grandmother came out to greet us, and with Horace’s help we stepped down from the wagon.
My grandmother was a short, pink-faced, double-chinned woman, who always held her back very straight, as if to make up for her shortness. She smiled stiffly and sadly and lowered her head, first to me and then to Lewis, to receive our kisses. She gave us nothing more in the way of encouragement or welcome. She had just received a terrible blow, worse even than I knew, but there was more to it than that. She had never been demonstrative toward me or toward my brothers. Taking into account the formality of her class and generation, she was relatively natural with my father, but as a grandmother she was chilly, and she had always struck me as rather selfish.
My grandfather’s manners were even stiffer, but his affections had a broader scope, and I knew that he did not view me merely as a difficulty thrust on him by my parents’ death. When we spoke, although we were formal, we were not impersonal.
He embraced me in his usual bewildered way, as if he had never quite understood the purpose of embraces but did not want to hurt anyone’s feelings by withholding them. Then he put his hands gently on my shoulders—a sincerer gesture—to hold me at the right distance to focus on my face and my eyes, and he welcomed me. He shook hands gravely in turn with Robert, Edward, and Lewis. He told us that the servants would show us our rooms, and that we should let them know that we were not loafers but serious, hardworking people, by helping them bring up our bags and trunks.
So we helped bring our belongings into our rooms, which were on the second floor, not far from the big dining room where we met on holidays. Robert and Edward were in the guest bedroom, and Lewis and Christina and I in another. From its window I could see a chestnut tree, a weeping willow, a fountain, a pool, and a garden. The linen on my bed was fresh and crisp. The rooms were more numerous and larger than we were used to; the chairs were covered with silk instead of chintz; we could go down to the kitchen at any time and get a drink with ice in it. Once we hadhelped to bring our luggage in, we had no work to do, for the help carried all the wood and water and did all the other work that we usually did at home. We were sad, but we were comfortable.
IT SEEMED THAT MY GRANDMOTHER HAD DECIDED to befriend me the best way she knew how, by having me accompany her as she went about her little routines and self-assigned chores. She did not have to cook or clean in any serious way, but she took upon herself the tasks she said could not be entrusted to the help, which were really the ones she simply liked to do.
So, while Christina minded Lewis, we baked and polished the silver and sewed. We made full suits of clothing from fabrics we selected—materials my grandmother possessed in abundance, drawers and drawers full of rich, heavy brocades and broadcloths, damask, jaconet, and fustians. There was a great deal of lace, which she showed me with guilty pride, explaining the astonishing and basically unjustifiable amount of work that had gone into the making of each piece, years of skilled labor concentrated in that one drawer. Collecting these fabrics was her main vice.
Because women in evangelical circles were supposed to shun vain frippery, an indulgence of this sort needed an excuse. My grandmother’s was that she belonged to her church’s Dorcas Society, which made clothes for the poor. (I did not ask whether she put lace and damask into these clothes, and I still don’t know.) Dorcas, said my grandmother, was a Christian woman in olden times who was so good that Peter raised her from the dead.
This got me to thinking, and after a few more minutes of sewing, I asked my grandmother the name of the illness of which my father had died.
She grew still for a moment and answered tersely, “It was fever. Nothing more specific is known.” A little later, she looked up again from
My grandmother was a short, pink-faced, double-chinned woman, who always held her back very straight, as if to make up for her shortness. She smiled stiffly and sadly and lowered her head, first to me and then to Lewis, to receive our kisses. She gave us nothing more in the way of encouragement or welcome. She had just received a terrible blow, worse even than I knew, but there was more to it than that. She had never been demonstrative toward me or toward my brothers. Taking into account the formality of her class and generation, she was relatively natural with my father, but as a grandmother she was chilly, and she had always struck me as rather selfish.
My grandfather’s manners were even stiffer, but his affections had a broader scope, and I knew that he did not view me merely as a difficulty thrust on him by my parents’ death. When we spoke, although we were formal, we were not impersonal.
He embraced me in his usual bewildered way, as if he had never quite understood the purpose of embraces but did not want to hurt anyone’s feelings by withholding them. Then he put his hands gently on my shoulders—a sincerer gesture—to hold me at the right distance to focus on my face and my eyes, and he welcomed me. He shook hands gravely in turn with Robert, Edward, and Lewis. He told us that the servants would show us our rooms, and that we should let them know that we were not loafers but serious, hardworking people, by helping them bring up our bags and trunks.
So we helped bring our belongings into our rooms, which were on the second floor, not far from the big dining room where we met on holidays. Robert and Edward were in the guest bedroom, and Lewis and Christina and I in another. From its window I could see a chestnut tree, a weeping willow, a fountain, a pool, and a garden. The linen on my bed was fresh and crisp. The rooms were more numerous and larger than we were used to; the chairs were covered with silk instead of chintz; we could go down to the kitchen at any time and get a drink with ice in it. Once we hadhelped to bring our luggage in, we had no work to do, for the help carried all the wood and water and did all the other work that we usually did at home. We were sad, but we were comfortable.
IT SEEMED THAT MY GRANDMOTHER HAD DECIDED to befriend me the best way she knew how, by having me accompany her as she went about her little routines and self-assigned chores. She did not have to cook or clean in any serious way, but she took upon herself the tasks she said could not be entrusted to the help, which were really the ones she simply liked to do.
So, while Christina minded Lewis, we baked and polished the silver and sewed. We made full suits of clothing from fabrics we selected—materials my grandmother possessed in abundance, drawers and drawers full of rich, heavy brocades and broadcloths, damask, jaconet, and fustians. There was a great deal of lace, which she showed me with guilty pride, explaining the astonishing and basically unjustifiable amount of work that had gone into the making of each piece, years of skilled labor concentrated in that one drawer. Collecting these fabrics was her main vice.
Because women in evangelical circles were supposed to shun vain frippery, an indulgence of this sort needed an excuse. My grandmother’s was that she belonged to her church’s Dorcas Society, which made clothes for the poor. (I did not ask whether she put lace and damask into these clothes, and I still don’t know.) Dorcas, said my grandmother, was a Christian woman in olden times who was so good that Peter raised her from the dead.
This got me to thinking, and after a few more minutes of sewing, I asked my grandmother the name of the illness of which my father had died.
She grew still for a moment and answered tersely, “It was fever. Nothing more specific is known.” A little later, she looked up again from
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