DURING all these years my father was under a sentence of death. In 1918 he had been drafted by the Army and discharged after five days with papers stating he had “a physical disability.” From his childhood it had been Morrisonville’s common knowledge that Benny had “trouble with his kidneys.” What the Army doctors found is not clear from the records. Maybe they told him the truth—that he had diabetes—but if so he kept their terrible diagnosis a secret. In 1918 insulin was still unknown. As a twenty-year-old diabetic, whether he knew it or not, he was doomed to early death.
The discovery of insulin in 1921 would have lifted that sentence and offered him a long and reasonably healthy life. If he ever learned about insulin, though, he certainly never used it, for the needle required for daily injections was not part of our household goods. Perhaps he didn’t know how seriously ill he was, but the state of medicine in Morrisonville must also be allowed for. New medical wonders were slow to reach up the dirt roads of backcountry America. Around Morrisonville grave illness was treated mostly with prayer, and early death was commonplace. Children were carried off by diphtheria, scarlet fever, and measles. I heard constantly of people laid low by typhoid or mortally ill with “blood poisoning.” Remote from hospitals, people with ruptured appendixes died at home waiting for the doctor to make a house call.
Since antibiotics lay far in the future, tuberculosis, which we called “T.B.” or “consumption,” was almost always fatal. Pneumonia, only slightly less dreaded, took its steady crop for the cemetery each winter. Like croup and whooping cough, it was treated with remedies Ida Rebecca compounded from ancient folk-medicine recipes: reeking mustard plasters, herbal broths, dosings of onion syrup mixed with sugar. Boils and carbuncles were covered with the membrane of a boiled egg to “draw the core” before being lanced with a needle sterilized in a match flame.
When my cousin Lillian stepped barefoot on a rusty nail, my grandmother insisted on treating the puncture by applying a slab of raw bacon. When my cousin Catherine’s hand touched a red-hot wood stove, my grandmother seized her arm and with fingertips light as feathers stroked the blistering skin while murmuring an incoherent incantation in a trancelike monotone. Catherine’s screaming stopped. “My hand doesn’t hurt anymore, Grandma,” she said.
This was called “powwowing,” a form of witch-doctoring still believed in then by the old people around Morrisonville and prescribed on at least one occasion by a local medical man. This doctor, after failing to rid Lillian of a severe facial rash with the tools of science, prescribed a visit to an old woman on the mountain whose powwowing, he said, sometimes cured such rashes. “But don’t you ever dare tell anybody I sent you to her,” he cautioned. Lillian did not go for the powwow treatment; her rash subsided without help from either science or witchcraft.
Very few people ever saw the inside of a hospital. When my grandfather George had a stroke he was led into the house and put to bed, and the Red Men sent lodge brothers to sit with him to exercise the curative power of brotherhood. Red Men who failed to report for bedside duty with their stricken brother were fined a dollar for dereliction. Ida Rebecca called upon modern technology to help George. From a mail-order house she ordered a battery-operated galvanic device which applied the stimulation of low-voltage electrical current to his paralyzed limbs.
Morrisonville had not developed the modern disgust with death. It was not treated as an obscenity to be confined in hospitals and “funeral homes.” In Morrisonville death was a common part of life. It came for the young as relentlessly as it came for the old. To die antiseptically in a hospital was almost unknown. In Morrisonville death still made house calls. It stopped by the bedside, sat down on the couch right by the parlor window, walked up to people in the fields in broad daylight, surprised them at a bend in the stairway when they were on their way to bed.
Whatever he knew about his ailment, my father made no concessions to it. If anything he lived a little too intensely, as though determined to make the most of whatever time he was to be allowed. By 1927 he had saved enough money to rent and furnish a small house of his own—the tenant house where grazing cows peered through windows—and there, that August, my sister Doris was born. In 1928 we were back in Morrisonville in a larger house, looking up at Ida Rebecca’s porch, and there my second sister was born in January of 1930. They named her Audrey.
