Speaker 1: after we'd dropped him off a guilt offering. He had
Speaker 1: been reading material put out by a A He said,
Speaker 1: had he learned things about alcoholism that he hadn't known?
Speaker 1: I asked, Oh, yes, he said, like what. He was quiet.
Speaker 1: I glanced at him sideways, thinking he might be weighing
Speaker 1: the choice between degrees of self revelation the duplicitousness and
Speaker 1: deception involved. He answered, looking straight ahead. He left it
Speaker 1: at that. I'd like to thank my guest Janny Scott,
Speaker 1: for telling us her story here today. You can learn
Speaker 1: more about Jenny's memoir That Beneficiary, Fortune, Misfortune, and the
Speaker 1: Story of My Father by visiting Janny Scott dot com.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is an I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagan
Speaker 1: is the supervising producer, and Julie Douglas and Bethan Macaluso
Speaker 1: are executive producers. If you have a family secret you'd
Speaker 1: like to share, you can get in touch with us
Speaker 1: at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com. You
Speaker 1: can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, Facebook
Speaker 1: at Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod.
Speaker 1: For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts. For my Heart Radio, visit the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.