The wooden Chinese junk, with its carved crew, used to sit on a small table in Grandfather’s bedroom, before his death. It had been a gift from his friend Burlingame when they were both young. Burlingame had brought it back from a trip with his father to the Far East.
The family were all great card players, and the boy’s parents in particular got caught up in the excitement of Auction Bridge.
Father was not religious. But he agreed to attend the First Unitarian Church near Harvard Square because he was concerned about his funeral. He wanted to have a proper funeral that his associates at the bank could attend.
Grandmother Lucy and her mother, Sarah, were Unitarians. Lucy’s mother’s mother had been a Congregationalist.
The boy’s ancestors were “Conscience Whigs” rather than “Cotton Whigs.”
A gilt-edged Bible with a leather-embossed cover was kept in Grandmother’s room but not read.
The bathroom was upstairs. It was the only bathroom for six adults and one child. But not all of them used the bathroom.
Grandmother and Grandfather each had a commode, or “cabinet.” Grandmother’s was of mahogany with an open seat, the pot under the seat being emptied, in later years, by her hired companion. Her commode was kept in her large closet. Grandfather’s was of pine or oak.
The house had back stairs and front stairs.
No one living on Clinton Street had a car when the boy was small. The only driveway on the street was at their house. It led back to the barn. Grandfather had once kept a carriage there, and two horses.
When Father and Mother went out for the evening, which was not often, Grandmother had charge of the boy. When cleaning his little body, especially his ears, she would pause and declare, “We are fearfully and wonderfully made.”
After his stroke, Grandfather Henry kept to his room, in the company of a male attendant.
The wallpaper in Grandfather’s room depicted an Italianate villa with a vineyard and umbrella pines and a view down toward a lake. The picture repeated over the wallpaper so that there were dozens of villas and lakes on every wall of the room. This wallpaper covered two earlier layers of wallpaper.
In the living room, the tiles around the fireplace illustrated scenes from Idylls of the King. On the wall hung a painting of roses, large blossoms separated from their stems and lying on an undefined surface.
During a violent storm, when rumours reached the family that the distant ice house was collapsing amid thunder and lightning, the maid dropped to her knees in the kitchen and prayed aloud to the mother of God.
The painting of roses had been a wedding present for Mother and Father.
The bank, too, had given them a wedding present.
Mother and Father had been married standing before an array of potted ferns and palms, the ceremony performed by Reverend Puffer.
The boy was born in the house at Clinton Street.
Father was born in 1877 in Mattapan. Grandfather and Grandmother had moved with their family to the house on Clinton Street in about 1880. Their three sons had grown up there: Gorham, Malcolm, and Walter.
By the time he and Mother moved out, after Grandmother’s death in 1944, Father had lived for nearly sixty-five years in the same house—not by choice.
Grandmother Lucy, after her death, was laid out in the parlour.
Because the young minister, one Sunday morning, had read a long poem whose refrain was “Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time; / Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn’t far from London!),” and because the family found the poem ridiculous, especially unsuited to a church service, this became a refrain in the family. One of them would say, “It isn’t far from London!” and another would reply, “No, no! It’s not so very far from London!”
There were many openings through which to go out of the house or take things out or bring them in. The front door, the side door, the back door, the door to the little room where the icebox was, and the door at the foot of the steps under the bulkhead, where Frank took the ashes out. There was also a slanting skylight that illuminated the stairs to the attic.
There were front steps and also back steps.
There were four outside doors to the house, all with steps, except that the cellar stairs went down. The stairs down to the cellar had a sharp turn in them, the boy realized later, trying to remember.
In her later years, Grandmother Lucy would sit in the bay window of her bedroom upstairs.
There was a dovecote in the barn where Grandfather kept doves until his bank failed.
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There were two furnaces. The big one sent heat up through registers; the little one heated radiators. Mother thought it was unhealthy to breathe air that came directly from burning coal.
Since the heat from the furnaces did not reach up to the attic, the maid’s room had its own coal stove.
It was not unusual for a middle-class family in the city at that time to have a live-in maid who did all the household work.
The maid in this house had her own toilet in the basement. Its walls were of rough boards like the boards around the coal bin. She had no running water in her room on the third floor. In order to wash herself, she had to carry a basin of water up to her bedroom in the attic.
Father and Grandmother sometimes quarrelled about the furnaces. Mother kept out of it. “I won’t have any- thing to do with furnaces,” she said. “I have troubles enough.”
