SORTING IT OUT


 

 

1

 

GRAMPS

 

       Born James C. Arnold, no amount of sleuthing has disclosed what the C. stands for; perhaps it is like the S in Harry S Truman, no more than a literary flourish, differing only in that it is permitted its own full stop.  I would like to say the C is for Connelly, but it isn't possible, for that comes from Gramma's richer side of the family.  It exists as a simple initial on a few documents, including his birth certificate, which are in my possession, and similarly on a few other family papers that I have seen but do not possess.  And there they mystery stops but does not end, as is the case in many other things involving the past, especially my own.  To  me this increases the sense of adventure and challenge, at least up to a point.  Beyond that point lies frustration and perhaps if pursued too long and too far madness.

       All of his life he was an educator.  This is how he thought of himself and it is evident from the papers he left behind.  These are mainly letters and postal cards addressed to his family.  I have only one letter from him, but it is a revealing one.  It says a lot about him.  And later there is an aside to me in a letter to my father, when he talks about teeth.  Our mutual teeth.  Our family teeth, as it were.  I was starting orthodontia.  His teeth at my present age were better than mine at that age, which is 63.

       Only recently have I learned a few more things about him and our family.  He was the son of Henry, who had a host of brothers and a sister or two.  Gramps was educated at Ohio Northern University, which sounds like a teachers' college and must be one.  He married Sara Leigh Connelly in  1900.  A round number for a round year and a round wife.  She was known as Leigh, pronounced Lee.  (But on at least one occasion, in a youthful letter to a friend, she signed herself Saraleigh—spelled exactly that way.

       Gramps was at that time superintendent of schools in Chrisman, Illinois.  Later he performed the same function at some town called Robinson.  I think both were in Illinois, though I can't be sure.  Small bergs, they don't show up on any maps of today.

       In 1906, with two young children to provide for, he became principal of the Metropolitan Business College in Chicago.  He held this job for the next twenty years.  About this time he got interested in real estate.  It is a surprising shift, so late in life, and there must be an interesting story behind it, but there is nobody alive to tell it and, as with other family matters, it has slipped into the mists, gone forever.  Thus I have given up hope of knowing the true nature of so many things, and do not want to hazard a guess.  For now I will happily settle for anything less than complete ignorance, without resorting to the crutch of fiction, the practice of which I both enjoy and dread.  It does not belong here.

       What I know now is more than might be expected.  There are a fair number of letters and printed documents to draw from, and I have read all available hungrily.  From these a picture begins to emerge of a family.  We must start with the paternal side of my father's family, though the maternal is equally rich and (at least to me) evocative.  The Arnolds came to America before the revolution that split us off from England and we were settled in what soon was to be named Culpepper County, Virginia.  (It was near to important things, such as the Atlantic Ocean and harbors.)  The men were mostly farmers, a few of them blacksmiths or small shop keepers.  Farming was natural; it is what men did with the land.  They cleared it, then planted it.  There was not much choice of other occupations.  Land came cheap in quarter sections and could be bought for a few hundred dollars.  As soon as a man had some coin in his pocket he would splurge on acreage.  It generally sold for less than $2 an acre.     Sometimes you could homestead it for free, but more often you bought it from a bank after a period of servitude to someone you learned to hate in order to earn the cash.  It was the thought of land ownership that sustained you during this tour of indenture servitude.  Then you cleared what was yours and brought it under cultivation with the help of a horse or ox, either removing the stumps or continuing to plough around them, depending on your temperament or inclination.

       To work the land you needed sons, so you found yourself a wife to bear them, and when she plum wore out, you found yourself a replacement.  And sometimes she gave you daughters, shamefacedly, and you lost a full year out of the cycle of production and had to try again for a son.  (Oh, for ameiosis then, though it might lead to murder.)  She bore your weight as she bore everything else, with a grimace and a groan that was barely audible.  I mean, you had really to listen to hear it.  In the Arnold and Connelly families broods of twelve or thirteen were routine.  So was natural attrition, or early death.  All those tiny graves recorded Jesse or Charles L. or Rebecca (a favorite of ours) or Ruth.  Born 1813, Died 1815, it might read, or Born 1855, Died, 1862, for a father gone away to war to discover on his return, if he lived through his battles and found his way home again.  All windfall apples returned to the soil, fallow and fecund and waiting; the moment's loss, the future's gain—wasn't it so, Gramps?

       Pictures reveal them to be a grim lot; well, there wasn't a whole lot to be jolly about, not even on a long Sunday afternoon, when everybody within hailing distance had assembled for an epic meal, spilling out onto the front porch for the photo opportunity and gathering round at an uncomfortable and previously unexperienced proximity in front of the camera and being told to "Hold it."  Was it the long exposure that rendered them all so stoic-looking and formidable?  Maybe the long moment simply underscored the tedium of the day.  Everybody is bored on Sundays, isn't he?  Not just children?

       Only, weekdays are worse.  What did the man say?  Life is a diet of shit, but the good news is, you have to eat it only a teaspoon at a time?  Some such thing.  My ancestors would blush at my free use of the common obscenity, while at the same time acknowledging the poetic truth contained in the statement.

       "It happens," my great uncle might admit.

       "What happens?" I urge.

       "Aw, you know.  What you said."  And a pink blossoming.

       But mostly grim.  And pious, too.  It was a combination that occurred frequently, for if this life held nothing but hard work and annual childbearing for the women, how could the next be any worse?  Only if it were Hell Itself, a literal prospect often alluded to, for these were literal Bible readers.  The next life in Heaven must be one endless Sunday afternoon, the women newly returned from cleaning up the kitchen after the meal and full of gossip, the children freshly scrubbed and starched and rendered clean, the husbands and unmarried brothers (some of those admittedly a little odd and weird) seated on the overstuffed divan or plump armchair, belt loosened, sleepy-eyed, and probably belching from routine overeating.

       None of them drank, at least not in public, nor fornicated even in private, but all of them smoked the crop, even the women.  Aunt Mattie had her little clay pipe, and when she filled it and tamped it tight, it was usually Little Becky who came running forward with the taper of a newly lit kitchen match, shouting, "Let me do it, Auntie.  Please, please."  And the gnarled old lady would lean forward expectantly to be torched, toking hard a couple of times and, then beaming, expel a cloud as purely white as if it had come from opium, which it somewhat resembled in use and effect.  And all present would smile widely, leastwise the women and gathered children.

       Meanwhile the men lit cigars, pronounced "see-gar."  First they circumcised it, then performed brief fellatio on it.  Next they lit it with a kitchen match seized from above the stove and snapped to attention with a quick scratch of the thumbnail or the scrape along a booted sole.  It was not a child's task, mind you, not like torching Auntie's pipe.

       Somnolent and silent mostly, the menfolks grumbled deep in throats and smoked cigars and thought their dark thoughts, which were not to be communicated.  Who would dare to speculate on the nature of their accumulated thoughts?  Not I, though they were probably bland enough and wholly self-centered.  The amassed cigars fogged the air and left it stinking.  Freud had just set forth on the planet and was not widely read.  His remarks about cigars sometimes not being phallic symbols but only cigars had not passed into conventional wisdom.  Nor had the war that could only loosely be called civil been fought yet, leaving the country sorely divided still.

       By now an exodus of dissident farmers had headed for the central states, namely Kentucky and Ohio.  Another generation would see them forge into Iowa and Western Illinois.  Land was plentiful, the domain of Indian savages, bears, wolves, and "panthers"—panthers?  Oh, come on now.  Well, it is what they called them, these bobcats or mountain lions.  Cougars.

       The words are those of Isaac Newton Arnold. (I kid you not; this is what he was ycelpt.)  It is from a privately printed chapbook dated 1927, which came into my hands as the result of an inheritance as eldest son.  Primogeniture again.  Though I cannot testify to the literal accuracy of Uncle Isaac, this being the stuff of fable, I can attest that I give it to you word for word, as it came down to me.  And how grateful am I that it did:

      

       "All our ancestors were agriculturists.  I want to tell the way Ohio was when over thirty families migrated from Fayette County and vicinity to Richmond, Washington County, Iowa, in the 40s and 50s.  I was surprised at the upkeep [?] of Indiana and Ohio which were first settled from one hundred to a hundred and forty years ago.  These states were generally large forests of hard wood timber at the time they left for Illinois and Iowa, the black prairie land.  Not over one-third of these old fields in that clay, light timber soil, were cropped so much.  It was very poor, except on their creek bottom land.  they had never used any clover or fertilizer for the upkeep of the land at that time.  Today and for many years they have been practicing diversified farming.  You see equal acreage of clover, fall wheat, corn, some rye, not very much oats, timber and creek land, blue grass pasture.  [Uncle Isaac Newton was a farmer himself, big surprise, and I delete a little here some listings of agricultural data not of general interest.]  Just the same, I admire good old Ohio where our ancestors first cleared the forest, drove out the wild animals, civilized the hostile Indians."  And so do I, Unc.

       The next item is entitled, "Indian Tragedy in Kentucky where Augusta is now, about the year 1800."  It is choice:

 

       "Fieldin Fegans, grandmother's brother, Absalom Creig, her brother-in-law, Joshia Wood, brother-in-law to Creig, and Cornelius Washborn, the story goes, went on a hunting trip fifteen miles from the settlement, made their camp near a spring, and one day while they were out hunting, the Indians came onto the camp and lay in ambush until they returned.  The two uncles, Creig and Fegans, came and started their fire.  Fieldin went to the spring.  He heard the guns fire and knew what was up and started for the settlement, with two Indians after him.  In the race they came to a tree blown over.  The Indians were close after him.  One ran to the top, the other to the root to head him off.  He jumped the log and a panther jumped out in front of him, scaring him more than the Indians.  He said a white man could outrun an Indian uphill, but an Indian was his equal downhill.  He outran them and got to the settlement.  They made up a company, started for their camp.  When they arrived, Uncle Absalom Creig had been scalped, his body thrown across the camp fire and burned into.  The Indians had taken their horses, guns and all their equipment.  Washborn and Woods got warning and made their escape.  Uncle Absalom had a fine shot pouch.  The power horn was finished with German silver.  They moved across the Ohio River and made their homes just South of where Georgetown now is.  A few years after the tragedy, two Indians came to Uncle Fieldin's cabin and one had the shot pouch of Uncle Absalom Creig.  He [Uncle Fieldin, I presume] followed them and killed the one and the other fled.  He buried the Indian on the West bank of White Oak about one mile below Georgetown, threw the rifle of the Indian into the deep water and kept all a secret until 1832, when the river washed out the skeleton."

       Yeah?  It makes a good story, and story is what we are after.

       Uncle Isaac continues, after informing us that most of what follows can be found in the records of Clermont and Brown Counties and was published sometime by Hobart [whoever he is, or was]:

 

       "The story is that Captain Fegans and his sons were drilled by Simon Kenton, in all the Indian traits of war.  We are not through with Uncle Fieldin's Indian story.  [Thank God.]  He and an old Indian chief were back of a tree, trying to get the first shot.  They fired their guns, both missed.  They came at each other with their dirk knives.  Uncle Fieldin had a scar from his ear to his chin he carried to his grave. He is buried in the Richmond Cemetery a little North of Grandfather and Grandmother Arnold.  I see his grave so often and think of him and the old Indian chief.  Preach to his soul and body.  He did not have much mercy for the Indians.  His grandson and name sake, Fieldin Sharp, at this time in his 83rd year, told me he remembered his grandfather and the scar on his cheek.  I must give him the credit for giving me the names of his uncles and aunts on his grandfather Fegans' side, which are in another list.

       "To all the generations of these pioneers I hand you down the story as it was handed down to me by Grandmother and my Father."

       And accordingly I pass it on, in my own wooden fashion, with side trips, asides, and short diversions.  But more of the narrative now, for it is both interesting and instructive, and will perhaps explain where we all came from and the direction [if any] in which we are as a family headed:

 

 

 

*    *    *

 

 

 

       Uncle Isaac Newton continues his pursuit of historical truth.  In his usual careful manner he uncovers more that would be lost without his diligence:  This item is entitled, "Recollections of Grandmother Arnold of How Time Changes Customs."  It is a good example of oral history preserved by somebody who recognizes its lasting value.  It also contains quite a bit of the moralistic and didactic, without which a narrative from the past would be incomplete:

 

       "Sixty years ago the grandparents would entertain the children by telling them stories of their pioneer experiences. Today the experience is reversed.  The children entertain the grandparents.

       "After Grandfather's death, Grandmother made her home with Uncle and Aunt (Charles Hasty) until death.  When we visited them in the evenings Grandmother would tell Cousin Alvin and me about the pioneer times in Kentucky and Ohio. When they could not get their wheat or corn ground (high water), they would bake the breast of wild turkey dry and slice for bread.  They had to pen all the young stock in long buildings to keep the bears, panthers and wolves from killing them.  In the night time these wild animals would howl and scream close by their cabin.  It would raise the hair on your head.  They tell us a panther makes a noise like a person in distress.

       "Then there were the Indian stories I have stated.  I remember I would be afraid to go to bed after the evening stories.  She would tell us about staying alone in their cabin when Grandfather in harvest time would take his hand sickle and go across the Ohio River to help the folks.  He would tie his clothes and sickles on the back of his head with his suspenders and swim the river in the morning and evening.  Say, kids, the Ohio River is no creek.  Bathing suits were never dreamed of in those times."

 

       Hey, "kids."  [Can you dig it?]  Great-Grampa Arnold swimming across the river with his clothes piled atop his head?  Picture it for yourself, as I do.  Greeted on the other side by she who would one day be Gramma, our essential ancestor, who upon seeing this strange, nekkid young man emitted a whoop not unlike that of the evening panther?  And later he would learn that she made nearly the same sound in coitus, though modestly choked back and muffled, so that the children adjacent or sleeping nearby, probably in the same room, would not awaken in the night and think the dreaded panther was loose in the house.  [No, Mother is not being murdered.  Go back to sleep, my dear.]

 

 

 

*    *    *

 

 

 

       The final part of Isaac's tale is modestly entitled, "Family and Biographical History of Brown, Clermont and Fayette Counties, Ohio, do not vary much in the Dates."  Okay; agreed.  We shall proceed:

 

       "In the 1790s Daniel Fegans' family, John Arnold's family and John Kirpatrick migrated from Virginia down the Ohio River in flat boats, the only way to travel in those times.  They made their homes for eight or ten years on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, not far from Simon Kenton Station, Limestone, Louisville and Augusta.

       "The family story is that these ancestors' parents knew Kenton before they left Virginia and he warned them on their way down the river to look out for the Indian decoys, such as kettles on poles for camping along the river bank.  In those days the Indians were on the war path and brought sorrow to many pioneer homes.

       "Capt. Fegans was given a grant of 3000 acres of land for service in the Revolutionary War, 2000 on the Kentucky side of the river and 1,000 on the Ohio side in Brown County.,  He made his clearing near where Georgetown now stands and died there in 1815.  In those days they buried on the home place.  They tell us they have the record in Ohio of 2000 Revolutionary soldiers' graves.  Our state claims three graves.  One is buried in our town, Washington.  His name was Timothy Brown.  The State and County erected a fine monument to his honor.

       "The Biographic History says Fieldin Fegans and four sons came up from Brown Country into Fayette County in 1809, also John Arnold and John Kirpatrick.  Our Grandfather in 1812 came with his family.  Today these families just named are the very early pioneers in Fayette County, Ohio.  There are today two dozen of these generations.  I personally know did not stop going West until they got to the Pacific Coast."

       Dad and Mom and Dicky and I were four of those, but not until 1942.

       And finally this, from the same source—Uncle Isaac:

 

       "John Arnold was born in Wales and came to Culpepper County, Virginia, and lived in Red Stone District.  We have no record of when he left Wales, but from record of the generations he came to this country in the 1740s or 50s.  The old county records have John, William and James Arnold as landholders in Culpepper County.

       "Great Grandfather, John Arnold, was married to Elizabeth Ross, who was born in Culpepper County, Virginia, and died in Fayette County, Ohio.  As before stated in regard to the record of their birth and death, the head stones were worn smooth by time and weather.  They raised a family of eight children to man and womanhood."

       And there were those unrecorded who died as babes.  Of course their gravestones or markers are worn smooth of dates by inclemency, or else are missing for other untoward reasons.  Thus flow the sons and daughters, Arnolds all, with names that are odd-sounding to us today but were common at the time—Levi, Hanna, Elijah, Jesse, Willis, Rebecca, Benjamin, plus the usual generational repetitions of John, James, William, Sara, and Elizabeth.

 

 

 

*    *    *

 

       So much for background.  I suppose every family is subject to a course something like this one; a history both weird and oddly fitting and in many ways predicting what is to come but not in the exact ways that it will happen.  Only close, sometimes amazingly so.

       My subject is Gramps (though I never dared to call him this) and the ways he influenced my father and me, and the end to which he came and to which his son did not come, and his eldest grandson wishes mightily he may not come to, either.  But what will be will be.  And life is instructive, if it is nothing else.  What did the old guy say, the historian?  "The only way to avoid the past is to get to know it ahead of time and take bold steps to keep it from jumping on your back and riding you like a pony?"  Words to that effect, anyway.

       My first remaining letter from Gramps reads as follows, though I am sure there were others before it and references to me in letters to my father, as there were in the future.  Each time I am mentioned, a little thrill goes through me, for it proves I existed.  Gramps was important in my life and continues to be, even though he's been dead these fifty years, almost.  He died the month I graduated from college and I, so full of myself and my importance at that time, hardly remember his passing.  It took many years for me to acknowledge his importance in my life and that of members of my family.

       But let him speak for himself.  It is early summer and I am nine.  And while the letter is full of pious moralizing on duty and responsibility, it is also full of a quality I never noticed before.  It is love.

 

 

 

 

*   *   *

 

 

Saturday, June 17, 1939

 

Dear Bob,

Grandma is taking a nap and I have just had a shower after finishing my part of the weekly cleaning.  I have been thinking of you, Bob, a great deal lately.  You were the little boy who was the "head of the house" while mamma and daddy went to Texas.  Then I thought of how you could not come to help me plant my garden out in the middle of a big peony field when they were all in bloom.  No sir!  Daddy was leaving for New York and you must see him off.  And how you do like flowers!  But leaving Daddy to go away for so long without Bobby being there to say goodbye was too much to be endured.  Now don't think Grandpa was disappointed.  He thought, "That's just what my boy would have done when he was about eight years old.  And his daddy would have been pleased to know that his little boy wanted to be home to bid him goodbye. Some day you'll know all about this and what it all means.  I suspect you do now.

 

Well, Bob, the garden was planted in the peony field, all covered with great big blossoms, and Grandpa enjoyed it very, very much, although he got pretty tired before he got thru.  But he thought all the time how Bobby would enjoy all this and why he was not there, but staying home to see Daddy off for New York.  Daddy was very much pleased, no doubt, and I know Grandpa thought you were very much like his boy in doing what you did.  It is too bad Daddy can't be home to celebrate Father's Day with his two boys and their dear Mamma.  But he'll be thinking a great deal about Bobby and Dick and "Mimi" tomorrow at Atlantic City.  (Have you looked on the map to find New York and Atlantic City?)  Don't you suppose Daddy will have chicken for dinner tomorrow?  That would be nice for Daddy.  But don't think Daddy is having so much fun.  He has been working very hard in the hot stuffy old city. And why?  You know, Bob, it takes money to buy all the things you and I need and want, and Daddy has to work hard to earn this money.  That is why he goes to New York to buy furs to sell again for more money than he pays for them.  What he and all the clerks sell them for, more than Daddy pays for them, is called profit.  It is this profit that pays Daddy's salary and the salaries of all the clerks.  So Daddy has to be very careful what kind of furs he buys and what he pays for them.  Otherwise he and Marshall Field and Co. would not make any money.  then Daddy would not have any salary to buy food and clothes and pay rent.

 

This is why Daddy has to go down to the store so early and stay all day;p why he has to go to New York and St. Louis to buy furs.

 

Now tomorrow is Father's Day. I know you have a wonderful father.  To be a wonderful father, Bob, you will have to be a wonderful boy.  You certainly are starting out that way.  You like Sunday school, you like public school, you are making good grades in school.  You have a wonderful mother and you love her.  You have a wonderful little brother and you are good to him.  You have a splendid home, Bob, and you have everything you need.  So tomorrow I hope you will think of Daddy way off in New York and what he is doing for us all because it will be Father's Day.  Daddy's Day.  I am Daddy's father and I will be thinking of him, too, for I love him, I suspect, almost as much as you do.

 

Now I am writing this letter to you, Bob, because Daddy is away and you and I are both thinking about him.  But you and I know we have thoughts enough to be thinking some for Mamma, too.  You could not be much of a boy, unless you loved your Mamma, could you?

 

Grandma is still sleeping.  May be she is dreaming about Daddy!

 

Goodbye, Bob, Be good, Grand-Dad

 

 

       Patronizing?  Sure.  Condescending?  You bet.  Full of pious moralizing and what we call today imprinting?  Without a doubt.  Yet caring and fully of grandfatherly affection.  He cared enough to write to me, a little kid, and explain to me my mounting responsibilities in Life as eldest son.  Please note how calculatingly and pointedly he called me by name.  Eleven times.  It is a clever truck to gain my confidence and compliance.  I see it now, as I did not then.  Or did not dare.  But it diminishes nothing.  I leave it up to you to judge the impact this mush have had on me—the sense of responsibility and the sheer impossibility of living up to all that is being heaped on my narrow shoulders in the name of approaching manhood.

       I feel it still today, when there is nobody left to measure my effort and grade me on it.  Or is this always the task of the generation that follows, and it is now my son judging me?  Of course.

       The past continues to make itself manifest and real in a modest pile of letters I've since inherited.  It was not so much primogeniture again as the fact that my brother (nor anybody else) wanted them.  [Accumulated letters from my father to my mother were ceremonially destroyed by my brother on our mother's death.  He insisted on protecting the privacy of whatever affection or lack thereof the letters contained.  While I understand his reasons for doing this and cannot fault them, I must mention in passing that there is little of the historian in him, and his interest in the past is solely in seeing to it that the past is either burned or buried.]

