We moved out to Marydell Road just before the war, and that ended my career as a foot soldier in William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire. After Lombard Street, Marydell Road was like walking into a Norman Rockwell landscape. Our place was at the very end of a long, downhill block of two-story brick row houses. Arching maple trees canopied the street halfway down the hill. At the bottom was a broad grassy field bordered on the far side by a bosky, shaded stream where I could walk in solitude and pretend I was a great airplane pilot like Colonel Roscoe Turner or an irresistible rake with the ladies like Clark Gable.
I had never dreamed people like us might live in such a paradise. A steep wooded hill rose from the far bank of the stream. If you climbed to the top and walked through a silent piece of woodland, you came to a small farm. Yet we were still inside the limits of a vast, grim city filled, as I knew from bitter experience, with misery, filth, crime, and deadbeats so unscrupulous they’d move out under cover of night rather than pay the paperboy the seventeen cents they owed for a week’s deliveries.
The Marydell Road house itself was a place of many splendors. It had hardwood floors waxed to a high shine. It had a sun parlor overlooking the grassy field and the stream. It had a long, roofed front porch where I could sit in a glider, look up the block, and watch what was happening on twenty identical front porches aligned perfectly with ours. On the second floor it had a bathroom, but not just a bathroom, a bathroom with a shower. You could stand in the tub and take a shower right in your own house. The second floor had four bedrooms. Mine was big enough to hold a single bed, a small desk, and an upright bookshelf gaudy with my two dozen volumes of “World’s Greatest Literature.”
That wasn’t all. Located underneath the dining room was a garage built right into the house. Underneath the sun parlor there was a club cellar, a narrow room paneled in beautiful pine, mostly below ground level and a little musty smelling, but a place, nevertheless, to boast about when you met the kind of person who was impressed by club cellars. The main part of the cellar was a wonder in itself, with the floor all covered by linoleum and a big laundry tub connected right into the plumbing. By turning a couple of faucets we could do the laundry in the new washing machine, run it through the electrically powered wringer and, lo, it was all ready to be dried in the yard.
On Lombard Street we’d had to dry the washing on a line stretched from the kitchen window to a telephone pole in the back alley. On Marydell Road we had an elegant new clothes drier, an ingenious wood-and-rope contraption which we could unfold and stand upright in a metal socket in the lawn, then take down and store out of sight when the clothes were dry.
This was living as I had seen it pictured in magazines and movies. We even had dark green canvas awnings which flared out over the windows to keep the rooms dim, if not cool, in the steamy Baltimore summertime. For winter there was an oil-burning furnace which roared merrily into action at the touch of a thermostat. To be able to touch that thermostat and hear the furnace instantly obey was like having a genie at my command.
Such a house, oh such a house it was. We were not just renters there either. It was our house. It was that wonderful “home of our own” that my mother had dreamed about all through the Depression years. Because it cost so much—the price was $4,700—we didn’t technically own it yet, but were buying it with a mortgage loan that would take twenty years to pay off.
This change in our fortunes resulted from my mother’s marriage in 1939 to Herb, a locomotive fireman for the B&O Railroad, and the birth a year later of my baby sister Mary Leslie. Mary was born the day after my mother’s forty-third birthday. Herb was forty-six years old. Mary was my mother’s fourth and last child, and Herb’s first. They were ecstatic about her. She was a blessing bestowed on people who had almost ceased to believe anything wonderful would ever happen to them again. In their amazement, they adored her and immediately set about assuring her an enviable life.
Thanks to Herb’s comfortable railroader’s pay, my mother finally had an opportunity to bring up a child without hardship. Ten years earlier she had had to give up Audrey for adoption. All through the Depression she had had to train Doris and me to accept hard times and hard work as the natural way of the world. Now, with this beautiful, pink, new baby given to her so late in life, she at last had another chance, a chance to do things right, a chance to create a happy world where a child could grow up happily.
It was easy persuading Herb that their first move must be from the Lombard Street apartment to a whole house in a tranquil neighborhood with trees, grass, and parks. Marydell Road was ideal. It was in the Irvington section of Baltimore, four miles west of my Lombard Street paper route. That meant giving up the paper route. My mother didn’t chafe about that. Mary Leslie was not the only person she hoped to spoil a little now that her luck had finally turned. Not that she was going to let me become a complete good-for-nothing. Far from it. I still had a mission in life. I had to make something of myself. Work was vital to keep me fit for the task, so I got a Saturday job doing heavy lifting in a grocery at the Hollins Market.