The furnace man, Frank, was supposed to take care of the furnaces, but he wouldn’t come if he had been drinking.
In the kitchen, they had two stoves—a newer gas one and an older coal one. Grandmother would not have the old one taken out.
When electricity was put in, Grandmother kept most of the gas connections in case the electricity gave out in storms when the wires went down. The gas was underground.
The bell would ring when dinner was ready. Dinner was at six o’clock.
The maid, at one time Nellie, did the cooking and serving, cleared the table, and put the food away, besides the rest of the housework.
Sometimes, Grandmother would not go down to dinner. She would be too upset to eat “after what happened.” Her companion might be able to persuade her to change her mind.
Father preferred to avoid scenes. When the strife between Mother and Grandmother became too prolonged, he would say, “Let us have peace.”
The boy took dance classes at Beech Street Bungalow, where he wore white gloves and pumps with black bows. Mother took him to warehouses to buy suits at wholesale prices. There was always a mint-fresh penny in one pocket.
In winter, Mother and the boy would go skating on the Charles River.
Now and then, Uncle Malcolm, Father’s next oldest brother, would come to visit, mainly in order to ask Grandmother for money. He was supposed to ask Father first, but he often did not. In asking her, he would lie down on the floor in his suit.
At the dinner table, before Grandfather had his stroke, were: Father, Mother, Grandfather, Grandmother, the boy, and perhaps a visitor. At the dinner table, after Grandfather’s stroke, when he was given his meals in his room, were: Father, Mother, Grandfather’s companion, Grandmother, the boy, and perhaps a visitor. At the dinner table, after Grandfather’s death, were: Father, Mother, Grandmother, Grandmother’s companion, and the boy—unless Grandmother preferred to take her meal in her room that evening. Then, over dinner, Mother would mainly talk to Grandmother’s companion, while Father remained silent.
The cuckoo clock was attached to the dining room wall over Father’s head. On it, there was a cuckoo and a quail, each with its own little house. At twelve o’clock, the quail would come out and coo four times, then the cuckoo would come out and coo twelve times. When Grandfather still ate downstairs, this made him nervous, and he threatened to blast them away with his shotgun.
Because Grandfather was bothered by the birds, the weights were taken out.
Dinner was sometimes creamed finnan haddie, boiled potatoes, and lima beans. For a time, Grandmother would also have a baked apple. She had decided that baked apples were good for her. Earlier it had been gingerbread. She would have this at every meal.
At dinner, the boy could tell his grandmother was mad at his mother by the way she ate.
When Grandmother wanted to upset Mother, she would chew her food for a long time and not swallow it. Sometimes she would spit it into a spoon, and sometimes, when she was in a particularly bad mood, she would spit it directly onto her plate.
Mother usually had a pain in her stomach half an hour after a difficult meal.
Away from the dining table, Mother would talk to the boy about Grandmother’s digestion.
In the living room, there was a bookcase on either side of the bay window with glass panels that you lifted up to take out a book. The Lion City of Africa was a present given to Grandfather by a friend in 1890. Grandfather also had an encyclopedia. Nothing was described in it that had happened after 1889, when there were forty-two states in the Union.
On a side table in the living room was a pile of National Geographics.
There was also a secretary desk in the living room. In one drawer, Mother kept the picture of her ulcerated duodenum. Her doctor, after removing it, had drawn the picture for her.
The same doctor had taken out the boy’s appendix and put it in a glass jar for him to look at.
The boy’s mother was concerned about his bowel movements and often gave him suppositories to use. “Have you done your grunty?” she would ask.
His mother called a washcloth a “face cloth.” His grandmother called it a “face rag.”
Street lights were carbide.
Mother would sometimes have coffee with a neighbour across the street.
Mother would wear a hat and coat and a fox fur when going out to the neighbour’s for coffee.
In the front hall was a pier glass with a shelf.
Some coats were hung from nails in the back hall, beyond the kitchen.
The boy did his homework at the dining room table. He had Palmer writing forms.
The boy’s father read the Boston Evening Traveller, which he brought home with him from work rolled up in his hand.
After dinner Father would sit in the living room reading the Traveller.
Father was head bookkeeper at the Shawmut Bank. The household lived comfortably on Father’s and Grandmother’s incomes, even with nurses or companions and a maid. They could also afford to go to the seashore. The boy, even when he was older, did not know where Grandmother’s money came from.
Under the skylight in the roof were steep stairs into the front part of the attic that came up opposite the maid Nellie’s room. Next door to her room was the darkroom where Grandfather’s old photographic plates were kept. The boy made prints from some of them.