       I wish the cache of letters was richer, thicker, but I am grateful for what I have, and for what the past has given me in order to be preserved and maintained.  Most of the letters from Gramps are a valiant and pitiable cry for help from an aging man who feels his freedom being taken away from him and his future being determined by others.  He feels his health deteriorating and is terrified by it.  His plea is for help.  And he is right in his surmise that neither his daughter or his son can provide it.  He is alone, frightened, at times paranoid, at other times completely rational and manipulative.  He is not the man I remember, but then I must acknowledge the imperfection of memory, especially mine, and in this sense the letters are important as standing as a necessary corrective to memory.  For it is the truth I seek, however awful.  Seeing the truth for what it is is the only way, alas, we can benefit from the past.  Otherwise it is not only past but without redeeming value.

       Letters from the past are mostly Gramps's.  There is but one from my Uncle Wayne, who married my father's sister, Ruth, and a handful from her, plus a couple of pathetic examples from my totally invalided Gramma, who responded to formal occasions with these thank you notes of a word or two.  She lived out the last ten years of her life in anguish and pain.  I'm told she wept almost ceaselessly.  Nobody would lie about a thing like that.  And there is reference—again from Gramps, mostly—of his efforts to comfort and console her.  It was an impossible job.  Nonetheless he was constant in his efforts to do so, and I must say he never shirked the duty or complained about it.

       This too is love.  It has taken me a long time to recognize it.

 

 

 

*   *   *

 

 

 

       As I said, I was nine.  We were living at 717 Wedgewood Drive, in Highland Park, Illinois.  I was an ugly little kid, with protruding ears (outgrown), unruly dark blond hair, skinny arms and legs, and little round gold-rimmed glasses that were called Granny glasses, decades later.  They were what kids wore then.  I had badly crossed eyes, and the lenses straightened them somewhat; I kept them on for years, but when girls began tot interest me greatly I took them off out of simple vanity and wanting to look handsome.  Instead, one eye looked North, while the other was pointed East.  This isn't the way to be better looking, but I tried.  For years I tried.

       I must have had some endearing points, but for the life of me I can't think of any.  Looks matter much.  We lived in a beige stucco house with a roof so peaked that it belonged in the Tyrol.  What it was doing in Highland Park, Illinois, remains a mystery.  Two years later we moved away.  It was our first house and previously we had lived in ever-larger apartments in Chicago.  So it had importance to us, but was soon superseded by superior houses—quite a string of them, as a matter of fact.  I guess my mother found each inadequate after a few years.

       In this bedroom suburb of Chicago each morning my father rose earlier than most, shaved dryly (electrically), breakfasted on Kellogs, and let my mother drive him to the commuter train which delivered him an hour later to the Loop and Marshall Field and Company.  The tracks it rode on were the same ones than ran behind our house, and rather than casting a blight on us the served to signify an affluence of an odd, passing kind.  It was the Silver Chief's route.   When the sleek, silvery train roared through our backyard, we and our neighbors strived to greet it, standing in our neatly manicured backyards, with apple tree and peony beds, waving for all we were worth.  The engineer (or the fireman, if it was headed in the other direction) invariably raised a gloved hand in response.  He always gave a little toot of recognition.  (Or else it and the chiming bell were for the road-crossing ahead.  More likely.)

       Dad was assistant buyer for furs at Marshall Field and Company, dealing in prestigious luxury items at a time when the nation was locked in the jaws of the Great Depression.  As Gramps indicates in his letter, it was a position of which we were all inordinately aware and proud.  It was a prestigious job that paid in considerable coin.  This Gramps tried to explain to me in his own quaint, pedagogical manner.  I got the message.

       When Daddy went away Bobby became Little Daddy.  Such role playing was common for little boys and girls.  We were being programmed to take our respective places in society.  As eldest son, the burden was mine.  I bore it on my skinny little shoulders like a brave toy soldier, all mine.  And while I complained about it from Day One, my brother was envious, all his life.  He envied me the burden and the locus of attention that came with it.  I've sometimes thought I would gladly give it to him, for what it was worth, but have recently decided not only wouldn't I but I couldn't if I wanted to.  It is mine and I am it its, and that is the way it is.  Primogeniture, for better or worse, as they say about marriage.  In a way you are married to it, we first-born.

       The lot at 717 ran back, back.  Finally its grassy weeds met the low fence marking the railroad's property.  Beneath it at one fence post I had tunneled a crawlspace to a world of standing water, garter snakes, flowering weeds, and flotsam from the train and its passengers.  One of my manly tasks was to cut the huge lawn, especially the part out in back.  In retrospect, it was big as a football field, though I am sure it was not, or half that size.  It is only the perspective of nine years that would make it so.  The mower was hand-powered, of course.  There not any other kind known to our family, then and now.  It is what we've always called getting a workout.

       I have a mental image of going at it, spindly legs achurning, the wet grass sent fairly flying, until what packed around the wheels and axle and rotary-blade sockets brought the skidding mini-thrasher to a halt.  Then I fumblingly disengaged the twined blades of cow fodder failingly fuming, the sweat slithering into eyes behind their gold-rimmed spectacles and lubricating them so that they slid off my ears and nose.  Something much like that.  And this over and over again.

       Meanwhile my father was off in hot New York City, enduring nightclubs and company-paid meals in expensive restaurants and an airconditioned hotel (the Seventh Avenue Statler) and nightly parties for buyers from all over the country, all this just so I could grow up with a strong moral character.  Here I learned to hate cutting grass, though for years it was the only way I could earn any money, which was expected of me.  When I was sixteen and working summers elsewhere, I hired my brother at good pay to do it for me, for it was still as eldest my responsibility.  When my father learned what I had done, rather than be angry, as I had expected, he was proud at how enterprising I had been.  All this is implicit in the 1939 letter from Gramps, I believe.

       I had other Herculean chores to perform, but none stand out; none are memorable.  There was men's work, and women's, each specific according to gender.  My mother was always after me to wash the bathroom floor—a task clearly in her department, though a case could be made for her because females sit down to pee and do not trickle on the floor or elsewhere, while boys and men do, inevitably.  Hence it would be my duty to clean up after myself and the others.  My father did not back her up in this assertion, thankfully, and so she was not successful in making of me what I considered to be a maid, though this does not mean she gave up trying.  It simply means she was never consistently successful.

       Women simply don't understand how it is.  They do not have to aim and are not faced with the problem of The Twin Jets, for instance.  When the two fonts appear at once, which one of them  do you trust?  Which do you believe?  You choose one, and if you are wrong, you pee all over the floor, until you can choke it off.  Women don't know about this.  They think you are careless and sloppy.  And you can't very well explain.  So your mother believes in her unforgiving heart that you deserve to scrub the bathroom floor, weekly or more often, for without you it would remain pristine and unsullied for eternity.  So I was coerced into taking up pail and mop, and applying them  to said floor.  Then I understood what bothered her so.  The stuff stank.  It was terrible, awful to be around.  And I suppose I caused it, or me and my little brother.  And my Dad.  Now I suppose a girl's pee is perfume?

       Cutting the grass was unmistakably male.  It was masculine, perhaps testicular.  Hence thirty years later my father arrived at my grown-up house, one summer twilight, to discover my wife pushing our handmower around the postage-stamp-sized parking strip, while I hung over my typewriter, searching once again for the right word.  Some things never change.  My father called me away from my work and, silently, pointed out for my benefit what my wife was doing.  I was flooded with nine-year-old shame.  I screamed at her to stop, at once.  And she has never, never, since been allowed to cut the grass—though my father is fifteen years dead.

       When I told my own son this tale in due course he heard me out bemused, smiling from his distance with dim apathy and mild interest.  His own wife cuts their sizable lawn with a power mower each week, while he remains at his computer in his loft, writing programs, occasionally smiling encouragement to her from out of the lofty window.

       I now must jump ahead.  From 1939, when we were not yet at war, we rush to late 1945, when the  Second Great War has just ended and the nation is returning to Normalcy.  The Arnold family was both part of its times and stood at a remote distance of them.  This gives us all an odd perspective.

       Gramps is in relative good shape still, and his letters are full of the detailed weather reports that his letters would be incomplete without and sadly lacking.  Cheery as he is, the letters barely hint at the rapid personal disintegration that is to follow.  Gramma has had a major stroke that has left her bedridden in a nursing home; smaller strokes were to follow.  Gramps is living with my Aunt Ruth and her husband, my Uncle Wayne.  It is not clear from the letters (all I have to go by) whether it is Gramps's house still or my aunt and uncle's.  There has been some big mix-up (read Loss) in finances, and my grandparents have sold their house in Beverly Hills.  Perhaps it was sold to pay her medical bills, which were extensive.  Or he had some losses from real estate investments.  Or both.  Anyway my aunt and uncle moved into the Beverly house, then sold it.  They were now paying her nursing home bills, perhaps from the proceeds of the sale.  It is not clear.  They are providing room and board to Gramps; this much is evident.  I remember that he was incapable of taking care of himself, so dependent was he on Gramma's cooking, etc. She spoiled him, in the old-fashioned way of wives with husbands.  I know just how it was, being one myself.  I doubt whether he could cook an egg, let alone sew on a missing button.  At least I can  perform these rudimentary feats.

       So Gramps is living with his daughter and her husband, a man who he has hated from the start.  Both Gramps and my father have always believed that no living man was good enough for Ruth.  The arrangement was thus untenable.  It was soon to prove impossible.

       The first letter is normal and full of the usual data.  It reads:

 

Sunday night

December 16, 1945

Dear Folks,

Just a few lines and I'll finish later.  We are having genuine winter weather.  Clear, bright but cold sunshine every day since it quit snowing.  Below zero this morning and will be about as cold tonight as last night.  The nights are pictures [?].  The moon is 3/4 or more full and the light on the snow is beautiful.  Frost in the air to add to the picture.  I went to church this morning and sat through the sermon.  This reminds me—Mr. McGee, of Bethany Union, Beverly Hills, has resigned the pastorship and a new minister has been chosen.  His name is Snodgrass, from Kansas.  He came on condition—that they provide a parsonage or manse.  That's how I found out—they need the money.  I don't know what has become of Mr. McGee.

 

Did I write you that when I mentioned the gift Ollie had bestowed upon her, she/mother had no recollection of it.  I did not say much about it to her.  We did not go in to see her today.  I was there Friday and Saturday.  She has not got back into her room yet.  I think she is very well satisfied where she is.  Ruth has said she would like to have mother stay in there for Mrs. Mueller (one of the two inmates), was always so cheerful.  Mother has told me several times in the past several weeks about this woman swearing so horribly.  One day last week Mrs. Bigly told me Mother and Mrs. Mueller were writing notes to each other, and were getting along so well together and Mother was so much more quiet than she had been that she thought of asking Mrs. Mueller if she would like to go into Mother's room to stay when Mother moved back.  Yesterday Mrs. Mueller told me that at one time she was trying to adjust a brace and having some difficulty she swore a little.  She said Mother told her to quiet [stet] her swearing and go to praying.  Mrs. Mueller is the most masculine looking woman I ever saw.  At first I thought she was a man until I saw it was a woman in the other bed.  She is certainly a contrast to Mother.  I don't know what she thinks of mother crying so much.  I don't think anything could cause her to cry.  The woman in the other bed has been at Bigly for 4 years.

 

Mother complained of her feet being cold yesterday.  I think they have a fine heating plant at Bigly.  I got a blanket and covered her feet.  She did not want the blanket over her.

 

I bought for her a nice Infant's blanket—large sized—to go over her lap when she sits up—a Xmas gift.  This will do as a foot warmer, too.  I wrote you that mother's blood pressure is 120.  Not bad?  Mine was 170 a week or so ago.  Is that high?  Russel [stet:  a consistent misspelling, which may indicate some thing in the nature of resentment.  He is Wayne's brother] has been discharged from the navy and is home.  He will be here tomorrow.  Wayne's cold is about well, or is well.  I don't know whether Wayne expects to work tomorrow or not.  There will be long week ends this week and next—from Sat. or Friday to the next Wednesday.  The latter is Wayne's.  Same with you?  Be fine for you to rest up before you go to N.Y. Monday night.  I saw Mother this P.M.  Ruth had to stay home to prepared for company—Russel and his wife.  Russ looks just as he did when he entered the service.  Not a change of any kind.

 

I was preparing my supper when Wayne brought him in.  After eating I went in to chat a few minutes when Wayne turned up the radio until I had to yell to talk to him.  When I left he turned it down again.  I felt like biffing him one.

 

I don't know how long he will be here.  I imagine all four will spend Xmas In Polo[?  A town, probably.  I have no idea where.]

 

Poor Mother was so restless today. She was back in her room and "Stella" was in the other bed.  Mrs. Bigly said she thought she would put Stella Mueller in with her for Mother and Stella seemed to get along so well together.  Stella is talkative, lively, and good company for Mother.  I don't think she has ever cried in her life.  She was at Bigly where [read:  "when"] Mother came.  Mother is so childish, just the opposite to Stella.  Stella is a grandmother, too.

 

Mother wanted some cards sent to some of her friends, more than I have sent already, so I got some more cards to send.

 

It is awfully cold tonight again, and almost a full moon.  Snow is promised for tomorrow.  I guess we are in for a hard winter.

 

I have a letter started to your Uncle Rufe, which I must finish and then get at Mother['s] cards.

 

I know you folks will have a merry Christmas without my wishing you one.  You always do have a big time.  I'll write some before Xmas but you may not get it until after.  My love to  all of you, Dad.

 

I got notice I had mailed a letter to you without postage on it—Chicago P.O.  I sent the stamps.  You will get it with this one may be.

 

The following from my Aunt Ruth, recovered in the same box, illustrative of what is to come.

 

 

523 So. Illinois Avenue

Villa Park, Illinois

January 3, 1946

 

Dear Folks,

Probably Eddie will have left for Chicago by the time this reaches Seattle, but I'll address it to all of you anyway.  We are looking forward to seeing him sometime around the 7th—and hope he'll have time to stop over both ways.  Wish Cecile [my mother] could be with him, this time, as she was a year ago; we really are looking forward to the time when the whole family can come and pay us a long visit.

 

The Christmas box from Seattle for Daddy, Wayne, and me came on the same day as my new fur coat—on the Friday after Christmas.  Everything was most welcome and very much appreciated.  My slip is lovely and fits perfectly and I was delighted with the perfume.  I shall wear the Town variety when I go in to Chicago and the Country one when I go to social occasions here in Villa Park!  Wayne likes his lighter very much and I'm sure Daddy has written to you his appreciation of the books.  He is reading the Ernie Pyle one now and is apparently enjoying it very much. Eddie wrote that Bob and Dick are renewing the subscription to Life as our collective Christmas gift, and that was good news, too.  It is a fine magazine and we all enjoy it immensely.  Thanks a lot for everything, everybody!

 

My coat is lovely and is warm!  It fits well and everyone thinks it looks well on me.  The first day I wore it, I went in to see Mr. Metheral [the manager of the Fur Salon at Fields and my father's former boss], just to have an expert look at it and tell me if it needed any slight adjustment or alteration that I might not be aware of.  He said he thought it was just right and didn't need anything.  Incidentally, I was invited to lunch at Field's tea room and to the theatre [stet] (Blackstone) the day after the coat came—so you see it arrived just in time!  I've been especially notching mouton coats since mine came and I haven't seen any yet that I like so well as mine.  [My father's discount ordinarily was 15%, but on a fur coat it would be around 40%, perhaps more.]

 

I hope our packages for you arrived safe and sound and that you all had a wonderful Christmas.

 

Wayne's brother, Russell, received his discharge from the Navy on December 15 and he and his wife came out here on the 17th and spent a couple of days with us.  Then the following Sunday we all went to Polo and spent Christmas with Russell's and Wayne's mother and step-father.  Wayne and I came back Christmas night because Wayne had to work the next day, but Russell and Ruth Ann stayed in Polo.

 

I did appreciate the nice letter from Dick, received some time ago, and hope he will write another one before long.  I think you write very well with ink, Dicky.  We enjoyed Bob's letter to Grandpa and Grandma, too, telling about his Scout hike, etc.  Sorry Bob had the flu, but we're glad it didn't last any longer than it did.  I wonder what the skit was that Bob had to do alone at the Scout Christmas party.  I'll bet he did it well, even though he was coming down with the flu at the same time.  [I generally got "the flu" at the same time I was required to perform in ;public, and while this didn't stop me, it made me feel rotten and nervous.  Still do.]

 

I can just imagine how pretty your Christmas tree looked in front of the big window in the living room.

 

I wonder if the newspaper strike in Seattle has been settle yet.  It must be strange to have no newspapers for so long.

 

We have been having real winter weather here—lots of snow and ice.  I don't mind the snow at all, but I don't like the ice. Walking has been very difficult, with dangerously slippery streets and sidewalks, for some time now and it looks as if it will continue that way for a while.  I've been trying to persuade Daddy to say in because I'm so afraid of his falling on the ice.

 

Mr. Truman is now broadcasting his [on radio, of course] report on the State of the Nation, so I guess I'll sign off and see what he has to say.

 

Much love to you all—and write, any or all of you, when you can—and thanks again for the nice Christmas gifts.  Ruth

 

 

       Back to Gramps, and the start of what can only be called in cold retrospect his rapid, major decline.]

 

 

528 South Illinois Ave.

Villa Park, Ill.

P.M. September 17, 1946,

[Addressed to Mr. Edmund C. Arnold, Seattle, Wash. c/o Frederick and Nelson, Fur Dept.  That's all.]

 

Sunday night—9/15

 

Dear Edmund,

This is Sunday night and I can't refrain from writing to my boy, altho [stet] I sent him one letter this week already.  It breaks my loneliness and helps pass my time in this lonely house, silent house.  Wayne must make Ruth play bridge, for I used to hear Ruth say she does not like it, night after night she and Wayne play by the hour, often with the radio going.  They keep out of sight, so making no sounds it seems they are away.

 

I went to Elgin today.  Saw Mrs. Washer and the upper floor nurse and asked them how Mother is doing.  "Just fine," they both said. A very nice way for critical trouble to end.  Other had the [bed] pan while I was there—I put the [hook?] over her hand before the nurse came in, and took it off when the nurse went to empty the pan.

 

I read the article by [Malcolm] Cowley in this week's "Life," "U.S. Books Abroad" to her.  This week's copy of Life is a remarkably fine one.  You should take the time to read some in it.  No doubt Cecile will read some of the fine articles.  I hope Bobby's finds some of them interesting.  A glance at the index of contents ought to interest him a lot.  Some are "right up his alley."

 

Don't miss this week's copy.

 

We are having lots of good things to eat now from the garden.  I picked the grapes and let Ruth sell them after I found a buyer.  No sugar.  We had two bushels of grapes.  I set out the grapes when we first came here, when I put out the strawberry rhubarb which I brought from Beverly.  We have strawberries, raspberries, and asparagus besides.

 

How is the Bellevue store showing up?  This may reduce sales at your main store.  Aren't the women wearing fur hats this winter?  How is your fur designer since he got back from the war?  [This was John O'Grady, who used to send me military souvenirs, including his Fourth Division shoulder patch.  Aside from this act of generosity to his boss's son, I don't remember him at all.

 

The following evidently to me, Gramps having heard that I was experiencing orthodontia:]

 

 

My upper cuspids (canines) came in too late to get in line and had to take front seats.  Father took me to a dentist a little soon and in the effort to get hold of the tooth to extract it the dentist hurt me so terribly, he put off extracting the other one.  I never could endure the thought of having that lonely outstanding tooth extracted until I was a big hulk of a boy.  I was so ashamed of my appearance when I laughed.  I always put my hand over my mouth. Finally one day I acquired enough nerve to resolve to have it out.  I went up the road a few rods to the home of a country doctor, who lived on a 20-acre farm—"Doc Cowan"—He got me out on the front porch and after anchoring his forceps on the canine we wrestled around over that porch—I seated on a straight back kitchen chair, and Doc ambling about on all sides of me, he succeeded in yanking it out, holding it up in front as proof of the job was done.  I expected to see hair on the tip of its root it was so long.

 

The lower canines came in on time of the incisors and made them turn sideways, the alignment being anything but perfect.  The canines should not have been extracted above or below, but an incisor should have been sacrificed in all four places.  The canines give the proper contour to the upper jaw, but they did not know any better 70 years ago.  Orthodentistry was not in our school books then, Bob. 

 

 

A dentist married a first cousin of mine—Cora Grubbs, of Albina [Ohio], and we got our dental work done at reduced rates.  After I had taught country school a year or two, I had an attack of "fevers."  My teeth began to decay and I gave that dentist a lot of work.  When he got through drilling and filling I averaged a filling for each tooth—or almost that. I had 30 teeth and about 20 fillings.  I spent several Saturdays in Dr. Stadder's chair.  I was 21 years old when I had the fever and I guess I have some of the doctors [stet]

filings still in my mouth.  No bridges, no false teeth, and only one crown.  See if you can beat it, Bob.  [Couldn't.]  You will have to wait awhile.  But in the meantime take good care of your teeth—nature won't give you any more replacements.  When your present set is gone you will have to gum it or buy false teeth.  And Dick can profit by our examples.

 

Has Grandma Clark returned from the Rockies?  She got pretty close to where Ruth was one autumn—Bozeman.  She and a young bacteriologist student name Mary Sarine [?] drove by auto and visited Yellowstone park and the Teton mountains, going thru several Indian reservations.  They took home another "bacti" student—Edith Swingle—whose father taught bacteriology in the Bozeman college, who sent his daughter to Chicago U. to graduate.  Mary Sarine came from Michigan to study "bacti" and after graduating had a position in the research department at the Rush Medical College.  She is now raising a family next door to us in Villa Park.

 

Missoula is not far from Bozeman.  Get out your atlas, Bob and Dick.

 

I am enclosing a sketch [a newspaper feature, with a screened photo of a plain, cheerful girl] of Jane Connelly, daughter of Joe Connelly, Joe being a first cousin of Edmund Arnold, copied from the high school paper of their home town by her Aunt Jennie Connelly, of Westfield, and sent to me.  Joe graduated from Illinois U. just after he returned from the 1st World War.  Jane is one Connelly that shows promise. I imagine she "takes after her father."