Benny’s development into “a good family man” was evidence of my mother’s success at improving his character. His refusal to forswear moonshine, however, mocked her with the most painful failure of all. After pleasing her with long bouts of sobriety, he often came home from work with the sour smell of whiskey on him and turned violently ill. With diabetes, his drinking was lethal. He paid terribly for whatever pleasure he took from Sam Reever’s Mason jars. My mother didn’t know about the diabetes; all she knew was that drinking acted like poison on him. When he came home smelling of whiskey, she abused him fiercely in cries loud enough to be heard across the road at Ida Rebecca’s. He never shouted back, nor argued, nor attempted to defend himself, but always sat motionless as her anger poured down on his bowed head—sick, contrite, and beaten.
One evening when we waited supper long past his usual arrival time and finally ate without him, he came in while the dishes were being washed. He was smiling and holding something behind his back.
“Where have you been?” my mother asked.
“I bought a present for Doris.”
“Do you know what time it is? Supper’s been over for hours.”
All this in a shout.
Holding his smile in place, trying to ignore her anger, he spoke to Doris. “You want to see what Daddy brought you?”
Doris started toward him. My mother pulled her back.
“Leave that child alone. You’re drunk.”
Well—and he kept smiling—actually he had taken a drink along the way, but just one—
“Don’t lie about it. You’re stinking drunk. I can smell it on you.”
—had been in town looking for a present for Doris, and run into a man he knew—
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Letting your children see you like this? What kind of father are you?”
His smile went now, and he didn’t try to answer her. Instead he looked at Doris and held the present in front of him for her to take. It was a box with top folded back to display a set of miniature toy dishes made of tin, little tin plates, little tin saucers, little tin teacups.
“Daddy brought you a set of dishes.”
Delighted, Doris reached for the box, but my mother was quicker. Seizing his peace offering, she spoke to him in words awful to me. It wasn’t bad enough that he wasted what little money he had on the poison he drank, not bad enough that he was killing himself with liquor, not bad enough that he let his children see him so drunk he could hardly stand up. He had to squander our precious money on a box of tin junk.
In a rage she ran to the kitchen screen door, opened it wide, and flung Doris’s present into the darkening twilight. My father dropped onto a chair while I watched this unbelievable waste of brand-new toys. When I turned back to see if he intended to rescue the dishes, I saw that he was just sitting there helplessly.
Doris and I ran out into the gloaming to recover the scattered dishes. While we scrambled on hands and knees groping for tiny cups and saucers, the sounds of my mother’s anger poured from the kitchen. When the shouting subsided, I crept back to the door. My father was slumped on the chair, shoulders sagging, head bowed, his forearms resting lifelessly on his thighs in a posture of abject surrender. My mother was still talking, though quietly now.
“For two cents,” I heard her say, “I’d take my children out of here tomorrow and go back to my own people.”
I sneaked back into the darkness and found Doris and tried to interest myself in the dishes for a while. The screen door banged. My father was silhouetted against the light for an instant, then he came down the steps, walked toward the pear tree, and started vomiting.
There were also sweet times in that house. On breathless summer nights my parents brought blankets down from the steamy upstairs bedroom to make a bed on the living room floor. The summer I was four years old my mother bought me my first book and started teaching me to read. One night at bedtime she and my father stretched out on the blankets for sleep, but before dousing the lamp my father wanted to see how I was progressing with the written word.
They placed me between them with the opened book. I knew a few words, but under pressure to perform forgot everything. It was beginner material: “cat,” “rat,” “boy,” “girl,” “the.” I didn’t recognize a word.
My mother was disappointed that I could do nothing but stare stupidly at the printed page. My father saved my pride. “Have a little patience with him,” he said. Taking the book in hand, he moved me close against him and rubbed his cheek against mine. “Now,” he said, pointing to a word, “you know that word, don’t you?”
I did indeed. “‘The,’” I said.
“You’re a smart boy. I bet you know this one too.”
“‘Boy,’” I said.