Issues of Harper’s Magazine were kept in the attic in a long row. The family had taken Harper’s for almost forty years, from 1852 to 1890.
Also in the attic was a dressmaker’s dummy, more or less his mother’s shape and size. They called her “the lady.” Once, when the lady was down in Mother’s room, Father lifted her from her stand and waltzed around the room with her. “Oh, Walter, don’t,” said Mother. “The hem will come out.
A dressmaker would come to the house to baste up a pattern.
The dressmaker would do her work in Mother’s room. She kept a sewing machine there, and a spool box.
Grandfather, angry at Grandmother and at Uncle Gorham, the oldest son, because they had committed him to a mental hospital, had gone off to live by himself on a farm. He stayed away for five years. Then the cold winters became too much for him. He returned to live in the house on Clinton Street when the boy was four years old.
When the boy was still quite little, his grandfather would often sit in the Morris chair in the living room while the boy played on the floor at his feet or on the little table beside him. He played most often with his “little men,” which were actually small segments of an architectural building set. It was a set of German architectural blocks of brightly coloured artificial stone.
Because of his grandfather’s presence, the boy would accompany the action of his games with an elaborate narrative. Because he played so often in his grandfather’s presence, he became used to putting his imaginative thoughts into words and sentences and thinking of them as spoken to someone.
Grandfather died when the boy was nine. After he died, the boy did not want to go into Grandfather’s room.
They offered him Grandfather’s knife, but he did not want it.
After Grandfather’s death, the house was Grandmother’s, as well as the barn, the yard, and the flower garden.
Grandmother had also bought a good, massive upright Steinway piano with a finish of black paint so that Uncle Malcolm could play it, if he wished, on his rare visits.
An old lady was later engaged at fifty cents per lesson to teach the boy to play the piano. She came on the streetcars. They would sit side by side on a narrow, upholstered bench in front of the keyboard of the large black piano.
After Grandfather’s death and the departure of his last companion, Grandmother decided she wanted her own companion, though she was in good health. She said she was lonely. Grandmother’s companion slept in Grandfather’s room.
When Grandfather still ate downstairs at the dining table, he had meat and potatoes for breakfast. He would eat each of the different foods on his plate one at a time until it was finished before starting on the next.
After Grandfather’s stroke, he stayed in his room, either in bed or in a chair. He had a male attendant to take care of him.
Grandfather had attendants for about four years, and then he died. The companion would sleep on a couch in Grandfather’s room. After he ate dinner, he would take a tray up to Grandfather. One of the attendants used to have disputes with the maid, in the kitchen. Once, the maid chased him around the yard with a knife.
The attendant Mr. James remarked once, at the dinner table, that eating horse manure was a way to cure epilepsy.
After Grandfather’s death, Mother and Father together removed the wallpaper from Grandfather’s room, wetting it down and scraping off the several layers. They believed it was infested by bedbugs, which, they said, had been brought into the house by Mr. James.
Mother’s bridge club, of women friends who did not go out to work, met weekly for lunch and bridge. On the bridge table were a score pad and silver dishes of almonds and peppermints. Once a month, on a rotating basis, the husbands joined the women and made up another table for the evening.
One of Grandfather’s companions used to drink Father’s liquor. This was during Prohibition. He watered down what was left. Father was then embarrassed when he brought out the liquor for the men at the bridge evening and it was not greeted with enthusiasm.
Hard liquor was stored under the counter in the butler’s pantry, which stood between the main kitchen pantry and the dining room. Dishes were kept there. Clean dishes could be passed from the main pantry through a large opening.
In the kitchen pantry, under a hinged counter, were barrels of flour (with a sifter) and sugar and jugs of molasses.
After school, the boy would make himself a piece of bread spread with butter and applesauce.
Food was brought from the kitchen to the dining room through a swinging door.
The family had a dog, a small Boston terrier named Pete. The boy would play with the terrier or with Grandfather’s nicest companion, one Mr. Sykes.
After Grandfather’s death and after Grandmother decided that she needed a companion of her own, there were a succession of female companions at the dining table for twenty-five years or more. They were middle-class spinsters who did this work in return for room, board, and some wages.
When Mother had guests, Grandmother and her companion would eat in Grandmother’s room.
Despite her companion, Grandmother was lonely. Toward the end of her life she used to long for her father and wish she could sit on his knee once again.
Once every four weeks, during a morning of nervous preparation, Mother would remind everyone: “It’s the day of my bridge club.”