 

 

[Taken from the Petersburg High School Paper.  About Jane Connelly.  (Senior)

 

Jane came to Petersburg High School from Pekin [?] High at the beginning of her Junior year, their loss has been our gain without a doubt.  Jane is very active in the local Girl Scout Troop.  She was in the Gay Nineties Review which was presented in many places through out the community.  She is also associate editor of the Sphinx.  Jane's trade mark is her constant smile, no matter what the weather is she is always smiling.  She makes all near her happy and cheerful.  She is always ready to cooperate and help others when ever the opportunity knocks.  Jane plans to go to college with her high scholastic standing and with her winning personality she is bound to reach the top in every walk of life she enters.  She has what it takes.  Our Janie]

 

The plant lice (aphids) ruined my asters this year.  They worked under the ground—a small green variety and I did not discover them until too late—thought it was the dry weather that was stunting their development.  I had had experience with the very small white lice which work deep in the soil on the small root of the asters.  I might have used some "Black Leaf 40" on them had I discovered them sooner.  I can't raise turnips on account of these little devils and they are going after my kohlrabi and Chinese cabbage.  You know they are propagated by ants (excuse me, Dorothy).  [Dorothy was my maiden aunt on my mother's side.]  Were there no ants there would be no lice, no aphids,  They are called the ant's cows.  Did you ever see the ants milk their cows?  I have watched them do it.  The ant carries an aphid to a leaf and it is only a short time until the leaf is covered with young ones, they multiply so fast.  See if you can find some, Bob.  I must close and get in bed.  Love to all—good night.

Dad and Grandpa

 

 

[Okay.  Me speaking again.  Gramps is still okay.  Sure, there is a little oddness to his words, but hasn't there always been?  It is half his charm.  The old pedagogic bent is alive and ticking.  His days as principal of what was essentially a business college are behind him.  You can take the man out of the classroom, etc.  And what is a grandfather to do if not preach and instruct his grandchildren?  I mean, there have to be some perks to old age, or else it is unmitigated pain, neglect, and misery.

       But now the tone changes; it does so by degrees.  Gone is the playfulness and the wit.  Well, he was getting on, and he was no longer young.  I've always had trouble finding out when (and where) anybody in my family was born.  James C. Arnold is no exception.  I know his wife, Sara Leigh Connelly, was born in 1878, in January.  From textual evidence I've found later in these letters I think he was about ten years older than she.  This would make him born in or around 1868.

       Some terrible things are starting to happen.  His health, for instance.  It is not your normal accumulation of complaints associated with aging.  Instead it is a litany of rather severe and surprising manifestations of ill health, surprising because they arrived and found him unprepared.  He reports them  almost as though they were happening to someone else.

       I have since noticed that this is singular among the Arnold men.  When we get sick we also get surprised, and we will recount to whomever is handy the extensive details of what we have perceived about our bodily processes with complete oblivion to how the account is being received by its (let us say) random audience.

       When my own father was stricken in the late 1980s, he did much the same thing with me.  I was more than interested; I was weirdly fascinated.  The day before the night he died, he described to me in the trauma room of Swedish Hospital, to which he had just been admitted and where he was undergoing the tests that continued until nearly midnight—or three hours before he died—his mysterious and fascinating symptoms.  He might as well be describing the industry of a colony of ants.  Or aphids.

       If he did not lie flat on his back, his blood pressure would drop to nearly zero and he would pass out.  Though distressing, I don't think (I must believe this) he was not undergoing any great pain, only consternation and—-that inadequate word again—-continual surprise.

       Well, here is the forerunner to Gramps's demise, and perhaps my own.  Remember, you heard it here first, Folks:]

 

 

Villa Park, Illinois

Monday, 9-16 [1946]

Dear Son:

I wrote you a letter last night intending to mail it this morning but I am so dizzy I have not gone to the mail box.  I had a spell about a month ago, and saw my doctor, and my blood pressure was only 145.  My head aches as it did then.  The sawbones said it was from my stomach.  I think I ate too much supper last night, when I returned from Elgin.  I thought I was using quite a lot of moderation, too.  But it was late and I have been accustomed to eating only shredded wheat and milk for supper.  This time it was some beef (very unusual) a very small piece, potatoes, and succotash (Lima beans & corn) and vegetable salad.  I'll be o.k. soon.

 

I received your letter written Thursday—a nice letter and I'll try to answer it now.  Ruth got it from the postman and as she left a few minutes ago she asked if she could read it to Mother.  I told her I should do it tomorrow.

 

I am awfully glad you get a half day off.  [This was about the time Marshall Field instituted the Saturday afternoon pass for its employees.]  It is only customary any how.  Now spend it out doors.  Have a good time.  It's coming to you.

 

Tell Bob to organize a sand lot feet [stet] ball team and play the J. & S. [junior and senior?] team.  It takes more brawn than brains, may be, Bob.

 

Yes, I do get a blue feeling often, but I must quit overflowing on you.  You need a free mind to attend to your work properly.

 

I think Ruth's attitude toward me is the result of Wayne's pressure to make life miserable for me.  He realizes she can do more in this line than he can.  A word or two semi-critical about Wayne is enough to throw Ruth into hysterics. 

 

It has been a year now since he has been carrying all the milk and making Ruth carry all the groceries.  He knows I want to do it.  He evidently thinks it shows I am not needed about the place.  Three or four days ago Ruth carried home in two baskets a lot of fruit jars from Elmo Smith's.  I asked her why she did not let me do it.  I did not know she was out of jars, and told her I would be glad to carry all such loads and the milk as I used to do.  This threw her into one of the worst cases of hysterics she has had yet.  She simply went crazy.  I could not stop her and the more I tried to reason with her the worse she got.  She ran to the bath room to find some poison to kill herself.  It took her out of the bathroom and she started to go to Mary's.  I grabbed her and forced her into her bedroom—all the time she was screaming and yelling at the top of her voice.  I tossed her on the bed but she jumped up a half dozen times to try to get past me to the door.  I told [her] I meant to stay and keep her in the room until she realized what she was doing.  I told her at best I could how I had studied hysteria at the C[hicago]. U. Library and the only thing recommended was to leave the subject alone, go away from her.  I told her she would have to acknowledge and realize how insane she was acting before she could correct herself—that I would make her stay in that bed room until she did if it took all afternoon and I could not go to Elgin. [Ostensibly to see his sick wife.]  I kept talking to her all the time and at the end of half an hour she quieted down and came to me and put her arms around my neck and her head on my shoulder and she cried like a baby.  It looked like she had thoroughly realized what she had done.  She seemed like Ruth used to be and I was very happy.  I felt I had solved the problem.  She maintained this attitude that evening and the next day.  She got me the best dinner next day I have had for a long time.  She is gradually getting back again to her old way, but seems to try to be reasonable.  I know Wayne won't stand for her changing her feeling for me if he can help it.

 

After the Seattle visit [a visit from my father, on his way to NYC?]  Wayne had the Waterman Home trap ready to spring.  It didn't work.  He had Ruth (and you, too, maybe) thinking it was the thing.  He would get rid of both of us and be in full possession of our goods.  They would have to make only one or two trips there in a month, for it would require two days and a night to make the round trip. They could not expect their friends here to drive them over three times a week, or even once a week.  Ruth goes 3 time each week and Mother thinks it is not often enough.  This was too much for Mother to consent to do.

 

The whole thing is like a bet to Wayne.  His gambling instinct tells him he has to win.  He works harder at something like this than he would to make his living.  [After the ear, when the government cut back its bureaucracy, Wayne was offered a demotion and transfer out of the Office of Price Administration.  He didn't have to take it and didn't.  Instead he retired early on pretty good pay, when he parlayed into much more money.  He was less than fifty at the time.  My father scorned this, but there was envy, too.]  He must win out in some way.  He repeatedly told me to leave and I don't do it.  Getting in at Elgin spoiled his plans.

 

I am very sure Wayne can find nothing in my conduct toward him since Ruth came from her visit.  While she was gone he left home before I was up and came home at bed time.  He would not stay around.  I am certain he did not speak a word to me while she was gone.  He has not recognized me since she returned.  It does not bother me one bit for him to act as he does.  He must know it.  But he knows I do care for Ruth's good opinion.  There is where the rub has been.  He must make her an enemy of mine no matter how it tortures her.

 

Well, there is nothing that either you or I can do about it.

 

I stay in my room and Ruth spends no time with me, when he is home, unless it is while we wash dishes.

 

I don't believe he could compel Ruth to sell. It is a joint tenancy affair.  He might scare her into it by threatening to leave her.  But he knows she would not want to go too far from Mother.  I don't believe he has nerve enough to go to New York or any distant place.

 

Sometimes I wonder if he is really working at the OPA office.

 

I don't feel their [stet] is any danger of his leaving Villa Park very soon.  I have not been very uneasy about it.  I have no desire to change my habitat.  I am content to stay here under present conditions. Your noble assurances, my dear boy, are fully appreciated and accepted with deepest humility.  You must not worry any about me.  I'm not worth it.  I am sorry I must impose on you.  Ruth will be curious to know bout your letter and so will Mother.  I will try to get by this difficulty.  My love to you and yours—Always—Dad

 

 

       This is a wonderful letter.  It is horrible, too.  It says it all.  Here is a lucid man, full of sentimentality and the conventional maudlin thinking about his family and how they ought to behave idyllically who, in a flash, switches over to a fairly strong paranoid scenario in which various members are out to get him, which actually proved to be the case.  If you think a thing is true, it is.  His description of what was happening to him is both candid and fraught with outrage.  Well, his life was beginning to change markedly and he was no longer his own person, in charge of daily events.  He was, in fact, a victim of them, however much he might resist.  There is great sadness here.  He has lost his wife to illness, that is, paralytic stroke; then his house and possessions, and finally his daughter, whom he believed was turned against him by her evil husband.  All he had for hope was his son, who lived clear across the country in Seattle.  A series of letters resulted, written to my father, Edmund begging him to intervene and save the life of this powerless and imprisoned man, his father.

       I am not overstating the case.  The letters are touching and often ludicrous.  The self-pity is obvious but appropriate to the events.  I have absolutely no doubt that he believed everything was happening as he said it was.  His feelings of unworthiness are both real and contrived.  Such abjectness I have trouble comprehending.  He wanted to make something different happen—the course of his life.  It moves me.  My heart feels caught in a wringer.

       The more I read, the more I feel myself becoming an advocate for Gramps.  I feel he badly needs one.  But I am just a kid.  Besides, the letters are not to me.  Only now do I get to read them.  And now is way too late.  He is alone in a alien and hostile world.  It is closing in on him.  It is stealing from him by degrees the one thing he values more than his freedom.  His reason.

       The next letter is from his sister, Ruth, however.  A thank-you note.  Short as it is, the subject of Gramps and what to do about him immediately comes up.

 

 

Villa Park, Ill.

June 19, 1947

 

Dear Eddie,

This will be just a note to enclose one which Mother wrote to you last Sunday to thank you for her bed jackets.  They are really very lovely and she is very pleased with them.  Daddy said he wrote you, "accepting" them, and the pajamas as Mother's Day and Father's Day gifts.  I don't know why he did that.  He must have forgotten, for one thing, that you bought the plant for the Mother's Day gift.  Of course it is up to you, but what I said before still stands and if you'll let me know the amount I'll see that you are reimbursed.

 

Mother was some better on Sunday.  I am going to Elgin this evening and hope to find her still better.

 

Must get dressed and go to work.  Will write more next time.  Love, Ruth

 

Enclosed on a newsprint half-sheet, in shaky pencil scrawl, as though written overhead while lying on her back, is the only written communication I remember from my paternal grandmother after about the age of six.  But she continues to exist in inscriptions on the flyleaf of children's books she gave me for Christmas and other occasions—usually a child's version of some classic such as The Swiss Family Robinson, or that other Robinson, the one named Caruso.

 

 

Dear Edmund, I can't tell how lovelely [stet] your present to me seemed and I can't say thanks enough, Dear, Your loving mother

 

 

And now back to Gramps and his problems, which were considerable.  I leave the spelling and punctuation as I found them:

 

 

Restville House Convalescent Home

443 E. Chicago St.

Elgin, Illinois

July 28, 1947

7/25/47

Dear Son:

Ruth was [here] last evening.  Before Supper Lulu, Phoebe, and Florence, the three Thompson sisters were here.  Ruth came alone.  Our [efficient?] nurse, Mrs. Malone went on a 10 day vacation [?] to her home in Huntington, W. Virginia, last Wednesday night.

 

7/26.   Last night was the warmest nite we ever had.  I slept under a sheet till 3 o'clock, with all the windows wide open.

 

I have been sitting under a tree for about 2 hours each day.  I get up and walk back and forth on the concrete " [stet] in that time.

 

Mother drinks so little water, one drink in the first part of the night which I usually give her and suffices.  Miss Kurt, the night nurse, knows only "Bed pan" in mother's language.  Where do I go from here?  The future looks obscure and dark.  I am glad for Bob to have an opportunity to indulge in his favorite pastime, fishing.  You are always thinking of something for our comfort, which shows you have a kind heart.

 

Sunday am.

Thunder storms after 3 oclock am. cooled the air so I could use my razor without fear of collecting too much Sweat.  Yesterday it was 92 degrees at 5 A.M.  The air was very humid.  Mother was fretful.

 

Pm.

Have just come upstairs:  have been out in the yard.  While I was out there the ambulance that took me to [Round Lake?], brought another patient to Restville.  They seemed surprised to see me here.

 

Since I returned I have been trying to teach Mother some things she ought to know.  It can't be done. 

 

Mrs. Gregvy advises me to give it up.  She says "it is hard to teach  an old dog new tricks."  Mrs. Gregvy has been here 4 years or more, and occupies the room next to ours.

 

With much love for all or you I will close, this, my longest letter to you since I have been stricken.  Dad

 

 

       Stricken?!  Then he knows what has happened to him.  Of course.  But he is restricted in his reactions, and the sense of tedium and helplessness are mounting.  Meanwhile his wife remains articulate—if only to him.  He has hopes he can teach her a few things.  After all, she is child-like and he a retired teacher.  He brings her her bedpan.  He reads her letters she cannot understand.  Her face grimaces at the effort at comprehending.  It looks like a smile.  She cries often—in fact, she cries all the time.

       She is his wife, after all.  Marriage is forever.  They are still together, aren't they?  Still, he can he feel the time approaching when they will be separated.  Daily she is giving up the threads of consciousness and comprehension.  Gramps senses a plot hatching to send him away from her because he has grown incorrigible since he was stricken.  He dreads this.  He can hear the clock ticking.

       Time hangs heavily.  And there is the heat, besides.  What is worse than the searing heat, the windlessness, the high humidity, the torpidity, of an Illinois summer?

 

 

Ruth speaking again, and the subject is dire:

 

523 So. Illinois Ave.

Villa Park, Illinois

Sept. 1, 1947

 

Dear Eddie,

I'm sorry to have to tell you that Daddy is back at Round Lake.  At Wayne's suggestion I called Mrs. Washer Saturday morning and asked if she would be willing to keep Daddy a little longer, saying that you were going to look for a place for him in Seattle and might take him there sometime before long.  But she was not willing to consider it. She said he had been "terrible' all day Friday, the patients were all very much upset, the night nurse was so afraid of him she would not go in the room, etc.  So I went to Elgin, prepared to get Daddy moved somewhere, although I didn't know where.  I couldn't make up my mind to move him to the Mary Margaret Home (where I had been with Mrs. Washer Thursday night) because, although it is only two blocks from Restville House and the rates are only $100 a month, I didn't like that fire escape opening off the dormitory which I told you about.  So I went first to Hilcrest, a nursing home which I knew takes men (and the only one I know of).  I was there quite a while because I had to see several different people—and wait in between times.  At first they said they couldn't take him because they had no room, but finally by moving a patient they made room for him, and the son-in-law of the woman in charge drove me in his car to Restville House.  I went to look for Mrs. Washer first before going up to the room.  Mrs. Washer said that Daddy had been talking all day about the "holy hell" he was going to give me when I came.  She said one of the nurses, Mrs. Malone, would go in with me and she and Mr. Washer would be right here if we needed them.  I'd rather not tell you many of the details of the terrible scene that followed.  I had hoped to be able to spare Mother from seeing much of it, but that  was impossible.  It took Mr. and Mrs. Washer and Mrs. Malone all three together to get him out of the chair, out of the room and down the back stairs.  Of course we had attempted to talk to him calmly and sensibly but that was impossible, too.  Daddy fought with superhuman strength and they could hardly get him into the car, but finally did.  Mr. Washer's face was badly scratched and there was blood all over his face and his shirt.  Daddy kept shouting that he was being kidnapped—but he knew that he wasn't going to be allowed to stay at Restville, and he knew why, although he never made any reply when we told him again why he had to leave—only that he was being kidnaped.  By the time they had got him in the car, Mrs. Washer said it was no use taking him to Hilcrest because they would never take him.  He kept saying he would tell them he had been kidnaped and taken there, and he would give no kind of a promise to behave himself there.  The only other place we knew of, the only place we knew would take him, was Round Lake. [A mental institution.]  When Daddy heard "Round Lake" he began to yell that he would kill himself—but still he would not agree to go to Hilcrest.  He was still unmanageable and the Washers were exhausted, so they finally called the police and the squad car came, but they could not take him to Round Lake because it was out of town.  So finally they called an ambulance and he went by ambulance to Round Lake.

 

It broke my heart to have him go there again, knowing how unhappy he was there before.  But believe me, Eddie, there was nothing else to do.  I hated to insist on your coming here this week end, but Saturday I wished that I had—for many reasons.  For one thing, I don't believe Daddy would have thrown a fit like that if you had been there.  For another, Daddy thinks all this is my doing and that you know nothing of it.  I told him I had wired you and you had called and what you had said for me to do, and he said I was lying.

       Mrs. Washer thinks he is definitely a mental case and should be nowhere else but at Round Lake or at Elgin State Hospital.  As for my opinion, I don't know.  I can't understand why he says and does the things he does, but he can be so very charming and nice—and very intelligent. Mother was so afraid of him and was so relieved to have him taken away.  I asked if she would like to have him go out to Seattle and she nodded her head vigorously "yes."  I believe that Daddy would be wiling to go to Seattle, certainly as an alternative to staying at Round Lake.  He will have to stay there until some decision is reached concerning him.  And I do hope you will come as soon you possibly can so we can decide what to do together.  It costs $55 a week at Round Lake, too, you know.  $90 for him and Mother.

 

I wish I hadn't had to write this letter—and that I didn't have to ask you to come, but he is your father, too, and we have to decide together what to do.  Love, Ruth

 

 

       Never in these letters is heard my father's voice.  It is as though he has been rendered mute to what is happening and must watch silently from his distance.

       It is either his father's voice or Ruth's, over and over.  But I can imagine the dread with which he greets the day's mail at night, after returning from another day of turmoil at the store.  I imagine his letters for him.  His response is always measured, considerate, kind.  He tries to do the right thing.  The pressures are intense.

       Picture this:  in his home in Seattle live his wife and two sons, but also his wife's mother and her sister.  He supports the mother-in-law and gives her a home.  The sister has a job and pays token board-and-room.  She has never married and lives in that tight, suppressed bondage that often exists between mother and daughter.  They are emotionally dependent on each other.  The mother has disapproved of the one or two men the daughter has brought home over the years.  None were good enough for the daughter who has been, all along, in second place to the eldest, who has married well.  My mother Cecile, or as she is known, Mimi.

       Now my father has family problems of his own, including a mother who is next to comatose, her mind gone, subject to constant unexplained weeping.  A father whose mind is going by degrees and has become angry and unmanageable.  He can no longer live with his daughter and her husband, a man he has long despised and believed unworthy of her love.  He fought the marriage and has never accepted it.  My father never except Wayne, either, poor guy.  There must be his side of it.

       Back to Gramps.  It is commonly understood that paranoids soon make enemies of the people around them, who then prove to be genuine enemies, all along.  "You see, I was right.  They're in cahoots."  I can picture Gramps triumphant at instances of discovering plots to send him away and lock him up.

       And the plots have substance.  They carry the weight of their own involvement separate from what was going on in his mind.  This leads us to what he calls "The Dog Episode."  It shows considerable restraint on Gramps's part, I think.

       It might be called "The Case of the Filthy Bitch."  Whatever, it led to his unraveling.  I cannot help but be his advocate again, but what good is an advocate so removed by time?  I was no help then and not now.  Besides, everybody involved is dead.  So the advocate is no help at all; he is helpless himself.  All he can do is respond with all his heart in a situation in which no action is possible.  It is gut-wrenching to read about, even after all this time.  I can actually feel my belly squirm each time I read the next letter.

 

 

J.C. Arnold

Bellevue Place

Box 472

Round Lake, Ill.

[Addressed by somebody else who is left-handed and uses ink.  Gramps always used pencil.  But the body of the letter is definitely his and in pencil.]

 

PM September 2, 1947

Dear Son:

Here I am at Round Lake again.  It happened this way.  I had been staying inside with Mother for two years or more.  It was so hot.  I wanted exercise and [illegible].  I would begin to take it that morning (yesterday).  [It] now seems Mrs. Carol one of our 2 day nurses, had quit last Monday.  We were [running left] with one day nurse.  I went to the toilet from there I could see into the 3-bedroom [wing?].  I could see no nurses.  Then I went to Mrs. Gregg's room and told her how I [use to tiptoe down those steps and never fall].  I told her how Mr. Washer had called from somewhere in the kitchen to me (I could not see him) to go on up, when I would stop at [the] back kitchen door to ask him to escort me upstairs.  He thought Mrs. Washer would not care.  I went once more to the toilet but could see no nurses.  Then I resolved to wait no longer.

 

I was walking back and forth for some time when Mrs. Washer appeared.  She offered to get me a chair.  I told her I would rest awhile on the stone steps.  She went into the house.  I continued my walk and went upstairs.  I saw no evidence of anger in Mrs. W.  On Wednesday night was awakened at 7[9?]:30 in time to see Mrs. Kurt, the night nurse, driving a dog out of our room.  I asked who had let the dog in.  She replied, "It is none of your business."  Well, I'll make it my business.  I'll find

out, or follow him outside.

 

Now it happened the morning before I was sent to Round Lake before I had put this same dog out, but between 3 and 4 o'clock, with considerable opposition on the part of Mrs. Kurt.  When [I] said, "I will put him out," She ordered me to get back in bed.  I again announced my purpose of putting him out.  The Amazon, for such she is, fought with all the fury of a wild cat.  I finally reached the toilet and looked inside.  The dog was not there.  I said [I] would stand there until somebody let it outside.  In a few minutes I recognized one yelp out side and went back to bed.