Still, for a few months it was a golden time, especially for my mother. New baby, new house, new life: It was the happy ending the movies promised, and she basked in the joy of it. There were always guests now, guests for her huge Sunday dinners, guests to play cards at the kitchen table on Saturday night, guests dropping by for coffee and gossip in the afternoon. One Sunday morning she commanded me not to leave the house for my usual Sunday afternoon at the movies, but to stand by freshly scrubbed and dressed in my finest. One of her mother’s sisters, Aunt Sallie, was coming to visit that afternoon.
Aunt Sallie? Which one was that? My mother had aunts galore and reminisced constantly about all of them, but they were not real to me. I had never met a single one. They seemed to belong to another time, to be part of another life she had lived in another world. I thought of them as dead, when I thought of them at all, which was rarely, and could never keep them sorted out. There were Aunt Lillian, Aunt Kate, Aunt Rose, Aunt Eva, Aunt Helen, Aunt Estelle, Aunt Edna, Aunt Alice. So this day I had to ask my mother, “Which one is Aunt Sallie?”
“Edwin’s mother.”
What a thunderbolt.
The mother of the great Cousin Edwin.
Coming to our house on Marydell Road.
What grandeur. What honor. Here was proof that Marydell Road had raised us out of the Baltimore muck. My mother’s sister Sally, named after this aged Aunt Sallie who had mothered Edwin, had once been ashamed to let Edwin’s sisters know we lived on Lombard Street. Now she was bringing Edwin’s mother to sit in our parlor on Marydell Road. Visiting in Baltimore, this grand lady had expressed a desire to see my mother.
For my mother this was a momentous event. Though she disliked Edwin, she dearly loved this Aunt Sallie. Aunt Sallie, her mother’s big sister, was a visitor from the happy years of childhood. Almost everything from that time was now long dead or lost or scattered: “Papa” dead since 1917. The wonderful family house, Mansfield, sold to strangers. Her brothers scattered across the continent. “Mama” dead since 1923. That was when she’d last seen Aunt Sallie, at “Mama’s” funeral eighteen years ago. That was in another world, another life, another time, before she had been married, and widowed, and sacrificed a baby, and survived the Depression, and brought up two children, and married again, and gained another baby, and finally come into a home of her own.
I had no feel for what my mother’s emotions about this visit might be. I knew she carried around a lot of old memories, but I yawned when she started telling me about them. To me, her aunt’s visit was just a chance to gaze at a curiosity, the famous Edwin’s mother. Funny, I hadn’t thought of famous Edwin having a mother. I’d heard my own mother angrily slander Edwin’s father as “nothing but an old oyster pirate,” but I dismissed that as pure romance. For such a mythic figure as Edwin, however, a mother seemed unnecessary. Well, he not only had one, just like everybody else, but she was about to arrive at our house, my great-aunt Sallie.
My mother had let up on me lately about Edwin James, and I had packed him away in my mind’s deep-storage compartment. Now, though, the memory of her old hostility and hurt returned, and I was determined not to show awe when I met this Aunt Sallie, but to let her know in a subtle but polite way, if opportunity arose, that I was not impressed one iota by her son’s greatness.
The car bearing her arrived at the foot of Marydell Road in midafternoon. Inside were the two Sallies, Great-aunt Sallie, mother of myths, and just plain Aunt Sally, who was my mother’s only sister. Uncle Emil, who was married to just plain Aunt Sally, was driving his latest Buick. A big, florid man who was proud of his Germanic roots, Uncle Emil worked for the most important insurance company in Baltimore and was forceful, dynamic, and opinionated. His Buick spoke of money and power to Marydell Road, which was Chevy, Ford, and Plymouth territory. Fortunately for the younger Aunt Sally’s social reputation, Herb kept his 1934 Chevrolet coupe out of sight in the garage.
From an upstairs window I saw the Buick arrive, then retreated to my bedroom while the welcoming fuss went on downstairs, first on the porch, then in the parlor. I was not going to be down there falling all over myself like my mother and Doris to make the great man’s mother feel she was doing us a favor with this visit. My plan was to act as though nothing at all special was going on. I would stay in my room reading until my mother called me to come down. Then I would descend casually, greet Edwin’s mother civilly, but in a way to let her know I was slightly bored, then excuse myself on grounds I had something important to do.
It was a hard scheme to carry out. For one thing, I didn’t really want to read. I wanted to know what was being said down in the parlor, and I couldn’t hear anything except Uncle Emil’s voice booming away now and then. Uncle Emil usually boomed when he spoke. Uncle Emil had a big voice, which he used to overpower conversations with big, powerful opinions. He sounded more terrifying than he actually was, because of his constant proposals that political problems be solved by lining people up against walls and shooting them.