Lunch at her bridge club was always chicken patties and tiny peas.
Dinner when the husbands were also present at their house for bridge was always baked ham and fricasseed potatoes. Dessert was more elaborate than at the women’s lunch, since men, it was known, preferred something more substantial.
Cousin Harold also stayed in Grandfather’s former bedroom for one brief period. He was at the time hiding from a process server. He had been threatened with a breach-of-promise suit by a Beverley telephone operator.
Mother told the boy later, when he was grown up, that Grandmother never let her husband see her “without her clothes on.” She always undressed in her large walk-in closet.
Three elderly widows used to come visit from time to time. They would sit in the seldom-used parlour knitting or crocheting. One was Great-Grandmother Sarah. The ancient ladies wore shiny black dresses and little white doilies on their hair. They thought the boy, when he was a toddler, was charming and funny.
Sometimes the boy was taken to visit them where they lived together nearby. Then, in their own parlour, they would sit on slippery, prickly horsehair sofas.
One winter, the boy’s Great-Grandmother Sarah came to stay in the house. She was there to be an ally for her daughter, Grandmother Lucy.
As long as Great-Grandmother Sarah lived in the house, four generations of the family at once would attend the Harvard Street Unitarian Church.
Whenever she was in church, Mother would look around to see who was there.
When Grandfather returned to live in the house, Great-Grandmother left and went back to live with the other two elderly widows, her younger daughter, Agnes, and her younger sister, Carrie.
There was an oil reading lamp on a marble-topped table in the living room. There was a gas chandelier hanging from the ceiling.
On nearly every occasion when he came into a room that was too dark—if, for instance, in the living room neither the oil reading lamp nor the gas chandelier was lit—Father would say something about the “dim religious light.”
Grandfather Henry had once been arrested and put in the city prison in Boston before being conveyed, at the wishes of the family, to the insane asylum. Many weeks later he escaped from the asylum during the night by knotting sheets together to form a rope and using this to descend from his window. Thereafter he wandered around for a few weeks, spending some time in upstate New York, in Syracuse with his old friend Burlingame, before he was returned to the asylum.
Grandfather was often “nervous.” He would pace up and down and carry on agitated conversations with Grandmother. She would try to calm him. He would tell her that she, Lulie, was the one making him nervous. Mother would whisper to Father, and Father would say to Grandmother, “Let me handle this, Mother.” Grandmother would say to Mother, “You don’t understand him as I do, Mary.”
When the boy was older and tried to share his interest in literature with Father, Father said he hoped the boy did not plan to “sit around writing poetry.”
After Grandfather was discharged from the mental hospital, “much improved,” the doctors said, he lived for five years in a house in the town where his mother had grown up, which had been left to him by a maiden aunt. He lived there by himself but for a hired man named Tony, who slept on a bed of hay in the barn. There he farmed potatoes and cranberries.
He would draw quite accomplished and detailed cartoons of scenes from his daily life and send them home in letters to Clinton Street.
Their house had been built on what was once the orchard of an estate. In the backyard was a crabapple tree and two Bartlett pear trees. The family ate the pears preserved in ginger. In the yard, too, was a catalpa, good for climbing.
One night, a burglar entered the house and walked from room to room lighting matches to see where he was going and dropping them on the carpets, where they burned out. Grandfather’s companion, Mr. James, woke up but did nothing, lying in bed in frightened silence as the burglar entered Grandfather’s room and opened and shut the drawers of the bureau.
After having dinner with Mr. James, Mother would say to Father, “I’m not used to eating with pigs.” Father would say, “What can I do?”
To go to work, in those days, when the boy was a boy, people would walk to the end of the street, to Main Street, to get the streetcar. They walked past houses, most of which had front porches, and would sometimes pause to exchange a few words with someone who might be sitting on the porch.
Because there were no cars, there were no driveways or garages. Where driveways would later be were wide yards. Out back, behind the houses, were gardens or summer houses. People walking past the house on the sidewalk might stop to exchange a few words with someone in the yard.
Next door to their house was a four-family building built after the boy’s grandparents’ house. His friend Alice lived in the basement and ground floors. Her father had a plumbing business. Because Alice was a girl, the boy did not play with her often, but he would sometimes eat cookies in her kitchen and read the comics in newspapers that his family would not subscribe to.
The boy was conceived in the big brass bed in the front upstairs room. He was also born there, but he was not breathing, and jaundiced. The problem, Mother later told him, was that the doctor had given her pills to delay the birth. The doctor did this, she said, because he was planning to play in a golf tournament that afternoon.