 

The dog is a spayed bitch of considerable size, with long jet black hair, and a long bushy tail.  Just the kind to gather dirt and keep it.  According to Mr. Washer, it has never had a bath.  It belongs to the Washers.

 

When Ruth came Thursday evening, she had hardly been seated when Mrs. Kurt came to the door and said Mrs. Washer wanted to see her.  Ruth came back in one hour and a half! The limit of her usual time.  As she came by for her things, she picked them up.  I asked her repeatedly for five minutes of her time to tell her the dog episode.  She refused to talk to me.  However she left the room to go to see Mrs. W.  She did not know what the interview was for.  But I did.  All she said to me was, "I'll be back Saturday."  She had never visited Restville before on Saturday.

 

Sat., 2 days later, was when I took my first walk outside alone.  So the matter of my disposal was decided upon at this hour and half interview.

 

When Ruth appeared Saturday she proceeded at once to the closet to begin packing.  I demanded to know where they were taking me.  The information was refused me.  Then I said, "I will not leave this room until I learn where you are talking me."  With this Mrs. Washer stepped to the back door and, unlocking it, called her husband, a husky fellow weighing two hundred pounds and the fight began.  Besides Mr. and Mrs. W., there were Ruth and Mrs. Kurt, the day nurse.

 

To make a long story short, they finally got me out to the car.  [But not till you bloodied big Mr. W., Gramps; good for you!  It was four to one.]  But they could not get enough of me in the car, and what was in was keeping Mr. W. so busy he decided not to take me to my new house and called an ambulance.  The police came and one of them became so confidential when he heard my story that he gave some advice that may be helpful in case we decide bringing suit.

 

Here is the only fly in the ointment.  When Ruth Thursday evening was bidding her mother good night, I reached over to grab her [Ruth] by the throat, but I realized what I was doing in time to check myself and I began to apologise [stet].  I was so angry that she would not give me five minutes to tell my story of the dog episode.

 

Mrs. Washer has not been friendly with me since I came back.  She has been even very disrespectful at times.  Ruth is influenced by her whether from out of fear that she may turn Mother out or because she knows how I resent any intrusion of my  rights, or any restrictions on my liberties.  There is too much Anglo-Saxon in my blood, I guess.  My future is uncertain; it is dark and gloomy.  When I think of how [resultless?] our lives may end I can not see why the Lord wants us to live any longer—Mother and I.

 

We are an expense to our children.  No good in this world.  Why should we continue to exist?  Wayne is pulling some of the wires. 

 

If you have not already obligated yourself to pay the $20 increase (the cost here is [by the week] at Restville 35 dollars) don't do it.  I'll explain later.  I must close or die from over exertion.  Dad

 

 

       Me speaking again.  I quote the part from Gramps's letter above.  "The dog is a spayed bitch of considerable size, with long jet black hair, and a long bushy tail.  Just the kind to gather dirt and keep it.  According to Mr. Washer, it has never had a bath.  It belongs to the Washers."

       How is that—students—for expository writing?  Does it leave anything for the imagination to furnish?  Is any more needed?

       How can somebody whose mind is supposedly gone, who is paranoid in a clinical sense, who is despondent, who is lost, gone nuts, write so very well?  How can he describe the situation in which he is enmeshed so that—-nearly fifty years later—we respond as if it were yesterday?  Or even had happened only today?  How can we not see that dog—the big, black, spayed bitch, probably overweight, surely filthy, if never in its lifetime bathed?  Evidently the dog had the run of the place.  Nobody dared protest because the Washers ran the place with an iron hand.  There is a waiting list.  They will throw you out if you make noise.  Private health-care institutions are sometimes like this, then and now.

       The episode is not yet over.  It continues to reverberate.  Gramps revisits it time after time in his mind.  He broods on it.  He fairly masticates it.   The dog is central to the crisis in his life, both its focus and its manifestation.  And it is not over with.  He refers to it pointedly in at least two letters to come.  Each time the effect is telling.

       Bear with me.  This will take a bit more unraveling.  But now an oddball letter.  It is the only one from my Uncle Wayne about this time.  From it can be determined a number of interesting and useful things.  One, Wayne is intelligent and persuasive.  He chooses his words well.  He presents his case from the standpoint of his wife effectively.  One could say (and I would, and so would Gramps) that this is clever and self-serving.  But something more important comes through in the presentation.  Wayne loathes his father-in-law, my Gramps.  He wants him out of his life, institutionalized.  And poor Ruth is being stretched like a rubberband between husband and father.

       Before you pity any one of them too much, remember:  Gramps is fighting for his life, what there is left of it.  I mean, everybody is aligned against him.  He has no freedom, no money, no home, no supportive wife.  He is striving to save the two things he has left, namely his self-respect and his sanity.  And if it isn't absolutely clear by now, let me repeat, I'm on your side, Gramps.  Somebody has to be, mean-spirited and ornery as he is.  But in a way, isn't he wonderful, too?

       So here is an unintentional self-portrait of my Uncle Wayne.  Did he know what he was saying?  How transparent his words were?  I should think not:

 

 

Villa Park, Ill.

September 10, 1947

 

Dear Edmund:

This is Ruth's birthday so will write a letter in her behalf.  We received your letter today and were both disappointed in your reaction to what transpired after Washers refused to keep your Father any longer.  We felt that you should and would view the situation with far more seriousness and would act accordingly.  It was unfortunate that Ruth had to go through a day of horror the like of a week ago Saturday.  Had you flown out here as soon as you could, it would have been better for the ["three" is struck out] four of the five of us—Ruth fainted that day and has been very nervous ever since.  But that is water over the dam.  We must look to the future.

 

Your idea to have your Father cared for in a University of Illinois Old Peoples Home, while it may save a little money—certainly will not remove the burden from Ruth.  She must try to see both parents in different places, one East and one West—and work besides: to help meet expenses.  And if your Father were to get to Elgin—only Ruth could see that he would get there safely.  It is too [underlined three times] much to ask her to do that.  If she gets sick from all this strain, then there can be no help forthcoming for your parents at all—unless you take over.  It seems only reasonable that she be asked to personally look after her mother and that you take your Dad out to Seattle.  There you can visit him.  If he is left here, Ruth cannot [underlined twice] go to see him—and her mother too.  Your Dad would be alone and [that] would be unkind to him.  As far as his being separated from his wife, he has been given ample opportunity to prove his love for her—and he has failed dismally. — He has made her so miserable, that Washers feared for her life.  Why should he see her now!!!

 

As to finances, we will probably get help for Mother Arnold.  We will split—50-50—on any help we do get—and send it to you.  In case one or the other dies—then the remaining financial cost should be split 50-50 between you and Ruth.

 

While it would cost $150 to 200 more to keep your Daddy at Round Lake until November than it would if he were to go to Seattle immediately, in all probability he would not make the trip alone—so I suppose Mother Arnolds [stet] few remaining dollars will have to be spent helping him at Round Lake until you come out on your regular business trip.

 

I sincerely hope that you will for Ruth's sake ["not" is struck out] give up the idea of keeping your Dad in Chicago.  You are the only [one] that, seemingly, he has any respect for—and the only one that can calm him down to a point that those who must come in close contact with him will not be made too uncomfortable. Sincerely, Wayne

 

 

       A couple of interesting things are in this letter.  One is that whatever money is left, it is my Gramma's.  Gramps hasn't any.  What happened to the house?  Was it sold?  Did the money all go to support Gramma in the nursing home?  The other emerging news is that Gramps is making Gramma's life miserable at Washers'.

       Who says?  Well, Wayne.  And who is he?  We know, we know.  Ruth's husband.  But he is an outsider, an observer, not an Arnold.  And what man is to judge the nature of what goes on between husband and wife?  Surely not the man who married their daughter.  The fact that Gramps loves Gramma comes creeping through all the roaring accusations, counter-accusations, paranoia, and the continuing Dog Episode.  True, he may have an unusual way of expressing it.  He is "trying to teach her a few things."  We will assume these are manual and rudimentary, things the body no longer "remembers" how to perform in the aftermath of a stroke, when the controlling brain cells are dead and the redundant cells have not yet learned their new roles or functions.

       And, remember, he is a life-long pedagogue.  Was it not evident in his letters to me?  Children are small adults.  They learn "life-lessons" from true adults  These will serve them well in the years to come as a participating members of society. There is no fun in life, only duty, and duty for men and boys is one thing, duty for women and girls another.

       Gramps was trying to teach his wife of the years how to perform for herself the basic functions of life, such as brushing her teeth, feeding herself with a spoon, drinking from a water glass, speaking in something other than monosyllables or grunts.  Who is there at Washers' to bother?  They got angry with Gramps for not complying and leaving her to vegetate—she was eighty percent vegetative already and soon to close the distance.  But he cared.  Not only his life, its remnant, was he fighting to preserve but hers, as well.  Theirs together.  To me it is highly commendable.  It is laudatory, praiseworthy.  In this world of the unholies (and nothing is more unholy than a nursing home), his acts were holy.  I mean, Holy.

       Of course he failed.  His duties were relegated to the area of fetching the bedpan.  There are not many husbands who will perform this chore more than once or twice.  Then they are too busy, or else go away.  Here, my friends, is the evidence of love.  It is the love that surpasses.

       Surpasses what?  Surpasses all.  Surely human understanding.  It is God's love, whether you believe in God or not.  Leastwise, not in a God that will inflict afflictions of the nature that both of them were subjected to.  But they did believe.   Yes.

       There is an aura of faith that seeps through Gramps's prose that leaves me, the faithless one, in awe.  If he could believe, after all that they were subjected to, then there must be more to faith than I ever suspected.  I am impressed.    Perhaps I am missing out on something, and that something is great.  Faith.  For what else kept Gramps going through the dark days, when everybody he came into contact with—family and hired custodians—was out to render him . . . neutral?  Inert?  A mindless vegetable that could be tended in an institution much like a houseplant and cause about the same amount of disturbance?  But Gramps wouldn't submit.  Bless him.  Or rather praise him for it.  Praise his undying, daily, faithful, human spirit.  His love.

       We continue, and learn The Dog Episode is not dead, or over with.  And I must note that this is pretty fine prose again.]

 

 

J.C. Arnold

Bellevue Place

Box 572

Round Lake, Ill.

Sunday A.M. September 9, 1947

Dear Son:

The more I think of my situation, the more I am justified in the position  [I] took.  As for the dog incident the dog was in my room when I first saw it.  It was a hot still night, and 9:30.  I opposed Mrs. Knot [Kurt?] when she interfered with me, as I believed the dog would be in the bath room.  When I heard its bark outside I went back to bed, and to sleep.


 

 

Here at R.L. [Round Lake] the dog is not allowed in the main bldg. even in the day time.  Mother approved of my actions that night, she said.  I believe this happened Wednesday.  [Words crossed out.]  Ruth came the next evening.  She was here 45 mins. when Mrs. Kurt, the night nurse told her Mrs. Washer wanted to talk with her.  She left at once, and did not return until time to go home—an hour and a half.

 

She began preparing to leave on entering the room.  The rest is told in my former letters.  She said she had been detained by going on an errand.  That she was coming Sat. and would tell me about it then.

 

Saturday came.  I detailed the events in my letter to your more [crisp?] detail that occurred on that memorable day.

 

Sufficient to say that some time early on Saturday p.m. Mrs. Washer said something about me breaking my pledge, was the reason (when Ruth was there) she was forcing me to leave.  Now which of these two (2) incidents is the cause for my coming back to R.L..  I offered to go to see the other place in Elgin, after I learned its name mentioned, I said I had never heard of the place but I would not stay there if I did not like its appearance.  They did not tell me the name of the place in Elgin until they carried me out fighting to the car.

 

I told Ruth I would not leave my room until they told me where they were taking me.  When Ruth came Saturday she was carrying a large Suit case.  This indicated my removal was at hand.  [I hadn't known] that I could be moved at anybody's pleasure.

 

I am enjoying myself have had ice cream again today is [missing] times since I came!  Never got it once at Restville when I offered to pay for it during all that hot weather.

 

Am looking for your reply early this week.

 

I love my boy.  Dad

 

 

       He did love his boy.  And "his boy" was his major hope for salvation.  It was his only way out of the place and it worked, though first he had to cut up some more.

       Now a word from Ruth.  This is her second letter that I have uncovered from around this time and her first to her father.  It is pretty factual and, of course, filled with the inevitable family weather bulletins:]

 

 

523 So. Illinois Ave.

Villa Park, Ill.

Sept. 12, 1947

Dear Daddy,

I am sending you some mail that came to Elgin for you.  I will send you your watch soon—as soon as I can get it packed and mailed.

 

Eddie wrote me that you wrote him that you were welcomed royally at Round Lake and that they serenaded you on your birthday.  I am glad they treat you well.  I know they did before.

 

We have been having a good deal of rain and it looks as though it will rain again today.  There was a down pour in Forest Park yesterday, but I was fortunate that I didn't get caught in it.

 

I saw Mother last night and she seemed much as usual—except I don't believe she cried as she sometimes does.  Love, Ruth

 

       Enclosed in the same envelope is the following:

 

 

9/12/47

My Darling Boy:

We eat in the basement.  It is a very high basement, and the steps are stone with a railing on each side and the approaches to the ground are made by as many as a dozen steps and no [underlined thrice] railings.  I climb up and down the basement 3 times each day, and make several trips to the outside, never accompanied by anybody.  I did so on my 1st visit here.  I never "disliked" the place.  It was the inmates and their actions I "disliked."  I always got along with the attendants, nurses and officials.  I am as far from Mother here as I would be in Seattle. I would be delighted to spend the winter in Seattle.  If you can find a convenient place for me and cheaper.  More anon on this subject.  Is this an explanation of Ruth's mistreatment of me?

 

She feels she must humor my enemy, Mrs. Washer, to ensure Mother to have a place to stay.  I suppose Wayne is satisfied at the same time.  Let me know if my theory is correct, will you, please?

 

I can live at 1/4 the cost at 523, as I was doing before I was stricken[ed], as I am costing somebody here.  I have never wanted to go anywhere else.  Fate is against me—Mother and me.  Tell Bob I am proud of his accomplishments as a fisherman.  But the year ahead of him in school is the most important one, and he is a year older to begin it.  To make it count most in preparation of the four years of college to come.

 

A fellow skillful enough to catch fish when others fail ought to succeed in college course where others too often make a failure of it.  Fishing for you is [royal?] play.  Now if you can make your last year of your H.S. course the best yet.  I believe you can and your will.  Writing is still work for me.  My hand gets stiff more than it used to.

 

Give my love to the other members of the family.  I'll write more next time.  Yours Dad

 

 

       Ruth is candid, straight-forward, and long-suffering.  Her father is now convinced, perhaps rightly, that she has sided with Wayne and the two of them are out to get him.  And this is so.  The question is, to what extend did he manipulate and intentionally alienate her, once he discovered she would not be a player in the scheme of his salvation?  I cannot answer this question.

       If there is sadism in his treatment of his daughter, or manipulation of her, there is a willingness to be used and masochism on her part.  Remember, I knew her well.  She was like this.

       Gramps now rightly calls Mrs. Washer his "enemy."  Let a spade be a spade, for once.  Again there is the quick movement between the paranoid scenario and the objective data conveyed to him in my father's last letter—we jump from "Fate is against me—mother and me" to the bit about telling Bob how happy he is I am a successful fisher.  Talk about your rapid swing from the epic to the mundane.  Still, I am grateful to be recognized and identified.  But again there is the pedagogic admonition—this fishing business is important only if it develops character traits that will lead to success in the business world.  [It didn't.]

       Gramps is astute, lucid, clever, exploitative.  He is also self-obsessed and broods for days on a single matter.  In the next letter he gets right to it.  The old item of the dog protest that got him kicked out of Washers'.  Then the maniacs at the place he was moved to—Round Lake.  Thirdly, the need to save money.  Fourth, how well things would go if only he was back home at Villa Park.

       Only a short time has passed.  The letters have been nearly daily, a steady flow.

 

 

9/15/47

Dear Son:

My father always kept a dog, but he never allowed it in the house.  He provided it a kennel either in the barn or coal house.  Not having an out-house for the kennel was the reason I why [stet] I allowed this want [illegible] to go unfilled.

 

A long haired dog is unsanitary.  Its habit of licking its penis with the same tongue he licks a baby's face or your hand is too disgusting to contemplate.

 

Besides 2/3 [?] of the "uproar" was made by the Amazonian opposing my two weak hands.

 

I am happier here than any place else except at V.P. [Villa Park], among my own house hold goods and cooking utensils, doing my own cooking, and taking care of my own room.  I can say this truthfully, even when the inmate next door does not allow me to get the sleep I need and have to make it up the next day.  They have to place the furniture of his room in the corridor, and remove the knobs of his doors.  But that does not stop his maniacal yelling.

 

Why not work on Wayne?

 

Try the economy dodge.  He goes early to his work, and comes home so late he won't see much of me.

 

"Necessary regulations"

 

I was sent to R.L. this time for what I did the Saturday morning I came here.  I go everywhere here without an escort.  I did when I was here the first time, before I left.

 

I can go to V.P. prepare my own meals, in every way do the things I did before I was stricken.  Wayne has got me out of the house and he means to keep me out.  You have got me wrong, Edmund.  Can't you believe me?

 

Mrs. Washer never wants me back.  She did not treat me right the 2nd time.  Wayne is working his darndest to keep me away.  Ruth would take me back, but she would lose her husband.

 

Try working on it again.

 

I was done.  Your poor old 79 year [old] father is without a house.  Dad

 

 

       This is an incredible letter.  Imagine yourself receiving it.  The old manipulation dodge is now aimed at his son.  It didn't work on the daughter.  Try again.  How easily he makes the transition and offers advice.  Do this, try that.  If this doesn't work, maybe the other will.  "They've got me wrong," he seems to be saying.   Who has?  Why, mine enemies.

       The part about the dog is excellent.  What writing!  Who understands the filthy beasts better than the man who never had one of his own?  The fact that it was a male dog in his boyhood and a female in his old age is glossed over.  It is the memory of that pale dog licking his private parts (Gramps is more explicit) that continues into the nursing home.  In his boyhood, it was his father who had the dog.  The dog was never let into the house.  It was a country dog.  We have them still.  They live outside, like the farm animals.  They sleep in the barn, with the cows and horses.  They are not to be allowed inside the house.

       And Gramps is deviously clever with his talk about the dog licking its penis, then licking the baby's face.  Of course there is no baby in a nursing home to have a face to lick.  (But what about some helpless old stroke-ridden woman, flat on her back in bed, like my Gramma?  Isn't she as vulnerable?  As helpless as a baby?  Mention her, Gramps.  It's a good argument.  It helps your case.  Get rid of the damn dog and there will be no problem, Gramps, and then you can live with the Washers, and Gramma, and everything will be jolly.  Well, not jolly exactly, but tolerable.  At least you'll be with your invalid wife again.

       Notice how the cast of villains has multiplied.  The two Washers, Ruth, Wayne, and the hired help, or "the Amazons."  Gramps is not a large man.  I'd place him at five feet nine or ten and, with some shrinkage from old age and illness, about one-hundred and forty pounds.  One-forty-five at most.  A big, lifting woman is often employed in a nursing home; she is not there for her mind.  To call her an Amazon is not an exaggeration.  The fact that Gramps battles them all at once is extraordinary.  It is the stuff of epics and legends.

       Mr. Washer weighs over two-hundred pounds.  There is the day nurse and the night nurse, besides.  There is the formidable Mrs. Washer, who everybody fears.  Then there is a cop and an ambulance driver.  Gramps takes them all on and doesn't exactly lose.  He draws blood.  And then he is exiled to Round Lake, which is the local nuthouse.  There he can still find small pleasures, chiefly in food.  Ice cream.  How wonderful ice cream can be at the end of a hot Mid-West day in September, when everything else has gone bad and nobody love you.  Ice cream provides solace.  It is something you can count on.

 

Sept. 17—47

[note on back of envelope:  "My garments came"]

Dear Son:

I sent a postal card to our address in V.P. "to whom it may concern," giving a list of things I need badly, especially since it has turned cold.  But I have not heard from it, although there has been plenty of time.  I have been questioned by those in authority considering my comfort, both yesterday and today.  I am getting deafer and my sight poorer noticeably since coming here.  The former defect hinders my getting better acquainted a great deal.  This is my 8th letter to you, all sent my air mail, since coming here.  My/our watch hasn't come yet.

 

I get a Chicago Tribune every day but Sunday.

 

This place evidently is not going under financially, for an [stet] half doz. men were busy all afternoon yesterday unloading beds and mattresses and storing them upstairs.  They were all new.

 

This is a place where inebriates sober off [up?], too.  They don't stay long, but take some kind of medicine, and are young men.

 

The weather is delightfully cool.  Just the kind to make you hungry.

 

I am anxious to hear from you about the future.  Don't you think I am right about going to V.P.?

 

I love you so much.  Dad

 

 

       Not only a nuthouse but a facility for treating alcoholics.  There was no alcohol or tobacco in my Grandfather's house.  Again the sentences are short and to the point.  He describes precisely what the place is like and the people around him.  (How I wish I could write with such economy and effect.)

       His eye sight and his hearing are diminished, he reports.  This "hinders my getting better acquainted."  But with mental cases and alcoholics, who would want to?  Certainly not him.  He would despise them.  Talk about your ability to adapt, though.

         He reports on the weather and how it improves his appetite.  He is a survivor Wherever he is, he will sleep and eat well.  And of course keep close track of the weather.  I think it is a family trait.

       And by the way, Son, I am interested in hearing about my future.  What will my last days be like?  You are my only hope.  I could be no farther away from my Beloved Wife, your mother, in Seattle, than I am here, with no hope of seeing her again.

       The next letter is in a positive, euphoric mood.  How he can et himself up for his occasions.  It is only the next day.  He will become whatever is necessary to get out of here.  The perfect citizen.  He is reasonable, cheerful, responsible.  In short, he will be a fine addition to his son's household.  He will fit in perfectly.

 

 

Sept. 18, 47

Dear Son:

Yes, Sir, I am coming home with you.  I want to see that glorious country, especially after such a warm invitation to make you a visit.