When I read most of the sentence without too much help, he said to my mother, “You’re doing good with him. Maybe we ought to send him to college.” Pleased, my mother reached across me and kissed him on the cheek. Smiling down at me, he said, “You want to go to college?” They both laughed a little at this. Maybe he liked the extravagance of the idea as much as she did. Then he turned off the kerosene lamp. That night they let me sleep between them.
The occasional outbursts of passion that flickered across my childhood were like summer storms. The sky clouded suddenly, thunder rumbled, lightning flashed, and I trembled a few moments, then just as swiftly the sky turned blue again and I was basking contentedly in the peace of innocence.
Morrisonville was a poor place to prepare for a struggle with the twentieth century, but a delightful place to spend a childhood. It was summer days drenched with sunlight, fields yellow with buttercups, and barn lofts sweet with hay. Clusters of purple grapes dangled from backyard arbors, lavender wisteria blossoms perfumed the air from the great vine enclosing the end of my grandmother’s porch, and wild roses covered the fences.
On a broiling afternoon when the men were away at work and all the women napped, I moved through majestic depths of silences, silences so immense I could hear the corn growing. Under these silences there was an orchestra of natural music playing notes no city child would ever hear. A certain cackle from the henhouse meant we had gained an egg. The creak of a porch swing told of a momentary breeze blowing across my grandmother’s yard. Moving past Liz Virts’s barn as quietly as an Indian, I could hear the swish of a horse’s tail and knew the horseflies were out in strength. As I tiptoed along a mossy bank to surprise a frog, a faint splash told me the quarry had spotted me and slipped into the stream. Wandering among the sleeping houses, I learned that tin roofs crackle under the power of the sun, and when I tired and came back to my grandmother’s house, I padded into her dark cool living room, lay flat on the floor, and listened to the hypnotic beat of her pendulum clock on the wall ticking the meaningless hours away.
I was enjoying the luxuries of a rustic nineteenth-century boyhood, but for the women Morrisonville life had few rewards. Both my mother and grandmother kept house very much as women did before the Civil War. It was astonishing that they had any energy left, after a day’s work, to nourish their mutual disdain. Their lives were hard, endless, dirty labor. They had no electricity, gas, plumbing, or central heating. No refrigerator, no radio, no telephone, no automatic laundry, no vacuum cleaner. Lacking indoor toilets, they had to empty, scour, and fumigate each morning the noisome slop jars which sat in bedrooms during the night.
For baths, laundry, and dishwashing, they hauled buckets of water from a spring at the foot of a hill. To heat it, they chopped kindling to fire their wood stoves. They boiled laundry in tubs, scrubbed it on washboards until knuckles were raw, and wrung it out by hand. Ironing was a business of lifting heavy metal weights heated on the stove top.
They scrubbed floors on hands and knees, thrashed rugs with carpet beaters, killed and plucked their own chickens, baked bread and pastries, grew and canned their own vegetables, patched the family’s clothing on treadle-operated sewing machines, deloused the chicken coops, preserved fruits, picked potato bugs and tomato worms to protect their garden crop, darned stockings, made jelly and relishes, rose before the men to start the stove for breakfast and pack lunch pails, polished the chimneys of kerosene lamps, and even found time to tend the geraniums, hollyhocks, nasturtiums, dahlias, and peonies that grew around every house. By the end of a summer day a Morrisonville woman had toiled like a serf.
At sundown the men drifted back from the fields exhausted and steaming. They scrubbed themselves in enamel basins and, when supper was eaten, climbed up onto Ida Rebecca’s porch to watch the night arrive. Presently the women joined them, and the twilight music of Morrisonville began:
The swing creaking, rocking chairs whispering on the porch planks, voices murmuring approval of the sagacity of Uncle Irvey as he quietly observed for probably the ten-thousandth time in his life, “A man works from sun to sun, but woman’s work is never done.”