The boy turned out to be a redhead.
In summer, straw matting was laid on the floor of his parents’ bedroom. On hot days, blinds with vertical wooden slats were drawn shut and striped awnings were lowered. To the boy, the room was like a warm cave.
The room had an alcove, which served as an area for sewing when the dressmaker’s dummy was brought down from the attic.
There were no wastebaskets in the living room, dining room, or kitchen. The boy later could not remember if papers were burned in the coal stove.
The family bought a Model T when the boy was about eleven.
Once, the boy took Mother’s fur muff, and he and the maid played catch with it in the kitchen. It landed on the hot stove and got singed. Mother did not get angry with them.
The parlour had sliding wooden doors with heavy-cloth, tasselled portières. The living room had three doors, the dining room five doors, the kitchen four. The back hallway had two doors, and there was a closet in the front hall with another door.
During the day, the front door was not locked, and family members, such as Uncle Malcolm, would enter without ringing.
The doors were locked at night by the last person to go to bed. This would be the maid if she had been out for the evening.
When Uncle Malcolm came to visit, he announced his presence to Grandmother by playing a few slow chords on the piano; he never played a piece. She would pound her cane on the floor as a signal that he should come upstairs.
The boy sometimes played with Grandfather’s nicest companion, an Englishman named Mr. Sykes, or with young Cousin Malcolm, Uncle Malcolm’s son, who was less obliging, or with the dog, Pete. That was when they might run in and out of the many doors.
Ice for the icebox was delivered every week. The quantity of ice the family needed was communicated by a rather battered square card that they turned in a certain way before placing in the window.
One door from the living room led into the back hall.
In 1905, Grandfather, angry at this wife and Gorham, left the house on Clinton Street to live in the original old family home near the sea by himself except for a hired man named Tony who became also, in time, a friend.
If Grandmother felt a draft, she would ask the boy to go upstairs and fetch her shawl for her.
Grandmother was subject to chills. At bedtime, she warmed her bed with a long-handled bed warmer, which held coals. She also carried up to bed a sandstone that had been put in the stove to warm after dinner. All winter she wore a piece of red flannel over her chest.
Many years later, when the boy was grown up, Alice, who never married, inherited and ran the plumbing business. Still later, after being frightened by an attempted burglary, which she fought off with a heavy plumbing tool, she sold the business.
Most things Grandmother did were conscious and often calculated to cause humiliation or affront.
There were two cooking stoves in the kitchen, a gas range and the original coal range, more economical for long cooking of foods such as bread, baked beans, and stews.
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In the years before 1917, the house had no electricity. There were gas chandeliers in the downstairs rooms. There were kerosene reading lamps on the tables.
Grandmother considered electricity unreliable and had none installed in her own room.
In the living room, there was a small grate with Dutch tiles around it telling the story of Arthur and Guinevere. In the grate, the family burned cannel coal.
When the boy returned to visit the house many years later, the small grate was still there, with the Dutch tiles around it.
The boy was sometimes sent outdoors to beat rugs, a job considered unsuitable for the maid. The boy found that if you beat the rug vigorously, there was no end to the dust that came out of it.
In about the middle of June, Father would begin wearing a stiff, flat-brimmed straw hat to catch the streetcar to work.
At about the same time that Father changed to a straw hat, the straw matting was put down on the floor of Mother and Father’s bedroom.
All the windows in the house had lace curtains. The curtains were washed every spring.
From the chimneys of the neighbourhood, all winter, soot and ash rose a little way into the sky and then drifted down. Fresh snow stayed white less than a day.
In summer the family went to Salem on the Boston and Maine Railroad.
Before his stroke, Grandfather would go out every morning to be shaved at a barber shop near Central Square.
After Grandfather’s stroke, the barber would come to the house to shave him and cut his hair.
Grandfather’s Morris chair in the living room faced the bay window lined with boxes of Grandmother’s plants.
Grandfather and his friend Burlingame would sit bent over their game of dominoes in the parlour, which was otherwise seldom used. Burlingame was his only friend in later life. This was the friend who had given him, when they were both young, the Chinese junk.
The boy sometimes climbed out the window of the maid’s attic bedroom onto the flat roof over Grandfather’s second-floor bedroom.
There was another smaller roof over the kitchen pantry and icebox room that could be reached from the bathroom window
At Sunday school, each child, after the lessons were over, was given a single Necco Wafer.