 

From now till then it [I] will be planning for the trip.

 

I want to see and get acquainted with those two grandsons before they are much older.

 

I want to see Cecile and you and that wonderful home you have made a reality.

 

My joy of anticipation can only be saddened by the thought that Mother can't come, too.  I'll [words missing] Dorothy and her mother my joy would not be complete without seeing them, too.  Seattle, here I come.  Dad

 

 

       Next, a postal card, which is unusual:

 

Sept. 21, 47

Dear Son:

Beginning my 4th week at Bellevue.  [Evidently a new place he's been put, and a transitional one.]  The tail end of the hurricane reaches us this a.m. and it has been rain.  Is allover smooth cloudy.

 

My future is behind me or I might sue Mrs. Washer and Ruth for damages for forcing me to come to such a place as this.  It brands one as simple minded or insane, when I am neither.  But I am treated royally and have my freedom.  My love salutes you all.  Dad

 

 

       It is agreed, he can come to Seattle.  There is a future after all.  God is in his heaven.  Was there any doubt, bad as things had seemed, with the Washers and all?  No, no, no.  They are behind him now.

 

 

9/23/47

Dear Son:

A month and 2 weeks yet before we start for Seattle.  To sit around with nothing to do!  I find I become dissatisfied.  It was almost ideal at V.P. when I had my garden activities and harvest, and my two meals to get besides my trips to see Mother.  I sit and dream of those days, and wish for them again.  I probably could not garden much, but I could do the other tasks.

 

"Oh, we may get uneasy and think work is dreary,

"Tis harder by far to have nothing to do."

 

Here I have nothing to do.

 

 

This has been a beautiful day.  Weatherman said this morning it went down to 36 degrees.  But there was no frost that we could see.  Perhaps the wind blew all night.

 

When the weather gets too cold to go out doors much it will get tiresome for me.  I have led an active out door life.  I can't stand it to be cooped up, that is why I am here.  Tomorrow I must write to Mother.  I know she misses me.  Especially at night.  How often those hot nights I would give her drink and wait for her to finish [it], which was something the nurses did not do.

 

She would show here gratitude by kissing my hand, sometimes my lips.

 

All love to you and yours, Dad

 

 

 

       Seemingly this is a benign letter, one of many that follow daily in the new euphoric mood.  Gone are the villains, Ruth and Wayne, the Washers, the Amazons, ambulances, police, nuthouses, and drunks.

       He longs for the good old out-of-doors.  This is probably genuine, only a little trumped up.  A little poetry thrown in, another weather report (my God, how my family could write back and forth about the weather; it reads like the minutes from a convention of meteorologists), and then the zinger—If only I could be back with Mother again.  I gave her care none of the paid professionals would.  I brought her water at night, and I waited until she was done drinking before I took the glass away.

       All this will be lost when I go to Seattle, but I will go.  Son, you must know what your Dear Mother will be giving up—personal, loving care.  And, Son, if you skimmed over my words, then listen to these:  Mother would repay me by kissing my hand.  Sometimes she would kiss my lips.

       I am absolutely as certain as that I write this that she did kiss his hand and sometimes lips.  And the only thing he omitted, this teller of tales, was that she wept, all the while.

       Weeping out of gratitude?  No, she was weeping continuously, copiously, anyway, as the aftermath of stroke.  It often happens, these uncontrollable tears.  She wept for ten years, and then she died.  I saw her in 1950 and, sure enough, it is what she did at the sight of her son and me; but it may well have been what she was doing without us.

       Still Gramps's faith remained unshaken, though he was not past asking, like Lot, "Why me, God?  Why this particular affliction?  Haven't we had enough?  First her stroke, then my own?  And all the tiny strokes that follow on the heels for both of us?"

       The next letter returns to The Dog Episode and the old matter of the Washers, on which he continued to brood:

 

 

9/25/47

Dear Son:

Your good long letter written Sunday came last evening.  It contained much that I must comment on.  It was while we were fighting our way down stairs that Mrs. Washer accused me of violating my pledge.  She said nothing about the dog incident.  This happened Sat. morning.  I could not understand because Ruth paused long enough before she left Thursday night to say she would see us Saturday.  I supposed she would hear my 5-min. speech Sat.  But refused to listen and began packing. I never got a chance to tell my side of the dog story.  My theory is:  violating my pledge was a better reason for my leaving "Restville" than the dog incident.  So the substitution was made Sat. p.m.  I hinted at this in a former letter.

 

Mrs. Washer never asked me about the dog incident.  She and [Washer?] do not sleep at Restville.  They have a room at a neighbors.  They go out evenings quite often/a little.

 

Does this explain every thing?  I want every thing made clear and definite.  Then if Ruth had so little to do with sending me here why doesn't she say so.  I can't hold her blameless, only unless she was afraid Mrs. W. would ask her to take Mother away.  Her actions Thursday night and Sat. P.M. make me doubt it.

 

Would Wayne have given back the [$]4000 if he had got hold of it, when it was needed?

 

I endured Wayne's "attitude" for more than a year.  I was prepared to try it again.  But it was part of his plan.

 

You are a Son in a million!!!!!  [Five exclamation marks]

 

You overwhelm me by your sympathy and generosity.  I [can't] imagine Wayne doing it.

 

I can choose between the two places you mention already, providing it is cheaper.  Wedding bells are to be preferred to maniacal screams.  Do you know any more about government aid, after Mother's money is all spent?  Ruth told me that there is a fund which pays sums of money to indigent people, according to the degree of helplessness, in public institutions.  All my love, Dad.

 

       The daily stream of letters continues.  The weather is getting cold.  Well, it is October.

 

 

Oct. 5 [1947]

 

Dear Son:  I copied the 1st [paragraph sign] of your last Sunday's letter and sent it to Mother in care of Ruth. When you consider I have been here over 5 weeks and have sent numerous requests for clothes, etc, which have gone unanswered since the 1st one, I have a right to consider Ruth as forgotten [of] her old father.

 

I have needed my light overcoat.

 

I fully appreciate what you are doing for me.  Such a contrast with Ruth's treatment!

 

They have moved my room upstairs.  (Wouldn't Mrs. Washer have a time expelling me, since I must climb two flights of stairs 3 times a day, unassisted, [unaccompanied?] to my meals[?])  We eat in the basement which is very high as it is the first story.[stet]

 

How expensive are the rooms?  I want the least expensive.  I want to room alone, if possible, and it does not cost too much.  Yes, the patients are noncommunicative or not interesting.

 

There is a radio but I have to have [it] so loud to understand that some body comes and turns it down so low I can't understand.  I have written to R. and W. asking for a week to prepare to leave.  It puts Ruth in a [hard slot?] to satisfy all of us.

 

There is nothing I need that I can think of.  Nothing that can't be supplied after we reach Seattle. This is my last and only sheet of paper.

 

       A word about this.  It is 5X7-3/4 inch wide rule newsprint, presumably from a pad and generally written on on only one side, with a soft pencil and weak hand.  Over the past several months the handwriting has deteriorated badly.  I've had great trouble reading it and must say that nobody else would bother to.  I did it because there was nobody else who care, either now or in the foreseeable future.  I was the sole custodian of these notes and letters; they might well have been thrown away.

       I simply had to make each one legible because of what I believed to be its literary content.  Or perhaps only its special meaning to me.

 

You are wonderful.  All my love, Dad

 

       His trip is imminent.  A few things are required for it, but most can be bought in the wonderful new city, Seattle, where soon he will be living with his wonderful son and the son's two sons.  Everything will be "sonny," he puns, with childish enthusiasm.

         New paper, same size, but much better quality.  Handwriting seems worse; soon this is explained:

 

[Round Lake]

October 8, 1947]

Tuesday P.M.

Dear Son—

Several times you have asked me if there is anything I want or need.  I think of nothing, but in making the change, the exigencies owing to delay are likely to happen.  So if you can bring from Fields or F.&N. the following articles they may come in handy.

 

1 pr cotton flannel pajamas, large & roomy

2 pr. cotton sox, size 12

3 shirts white of colored, which are the cheaper?  Some shade of blue, if colored.  Size 16-1/2, 35-inch sleeve.  [Same size as my father wore, incidentally.]

 

I have written Ruth to investigate my heavy underwear and yarn or woolen sox.

 

(My crippled hand seems worse this morning, Wednesday.)  I will stop writing for this time.  Your Dad

 

       Instructions follow for the son who is coming to Illinois to fetch his adoring father and thereby save him from a prisoner's life among his acknowledged and unacknowledged enemies, including some Amazons:

 

 

Oct. 10

Dear Son:

When you arrive in Chicago Oct. 19, call Ruth and tell her—  (I leave blank what to tell her.)

 

Get an auto as you have done before.  Drive to Round Lake.  There you will find plenty of people there [stet:  inserted "to direct you to Bellevue Place."

 

When you get here it won't take long to throw my things in the car and we will be on our way to V.P.  Then there is no reason why I should limit my stay there, if Ruth should grant me a week.  If we [we is double-underlined] return from Bellevue Pl. via Elgin, my be Mrs. Washer might phone Ruth.

 

What do you think of my plan [?]  I thought of this this morning lying in bed.

 

We can find out about State aid from Ruth.

[No closure, no signature]

 

       Interesting that while he is planning to move clear across the country with his son, he still clings to an outside hope of returning to V.P. to be near his wife.

Oct. 11

Dear Son:

Arrived this a.m. 11 ps woollen sox, 2 prs. trousers, 1 over coat, two shirts.

 

Looks like they were not expecting me to come home.  What shall we do?  May be you had better come by V.P. and pick up a trunk before we decide. 

What ever you say goes.

 

Oceans of love for you and yours.  Dad

 

Postmarked same date as above.  Handwriting very shaky.

 

Monday

Dear Son:

Cost at Restville by the week—$35

"    "  Bellevue P.   "    "  —55

"    "  both places                      

 

Cost at Restville      "   "  —35

"     " V.P.           "   "  — 5

"     " both places    "   "  —40

 

amt saved              "   "  —50

 

I am too nervous to [write] any more.

Dad

 

P.S.  Did not sleep much last night

 

 

       My father took the train to Chicago and then went to Round Lake, where he retrieved his father.  The outside hope to remain in V.P. did not materialize; it was mad to think it might.  They returned on the Great Northern's Empire Builder.  Knowing how my Grandfather abhorred liquor and tobacco, my father—a cigarette smoker from way back—decided that three days and two nights without a smoke was more suffering than any dutiful son should have to put up with.  So he lit up a Pall Mall in front of his father, for the first time in his life.  He was 43.  Gramps did not comment on it.

       But it was impossible for him to live with us.  It was never in the plan.  I recall a picture of the three of us, taken about this time.  Gramps is wild-eyed.  He has lost a lot of weight and evidently the stroke has badly cramped his right side and hand.  He looks diminished but fierce.  He appears as though at any moment he might spin off from in front of our house and go caroming into space.

       My mother couldn't handle even the mildest of bad situations.  So Dad put Gramps in another rest home.  (God, what a name for these places; as if anybody could rest.)  It is from there that he reports next.  It was the kind of place of which he had seen a number of recently and could comment on with keen professional assessment.  As usual he was right on the mark about it, but unfortunately being right did not help his cause any.

 

 

[Postmarked Seattle, December 16, 1947]

Monday night

[No salutation]

You were right.  I found it out last night.  We had the largest influx of inebriates yet, some of them with the "delirium tremens".  Now if you want me to associate with such persons, I, who never was drunk in my life, I can do it for your sake.

 

I would do it for nobody else in this world.

 

Let matters stand as they are until after the holidays.  May be they will get better.  You devoted father.  Your own Dad

 

       This may have been written from Firlands, an expensive sanatarium.  The best.  I recall his being there and that it was a treatment facility for alcoholics and those mentally ill—generally schizophrenic patients and those who are manic-depressives.  The poet Theodore Roethke went there regularly for treatment, while I was an undergraduate in English.  That made him and Gramps peers of sorts.  I wonder if they could have known each other?  Not likely, and not much in common, either.  And Gramps abhorred anybody who drank.  Roethke was a veritable fish.

 

443 E. Chicago St.

Elgin, Illinois

 

       Stationary and handwriting clearly Ruth's; paper pale blue, with purple iris running down the left side, folded, four-sided, but written on only the front side.

 

December 28, 1947

Ruth's handwriting again

Dear Edmund and all of you,

Such gorgeous flowers I never saw before and I do thank you all so much.  You know I do.  Love to all Mother and Grandma and Leigh.

 

       Handwriting here extremely shaky and written with a pronounced uphill slant that indicates, not the usual optimism, that the person is lying flat abed and unable to see what the pencil or pen is doing.  She is Sara Leigh Connelly Arnold, the second wife of Edmund Riley Connelly.  His first wife bore him eleven children, then died at about thirty.  His second wife bore him only one child, my Gramma.  Her daughter made a home for her in her widowed old age.  My Great Gramma died in Chicago some ten years earlier.

       This is probably the last letter from my paternal Grandmother, whose stroke symptoms were worsening and soon put her into a coma.  I saw her in June 1950 and she was immobile and unresponsive.  Ruth told me she recognized me and indicated she did by a flutter of her eyelids.  This I did not believe at the time or now.

 

 

523 So. Illinois Ave.

Villa Park, Ill.

January 2, 1948

Dear Eddie,

Thanks a lot for our nice Christmas gifts.  Wayne is much pleased with his gift from you and I had been wanting a blouse just like the one you sent me.  The Frango mints are delicious and certainly deserve their reputation.  [These were a confectionery marketed solely by Frederick and Nelson and their owner, Marshall Field and Company.]  I had heard of them when I was in Seattle but you remember we couldn't get them then.  The flowers you all sent Mother were beautiful and she was much pleased with them.  She wrote you a note thanking you for them and you probably have received it by now.  I went to see her today and the flowers were still very nice.  Mr. and Mrs. Van Valkenburg and Jean sent her poinsettias, too—a smaller plant—so she had a lot of color in her room.  We gave her a blue knitted bed jacket and a box of stationary [see above]; I, Aunt Beth, Aunt Bess, Mother Travis and Mrs. Caruso [?] (next door) all sent her handkerchiefs (the only thing she had mentioned that she wanted).  Mrs. Washer gave her a bottle of lotion and the daughter-in-law of Mrs. Dugas (the other woman in the room) have her a box of soap.  Becky Grisham sent $5.00 for me to buy something for Mother and we have bought one gift with part of it—a little light to clip on a book so that I can read to her without having any other light on in the room.  I may get her some bed socks with the rest of the $5.00—one pair is about worn out.

 

I imagine you had a nice Christmas—your letter and Daddy's note to Mother sound as though you did.  We went to see Mother in the afternoon and then spent the evening with the Johnsons.  We enjoyed seeing Mary Ann [Durnin, I believe, the daughter of the man across the street, a physician] and Bobby with the tree and gifts.  Christmas isn't really Christmas unless there are children in it somewhere.  [Ruth was childless.]

 

I started a letter to you on the 28th but decided not to send that one and started over again today.  In the other letter I quoted some of Daddy's letters to me.  He has been expressing a good deal of discontent and dissatisfaction and of course sometimes is rather dramatic about everything.  [Well, Firlands as I remember it is a pretty dramatic place, full of drunks and loonies in their extreme stages.]  I believe he voices most of these feelings first to me—why, I don't know—and I do hope he doesn't talk the same way to you.  It is true that he would have some criticism of any  place—no place would ever suit him in every respect.  And I'm sure Catalpa Crest is comfortable and the food is good and plentiful (so important to him) and the people are kind to him.  It is probably just something sadistic in him where I am concerned (he does seem to enjoy making me unhappy) which has caused him to write to me the way he has—and I trust your judgment and know you want him to be as satisfied as possible as much as I do—so I am not going [to] let myself get unduly concerned over his letters.  I have written to him trying to cheer him up and to show him all the things he has to be grateful for—and succeeded only in making him angry.  So in the future I'll try to make my letter as non-committal as possible and pay no attention to the things he says.  (New Year's resolutions!)

 

Good luck to Bob with his paper route—and his managerial duties!  [What were these?  I recall nothing managerial about delivering newspapers except the difficulties in collecting from deadbeats.  Must be it.]  Should be good experience for him.  Daddy wrote that Dick entertained you all on Christmas day with music on his cornet.  [I'll bet; he was as bad as I.]

 

I am glad the gifts you chose for us to give Daddy and the boys were so acceptable. I knew they would be—and much more acceptable than something we might have selected.  [Ah-ha, so that is where they came from, and I gave them so much credit.]  I just was sorry to cause you the extra trouble of having to get the gifts.

 

We are going out to Beverly tomorrow evening to stay over Sunday.  [Don't understand this entry.  Beverly Hills was where my grandparents' old house was.  Wasn't it sold by now, for money to keep them in nursing homes?  Why was Ruth going there?  And where would they stay, if not in the old home?]

 

A happy new year to all of you and much love, Ruth

 

 

       The next, special letterhead stationary: R. H. Arnold, Chairman, Edw. M. Wimmer, Sec'y-Treas., The Wimmer-Arnold Co. Ltd., Drugs, Books Wall Paper, No. 2. Masonic Temple Bldg., 404 Main Street, Coshocton, Ohio.

 

January 20., 1948

 

Dear Edmund:

We were glad to get your letter today as we have been wanting to hear about your Dad and we did not have your address, so could not write you.  I know you have been having a time and you have my sympathy.  I knew your Dad long before you did and your letter was no surprise to me.  I did not know that he had any ill feeling towards me but I can assure you that I hold none towards him.  the only reason that I can give that he would have any feeling against me is, that I would never take any side in his controversy with Wayne.  I knew he did not like Wayne and would keep writing to me about him, but I would not mention the matter when I wrote him.  I think that rather irked him.  I also can realize the position Ruth was in.  I knew also of his trouble at Elgin but never mentioned it to him.  He wrote me once complaining of his circumstances and I replied that he should make the best of the circumstances and be as contented as possible and be thankful that he had two children that were caring for him as you were[.]   I guess from his reply that [he thought] I did not sympathize with him.

 

I have written him that he cannot help his physical condition and for him to adjust himself to his condition and get all he can out of the remaining days that he has, but I know how difficult it is to advise him.  You are doing the only thing that can be done under the circumstances.  I do hope he will become reconciled to his condition and will act accordingly.  You have enough on your hands, even if he would act like an angel.  Give our regards to Cecil and the boys.  Your uncle, Rufe

 

       This was Gramps's brother, Rufus, whom Gramps greatly admired as a successful businessman and who my father respected for much the same reason.  It is the only such letter and was written in response to my father's.  Without Dad's intervention, the long silence would have continued, and I would be lacking Rufe's perspective, for which I am grateful.

       Ruth now:

 

 

523 So. Illinois Ave.

Villa Park, Ill.

January 26, 1948

Dear Eddie,

It's been quite some time since I wrote you—I've planned to before, but other things have crowded it out.

 

We saw Mother yesterday (her birthday) and I want to tell you that the flowers from you were beautiful.  I have really never seen anywhere a more gorgeous arrangement of flowers—and all the flowers so large and so perfect.  The nurses took it around to all the rooms so all the patients could have a look at it—and they said, too, that they thought it was unusually beautiful.  Of course Mother was pleased and delighted with it and will probably be writing you a note soon to tell you so.  Daddy wrote her a birthday note and she had a birthday letter from Aunt Ollie.

 

Two other things I want to be sure to speak about.  Do you could arrange to send our suitcase back to us?  We have really needed it a couple of times since Daddy left and I have meant to mention it before but forgot.  We would appreciate it if you would send it back as soon as you conveniently can.

 

The other thing is the hospital insurance for Mother and Daddy.  You see, they are covered in a family plan under Daddy's name and when Daddy went to Seattle he had to be transferred to the Washington plan.  If Mother had to be hospitalized it would be paid by the Seattle office to a hospital here.  Has the change been completed—and did Daddy receive another card?  If so, there must have been two of them sent, one for him and one for Mother, and one would be sent back here for Mother's use if she should have to be hospitalized at some time.  Wayne says that he paid it a month or so ago—for the next 3-month period, and he gave Daddy's new address in your care at your address, so you will be receiving the next bill.  We are rather anxious to know whether the change has been made and everything is straight.

 

Daddy's letters have been much more cheerful lately and I am glad of that.  I think the weather being more pleasant has had something to do with it.  I had another letter form him today.  He started to ask me to do something in the letter—and fell asleep while he was writing—and forgot what it was he wanted me to do.  The other day he sent samples of leaves from various trees and bushes that grow nearby.

 

We haven't learned anything further about the old age pension.  We have been planning to go to Wheaton some Saturday mooring to make inquiries, but last Saturday Wayne had to work and the Saturday before it was so very cold and the Saturday before that the woman we were to see wasn't there—so we haven't been able to make it yet.  Will let you know when and if we find out anything.

 

Yes, it does make a difference having just Mother to visit and plan for.  Did I tell you that Mrs. Washer has increased her charge from $35 to $40 a week?  I suppose it was only to be expected, with prices rising everywhere; still I had hoped it wouldn't happen.

 

Yes, I suppose Daddy will want to come with you when you come East—and, of course, so far as I am concerned I'd be wiling for him to—for a visit here, but Wayne would never consent to it, it would be an additional heavy expense, and he would have to be alone here in the house all day—lots of reasons why it couldn't be done.

 

Daddy mentioned that they didn't darn socks at Catalpa Court and inferred  [Ruth rarely makes grammatical mistakes.  I think in her time, in the Mid[-West, inferred and implied were used interchangeably.  Or else she means "I inferred," but left the I out] that his needed darning.  I offered to do them if he wanted to send to me but he wrote today that anyone having my job (at Sacony) shouldn't  be darning her father's socks!  Do you suppose Mrs. Stiles or someone at Catalpa Crest could be persuaded to darn them?

 

Must close now.  Much love to all or you from both of us, Ruth

 

 

       Postmarked February 11, 1948, Villa Park, and apparently the envelope was addressed by Ruth for my Gramma.  Handwriting my Gramma's and nearly illegible.  On the famed blue stationary given her for Christmas, with the purple flowers.