Ida Rebecca, presiding over the nightfall from the cane rocker, announcing, upon hearing of some woman “up there along the mountain” who had dropped dead hauling milk to the creamery, that “man is born to toil, and woman is born to suffer.”
The timelessness of it: Nothing new had been said on that porch for a hundred years. If one of the children threw a rock close to someone’s window, Uncle Harry removed his farmer’s straw hat, swabbed the liner with his blue bandanna, and spoke the wisdom of the ages to everyone’s complete satisfaction by declaring, “Satan finds work for idle hands to do.”
If I interrupted the conversation with a question, four or five adults competed to be the first to say, “Children are meant to be seen and not heard.”
If one of my aunts mentioned the gossip about some woman “over there around Bollington” or “out there towards Hillsboro,” she was certain to be silenced by a scowl from Ida Rebecca or Uncle Irvey and a reminder that “little pitchers have big ears.”
I was listening to a conversation that had been going on for generations.
Someone had a sick cow.
The corn was “burning up” for lack of rain.
If the sheriff had arrested a local boy for shooting somebody’s bull: “That boy never brought a thing but trouble to his mother, poor old soul.”
Old Mr. Cooper from out there around Wheatland had got his arm caught in the threshing machine and it had to be taken off, “poor old soul.”
Ancient Aunt Zell, who lived “down there around Lucketts,” had to be buried on a day “so hot the flowers all wilted before they could get her in the ground, poor old soul.”
When the lamps were lit inside, someone was certain to say to the children, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
Uncle Harry usually led the departures, for he lived outside Morrisonville proper and had to walk a half mile to get home. Only a year younger than Uncle Irvey, Harry was Ida Rebecca’s quiet son. A dour man in sweat-stained work shirts, baggy trousers held up by yellow galluses, he worked in the fields, did some carpentry, turned up on a building job occasionally. He was gray, solemn, and frosty. A lonely man. His wife had died in childbirth twenty years earlier.
I knew he was slightly scandalous. Lately he had taken an interest in a younger woman who had borne an illegitimate child and been abandoned by her lover. Everybody knew Uncle Harry had “gone to housekeeping” with her and was devoted to her child, but he did not bring either mother or daughter to sit on Ida Rebecca’s porch. Morrisonville’s social code was rigid about such things.
Another person who did not join our evening assemblies was Annie Grigsby, Ida Rebecca’s next-door neighbor. Annie had been born in slavery, and this made her a notable citizen. Her log house was pointed out to travelers as one of the Morrisonville sights not to be ignored. “Annie was born in slavery,” the visitor was always advised.
“Born in slavery.” That phrase was uttered as though it were an incredible accomplishment on Annie’s part. Elsewhere, people boasted of neighbors who had tamed lightning, invented the wind-up Victrola, and gone aloft in flying machines, but we in Morrisonville didn’t have to hang our heads. We had Annie. “Born in slavery.” My mother told me about Abraham Lincoln, a great man who freed the slaves, and living so close to Annie, who had been freed by Lincoln himself, made me feel in touch with the historic past.
Annie was not much older than Ida Rebecca, who was born in 1861. She was a short, gray-haired, rotund woman of weary carriage and a dignity appropriate to her remarkable birth. Now and then she unbent enough to invite Doris or my cousin Kenneth or me into her dark kitchen for a piece of butter bread, Morrisonville’s universal treat. One afternoon I wandered into her backyard to find her hacking the meat out of a huge, freshly killed terrapin.
“What’s that, Annie?”
“It’s a tarpon.”
“What’s a tarpon?”
“Tarpon’s big turtle, child.”
“Why’re you cutting it up like that?”
“To make soup. You come back over here when I get it done, and I’ll give you some.”
White Morrisonville’s hog-meat diet hadn’t prepared me for terrapin soup. I hurried back across the road giggling to my mother that colored people ate turtles.
“Colored people are just like everybody else,” she said.