In those days, no lady would appear with her hair down unless she wore a boudoir cap over it. Mother’s hair, when she was not in her room, was always coiled in a small, tight bun pinned firmly at the top of her head.
The boy, when he stood in the upstairs hall, could hear the sound of Mother, in her bedroom, brushing her long, dark hair. Sometimes, at the same time, he could hear Grandmother, in her bedroom, brushing her long, grey hair. The grey hair had a different sound, crisper and drier.
Before they brushed and combed their hair, they always put on peignoirs or dressing gowns.
The hairs Mother removed from her brush or comb were kept in a bright, flower-ornamented china bowl with a domed top.
Once, the boy stood on a corner of Main Street watching a Massachusett Indian braid his hair tightly and neatly in front of the Cambridgeport Savings Bank. That building had once housed Grandfather’s bank. His partner had embezzled the bank funds and run off to Canada, following which Grandfather had had a breakdown. He had left the house on Clinton Street carrying his shotgun—in search of the partner, the family surmised.
During a parade, people who lived on Main Street would sit on their front steps to watch.
In Woolworth’s, there was a piano. If you were thinking of buying a piece of sheet music, you would hand it to a clerk and he would play it for you on the piano.
The boy would sometimes be sent to Fabian’s Market for a pound and a half of the bottom of the round, to be ground up for hamburger.
Grandfather’s bedroom was at the back of the house. After his stroke, he complained that Mother and Father did not visit him often there. On a small table in Grandfather’s room was the Chinese junk.
The bathtub was a narrow tin one in a painted wood frame.
Father had once repainted the bathroom. The toilet, basin, and bathtub were all boxed in wood.
After Grandfather’s death, the Chinese junk was moved down to the parlour and placed on its own pedestal near the grandfather clock. It had thirty removable oarsmen and thirty removable oars. Each oarsman was depicted with his own individual features and expression, though all looked anxious and overworked.
After Grandfather’s death, Grandmother, in her will, left the junk to Father, and also the good Steinway upright piano, the latter to be passed on to the boy when Father thought proper. She left Father and Mother, also, the grandfather clock, which was a Hoadly of Plymouth tall clock, and the Willard banjo clock. Also the folding table in the hall given to her by Grandmother Anna B., Grandfather’s mother. Also the bookcases she had from Aunt Caddie’s estate and the mirror that once belonged to Grandmother Tucker and was given to her by her sister Agnes. In her will, she expressed appreciation for what all her sons had done for her but especially “that Walter has helped me to have my home.”
In her will, Grandmother paid off all Malcolm’s debts and forgave him what he owed her. But it was another eleven years before she actually died.
Grandmother permitted almost no changes—in the placement of a chair or picture or in the choice of laundry soap.
The laundry soap, delivered twice a year in a great wooden box, made Mother feel ill, and she had to be out of the house every Monday morning when the washing was done. A clothesline stretched from the back of the house to the barn.
When Father was agitated, he would become restless, gesture nervously, pace the floor, or go out into the yard to smoke.
Grandmother would sometimes come and stand outside Mother’s door when Mother was napping and call out, “Are you awake, Mary? Are you awake?” She would call louder and louder till Mother came to the door and said, “Mother, what is it?”
Father preferred not to become involved where emotions were concerned.
Father thought it would be ungentlemanly to sit around in the house in a vest with no jacket on.
Though in separate rooms, the head of Grandmother’s bed was less than a foot from the head of Mother and Father’s bed.
Because of an early bad experience, Grandmother had not had a strawberry in fifty years.
Although she and Grandmother quarrelled so constantly, sometimes Mother would say to the boy sternly, “Bobby, you’re upsetting your grandmother.” She wanted the older woman to love the boy. Grandmother did love him.
Grandmother would sit in her room crocheting or cross-stitching. The boy would sit with her. She would allow him to go into her closet and find a piece of horehound candy.
Grandmother’s bay window faced Alice’s house. Grandmother’s flower garden lay by the fence between the two houses. The boy would walk along the top of the fence, scaring his grandmother by pretending he was about to lose his balance and fall, either into Alice’s family’s walkway or into Grandmother’s dahlias.
In June, Grandmother would provide Father every morning with a boutonniere from her flower garden to wear to work, usually a bachelor button.
A lilac shrub grew in the back of the yard. When it was in bloom, neighbourhood girls would go into the back and pick branches of flowers.
After June, the family would leave the house for Winter Island. Father would take the train out to join them after work every Friday.