 

Dear the flowers are simply wonderful I thak [stet] you  you so much [rest illegible]

 

 

523 So. Illinois Ave.

Villa Park, Illinois

March 24, 1948

Dear Eddie,

Your letter was very welcome and I enjoyed it.  It's too bad you had to move Daddy again, but I don't see what else you could have done under the circumstances.  I do hope he will like the new place and will be able to find some congenial associates among the other old people there.  A room by himself does mean a good deal to him—and he will probably like the fact that there are no mental cases of any kind there.  He wrote me that he was going to move, and said, "It is a private room with a large closet and a bureau of several drawers.  I think I can make it do."  Well, all we can do is hope—and I do hope you won't have to go through this business of looking for a new place and then moving him, over and over again.

 

Speaking of hope—there is still some in the Old Age Pension situation.  We filled out an application for Mother and sent it in (as I believe I told you) and they sent us a refusal of the application.  Whereupon Wayne appealed it.  I didn't expect it would do any good—and thought we would hear nothing further about it.  Instead, Mr. Thompson and Mr. Hall, who is head of the office in Aurora, came out here one evening to see us.  They were very pleasant and friendly and while they certainly didn't make any promises, they led us to believe that something might be done.  They said some recent changes had been made in the laws and there was a possibility that we might receive some assistance, and that they would do everything they could, etc.  Mr. Hall suggested that I write him a letter stating the facts of the case, and saying that I would be willing to pay a certain amount (I made it $100 plus all medicines, clothes, incidentals) if the State would pay the balance.  I wrote the letter and we have heard nothing further.  I imagine it will be a few weeks before we do.

 

About the hospital insurance, we can renew it here June 1, if you wish—However, to keep things straight, I think you had better at that time notify the Seattle office and also the Chicago office (transfer department) that the insurance is to be transferred here and paid to this office hereafter.  If, however, you prefer to keep it there, that's all right, too.  As I said before, it doesn't make a lot of difference.

 

April 2—More than a week since I started this letter and it still isn't finished.  I had a letter from Daddy today and it sounds as if he were quite pleased with the new place.  He spoke of going to a branch of the public library a block away [Fremont?]—and of going to church on Easter Sunday.  He says there are congenial people at the Woodland Park Rest Home—the food not so fancy, but sufficient.  He says what he likes is the quiet and that he gets a good night's rest every night—which of course is important [to him].  He has probably told you all this, but I thought you might like to know that he had written it to me.

 

Now I must tell you something that will surprise you a good deal and that you probably won't be very pleased to hear.  I am not very happy about it myself, but I let myself be persuaded into it and so now we must make the best of it.  We have sold our house.  Wayne had been talking about selling it for some time, and when he finally put it on the market it was sold very quickly and for more than twice what we paid for it.  The house is really in very poor condition.  The foundation is badly cracked and there are other things that cause trouble now and will cause more later.  Of course now is a good time to sell (the market has even gone down some since we sold the house) but the worst of it is it is practically impossible to find a place to rent—at a price we can afford to pay.  We want a four or five room house or apartment—unfurnished—and near good transportation to the Loop, which in ordinary times wouldn't be too much to expect—but nowadays you have to pay from $90 to $150 or more and buy furniture in order to get the apartment—or else they are dumps you wouldn't ask a dog to live in.  Fortunately we don't have to get out right away, but rents continue to go up—and apartments are increasingly hard to find—and the situation seems to get worse instead of better.  Of course Wayne doesn't understand (and I suppose I can't really expect him to) how it hurts me to dispose of Mother's and Daddy's things—when one of them is so helpless and the other thousands of miles away.  We'll have to sell a lot of things of course—and a lot of things they brought along will have to be disposed of.  It's a tremendous job, for one thing, and we have so little time to give to it. We'll see that the money from the sale of their things goes to them, of course—I just hope and pray that I won't dispose of anything that shouldn't be—I haven't told Mother about it yet and I haven't written Daddy.  I haven't had the heart to.  I don't know how much it would mean to Mother, but I can just imagine how Daddy will feel about it.  Of course it is our house (or was), and it is perfectly within our rights to sell it if we want to, but it is the fact that so much of the stuff (some of it of course is stuff) here belongs to them that bothers me.

 

I'll hate to leave Villa Park and all my friends here—although of course I don't get to see them much any more since I have been working.  We don't need the room we have here—for just the two of us—and I think Wayne feels it is too much for me to work and try to keep the place up, too.  And it is a long trip to the city and back every day.  I leave the house every mooring at 7:00 (Wayne leaves at 7:00) to get to the office at 8:45 and get home from 6:10 to 6:30 (Wayne gets home at 6:40).  Life is pretty much of a mad scramble for the working wife when she lives out in the suburbs!

 

Well, as I said, it is done—and there were lots of good practical reasons for doing it—I've always tended to be more on the sentimental than on the practical side, and it's probably a good thing Wayne is more practical than I am.  Sometime—if things go well—we still hope to build—the kind of a home we've always wanted, and the money from the sale of this house will help make that possible.  Another thing—Wayne's job is uncertain.  WAA is scheduled to end July 1 and we don't know what he will be doing after that.  He was out 5 months after OPA ended before he landed the job with WAA but was paid for the entire time because he had accumulated that much leave.  He has only about a month or a month and a half leave now—and government jobs are harder than ever to get.  He might have to take one out of Chicago, although he says he wouldn't go too far away because of Mother.  (And that, you must admit, is very sweet and considerate of him.)

 

Well, I've  raved on and on and now I must stop.  Daddy hasn't found his summer pajamas.  They're not here.  Can you think of what could have happened to them [?].  Do you remember whether they were packed when you went to Seattle?  And could you return the small suitcase now?  Daddy seems to be settled now, at least for a while.  Love to all, Ruth

 

 

523 So. Illinois Ave.

Villa Park, Illinois

April 30, 1948

Dear Eddie,

I'm sorry it has been so long since I have written to you, but as you wrote to Mother, I have been very busy.  We've been working like Trojans and have barely scratched the surface in trying to get ready to move out.  So much stuff to get rid of before we can even start packing, and while most of it is stuff, it makes me feel terrible to destroy or give away or sell possessions (even though mostly worthless) of Mother's and Daddy's, as though they were already gone.  We still haven't found a place to live, so we still don't know how much furniture, etc., we should keep.  Rentals are absurdly high—and going higher.  We have put ads in the Tribune and will have some next week in some community newspapers, but don't know how much good it will do.  We looked at an apartment tonight—an answer to one of our ads, but it was 6 rooms (3 bedrooms) and the rent was $125 a month!  Much more than we could or should pay, unless we got someone to share it with us, and we rather hesitate to do that.  It's a problem to know what to do.  We thought of buying a cooperative apartment—it seems the only hedge against these high rentals, but there's always the danger of not getting your equity out of it in case you had get rid of it.  Most people would rather put a sizeable amount of money into down payment on a house rather than an apartment.  [They finally bought a co-op apartment near the Loop.]

 

Well, it's our problem and we'll have to solve it somehow.  In the meantime I wanted to ask you some questions.  About the hospital insurance for Daddy and Mother, did you decide to keep it there or to transfer it here?  Seems to me you said you had it paid up to the first of May (or was it the first of June?)  You'll remember I said you'd have to let us know so we could start making the payments here, and inform the transfer department to transfer it here, if that's what you wanted done.

 

I remembered the other day that Mother had bought a bond with Aunt Ione as the beneficiary.  Did you know about that, and do you know where it is (maybe in Daddy's safety deposit box?) and if anything has been done about it, i.e., changing the beneficiary or anything like that?  Also didn't Mother have one or two bonds with Daddy the beneficiary?

 

You will remember that quite a while ago we tried to find Mother's certificate for 10 shares of stock in the South Parkway Building Corp.  It was at the time Daddy was selling Mother's various stocks.  We found the certificate the other day, and while I believe Daddy had a duplicate certificate issued and sold the stocks, too, I thought I would ask you to ask him what he remembered about it, just to be sure.

 

Daddy's letters have been very cheerful lately.  The only complaint is about being so cold at night that he can't sleep.  He says he gets up and puts on sweater, socks, etc., but still can't get warm enough.  No doubt he has told you about it, too.  He said in his last letter he didn't need any summer pajamas, but we found those you gave him last summer, not in the dresser drawer but in a box upstairs in the attic.  We'll send them to him, along with his summer underwear and some other things of his that he may need when and if it gets warm enough for them.

 

I'm glad Daddy seems better and more agile and that he can have more freedom and enjoys it.  I agree that the more he can have to occupy his mind, etc., the more contented he will be, and that is only natural.  I will imagine he will want to come east with you when you come in June—and that will be another problem to be faced.  It would be nice if he could come with you each time you come east [sure it would!] and stay here while you were in New York—just for the visit—but it would be very expensive—and I don't know what Wayne would think or do about it; he would be afraid that sometime Daddy would just refuse to go back to Seattle.  I live in dread of telling Daddy that we have sold our house.  When I think of it from his point of view (a thing Wayne simply isn't able to do, and I can't blame him) it seems like we have simply cut off his roots—in a way—and now he has nothing but the clothes on his back—if you know what I mean.  I think you do.  Even Mother will take it pretty hard, I'm afraid, because every once in a while even now, she asks when she can come home. I'll have to play up the story that's it's too much work for me to keep the house, etc. that might have some effect with her.

 

I would like to store some of the old things (like the cherry chest of drawers) but storage rates are so high (moving rates have gone up, too).  We may store some things at Wayne's mother's in Polo but they will have to be smaller articles that can be moved without too much trouble.  I just hope and wish that it will work out that we can keep or store all articles of any value and not sell anything except what I am sure Daddy wouldn't care to have kept and we have no need for.  Of course I can understand Wayne's feeling that nothing here is really of any use to Daddy any more—because he'll never be furnishing a place of his own, or anything like that.  I've saved out some old pictures, etc., I thought he might like to have in his room sometime.  Wayne does try to understand my view-point, but I can't expect him to understand it entirely.  You see, I'm still too much torn between them, even with Daddy thousands of miles away.

 

It doesn't seem possible that Bob is graduating from high school.  Please give us some hint of what he might like for a graduating present.  I imagine you are glad he decided to go to the University of Washington.

 

We all enjoyed your account of your little vacation trip.  [I think this must be the time our family went to Chiliwac, British Columbia, and stayed at a dude ranch.  Fishing represented about 1/20 of it.  There was tennis and horseback-riding for us boys; a horse kicked my brother about ten feet.]  Would Daddy be well enough to go fishing sometimes with you and Bob?  All his life he has talked about going fishing.  You know, or all my life.  Anyway, he'd enjoy it.  Must close and go to bed.  Much love to all, Ruth

 

 

            This is an important letter, for it hints at the ultimate breakup of Gramps and Gramma as an viable entity, as we might say today, with little grace.  All of their goods have been disposed of, their last home sold. Though Ruth refers to it as "our" home, there is some doubt.  I think there are hidden economics at work here.  Perhaps the Beverly home was sold to pay nursing- home costs, and the money used to buy Ruth and Wayne's home, on the condition that Gramps be able to live there, which of course proved impossible, over time.  The loser, however, was Gramps.  I can see that clearly now.

            What is it most married couples work hardest toward but owning their own house, and mortgages are designed so that in thirty years time, a normal working life, the mortgage is paid off at about the same time the man retires.  So Gramps worked toward that goal, but illness kept it from becoming a reality.  The house was sold to provide money for medical costs for his wife and, ultimately, him, but the money realized from it went to Wayne, the hated son-in-law.

            It is probably best that I do not know the particulars, yet they are precisely what I need to know to write this account.  Whatever they had saved disappeared, including their home equity.  And then there was the old problem of Wayne needing $4000, perhaps as down-payment on a house for him and Ruth, and Gramps declining, refusing with fury.  Asking his son-in-law for collateral and Wayne not having any, and Ruth becoming angry because in a family you do not ask each other for collateral; you trust each other.  Or do you?  What if one is untrustworthy?  That was Gramps's reading of Wayne, and he might be right.

            My job as advocate is to take Gramps's position and argue it for him, whether or not I think he is right.  It is like being a lawyer.  But if you think your Gramps is right, then it is not so difficult to do.  It may be that his vision of his son-in-law as a scheming, underhanded conniver is correct (though Wayne and I always got along fine, except the Christmas of my seventh year, when Wayne and I were playing checkers, and his knee "accidently" toppled the board and all the checkers fell to the carpet.  I was winning, at the time;  all this can be forgotten, or at the least put aside as meaningless, and I only record it because my job is to put down the facts in the hope that they might add up to something close to the truth.

            So if he was right, and it was Wayne's intention to take from him his house and his minuscule life's savings, then Wayne was successful, and by the time my father took Gramps West the old man was destitute and a burden.  Wayne sold the Villa Park house and Ruth disposed of the furnishings, many of them my grandparents.  What happened to what was left of the equity?  Well, some of it went to maintain Gramma in the nursing home, whose costs had jumped.  And the rest of it went with Ruth and Wayne when they moved away from Villa Park.  My old telephone directory lists a number of Illinois addresses before they settled terminally in Florida.  It was Wayne's idea to live there.  Ruth, who always hated the heat, did not protest his decision.

            And finally there is this letter from Grandpa, with the return address on the envelope of 3515 Woodland Avenue, Seattle.  The handwriting is good—excellent, considering the extent of his deterioration in the past two or three years.  Again it is that hideous 5X7-3/4 wide-ruled paper of a grade just above newsprint.  I would guess he had made some degree of recovery, but it was not long lasting.  Still, he is lucid.  There is an uncomfortable degree of duplicity in the letter.  Though written to his wife, she is comatose and unable to read or comprehend it, if someone read it to her.  Then who is it really "to"?  My father, of course.  And it is terribly self-serving.  Again there is the cloying argumentation, that casuistry he is famous for; it is evident in the letter he wrote to me as a nine-year-old, almost exactly ten years earlier.  But so much has happened.  A life has collapsed and is nearing its end.

            It is the last words an adoring grandson has from his Gramps of forty-five years ago.  Paranoid, sure, mildly threatening, yes; conspiratorial, accusing, tautly reasoned—all of these things.  But perhaps. . . right.  Right in its ultimate judgement.

            If I were have to guess—that is, sit as his judge and jury—I'd say it was.  You are not as alone, Gramps.  I'm with you, every time.  Right to the end.

 

June 19, 1949

Dear Mother,

Today has been "Fathers' Day", and a long lonesome day it has been, and a long lonesome week it has been, too.  Nobody I ever knew before I came here has been to see me.  No one who knew me before I came here has spoken to me.  Alone.  Alone.  Sometimes I wonder if any body cares for me.  Is this to be my punishment for doing what in my judgments was the best thing for you?  Had Wayne got the $4000 would he have given any of it back, to you, to pay your heavy expense, which came two months after he would have borrowed it, on his individual note, unsecured.  Would he?  Would he?  He could have kept it all.  And who would have paid the heavy bills, as much as $1000 a month, in months following your cerebral hemorrhage?

 

Could he have borrowed it from any bank?  No.  [Underlined twice.]  Could he have borrowed it from any person?  I don't believe there was any one that would have loaned him the money.  Would he have surrendered his home?  I don't believe he would have done that.  The method he was taking to get the $4,000 convinced me that he would not [let?] this chance slip.  The way he talked to me at the time I asked him for acceptable security for the note was further evidence.

 

What he said to me the time showed his chagrin at being defeated.

 

But, Mother, why did that paper on which Wayne had written the first note[s?] have to separate itself from the trash I was burning that day, and turn up at feet that I could read it?  It was the hand of God.  God is watching over us; He has been doing so all the time.

 

I could give more evidence of this but want to leave you something to think about.

 

Oh how I love you!

Dimdad [or something pretty close to that]

 

for Edmund:

Some of my thoughts on Fathers Day.  6-20—Do as you please about sending this to your Mother.  I will leave it to your best judgement.  Cut away the lower part and return all above it.  Means your approval.  (over)  Also it means you would send it to her as it is written.

 

Your Father, who loves you dearly.

 

            This letter was found, out of sequence, in the drawer in the apartment, with the rest of Gramps's letter to my father's letters upon my father's passing, so it was clearly not sent on.  Neither was the bottom torn off.  It served its purpose, which was to deliver a message to his son.

            The son, "whose father loves him dearly," chose to do neither, which was his option.  It was the wisest course, too.  Gramps died in June, 1952, the same time as I graduated from college and, being self-centered to an almost absolute degree, I remember nothing of his passing.  Gramma, who had suffered so much and had been comatose for a decade, outlived him by two years.  Who says there is a God who watches over us and who . . . cares?  Well, Gramps does.

            Gramps is buried beside his wife of the years, Leigh.  Their graves are in Westfield, Illinois, and with some effort I could locate them, but I don't think I will.  Graves I've visited in the past have had nobody at home.  They are green plots of earth tended by strangers in some perpetual pact involving money and a contract that is legally binding.  With the possible exception of my son or niece, there is nobody left to care about these once-lively persons who have passed into oblivion.  My guess is that it is not a bad place to be, and there is no pain or anguish there.

            A number of years later when my father's sister, Ruth, died in a nursing home in Kissimmee, Florida, I inherited her papers, which I found illuminating.  Most of this will have to wait until the chapter on my Gramma, Leigh, which follows.  But there is an echo from the grave that is highly fitting now.  It is, of course, Gramps speaking again.  (Or has he ever stopped?)

            There are two items.  One consists of three postal cards.  I will disclose their contents first.  Again there is some ambiguity of date and intent.  All show that ragged handwriting that resulted from what he bitterly called his "affliction."  In the first postal it runs uphill; this used to signify optimism, but in his case it doesn't.  Since the card is lacking a postmark across its one-cent stamp, I have the month and day but not the year.  My guess is that it is 1948.  It reads:

 

May 13.  My dear Daughter:  I wish I had the power and speed to write to tell you I thought of you last Sunday.  I wish they could have a mothers day for disappointed mothers.  [Underlining his.]  You tried to have the little one that would have made your happiness completed on M.D.  But God knows best.  You life may have been required to pay for it.  I think while I believe you would have been willing to make the sacrifice, you were saved for your mother and your father.  It is not signed.

 

            I don't know what to make of this, truly.  Did Ruth not show up for Mother's Day and Gramps is punishing her, even though Gramma can only blink her eyes as a sign of recognition or comprehension?  Punishing Ruth and invoking God on his side, yet complimenting her in a perverse way for what she has done in the past and for the additional burdens he will place on her in the future?  It would seem so.

            Poor Ruth.

            The next card is canceled and postmarked August 17, 1948.  The handwriting runs downhill this time, but the message is positive, laudatory.  When Gramps praises, he gushes.  This follows by about a year the sad, daily letters directed to my father.  Gramps is in Seattle now.  The mood swing is 180 degrees from the earlier postal, though only three months have passed:

 

May 17

My dear Ruth:  Your wonderful letter has been recd.  It sounds like mother talking to her son, and what a wonderful mother you would make.  [Ruth was childless, not be intention, so there may be a bitter barb here, under the guise of sympathetic kindness offered.  God must be wanting to use you for his angels to copy after.  I think He wants to see you to console your parents while they are yet living, and then call you up high, when they are dead.

            "I am glad mother is better.  He (God) is watching over her.  Your adoring Daddy.

           

            Again, I do not know what to make of this.  Nearly fifty years later, we are of a much different sensibility.  Talk of God's wishes, even among the devout, does not spring so easily to lip.  The sentiment rings false, however.  The tone is manipulative.  The egocentricity is unbelievable.  Ruth, Gramps's daughter, has an existence only in relationship to her parents.  Her job is to console and comfort them.  If she does so, she is an angel.  Not an ordinary angel but a model angel, one to copy the others after.  And when God is done using her, she has no other earthly purpose and He will call her home.

            Yeah, yeah, yeah.

            This is the same God, remember, who destroyed Gramma with a series of strokes and left her to vegetate for a decade before "mercifully" finishing her off.  I cannot accept this, or what logically follows.  If God is watching over her, he has a perverse and malevolent vision.  His cruelty is without limit.  I would prefer to believe that such a God doesn't exist.

            And there is another level of irony here.  If Ruth talks to her father "like a mother talking to her son," then she is condescending and feigning a patience he provokes that she doesn't truly feel, and he knows it. That is why he is justified in gushing a false praise that is given a keen edge by telling this aging, barren woman what a wonderful mother she would make.  If I am right, this exceeds the bounds of common cruelty and becomes something grotesque.  It does not have an ordinary name.

            And then we come to the third and final postal card.  I say final because if there were more or earlier ones, Ruth is the kind to have saved them, and they did not pass on down to me.  It is dated July 6, 1950; nearly two years have passed.  He is still in Seattle and in yet another nursing home because of his obstreperousness. My guess is that Ruth wrote regularly and he did not.  It is a long time to go without a letter from your father.  We know that she wrote once recently and her letter provoked his response.  It is addressed, not to Ruth Reinert, but to Mrs. W.L. Reinert. 

Since we know that Gramps loathed Wayne, perhaps Gramps is intentionally addressing her as being the hated man's wife:

 

Dear Ruth: 'I saw Mother today and she was the same.'  Glorious news.  I wish my palsied hand could stand it I'd write you every day, must to tell you how much I love you for taking such good care of your Mother.  You have so much company.  How do you find the time?  That was a long time for Ed's letter to reach its destination.  I'll bet Mother was glad to get it.  My memory is so short.  [Except for grievances, Gramps.]  I could not tell the day of the week if I did not take a daily paper.  Did you ever think how close we are to Russia across the Pole?  It makes me shiver.  Much love, Dad

 

            This is interesting, for evidence of his progressive dementia, and no less his self-centeredness and -pity.  The fact that Ruth could do no more than report that Gramma was just the same is a neutral event, but Gramps milks it for all it is worth.  If his "palsied hand" [true enough:  the handwriting confirms it] could stand it, he would write every day.  Twenty-three months have passed since the last postcard.  Ruth, so far away, is in no position to do him any good any more.  (Or harm, for that matter.)  But her devotion to her mother is commendable; still, it is not what Gramps used to provide when he lived with her in the nursing home Ruth moved him out of.

            This terrible event lurks in the background in all his communications with her and colors it adversely.  Ruth took him away from his wife, too, and no matter how often she visits this person who is in capable of response or improvement it is not as often as he would.  Nor is her care on a par.  Why, he used to bring her water in the night, when the night nurse was unresponsive to her alarm.  And how she responded to his kindness, this woman who could only blink her eyes.  I imagine Ruth received these rare postal communications with dread, and the crabbed handwriting—whether it slanted uphill or down—portended another chastisement in the disguise of unctuous praise.

