There are my childhood memories and then there are my memories of Gannochy, my grandfather’s estate in Northern Scotland. In my childhood memories, I can recall watching morning cartoons before my mother whisked me off to school. In my memories of Gannochy, I smell the dankness of a tweed jacket steaming by the fireplace in my grandfather’s study. In my stateside memories, I played on a soccer team and refused to do my homework. In my Gannochy memories, I gaze at the North Sea from the tops of hills stained purple with the blossoming heather.
What compelled my grandfather, a poor Jewish-American orphan who came of age in the Midwest during the depression, saw combat in Europe, and then made it big in the stock market during the post-war boom, to fashion for himself an old-world aristocrat’s idyll, I’m not sure. To even speculate makes me uneasy: the strangeness of it never occurred to me while he was alive and I was still young, and now that he’s gone I don’t dare presume to understand what his friends referred to at his funeral as his “complex character.” The closest I ever heard anyone come to rationalizing him was my mother, who used to explain to me, usually to comfort me after an argument with my father over my grandfather’s most recent gruffness, that there are two kinds of people: the ones who were soft on the outside but prickly on the inside (who you had to look out for) and then the ones like my grandfather, who were prickly on the outside and soft on the inside but who could nonetheless be real sons of bitches.
But as a child I was blissfully ignorant of my grandfather’s mystique. I didn’t know he’d seen one of his friends shot in the face by a sniper during the war, or that he was a brilliant businessman who’d made a fortune from virtually nothing. I didn’t know he’d kept mistresses, or that my grandmother was nearly twenty years younger than him, or that my father resented him all his life for being aloof and domineering during his childhood. I didn’t know until after he died that many considered my grandfather a great but unknowable man.
But until he died, until I grew up and I started actually listening to the stories people told about him, I knew my grandfather. To an eight-year-old, he wasn’t hard to figure out. He was always kind to me, even as he was grouchy to everyone else in the room. He gave the best, most extravagant gifts. Even if he sometimes teased me for being so shy, remarking that I was a “dollar a word man,” I didn’t understand what he meant and I didn’t mind. When he’d say he loved me, I’d look at my feet and say I loved him too. Being his grandson was easy once you knew the formula.
Best of all though was Gannochy. Visiting my grandfather meant visiting Gannochy. The ten-hour, multi-staged voyage there in planes and cars, over oceans and through endless tracts of green pastures, was like the hallucinatory passage to another world. We’d invariably arrive in the middle of the night, so bleary and jet-lagged my parents would have to carry me up the stairs. But when I’d awaken the next day, I’d launch myself out of bed, into all of Gannochy’s peculiar, innumerable marvels.
There were the impassive highland cattle that would listen all day to my sister’s and my rude noises and naughty words. There was a garden with a baffling artichoke plant and gooseberries whose slippery, flesh-covered seeds burst in your mouth like cluster bombs. Down the road from the estate there were even the ruins of a small castle, which my grandmother would permit my sister and me to explore while she painted on her portable easel.
And then there were the walks, epic, breathtaking rambles unlike any I’ve ever taken since. We’d all suit up in tweed and waxed jackets and big, green boots, and after my sister and I had selected our canes from the mudroom, we’d all start down the path along the river where rows of ancient beech trees arched overhead and cast a leafy, rustling sunlight over everything as if through stained glass. As the grownups chatted, my sister and I would run up ahead to where a rusted-out footbridge crossed a gorge in the river. We’d dare each other to the center of the bridge before the grownups could catch up, then peer down into the rapids and watch for leaping salmon.
And the path wound gradually up, through mucky fields pockmarked with rabbit warrens and redolent with cow manure, and into the hills. In August, when my family would make its annual visit, the heather covering the hills was in full bloom, and would form a scratchy, purple mat out of which pheasant and grouse would dart as we passed. As the grade increased near the summit, our banter would lapse into reflective panting.
And if there’s ever a sight I could see again, it would be the view of the North Sea from the tops of those hills in August. Even at eight, with aching feet, the sight dumbfounded me every time I saw it. It was a monumental cascade of color: the purple hills spilling into the green farmland spilling into the blue ocean fading into the impossible horizon.
I had just turned fourteen when my grandfather died. As far as deaths go, his was about as graceful as they come. He was nearly ninety, was only very sick for about a month, and he was as lucid as anyone could have wished. Several hours before he died, he and my father shared his most prized bottle of wine together in his hospital room. Within a month of his death, Gannochy was broken up and sold, with the main house converted into a bed and breakfast.
It’s taken me several years to figure out what his death meant to me. The last time I spoke to him was a couple weeks before he died, on my birthday. I can remember how sunny that day was as I stood outside my home in Massachusetts, pressing my father’s cell phone to my ear. He was characteristically succinct. In a hoarse whisper, he wished me a happy birthday, and then he told me that he loved me. As weak as he sounded, I could still hear a smile in his voice as he said it. He already knew it would be the last time he’d talk to me, and when I heard that smile I understood too.
In the weeks following his death, after I’d heard all the eulogies recalling times when my grandfather’s soft inside had shone through his prickly exterior, after I had read the journal my father had kept during the most strained years with my grandfather, I’d catch myself crying strange, anxious tears. I realized that I had not known my grandfather, and not only that, but that I’d been too young and too shy while he was alive to even make an effort to plumb the man’s depths, as futile as it might have been.
I held this realization inside myself like a knot for several years before it began to unravel. I’m not sure whether it occurred to me in a since-forgotten flash or in a gradual dawning, but sometime in the last year I knew a resolution lay buried somewhere in my nostalgic clutter of Gannochy memories. In a way I began to understand my childhood experiences of Gannochy as a kind of knowable metaphor for my grandfather’s unknowable inner landscape. Somewhere in my mind, I sensed my memories of that mythic place draining into the void he left when he died.
But of course, metaphors can’t heal like a pill or a bandage. I will always have some remorse over my grandfather’s death. Still, though, it’s a way of thinking that has given me solace: knowing that, in a sense, my grandfather will always lie just across the ocean, through green pastures, in those hills over the North Sea.