Father, so often reserved, would sometimes make a joke. Once, when they remarked with surprise that the postman had no trouble hefting his large bag of mail onto his back, Father said that was because the letters inside were full of hot air.
Mother, an affectionate young niece told the boy many years later, had been a brave and dutiful woman.
In their yard, Concord grapes grew over a trellis. The trellis was attached to the fence that separated their yard from the walkway leading to Alice’s family’s side door. When Mr. Dean came home from work, on his way to the side door, he sometimes talked to the boy over the fence. He sometimes teased him. Once, when Mr. Dean teased him, the boy answered him rudely and later had to go apologize.
The family were out in the yard one day when the organ grinder came by. When the organ grinder, after playing a few tunes, unleashed his monkey so it could go into the yard and collect pennies, as it was trained to do, it instead climbed the grape arbour, selected a bunch of purple Concord grapes, and went up the wall to sit on the windowsill of Grandmother’s second-floor bedroom and eat them. There was general consternation. The organ grinder proposed going into the house and capturing the monkey from inside. But Grandmother felt it was bad enough to have a monkey sitting on her windowsill—she did not want a strange Italian walking through her bedroom. They waited. The monkey ate all the grapes, spitting out the skins, then it came down and collected the pennies. After the organ grinder and monkey were gone, the boy was asked to pick up the grape skins from the ground under Grandmother’s window. He did not refuse, but he went into the house first to get a spoon and then picked them up with the spoon.
In Grandmother’s later years, a certain Miss Bainbridge would come over once or twice a week to bathe her in her room.
At dinner, one of Grandmother’s companions, Lottie, would flatten the mound of mashed potatoes on her plate and then divide it into equal bite-sized segments. Lottie would eat the segments one by one, pausing to talk to Mother. The boy would watch the segments slowly disappear. Dessert would not be brought into the dining room until everyone was finished.
The family would be served “made” desserts every evening except for Thursdays and Sundays, which were the maid’s half-days out.
They often had stewed prunes for dessert on the maid’s half-days out.
The only telephone, at first, was a wall phone in the upper hall between Grandmother’s and Grandfather’s rooms. Any conversation could be heard by anyone who cared to listen.
Grandfather’s room was a fine, large room with many windows, occupying the whole second floor of the kitchen wing.
Father was the shortest of the three brothers, Grandmother Lucy’s three sons. There was Gorham, the oldest, who made money in business and lived in the South for a time, where he picked up certain “Southern attitudes.” The middle son was Malcolm, Grandmother’s favourite, the charming one, often asking to borrow money. The youngest and short- est one, moderately athletic, was Walter, the loyal one, who had brought his new wife with him to Grandmother’s house to stay with her “temporarily” after Grandfather went away to the small old family home near the ocean.
At home, Father sometimes busied himself with various tasks. He cleaned the furniture, rubbing it with linseed oil. He cleaned the car, once they acquired one. He clipped the hedge.
After Miss Bainbridge, it was Mrs. Barberry who came to wash Grandmother.
An osteopath also came to the house, to give her massages. He tried to persuade her to go into a nursing home.
Mother sometimes hung a cloth over the boy’s window to shield him from the direct light of the moon.
Administered for various ailments, in the household were Castoria, syrup of figs, and cod-liver oil.
The family car, when at last they got it, was a Ford with planetary transmission.
In the house behind their house lived an insane woman who spent all day going from window to window and fumbling nervously at her mouth. Her adult son would sometimes tell the neighbourhood children not to make so much noise because it further disturbed her.
Father, for many years, used to walk out into the yard to smoke a cigarette before he went to bed, but after a certain incident in the neighbourhood, he gave up the habit for fear he would be taken for a peeping Tom.
After working as head bookkeeper at the bank for many years, Father became an assistant cashier there. He worked for the bank his entire business life.
The house was about a block and a half from city hall. Visitors with insomnia would state, over breakfast, that they had heard the city-hall clock strike two and three and four.
Grandfather was committed to the asylum in the fall of 1904, escaped two months later, was taken back to the asylum, and was discharged in late spring of 1905, “much improved.
Summers, when he was older, the boy would play tennis with his father on Saturdays and Sundays on the United Shoe Machinery courts in Beverley.
Before anyone owned a car, family members visiting one another would take the streetcars.
“Mightily” was one of Uncle Malcolm’s words. He said the reclining chair in the living room “creaked mightily,” though it never gave out. Another of his words was “Pow!”