            I repeat my litany, poor Ruth.

            He follows up with a matter-of-fact statement about his condition.  He needs the daily paper, paid for by my father, to tell him what the day of the week it is.  Wouldn't a calendar do?  (It works for other prisoners.)  How short his memory is, he mentions in passing.  And I note, for everything except grievances, Gramps.

            Then there is the abrupt shift to how close we are to Russia, the dread enemy.  Right across the North Pole lives the real villain of the piece who will do us in with massed armies and superior nuclear weapons if we let our attention waver.  The realization makes him "shiver."  In 1950, that fear was real and concerned many.  In addition to his personal affliction—-the product of both a stroke and the isolation inflicted upon him by uncaring children who drove a wedge between him and wife—-there was the poised threat of war with Russia.

            The second item uncovered in Ruth's papers after her death is important to me.  It is almost as though Gramps had the prescience of mind to imagine that, one day, little Bobby might paw like some demented scholar through the papers left behind by his dying family and become hopelessly confused by the jumble of facts and dates, and need some help in sorting them out.  So he provides what he called a "Record of Events," or as he also called it, "Something of a Diary."

            Thanks, Gramps.  It's a great help, though it comes a bit late in the search.  It fills in a number of missing pieces in the puzzle.  I might as well list it as the items came to me, just three short days ago.  Perhaps he constructed it because his "memory is so short."  I feel another bond because my own has grown so, too.

 

            1944

5/22   This A.M. (3 o'clock) Leigh fell in her bed room and fractured her right femur.

 

5/25   [She]Entered Wesley Memorial Hospital.

10/23  Leigh had a thrombus on her brain causing paralysis on left side.

11/19  [She]Contracted pneumonia.  Employed three nurses.

11/22  Leigh had a severe cerebral hemorrhage.

 

            1945

2/10    Moved Leigh to room 678 in hospital.

4/17    Miss Monroe's (nurse) last day.

7/18 Leigh was removed to the Bigly Nursing Home on Wellington Ave.

12/8    Discovered Ollie's gift?.

           

            1946

4/27    Left Bigly Home for Restville House, 443 E., Chicago St., Elgin, Ill.

5/21    Bought a burial lot in Chapel Hill Gardens.

10/1    Killing frost.  Strike on C.&A-E Rr.

10/15   Price control on meat removed.

10/16  Strike on Aurora-Elgin over.  Nazi leaders executed.

10/26   Edmund arrived on way to New York.

11/6    Took out Accident & Sickness Ins. Policy in Union Life Ins. Co., Chicago, Ill.

11/23  Placed Leigh in the Sherman Hospital on request of Dr. Millikan of Elgin.  For observation and X-rays on account of looseness of her bowels.

12/1    Leigh returned to 443 E. Chicago St.  Nothing accomplished by hospital visit.

12/5    Bill received from Blue Cross Ins. Co.

                                            $77.80  paid by Company

                                            $15.00  paid by Insured

                                            $92.80                

12/13   First real snow.

12/31   R.&W. [Ruth and Wayne] went to Polo.  Back on 2nds eve.

 

            1947

1/3     R.&W. to Russells.  [Wayne's brother, who evidently lived in Polo with his mother, at least for now, right after the war.]

1/16     Paid Dr. Milligan to 12/1—$48.

1/24     Ed. Connelly called up from Deer Field and arranged to meet Ruth at Elgin that day.  He returned to Deerfield that evening.  John & wife accompanied him.  [These were relatives on Gramma's side of the family, being Connellys.  "Ed" might be Edmund Riley Connelly, Gramma's father and her mother his second wife.  His first had eleven children by him, then died at 40.  John might be her step-brother.  It is a common name on all four sides of the family.  Edmund is a family name on the Connelly side and repeats nearly every generation; as an Arnold it appears only once, though it is my  brother's middle name.]

1/27     John & wife brought Ed. to Elgin and to V.P. [Villa Park].  [They] went home that night.

1/28     Ed. and J.C.A. [himself] to Rockidle, Ind.  J.C.A. returned home on 30th.    [Also] Edmund's and Cecil's 20th wedding anniversary.

2/2      Ground-hog Day.  Clear and bright, all day.

2/4      Second time this winter temperature a minus 10 degrees.

            As usual, the weather reports follow, right up to the grave.

 

 

 

2

 

A DIM, FRAGRANT MEMORY

      


 

        I find it difficult to write about women, especially those in my family.  I feel very much as a dog would, discussing cats in the presence other dogs or, worse, in a mixed audience of cats and dogs.  I might begin, "Guys, these cats are very much like us.  Don't they have four legs, paws, a long tail, and walk all bent over on the ground?  So we have a lot in common.  Why is, then, that every time I try to get close to one, I get my nose scratched?  And why do I have the overwhelming urge to chase one up a tree?"

       We live with women in our families for decades, yet never begin to understand them.  How can we, when very often they don't understand themselves, or even wish to?  Leigh was a Connelly.  She was a Sara first, Sara Leigh, but called herself that only once, briefly.  Perhaps there was some other Sara in the family and the potential for confusion great.  Leigh is a sweet name enough for any woman, young or old.  She being my Gramma, I've always thought of her as old, until the other day, when I unearthed in my aunt's effects a picture of Leigh as a juicy young woman, married to a man who looks a little like a young prankster (James C.—the C. for, who knows?), surrounded by adoring son and daughter, who must be about five and seven, respectively.

       All are posed as a close family unit, as the sociologists of today might describe such a modern rarity.  The lighting is excellent—directional but diffuse—and the expression on each of the four a bit dreamy but realistic.  They look straight into the camera and there is no shyness, even in the children's expressions.  Rather, they each show a confidence and sophistication that, however false, takes my breath away.  They look . . . measuring, sly, crafty.  Surely this can't entirely be the work of a skilled photographer?  There's got to be some basis in truth that the camera not only catches but reveals as nothing else will.

       Leigh is dark-haired, her long tresses swept up and coiled around her head, framing it.  She is soft, maternal, nurturing.  She looks. . . serene.  From what I've read about her, she was not so much tranquil and abiding as wishing to be accommodating.  This I can understand.  There are modern women like her and I know several.  Yet there is a wonderful calm center to her.  She is in the middle of the picture, this life-giver, her son on her right, his head titled sleepily, already wearing the jacket, tie, and collar that were his mainstays throughout his life.  And Ruth, her head caught up in mammoth white bows, her hair swept back tightly from her temples, her little dress of crinoline riding high on her neck, far above where her little breasts would sprout disappointingly in a few years.

       Such eyes.  They are piercing.  They bore into the camera and spike it twice.  It pouts, it appears grimly disapproving.  Her little mouth is narrowed, as it continued to be throughout life.  The eyes are right out of Henry James.  Turn-of-The-Screw Eyes, I would call them.  They see all.  They measure the adult world and its capacity for evil, and do not look away from what they suspect more than what they see.  They regard you with vague interest, but find you lacking in several critical departments which are not clearly stated.  If they judge you, they do not speak their findings in any of the quarters in which we come up short.  They retain their silent, youthful wisdom, or whatever it is.  It is striking, startling, slightly fearsome.  I feel a chill run down my spine but shrug it off.  Ah, Ruth.  I knew you well, Auntie.  But I did not know you at all.

       To understand Leigh, you must know Ruth.  Some mothers and daughters are never truly separated at birth.  The umbilical cord is cut, but the psychic bond stretches to the end of the earth.  A little tug of guilt and the distant daughter comes snapping back from wherever she has fled.  They were like this, my forbearers.  There are clues I've unearthed.  Ours was a literate family.  I do not mean they were authors, though many of them thought of themselves as writers do.  They were well read, especially the womenfolk, and all wrote, from time to time.  When it mattered most.  They kept diaries.  Something called out to make written records of what was happening in their daily lives.  Often it wasn't much, the usual domestic travail.  And often it was the great insecurity of travel that pushed them over the edge of silence and made them pick up pencil or pen, a bit grudgingly.

       Leigh wrote, or tried to write, even as a child.  But she sought diversions and easily found them.  Several times over a decade she tried to keep a coherent diary but failed.  She hope for a distraction and one always providently arrived.  She was better at writing letters, but there is only one to be found.  It was written much later in life, after some forty years had passed.  It was overly long, self-indulgent, perhaps to make up for all the letters that went unwritten.  (And most likely this one wasn't mailed, or else was condensed into a much shorter one the next morning that was.)  This isn't much to build a case on, admittedly, but it is I've got, and I so I seize it most gratefully.

       So there are two written records framing her life.  Bookends, if you will.  The first document is a hand-written diary begun and stopped and begun again over a period of four years.  She is ten.  Imagine!  It came into my hands among three boxes of artifacts mailed me by my uncle's sister, Myrna Reinert.  She is presently alive, about 90.

       Gramma called herself SaraLeigh for a while then,  and wrote her name as one word.  What a wonder it is to me to find such a document.  I read it avidly.   I find her remarkably coherent and focused, the same person revealed in the second document, from the same source, in a letter written some forty years later.

       The handwriting in the first document is tiny, crabbed, runs straight up and down, is highly disciplined.  But after a couple of years it changes dramatically and becomes wild and flowing, with ink blots frequently appearing.  Of course; she has entered puberty.

 

Sept. 12, 1888.

I am seated in my little room trying to collect my thoughts together so as to form a good sentence with which to begin my Journal.  I have never kept one before or even begun one as some do begin and then neglect it.  That, mamma thinks, will be the most trouble with me.  The day I bought it Uncle Hart told mamma and I'm to answer to mamma the question, "Do you think she will keep it up?" that it was all in resolution.  So I will try and keep up my resolution.  I can hardly keep my thoughts on my writing now because I have an aunt that we are expecting to come this fall and mamma and I have got to thinking that she is in Charleston now, where she would be apt to arrive at and stay a while.  The fair is going on there now and papa has gone to Charleston to take my sisters over to attend it and I am in a hurry to see if mamma's and my expectations will prove true.

 

October 21.  It has been a month since I last wrote in my journal.  This does not look much like keeping my resolution and I am so ashamed of myself.  I was to write every week and I do not know now why I did not write the week after that other was written or the second week but in a few weeks school began and then I did not get to write only on Sundays any way.  Sunday before last Beppie my sister was sick and I sat in her room and read to her and last Sunday we took a walk in our woods and today I thought I would write.  I spoke something about my neglect to mamma and she did [not] seem so much sorry as I supposed she would be she said she thought she thought it would be better for me to write when I felt like it, so that is what I am going to do.  Well mamma and I guessed right in what I spoke of in my last writing and that auntie is sitting by me now.  But she has a misfortune that I am afraid is on her mind now.  Aunt Manda's trunk is lost.  It did not come off the train when she got here.  She has been here over a month and it has not come yet.  It is a great loss to her and I feel so sorry for her.  Just now I happen to think about whether I intend to tell all my thoughts in here.  All my troubles that I would not tell any one except mamma I believe I will if I can get used to it (for I have a good many burdens to bear it always seemed to me more of my kind than any one elses) yes I know no one else has trouble just like mine—that is anyone that I know.  And then it seems they are all secret that they are deep down in my heart that I never tell any body.  Yet I have somethings which I dont tell even mamma.  But I would tell her but I cant so I will write them in my Journal and mamma can read it.  I think it will make my Journal more of a pleasure to me if I do.  But one thing kind of hinders me and that is I would not care about any body but [underlined] mamma seeing it if I would do as I said before but may be they won't mind and if they do it won't hurt so much because I dont intend to say anything wrong and I need not be ashamed [underlined]  of any thing which is not wrong.  I guess I will quit now for I would like to begin a letter to Aunt Nannie [?] and Aunt Sara which duty I have neglected for a great while.

 

Dec. 9th.  It has been a long while since I wrote last in here but I don't think I felt like it before this and so I believe I will follow mamma's plan and write when I feel like it.  I was thinking to-day if I had been keeping a journal like other people do; because really I don't know [how] to keep one.  I don't know whether people tell what happens or just their thought.  I will do both ways then I guess; tell some things that particularly interest me and my thoughts too.  What I spoke about the last time I wrote of telling my inmost heart I have changed my mind since that.  I believe I will keep them to myself and they will pass away.  I will tell them only to God.  I wish I [could] write good things in here like Mary Willard did in hers.  I have the book it is in.  I meant the life of Mary Willard or Nine teen beautiful years and it contains some of her journal and it was full of such earnest, good, pure thoughts.  I have thoughts too but I can't express myself.  Well I am not as old as Mary was and may be by the time I am that old I can express myself better.  As Mary Willard was in her seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth years maybe when I am seven, eight or nine years older than I am now I will have more serious thoughts.  I was in the sitting room where mamma is and she said when I spoke about not knowing how to write in a journal that there wasn't any way; each has her own way.  Well I can't write much any [underlined] way with-out getting tired so I guess I will stop just now and write to Uncle Mart [Wirt, Ort?  These were two of their names, on her mother's mother's side].

 

Feb. 17th—It has been a long time again since I wrote last.  I haven't felt like it for a good while.  I only want to write a few things today because I want to read some in a book of poetry I have.  I cant help wishing this afternoon that someone would come to see us.  I like to write pretty well but I like company better.  I was not at church today none of us but papa went I thought the sermon was good last Sunday.  Mr. Senoff [?] is the pastor.  I think he is a nice man he preaches to the children the first Sunday in each month and last Sunday he preached to the children.  We haven't been to Sunday School regularly for a long time.  I have a good S.S. teacher also.  Miss Kephart is the teacher.  She is a pretty, young girl.  It seems like a good many people that are pretty are not good but I know she is.  I want to stop now and read.  I like that better than writing.  I always end so short though.

 

Apr. 7th—I guess I'll not try to keep a weekly journal nor even a monthly just whenever I want to I will write.  I was at S.S. and church this morning and mamma wants me to write a synopsis of the sermon  It was a sermon to the children.  The text was in the seventh chapter of Genesis and last part of the 16th verse  "And God shut him in."  God shut Noah in the ark.  Mr. S. repeated the story of Noah and then said that God closed the door of the [ark] so  Noah was safe.  The text was to represent Jesus as our Protector, Shield and Comfort.  The ark was about 5 or 600 feet long and 90 wide, and Noah was 120 years in building it.  Mr. Seneff said that if we seek protection from a wild [beast?] there was a great high rock we would climb up there and if there was a cyclone we would go in a cave but God is a better protector than these.  If we would ask any aged person who they think about the thought they would say that through this life Jesus had been their shield and had shut them in from danger.

 

June 15th—I have been keeping my book in my little trunk and had locked it and misplaced the key so it was but recently I found it.  I have read two books since I last wrote:  The Wide, Wide World and The Fair God written by Lew Wallace.  I believe I like the Wide Wide World the best it has made me wish more than ever that I was a christian.  The Fair God is a story on the conquest of Mexico and has to[o] much fighting for me.  I hope no one will read this writing.  I just get the book out and scribble.  I ought [to] keep a journal nice I know but it seems like I can not."  [Rest, if any, is missing.]

 

       The journal begins again more than two years later.  The year is 1890, the month November.  She is twelve, going on thirteen.  She seems a very nice, very knowledgeable young lady.  She wants to do the right thing.  She depends on her "mamma," as she spells and capitalizes it  I find I am growing fond of her, my grandmother as a little girl.  But youth is half her charm, and I am easily won over.  Still I am lucky to have discovered this fragment of a life now long ended, and the writer a person related most directly to me.  It is worth its weight in gold.  What I have here in my hand at this moment is, well, holy.  Or about as holy as anything gets, these unholy days at the end of the Twentieth Century.  Holy.

 

[The journal is prefaced, "This book is affectionately dedicated to Myself."  Wonderful.  Love you, Gram.  The overleaf reveals the following:

 

Preface

La Connelly

Westfield Ill

Nov. 1890

 

Steal this book for fear of Shame

For here you see the owners name

 

This book is written as a help to me in my writing and to help me to get in the habit of keeping a journal.

 

Talks with myself

 

Nov. 9.—This is Sunday, and a rainy Sunday too, and I was more than half inclined to be out of humor because I couldn't go to S. S. this morning, but still cherished hopes of going to the Sunbeam Circle in the after-noon, and then when it was decided I couldn't go there either, [underlined] it just "capped the climax" and I just gave way to my feelings, as I often do, though of course I oughtn't.  It isn't so dull, perhaps, as we make out, here at home because there is lots to read thats good [underlined] but I 'wanted to go to the Sunbeam Circle' [all encased in single quotes and underlined additionally] so nothing else seems to satisfy me.  But I'll get over this mood after awhile I hope.  But nothing puts me out of patience as to think "What can't be cured must be endured," doesn't that sound doleful?

       But I have no great [underlined] loss to be endure merely a small dissapointment [stet] I think it would be better for me [unclear] my ill-humor [underlined] that is a thing that can [underlined] be cured and am certain it is not as pleasantly endured by others.  I know that by experience.  That makes me think of that old saying Scotch, isn't it?  I forget how it goes, something about if we could see ourselves as others see us wouldn't that be nice!  though I'm not sure but that we might get our opinions of ourselves lowered a little sometimes and I don't know that it would profit us after all.  I think I have a good title to this little book and that is just what I mean it to be.  I undertook to keep a journal about two or three years ago and made but a few entries and those just because I wanted to keep it up not because I felt like like [stet] it.  But now I am "so much" [two words also underlined] older I really think I am going to enjoy it.  Well, it is getting too dark to write "Blindmarie's holiday" and I close this entry in my journal almost as reluctantly as I do an interesting book.

Sunday Eve"

 

       The next entry is dated 28 of August, 1892.  Leigh is fourteen.:

 

Nearly two years later!  When I opened this little old book a few days ago my first impulse was to tear out the first and last pages of it and burn them, but after a moments consideration I decided not to, but I am going for the third time to resolve to write in it.  And my dear, little, old journal I am going to give you a short sketch of my short uneventful life up to the present time and afterwards confide in you and my successors my thoughts and the happenings of this little spot of the great world in which I live.  First picture to yourself a country girl, "ungainly, dull and tall" of fourteen, aye, nearly fifteen years.  She has been reared, the youngest of a large family of children, on a large farm in eastern Illinois.  There is a grove of hickory trees in front of the huge, handsome, old-fashioned farm-house and a favorite uncle has named the place Hickory Villa and we shall always cling to that name.  On this farm and a short distance from Hickory Villa stands a little red brick school house where she received the foundation for her scant education.  About two miles east lies a little village of about eight hundred inhabitants which is the seat of a small college.

       This college I (for of course I am the tall, awkward, ignorant country girl in question) attended for three terms; getting a start a year in Latin, a little help in the latter part of the arithmetic and thats about all.  To be sure I studied Grammar, Physics & Phys. Geog and U.S. History and Algebra each a term but the present benefit I have from these is little, excepting perhaps, the last two.  Now I have rather drifted from my subject.  But I cant help talking about this subject which worries one so.  Of course when I am a great woman I shall write a large Auto-biography of myself and perhaps, off and on, I shall treat you to a bite of my history in the near future, but now I'll leave you to guess the rest and tell you what just now awaits me.

       Then listen, you odd, little, journal, you.  There is going to be a change in my life—a new life, it seems to me, opens before me.

       We are going to move to town.  That is, what's left of us.  Papa, Mamma, my two sisters, Ione and Beppie, and myself.  All of my brothers and sisters but these two are married except the twins (boys) and they will be doing for themselves.  My youngest brother and his wife will occupy the old homestead.  Except three rooms we are going to keep to use when we come out here, for we are not going to sell the farm, and we are going to raise sheep and so will have to be here a good deal.

 

Sept. 11.  So I am trying to say good-bye to Hickory Villa this morning.  All the different sports on the farm and their associations are very dear to me and I know all through my future life Hickory Villa will hold a warm place in my heart.  But now my mind is full of the future; for just tomorrow Beppie, (my next older sister, 17) and I will go over to Charleston, my future home and stay with our cousins, the Huber[?] girls, and start in school for it will be a few days before we begin to move.  And Oh! [also underlined] I dread [underlined] it!  Not alone the starting in school in a strange place, but its how little I know.  Of arithmetic, grammar, geography, U.S. History and Physiology I know—comparatively nothing.  And in those very things I suppose, the great and august Prof. Henninger will examine us.  If I allowed myself I would worry myself sick but I'm going to trust to Providence [from but on underlined].

       It is strange how sorry [sorrow?] unites persons and softens our harsh judgements of others.  To day I was thinking rather unpleasant thoughts concerning a girl friend of mine, Irma Moore who sat next me in church when she [turned?] to me and said, "You know Ma is not able to be out, she is so weak and I was talking to her this morning and she said 'it seems like you will never be able to go any place' and she said 'I don't expect I will ever get well.'"  Irma paused, leaned over again my shoulder and cried silently.

       All was changed, my hurt was warm when just before it was cold and hard.  "Sorrow makes the world akin."  I know I am not very pretty or jolly, but I wish I could always be loving and sympathetic.  But I am not.  It would seem like my heart was cold and hard as ice to hear and see the way in which I treat Mamma sometimes—oftentimes.

       Does it weaken one to make good resolutions and break them?  If not, I, this night, do resolve with God's help to be kinder and more obedient to my mother.

       Well, Good-night, everything about me, this windy night.  The moon and the tireless 'katydids' when next I see and hear you I will be wiser in regard to "tomorrow."  [Last word underlined also.]  It says in my little dew-drop book, (which is verses from the Bible for each day in the year), in the verse for to-day.  The Lord is slow to anger and great in power.  I know He has power to help me tomorrow, if only I could trust in it.

 

May—Eight Months After

 

       A year of school in Charleston has, in some unaccountable way, passed.  I write the above sentence, stopped and looked at it, but could not realize or even comprehend it.  It has been so short and yet so [underlined] long.  The night in which I made the last entry seems like a dim, fragrant memory and yet I remember so [the rest is either lost or uncompleted, probably the latter.]

 

 

*   *   *

 

       The second existing document containing what remains of Gramma's life (all except for a few old photographs) is a letter written when she was fifty, her daughter, Ruth, in her mid-twenties.  Its salutation is to "My dear Friend." It reminds me of letters written by Eleanor Roosevelt and took place at roughly the same time.  Women were encouraged to have close friendships with other women.  Men were distant and demanding.  Only another woman could understand the isolation and misery of a woman's station in life.  Men were the cause and not the solution.  One's children were to some extent companions in misery, at least female children were, though lacking in the capability to extend sympathy.