Despite the respect accorded Annie, no one else in Morrisonville held my mother’s radical view. Nor did Annie. Only when there was death or sickness did Annie presume the social freedom of white households. Then she came to help in the sickroom or sit in a rocker on Ida Rebecca’s porch comforting a sobbing child in her lap. In time of crisis her presence was expected, for she was a citizen of stature. An historical monument. A symbol of our nation’s roots. “Born in slavery.”
For occasional treats I was taken on the three-mile trip to Lovettsville and there had my first glimpse of urban splendors. The commercial center was Bernard Spring’s general store, a dark cavernous treasure house packed with the riches of the earth. Staring up at the shelves, I marveled at the bulging wealth of brand-new overalls, work shirts, gingham fabrics, shoe boxes, straw hats, belts, galluses, and neckties and intoxicated myself inhaling the smell of plug tobacco, chewing gum, gingersnaps, cheese, leather, and kerosene, all of which Bernard Spring sold across the same polished counter on which he cut bolts of cloth for the women to sew into new dresses.
Nearby stood the Spring family’s mansion, the most astonishing architectural monument I had ever seen, a huge white wedding cake of a building filled with stained glass and crowned with turrets and lightning rods. The whole business had been ordered from the Sears, Roebuck catalog and erected according to mail-order instructions. Since Mr. Spring insisted on top-of-the-line in all his dealings, Lovettsville could boast that it contained the finest house in the Sears, Roebuck warehouse.
Just as wonderful to me was a contrivance my Uncle Etch kept behind his Lovettsville house. Uncle Etch, Ida Rebecca’s fourth son, was married to the town undertaker’s daughter and had inherited custody of a hearse, which he kept in his backyard shed. It was not one of your modern internal-combustion hearses, but a beautiful black antique horse-drawn hearse with glass windows on all four sides and elegant wood carvings jutting out hither and yon. It was a hearse fit for a royal corpse, but I never saw anything in it but a few of Uncle Etch’s chickens who enjoyed nesting down inside during the heat of the afternoon.
My cousin Leslie, Uncle Etch’s oldest son, much older than I, assisted in the family undertaking business and took part in one of the most appropriate buryings ever held in our part of the country. The customer was Sam Reever, the famous bootlegger.
For several months before their triumph Leslie and his grandfather had been unnaturally depressed. The cause of their sorrow was a unique coffin foisted upon them by their chief supplier of funeral goods. The thing was made entirely of glass. They hadn’t ordered it; the supplier had just had it delivered out of the blue one day. His covering letter explained that glass coffins were the wave of the future. To help popularize them, he was sending specimens to a few lucky customers for showroom display. Leslie’s grandfather had been selected to be among the few let in on the ground floor of the glass-coffin boom.
The price was staggering, and so was the weight. Leslie and his grandfather tried to move it but couldn’t.
“Lord, it’s heavy,” the old man groaned.
“Must weigh a ton,” Leslie grunted.
They had to step outside and corral six other men to help before they could position it tastefully in the showroom. Weeks passed, then months, and though death took its steady toll, there were no customers rich enough to afford glass interment. Leslie’s grandfather sank into despair.
“We’re never going to be able to sell it,” he told Leslie.
Then, hope: news that Sam Reever had died. Everybody knew bootlegging was one of the richest businesses in the county. Leslie and his grandfather collected Sam and carried him to Lovettsville. Close behind came his widow, Liz, determined to put Sam away in dandy style.
“Now here’s a really wonderful coffin,” Leslie’s grandfather said, after showing her the pauper’s pine model to rouse her appetite for higher quality. “Look how heavy this glass top is.”
He and Leslie demonstrated that two men could scarcely budge it.
“And look all around the edge of the lid here,” Leslie said. “That’s a rubber gasket, just like you use to seal the cap on a Mason jar.”
“When you seal it up with that gasket in there,” said his grandfather, “it’s completely airtight. With a coffin like this, Sam’ll look as good a hundred years from now as he does the day you bury him.”
