Milking the Moon by Eugene Walter as told to Katherine Clark Page B

Some say that my grandmother left me to Mr. Gayfer in her will as a surprise. But the truth is, Mr. Gayfer came forward when my grandmother died because her family, the Luenbergs, had taken on his three orphaned great-aunts from Switzerland in the 1870s.
    Mr. Gayfer’s father was Charles J. Gayfer from England, who came to Mobile and started a quality department store of the sort they have in London. It was clothes for men, women, and children and china, glass, silver, and linens. It was right on the corner of Bienville Square. A delightful set of people worked there, little ladies and maiden aunts and spinster daughters of good but poor families. My Mr. Gayfer, Hammond Gayfer, did not actively run the department store. There were all kinds of partners and lawyers—he wasn’t interested. After he got to London and Paris, all he wanted was the arts. I think Mr. Gayfer was—cheated—shall we say? I don’t know by whom. I think he was not as wealthy when he died as he was before.
    He was a rare bird, a rare creature, and a real charmer. He could charm the paper off the walls. He had studied with some of the most famous magicians, and I can remember on my birthdays, he would say, “What’s that in your nose?” And he would pull a five-dollar piece out of my nose. If I ever asked him for a dime or a nickel, he would say, “What’s that in your ear?”
    He had been to Sewanee and was a classical scholar. Then his father gave him a couple of years in Europe. He had lived in London and lived in Paris. He wrote that wonderful play that was in print until a few years ago called The Subsequent History of Mr. Jonah. It’s a long one-act about the divorce proceedings of Mrs. Jonah against Mr. Jonah. Her complaint is, “I just don’t believe that fish story. He was gone from home forty days—I just don’t believe that fish story.” It’s a very amusing play. It has a black cook who talks in dialect—I guess that’s one of the reasons it’s not performed anymore. There is a judge trying to make everything okay for everybody, and then there is a traveling salesman. It is very funny. He wrote other plays and a lot of poetry.
    Mr. Gayfer always encouraged me to write and paint and to do marionettes and to act. He never suggested what I should do, but he said, “Stay at home from school if you want to do that.” In Mr. Gayfer’s household, nothing was ever forbidden, nothing was ever encouraged too strenuously. He never said, You must do this or you must do that. He was this delightful person with whom I shared a house. He lived on that side, I lived on this side. We met at the breakfast table. We met at the luncheon table. We met on the porch to talk about books. I was a guest in his house.
    The house had been built to his own design. You came onto this huge screened porch which faces Dog River. Instead of a hall, there was a living room through the middle. You go straight through and then three steps up there was the dining room, which he built to be like a little salon theater. It had a stage, a red piano, one of the most advanced kind of phonographs, and a tremendous record collection. He often had entertainers there, little concerts or little readings. The Children’s Theater did performances there on occasion; I played King Midas there once.
    Outside, he had jungle. He didn’t like lawns. There were all these kinds of crazy trees and big magnolias. They had a hard time keeping me out of the trees, monkey that I am. There was one huge, ancient magnolia, and by starting in the camphor tree next to it, I could get to the first big limbs of the magnolia and get right to the top. The three huge limbs at the top were just made to sit in with your feet up and read. That was my secret place.
    And I used to go exploring back in the woods. There were woods and woods and woods, with this little creek going through. And oh, the wildflowers. And snakes and birds and coons and possums and tortoises. And of course, all of that