Had a larcenous gang of political boodlers been caught robbing the municipal till?
“They ought to line them all up against the wall and shoot ’em,” said Uncle Emil.
Were conscientious objectors refusing to answer the draft call to report for military duty?
“If I were in charge, I’d line them all up against the wall and shoot ’em,” said Uncle Emil.
From behind my closed bedroom door, I couldn’t make out whether he was urging the usual sanguinary solutions this afternoon. His rumble was more muted than usual, and there wasn’t as much of it. Apparently the women were doing most of the talking.
The book I’d chosen to read was one of the unread classics from my “World’s Greatest Literature” set. It was numbingly dull, possibly because I was so busy straining to hear what was happening downstairs that I couldn’t concentrate. I had chosen it so that when my mother called me to come down I would be carrying an impressive tome. I wanted this Great-aunt Sallie to notice it, to say with admiration, “Ah, I see you are reading ‘World’s Greatest Literature.’”
To which I would reply, “Yes, but it’s not one of the best. It’s just Hawthorne, or Poe, or Shakespeare,” depending on whatever it happened to be.
Wasn’t my mother ever going to call me, so I could make my languid entrance coming down the stairs? Had she forgotten I was up there?
To remind her, I opened my bedroom door and walked out into the hall and took a few steps back and forth, making noticeable noises with my heels on the wonderful hardwood floor. Then I waited for a reaction downstairs. And waited. Still no call to appear and meet the great guest.
It was finally unbearable. I picked up my volume of “World’s Greatest Literature,” left the bedroom, and started down. From the top of the stairs I could instantly see our visitor. I was startled. She was so different from what I had envisioned. I had expected a commanding woman of regal stature, square-shouldered, robust, authoritative but youthful, an Amazon, a school principal. Until that first sight of her, I didn’t realize that I’d had a vision of what she would look like. The woman I saw, however, gave me the kind of jolt that comes only when some preconceived notion is proved by the reality to be completely wrong.
What I saw was a short, stout old lady swathed in black, with a touch of white here and there, lace maybe, at the neck and cuffs of the gleaming black dress. Her face was a thousand wrinkles, her hair a gray that would never turn silver. It was like looking at one of those old nineteenth-century portraits seen recessed in oval frames in old country houses.
But of course I should have realized that she would be ancient. She was four years older than my grandmother who had died before I was born. Later I learned she was born in 1863, the year of Gettysburg. On my sixteen-year-old’s scale of time, that made her seem almost as antique as the pharaohs, though on that day at Marydell Road she was only seventy-eight.
We were introduced. She did not take notice of my book, but appraised me with a professional eye. She had been a schoolteacher, after all. She may have been old, frail, and wrinkled, but her questions were crisp, and her facial expressions suggested an intelligence so superior that I was glad she didn’t ask me about the book, since she probably would have understood at once that I hadn’t read a word of it.
So I was a senior in high school?
“Yes, ma’am.”
I fell back instinctively into the southern form of respect.
And was I doing well in my studies?
Better in Latin than in math, ma’am.
She was pleased to hear I was taking Latin. It was good, rigorous training for the mind, and important to a sound understanding of English.
With that, she was finished with me, and resumed the conversation in progress when I came down the stairs. It was about something that was occurring in Washington, but since I paid no attention to news about government and politics, I had no idea what she was talking about. Neither, I guessed from their withdrawn expressions, did my mother or Aunt Sally the Younger. Uncle Emil, though, seemed to know all about it, and expounded on it forcefully.
Great-aunt Sallie listened to him with beautiful politeness, and, when he subsided, said, “There was a good article on it in The New York Times last week which you probably missed. If you go back and read it, you’ll have a much better idea of what’s involved.”
It was magnificent, and even at age sixteen I knew it was. With impeccable courtesy, she had told him he hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about; she had flattered him with the suggestion that he was a regular reader of The New York Times, though she surely knew it was almost impossible to find in Baltimore; and she had let us all know that, though she might look older than Pharaoh, when it came to keeping up with the world, she was miles ahead of anybody in the house.
After that they moved on to easier ground and reminisced about kin living and dead and about times long gone, and it was all “Have you heard anything of—?” and “When was the last time you saw—?” This left no conversational role for me, and I sat gratefully silent, for I knew this ancient lady was too formidable for me to cope with in any way short of utter humility.
That afternoon I had a sobering glimpse of where Edwin James had come from. It made me wonder if my mother had been deceiving me. After seeing my great-aunt Sallie, I began to suspect that, in spite of what she said, maybe Edwin really was smarter than anybody else.