The widow would have nothing else. Maybe it was the gasket sealing the glass that sold her on it. Maybe she saw the esthetic beauty of burying Sam in the symbol of his profession. Like most country bootleggers, Sam bottled his moonshine in canning jars. When they took him to the graveyard the mourners approved of the fitting way in which Liz, as a grace note to his life, had him buried in the fanciest Mason jar ever sold in Loudoun County.
Beyond Lovettsville, on the outer edge of my universe, lay Brunswick. I first walked in that vision of paradise hand-in-hand with my father, and those visits opened my eyes to the vastness and wonders of life’s possibilities. Two miles north of Lovettsville, across the Potomac on the Maryland shore, Brunswick was as distant and romantic a place as I ever expected to see. To live there in that great smoking conurbation, rumbling with the constant thunder of locomotives, filled with the moaning of train whistles coming down the Potomac Valley, was beyond my most fevered hopes.
Brunswick was a huge railway center on the B&O Main Line, which linked the Atlantic coast to Chicago and midwestern steel centers. Approaching it was almost unbearably thrilling. You crossed an endless, rickety cantilever bridge after pausing on the Virginia bank to pay a one-dollar toll. This was a powerful sum of money, but Brunswick was not for the pinchpennies of the earth. As you neared the far end of the bridge, its loose board floor rattling under the car wheels, the spectacle unfolding before you made the dollar seem well spent.
In the foreground lay a marvelous confusion of steel rails, and in the midst of them, on a vast cinder-covered plain, the great brick roundhouse with its doors agape, revealing the snouts of locomotives undergoing surgery within. Smaller yard locomotives chugged backward and forward, clacking boxcar couplings together and sending up infernos of black gritty smoke which settled over the valley in layers.
If the crossing gate was down, you might be treated to the incredible spectacle of a passenger express highballing toward glory, the engineer waving down at you from the cab window, sparks flying, cinders scattering, the glistening pistons pumping with terrifying power. And behind this hellish monstrosity throbbing with fire and steam, a glimpse of the passengers’ faces stately and remote as kings as they roared by in a gale of wind powerful enough to knock you almost off your feet.
Between the mountains that cradled the yard there seemed to be thousands of freight cars stretching back so far toward Harpers Ferry that you could never see the end of them. And flanking the tracks on the far side, a metropolis: Brunswick had electric light bulbs, telephones, radios. Rich people lived there. Masons, for heaven’s sake. Not just Red Men and Odd Fellows and Moose such as we had around Morrisonville, but Masons. And not just Masons, but Baptists, too—genuine dress-to-the-teeth-and-give-yourself-fancy-airs Baptists.
Three of my uncles lived there: Uncle Tom, Uncle Harvey, and Uncle Lewis. They were expected to come back to Morrisonville and sit on Ida Rebecca’s porch too, but only on Sundays. As citizens of Brunswick, they had crossed over into a world of Byzantine splendor.
Brunswick had a department store and a movie house. There was a street stretching for two or three blocks lined with stores, including a drugstore where you could sit down at a round marble-top table and have somebody bring you an ice-cream soda. There were whole blocks of houses jammed one right up against another, the blocks laid out in a grid pattern on hills steep enough to tire a mountain goat.
Uncle Harvey lived with his wife and daughter at the crest of one such hill. He was one of God’s favored people, a locomotive engineer. I was in terror that he might try to engage me in conversation. When he heard a train whistle echoing off the valley below, I goggled in admiration as he produced his big railroad watch, studied it coolly, and announced, “The three-fifty-four’s running five minutes late today.”
My Uncle Tom worked as a blacksmith in the B&O yards near Harpers Ferry. That was a good job too. Though he walked the four-mile round trip to and from the shop daily in sooty railroader’s clothes, Uncle Tom was well off. His house contained a marvel I had never seen before: an indoor bathroom. This was enough to mark Uncle Tom a rich man, but in addition he had a car. And such a car. It was an Essex, with windows that rolled up and down with interior hand cranks, not like my father’s Model T with the isinglass windows in side curtains that had to be buttoned onto the frame in bad weather. Uncle Tom’s Essex even had cut-glass flower vases in sconces in the backseat. He was a man of substance. When he rolled up in his Essex for Ida Rebecca’s command appearances on Sunday afternoons in Morrisonville, wearing a white shirt and black suit, smoking his pipe, his pretty red-haired wife Goldie on the seat beside him, I felt pride in kinship to so much grandeur.