Uncle Malcolm, on a visit, would say, when impatient for dinner or finding the weather unbearably hot, “I am dying, Egypt, dying.”
One of Uncle Malcolm’s unsuccessful business ventures was the purchase of a coal mine in Nova Scotia.
The family spent most of their social time in the living room. There was an adjustable Morris chair and another reclining chair where Father, in later years, would fall asleep in the evenings.
The marble-topped table with the very large oil lamp occupied the bay window.
The glass-fronted bookcases on either side of the bay window had been passed along to them by Great-Aunt Caddie. They were full of books mostly bought by Grandfather when he was younger. Grandfather was particularly interested in Africa.
Besides books about Africa, included in the bookcase were a multi-volume Memoirs of the French Court; Lew Wallace’s The Fair God, a novel about Mexico in the time of Cortés; and Lorna Doone.
Mother and Father never bought any books or brought any books home from the library. They never read a book.
A seascape hung on the wall in the dining room. It was not a good painting, but once it had been put up, it was not moved again. Father said, with irony, that he had never seen floating rocks before.
The boy’s parents and grandparents began renting a house for the summer on Winter Island, in Salem Harbor, when the boy was eight years old. They continued going there every summer for at least another fifteen years.
Mother learned to drive the Model T. Sometimes she would invent an errand just to get out of the house for a while. Grandmother would learn that Mother was going out in the car and would come down, suitably dressed, to sit by the front door, expecting to be taken along. She liked a ride in the car.
Grandfather Henry’s father, Great-Grandfather Stephen, had moved with his family into a house at the corner of Hancock and Main Streets, not far from Clinton Street, in about 1835. Grandfather Henry, the youngest child, was born and grew up there.
The boy’s parents never read a book, but they read the newspapers, The Saturday Evening Post, and National Geographic. They read the serials in The Saturday Evening Post.
Father derived his ideas about poets chiefly from The Saturday Evening Post and the old Life magazine—which published cartoon drawings of poets in velvet jackets, flowing ties, and long hair.
Alice once told Grandmother that she had no grandmother of her own. Grandmother then offered to be her grandmother, and Alice accepted and thereafter called her Grandma.
Although no one had expressed an opinion to the contrary, Mother would occasionally assert that her father, the sea captain, had been a gentleman.
The boy’s parents were conservative Republicans.
Father, though he was silent about most things, once exploded, with unusual vigour and clarity, in a tirade on the subject of socialism. Socialist theories, he said, were mere words on paper, written by irresponsible daydreamers.
Unlike Mother, Father never reminisced.
Among many other things, Mother remembered that in Salem when she was growing up, before the days of flush toilets, carts used to go through the streets in the middle of the night collecting “night soil.”
Mother and Father had met when Mother was still working at the bank. After they married, Mother resigned her position. However, she retained her friendship with her fellow employee Mabel, who, Mother boasted, was the fastest one in the bank on the adding machine.
Grandmother preferred the tapioca pudding without pieces of orange in it.
Throughout the house, the woodwork was dark.
When Mother went out in cold weather, she wore a fox fur around her neck and a three-cornered hat with one point in front.
Mother and Father did not object to the fact that so many people had so much more money than they did, so long as those people were the right people to have it.
Mother and Father held what they considered suitable social and political opinions in the same way that they wore suitable clothes.
Father was reticent about emotions and also about finances. But it was known in the family that Grandfather had a considerable holding of bonds in South American railroads and streetcar companies.
After Grandmother died and Mother and Father moved out of the house, Alice next door, with the money she had reserved from selling her business, bought their house, the boy’s family’s house. It was “her” grandmother’s house.
When the boy, after an interval of many years and by now a grandfather himself, returned to the street and stood looking at his old house, a neighbour passing by, after they fell into conversation, informed him, to his surprise, that his old friend Alice now lived there and would be glad to see him. He rang the front doorbell, and after a suspicious inquiry from the other side, it was Alice who opened the door.
During their visit, sitting in the living room, Alice told him, among other things, that she now used the parlour as her bedroom, since all the rooms upstairs were occupied by her boarders.
It comforted her, she said, to sleep in the same room where Grandmother had been laid out after her death.
In those days, a merry-go-round was also called “flying horses.”
The boy remembered that the driveway was gravel.
Following her Essays and Essays Two, LYDIA DAVIS’S most recent book of non-fiction is Into the Weeds, on reading and writing. Her latest collection of fiction is Our Strangers. She has also translated many works from the French, including Proust’s Swann’s Way and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.