Lewis, Ida Rebecca’s youngest son, also thrived in Brunswick, at the barbering trade. Though scarcely twenty-five years old, he had his own shop and called by appointment on the Brunswick ladies to cut their hair at home in the new boyish bobs and sometimes, according to people envious of Uncle Lewis’s reputation for gallantry, to render more knightly service. Uncle Lewis was my first vision of what male elegance could be. He had glistening black hair always parted so meticulously that you might have thought he needed surveyor’s instruments to comb a line so straight. Thin black sideburns extended down to his earlobes in the style cartoonists adopted as the distinguishing mark of high-toned cads. With a high gloss on his city shoes, in his crisp white barber’s smock, he wisecracked with the railroad men as he presided in front of a long wall of mirrors lined with pomades, tonics, and scents. I admired him as the ultimate in dandyism.
On those magic occasions when my father took me to Brunswick, the supreme delight was to have Uncle Lewis seat me on a board placed across the arms of his barber chair, crank me into the sky, and subject me to the pampered luxury of being clippered, snipped, and doused with heavy applications of Lucky Tiger or Jeris hair tonic, which left my hair plastered gorgeously to the sides of my head and sent me into the street reeking of aromatic delight.
After one such clipping I climbed a hill in Brunswick with my father to call at Uncle Tom’s house. Though Uncle Tom was fourteen years older, my father loved and respected him above all his brothers. Maybe it was because he saw in Tom the blacksmith some shadow of the blacksmith father who died when my father was only ten. Maybe it was because Tom, living in such splendor with his indoor bathroom and his Essex, had escaped Morrisonville and prospered. Maybe it was for Tom’s sweetness of character, which was unusual among Ida Rebecca’s boys.
Uncle Tom was at work that day, but Aunt Goldie gave us a warm welcome. She was a delicate woman, not much bigger than my mother, with hair of ginger red, blue eyes, and a way of looking at you and turning her head suddenly this way and that which reminded me of an alert bird. She was also a notoriously fussy housekeeper, constantly battling railroad grime to preserve her house’s reputation for not containing “a speck of dust anywhere in it.” Before admitting us to her spotless kitchen, she had my father and me wipe our shoes on the doormat, then made a fuss about how sweet I smelled and how handsome I looked, then cut me a huge slab of pie.
My great joy in calling on Aunt Goldie was the opportunity afforded to visit the indoor bathroom, so naturally after polishing off the pie I pretended an urgent need to use the toilet. This was on the second floor and required a journey through the famously dust-free dining room and parlor, but Aunt Goldie understood. “Take your shoes off first so you don’t track up the floor,” she said. Which I did. “And don’t touch anything in the parlor.”
With this caution she admitted me to the sanctum of spotlessness. I trod across immaculate rugs and past dining room furniture, armchairs, side tables, a settee, like a soldier walking in a mine field. There would be no dust left behind if I could help it.
At the top of the stairs lay the miracle of plumbing. Shutting the door to be absolutely alone with it, I ran my fingers along the smooth enamel of the bathtub and glistening faucet handles of the sink. The white majesty of the toilet bowl, through which gallons of water could be sent rushing by the slightest touch of a silvery lever, filled me with envy. A roll of delicate paper was placed beside it. Here was luxury almost too rich to be borne by anyone whose idea of fancy toiletry was Uncle Irvey’s two-hole privy and a Montgomery Ward catalog.
After gazing upon it as long as I dared without risking interruption by a search party, I pushed the lever and savored the supreme moment when thundering waters emptied into the bowl and vanished with a mighty gurgle. It was the perfect conclusion to a trip to Brunswick.