       The letter is dated June 10, 1928.  I wasn't born yet.  The address in the upper right-hand corner is 2008 West 102 St., Chicago, and I had forgotten it, but I remember the house.  It was in a section of town called Beverly Hills.  It's been mentioned in Gramps's letters.  It couldn't have been in South Chicago, for that is where we lived, and our journeys by closed car took at least an hour.  And it wasn't in North Chicago, I am certain, though North wasn't so far away.  So it was to the West, of course, the lake being East.

       I am aided in remembrance by an old photograph, prepared as they often were with a preprinted back so it could be used as a postal card.  Such cards were popular, but frequently not used the way they were intended, at least not in my family.  We saved them as mementoes.  In the postal, the house is caught up in early snow; in fact, snow edges the bare hardwood tree from its left side, from which must have come the prevailing wind.  This way then is East, towards the water, for Lake Michigan is famous for its stiff breezes.  I have to imagine that it is, for there is no one to consult with about this aspect.

       I see the second-storey garret that used to be my father's bedroom and from which he once, in a famous sleep-walking vignette from my childhood, simulated flight in a dream, awakening with a thud to find himself landed on that very same front lawn, now pictured in snow.  And the house next door—towering, shadowed—is crowded close.  Funny but I remember much more space around everything.  True, the lot on the other side remains empty, and I recall it is where Gramps planted one of his many gardens.  In the Mid-West during the Depression everybody who could grew vegetables and fruits; it was prudent, imperative, and a trait inherent to the region.  Even though the son of a farmer may be an educated man, with a degree, with a profession as a teacher, he will each spring plant his crops wherever he finds a cleared space, even in the heart of Chicago.

       Gramps did.  I remember his great corn and tomatoes, his rhubarb for pies and sauces, and his beans—pole, bush, waxed, and yellow.  Gramma made grape jelly; I was allowed to help as a little boy.  She used to strain the pulp through a cloth that probably was an expired dish towel, for it would stain and make the towel unusable for anything else.  I see again the fluted and flanged jelly glasses that received the hot liquid jelly and also the paraffin heated on the stove in a little pot with which to seal them and prevent the jelly from spoiling.

       Outside the back door she grew nasturtiums.  They were yellow and orange.  Not far away was the grape arbor, where the makings for the jelly came from; it spanned the entry into a vast backyard.  It went on and on, stretching back.  I remember the tall, uncut grass and a little bench.  How hot Chicago was in June, the date of Leigh's final letter, the one to her female friend.  People sat out on benches in their yards, trying to catch a breeze, which was rare and fleeting.  The house in the snow scene displays a covered front porch, which I'd forgotten.  It ran the width of the house.  Hot, if the ghost of a wind came drifting from the South, nobody would have wanted to miss it. The porch is where everybody would wait, gathered expectantly.

       Excuse me.  Remembrance is overwhelming; it comes roaring back when you least expect it.  It takes you away.  You are caught up in somebody else's past, suddenly and transported.  Where was I?  Oh, yes.  In June, two years before I was born, Leigh wrote to her permissible female friend the following, in a hand that is easy to read, on paper that is unlined but whose sentences are remarkably level and even.  I suspect Gramma's life was, too, at least on the surface, though beneath the surface there may have lurked chronic discontent.  There are hints—just hints, mind you—of a long, presiding unhappiness.  There nearly always is, if your world consists solely of a busy husband and children who are outgrowing their need for you.

 

       Almost six months since your welcome Christmas letter came, and many [underlined] times in that interval have I thought of you living in your new home in the dear old home-town which you have always loved so well.  I thought that, when your Ruth would come in March (as you said she was going to do) you and she might come up to Chicago and Evanston together for a visit—at least that she would come through Chicago, en route, and call us up.  But so far we have had no further word from either of you.  I did so much enjoy the little visit we had with Ruth—now several years ago, isn't it?  And it seems so long since I have seen you. [Last word underlined.]  I do hope your health is better than it has been for years—indeed, I can't remember, dear friend, of your ever being entirely free from physical ills—but I hope [underlined] you are feeling really well and strong now and enjoying life to the utmost, there among your many dear friends.

       You so kindly invited me to visit Chrisman this spring, but it could not be before fall now.  In October, my three sisters and I (they are half-sisters, you know, but so good and sweet and dear to me) plan to meet at Ione's in Cadiz, Ohio, for our usual annual reunion since my precious Mother left us a year ago last October.

       It wouldn't be much out of the way to come due West from Cadiz to Chrisman, to stop for a couple of days on my way back to Chicago.  Are you living all alone?  Mapleton used to seem "far out," but no doubt the town is built up more in the direction now, and it isn't so far to go to the M.E. Church; but it would seem pretty far to walk to the store and P.O. for you, if your are not strong.  (I suppose [underlined] you have never formed the habit of driving your own car.)  But maybe you have free mail delivery now, and telephones save a lot of going to market, of course.  But maybe you have a maid.  When your health isn't the best, I couldn't think of adding to your burden for one day and, you know, there is no other place I could wish to stay in Chrisman, when you are there. So write me again and tell me more about yourself and your life.

       You may want to ask me why it is impossible for me to come before fall.  Well, I was coming to that—and you may be surprised to hear that my Ruth and I have a European tour all [underlined] arranged for this summer, leaving on July 6 from Montreal, and returning to New York on September 9.  We are so happy and excited over it.  We land in Glasgow and have a 13-day motor tour through Scotland and England—in that way visiting the houses of so many English authors—and including five days in London.  By boat we cross to Holland, where we stay two days, then two in Brussels, Cologne (Germany) one, before taking a boat trip down the Rhine to Wiesbaden.  A motor trip through the Black Forest brings us to the Alps of Switzerland.  A week's motor tour in Switzerland is supposed to reveal the gorgeous beauty of the Alps from many angles; we stay overnight at Lucerne, Interlaken, Montreux, and Lugano.  Then we have three days in Venice, three in Florence, three in Naples (with Pompeii included), four in Rome and go up to the western side of Italy via Genoa and Pisa to Nice, France, by train, and after two days in Nice and one in Avignon, to Paris where the remainder of our 66-day trip will be spent before leaving Havre for N.Y. and home.  Doesn't it seem too wonderful to be true?  Tho' it isn't so expensive a trip as you, perhaps, might think, yet it will cost me more than I would have thought of spending in one summer, had not a combination of circumstances placed the thought so forcibly before my mind.  First, at the private school in Tennessee, where Ruth taught French and Spanish last year, the proposition was made to her to chaperon a group of girls on a summer European trip.  It fell through, for various reasons.  Then up here, in this far wealthier Starrett School for Girls, as soon as school opened in the fall, the movement was launched and would have carried through easily, and I realized  both how Ruth longed to go and how hard it would be for [me] to have the ocean between us so soon after giving up my mother.  Besides, a wise sister-in-law pointed out that a trip in which so much of a burden of responsibility would be placed upon Ruth could not bring her [underlined] as much care-free pleasure as she should have.  "But, Mother, I should by all means have visited France if I teach French another year," she kept saying.  Then my reply seemed to come easily, "Give up taking a group of girls, and I [underlined] will go with you."  She, as well as I, felt much happier.  It had always been the dream of my life to go to Europe.  Ruth had such a hard, nerve-racking year of teaching here in this beautiful [underlined] school, where, besides five classes she has had to do much private tutoring, much chaperoning, conduct the French Club, and perform many indoor activities, such as what they call in private schools "corridor duty" and "study hall duty."  I am glad she will have three weeks of rest at home and, I hope, a restful as well as interesting summer.  If my letter were already not so long, I might add that I fear a man is going to persuade her to marry him by next [underlined] summer, since he wants [underlined] her to as soon as she returns in the fall.  [The following sentence inserted vertically in the left margin:]  And this is another reason for my [underlined] going abroad with her this [underlined] summer.  She has wisely refused her consent to that,—she doesn't feel sure enough of her own heart—but has refused Starrett's offer for next year and has [underlined] accepted that of Columbia Institute, Columbia, Tenn., to return there next year so that she may have an opportunity to learn to know this Southern man better.  He lives in Alabama, and Ruth met him while visiting the home of one of her adoring pupils.  As my sister Olive put it, Ruth "has been wooed [underlined] so often she wont [stet] know when she is won [underlined]."  This [underlined] man, Captain Horace B. French, is the seventh [underlined] who has ardently and urgently wooed [underlined]—five of them within the past 2-1/2 years.  Each one, she thought for a little while she cared enough for.  Yet she isn't fickle—she just hasn't seen the right one, I think.  I [underlined] haven't seen but one [underlined] I should feel as sure would be the right one for her, as I know [underlined] my dear little jewel [underlined] of a daughter-in-law is the right one for Edmund.  (This one [underlined] I speak of for Ruth is only a good pal—they are together now, visiting Hillsdale College (for Commencement) where they were class-mates.  He visited a few days in May, coming from St. Louis to take Ruth to the Senior Prom at Starrett.  He isn't in love with her that I know.)

       I am certainly fond of my daughter Cecile.  [My mother.]  They will soon have been married a year and a half.  Marie Runge found Edmund in Field's managers' office last summer.  Tell her that he is now assistant buyer in the fur section in Field's 6th floor.  (They are re-decorating that section this summer at the cost of $250,000)  It is a department that pays [underlined].  A salesman there has averaged $5000 a year in commissions alone.  Other department heads had asked [underlined] for Edmund, when the Merchandise Manager of the whole retail store, who is also one of the vice-presidents, himself selected this position in furs as the best of all for advancement.  I'm pretty proud of our boy.

       I guess I could write all night now that I'm started.  I want to tell you that Mr. Arnold is well (as he always is [underlined]) and of course would like to go to Europe with Ruth and me, but feels that he would like to sell some of the realestate [stet] he has been investing in before he could leave.  He is still manager of the Metropolitan Business College.

       I still have some private classes in Latin and English downtown, but not at the Y.W.C.A. but at a studio I rent for two days a week.  I have taken one course in U. of Chicago since Mother was taken from me, and, encouraged by my "A," am doing some correspondence work in the University now.  I must [underlined] keep on studying and growing.  Life doesn't seem worth while otherwise, to me.

       Now, dear Mrs. Earhart, wont you please answer this voluminous letter.  I'd be delighted to get a "steamer letter", addressed to me[.]

 

Sailing S. S. Adania (July 6)

Room B60

Cunard Line

(Care of Students' Travel Club)

(from) Montreal

Canada.

At Paris, we receive mail addressed in care of Students' Travel Club

Tour 86 & 108

19 Avenue de l' Opera

Paris, France

 

Much love from

SaraLeigh Connelly Arnold

 

       And noted below, in different handwriting and bright red ink:  somebody's "A Very interesting letter.  I am glad to read many of the accumulated letters."  I don't think the handwriting is my Aunt Ruth's.  Then whose can it be?  Sister-in-law Myrna Reinert?  Doesn't look like it.

       Another bottomless mystery lost to time and attrition.

 

 

 

 

*   *   *

       "A very interesting letter," I agree.  I doubt if it was ever mailed.  It is the kind of letter written by a woman isolated by marriage to another similarly situated, in hopes of bridging the loneliness that separates them like islands fixed in a stormy channel, one not unlike the one she was about to cross with her daughter while traveling by steamer from England to France.  For the tour itself I am lucky to have Ruth's journal, bound in blue leather, with a little thong clasp, entitled in gold script, "My Trip Abroad."  But this is not yet the time for that.

       A writer walks a fine line between textual reconstruction, interpreting clues, providing missing textual links, pure conjecture, and impure fiction in attempting to make sense and meaning out of what he is given in scraps and fragments of the past.  Yet (my wife tells me) I am luckier than most.  My family has read a lot of books, worships education, thinks of itself as singular, and tends to write things down.  Even the non-writers in my family, such as Leigh, on occasion took up pencil or pen.  Lucky for me.

       Did not mail the letter because she believed she had gone too far in it.  Late at night, in an upstairs bedroom on a warm summer's night, with her husband asleep at his appointed time and early to rise and go off to manage the Metropolitan Business College, she began in measured, halting phrases, only to become overcome with pentup need for self-expression to and with some kindred spirit, this singular Mrs. Earhart, about whom we know nothing.  So I speculate.

       Mrs. Earhart too has a daughter named Ruth, or else I misread the early part of the letter.  What an odd coincidence.  This would have the opposite effect of driving a wedge between them.  And she lives in Chrisman, a small Illinois town where Gramps earlier administered a small business college whose primary mission was to prepare people for a world of book-keeping and other pedestrian commercial practices.  The two women were about the same age.  Mrs. Earhart was sickly, not strong.  She could not travel—perhaps not even to leave the house.  But there was the consolation of the telephone.  Why, you could even order groceries over the phone and in bad weather it was a Godsend.  Or, if she had a maid, she could send the maid to the store.  But she was not able to visit her friend, Leigh, or as she this time spells it as one word, not accidently, SaraLeigh.

       But perhaps her friend could come to visit her, instead.  Still, that might be a great imposition on a sick or sickly person, mightn't it?  In which case Leigh would not consider coming and staying in a hotel; friends did not do this.  At any rate, Leigh's schedule had become jammed up and there were only certain times of the year she would be free to make such a visit, since she was now going to Europe with her daughter.  This required an explanation and the explanation is where the letter started going so astray that it became one of those private expressions whose function is mostly therapeutic.

       Leigh babbled, on paper, and I am most grateful.  It is not often that a man and a writer gets to know so intimately the grandmother who has been dead these fifty years.  Thank you for this indulgence, Gramma, this night and early morning hours of excess, and for the packrat's characteristic of both mother and daughter in not throwing away very much.  I am much like you, in this regard—dear grandmother and dear aunt.

       Remembering you as comatose ("No change," wrote Ruth, time after time, to her brother and her father in Seattle) for ten whole years, when all you could do is blink your watery eyes and moan, I am joyous to have you bubbly on paper, vibrant, alive, buxom (I must have you so and so you were, judging by this old picture I have before me, as I write this; you were sexy, as well, and that look in the eye of James C. may not be that of the trickster so much as the pixy or even, gasp, the lecher.  Oh God, let us hope so), and undead, surrounded by family, and all of them not undead now, either.

       What I am in search of here is the personality of Gramma.  Long obscured and out of reach, I feel myself coming near, nearer.  I want her warm, uncertain, full of hesitations, doubts, fears, loneliness, thoughtfulness, projecting cheerfulness and good cheer, even when dark thoughts are upon her, which must have been often.

       She sent me books, alas, not the real McCoy but the edited-for-children's versions of Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Caruso, Merlin the Magician, etc..  Well, it was a start.  Books were what she and Gramps gave for Christmas, bless 'em.  I remember how she tutored, I was told, U. of Chicago students in their missing or weak in their Latin and Greek.  "Umbra," she told me, "is the Latin word for umbrella."  Well, not quite, but it will do, when you are six and a long time coming to the true answer.  Was she translating this loosely in terms I could understand, and thereby grossly distorting it, or do I misremember and she said, "Bobby, our word umbrella comes from the Latin umbra, which is a kind of shadow"?   I should hope so.

       There are people not particularly well schooled or read (I am one) who revere learning and make it into a somewhat holy and dreary subject, to be approached with seriousness and caution.  I suspect the pair of them were of this mind.  They were also religious.  Gramps's letters evoke God mostly when he wants something and can think of no other way of bludgeoning you into doing what he requires of you.  With Gramma and my father faith was not so practical or useful, but probably ran deeper.

       So Leigh believed, with one side of her not inadequate mind, in the simple female verities—that you should marry a provider and have children that will make you happy.  You measure the success of your life by what you accumulate and the job title of your husband (or son).  A daughter, though, as with a wife, must settle for simpler things.  The great joy in life came through courtship and the female selection process that terminated in marriage.  Ruth had not found the right man yet, but was greatly sought after; Eddie had found his Cecile, my mother, and married this "jewel" of a woman.  Well, she was not, and I wonder at the degree of duplicity in everybody's life, in my known and unknown family.

       What did Gramma know and to what extent did she deceive to hold off the void that overtakes us, late at night, and steals sleep?  Can you deceive yourself in the same ways you fool others?  I've never believed you could.  The voice that comes in the night and keeps you awake speaks the Godawful truth.  So-and-so is selfish, so-and-so is mean.  Men are awful.  If they don't hit you, the terrorize you in other ways, and some of them are worse.  A woman's life is terrible, but what are you to do?  Poor soul.

       Childbirth hurts, hurts greatly, shortlived as it perhaps may be.  And all children are not dutiful and grateful.  A host of questions descend on me.  Did Gramps beat her?  No, I must believe.  What was their sex life like?  Probably she suffered sex as her womanly due.  You can't have children without sex, but sex is mainly to have children.  You shouldn't get married if you don't want to have children, not by this man.  It is a woman's lot, children are, and so is the resulting pain that extends into the certain future.

       Did she have orgasms, or is that a modern invention?  Did society perform a mental clitorectomy on its daughters or did they do this all by themselves?  Or was her husband's lust so powerful and thrusting that it took her out of herself and she became a different person, astonishing even herself, crying out in the night (for sex belongs to the night and the double bed) for more and deeper?  I would guess not, but I am enough of a long-married man not to be surprised by the prospect of its opposite—surprised by sex, as perhaps my grandmother was, and I would wish this for her.

       None of my business, I know.  But I wouldn't be a serious writer (and I am) if I didn't speculate and dearly want to know.

Let's see.  Leigh was a status seeker, at least in this letter, which perhaps (like sex) embarrassed and overcame her, and which accordingly she did not mail.  She left it in her effects for her daughter to come across and thrill at; the daughter kept it, according to that packrat mentality of us Arnolds, and left it for me to inherit in a box of effects sent on by her husband's sister.  At my urging and expense.

       Myrna had stored it in her warm, damp basement in Florida, hoping that eventually a query would be directed at her and she could respond with three tightly bound boxes in which the recipient would surely marvel that three women of two different generations and families were united in one simple goal:  never throw anything away.  And I am bound to them, as well.

       To know Leigh one must know her daughter, her first child and closest, the one she traveled to Europe with.  In family matters, women are all kin, all of a kind.  They are alike, I mean.  Ruth, again like her mother, suffered a series of strokes that left her (I'm sorry to have to say this) an unresponsive, weeping piece of human protoplasm, living on pointlessly, institutionalized, costing some anonymous financial institution about $50,000 a year to maintain, year after year, for at least one decade.  And then she mercifully died.  A year passed.  I queried the nursing home about the existence of a journal I'd heard she'd kept.  (I too am a journalist, and curious.)  And a nurse sent on my request to Myrna, who honored them.  The boxes arrived while I was out of town, but I got word and hurried home to open them.  The postage totaled eleven dollars and scratch.  I reimbursed her immediately, as I'd promised.

       I found a treasure inside.  My aunt, my gramma, lived on—in words.  They existed on old foxed paper and fading ink or in soft pencil, along with some wonderful  photographs hardly touched by time.  Most were in the soft, cameo fashion of the day.  Their brown tone was intentional, not the result of fixer failure.  They had come to what for the time being was their ultimate destination a family member who would value them inordinately.  Somebody who would know what to make of them.  An aspect of literature.

       And, O, what an obligation, what a burden, it is.  Happily I accept it.  Gratefully; for their life is my life.  As I grow older, I am convinced of it.

 

*   *   *

 

       The image Saraleigh presents of Ruth astonishes me. It is not how I remember her, as a gaunt, nervous, aging woman who bore no children and smoked a lot of cigarets.

       In the summer of 1928 she is a "belle," widely sought after.  Five suitors in the past two and one half years and a total of seven in five years or so want her.  One is most favored, the last in line,  but not enough so to become engaged, let alone married, to him.  He is a Southern man, from Alabama, a Captain Horace B.  French.  (And French, appropriately, is one of the languages Ruth is teaching and whose country she will visit when she goes to Europe with her mother.  This will be soon, very soon.)

       In 1928, with one great war already a decade behind them and the next looming a second decade ahead, he bears a military title.  How odd.  Career military man?  Surely not a title clung to at the end of military service, as Southerners are apt to do?  He must be on active duty.  Regardless, he is ardent, attentive, persistent, yet he comes at the end of a queue of suitors whom Ruth, each in turn, thought might be the one and summarily rejects.  She didn't know her own heart or, put in a more favorable light, was not sure enough of to settle down with.  He wasn't the right one, her mother said.  Yet she was not fickle.  No.  Aunt Olive and her own mother insist upon this, even though she was wooed so much she might not know when she was won.

       From this portrait emerges a romantic picture.  The belle, Ruth, pursued dizzily, without relief.  Smooched and nuzzled endlessly as one after another chases her and is systematically rebuffed.  None of them, even the vaunted Captain,  measured up to Saraleigh's Eddie, her son and my dad.  And Ruth was a  "jewel", as my mother was, who was deserving of a husband who would go out into the business world and prove his worth.  In the meantime, Ruth is going to a ball with a man who is just a pal, a classmate of hers and my dad's at Hillsdale college.  He isn't in love with her, her mother states, and there is the implication that something must be wrong with him if he isn't.  (Gay?)

       As for her own husband, he is well, as he always is, and busy with his own affairs at the business college he administers.  Also—and here is a sizeable clue, in my piecing together what happened to my family—he is unable to come, though he'd love to, because of his recent ventures in "realestate," as she spells it (and I rather like it, her way).   He isn't selling it but investing in it.  Ah ha.

       I suspect, from hints in letters from Ruth to my father, much after the fact, that he lost it all.  He bought Chicago real estate in the mid-1920s on spec and on margin, hoping for big profits.  The air was filled with tales of money begin made off land development in many places, such as Florida.  A man had only to raise a tiny amount of the purchase price to "own" the land and could sell it months later for many times its purchase price, without having to raise all of that money or have it tied up.  In fact, you didn't have to have much money at all.  Only a few dollars would put the land in your name.

       And then the realestate market collapsed, followed in a couple of years by the stock market.  Gramps was left penniless.  All the money they now had was hers—Ruth talks about a few bonds much later and how they might be liquidated to pay hospital and nursing home costs.

       By then they had lost their home in Beverly and were living in Villa Park with Ruth and Wayne. Wayne and her father did not get along at all.  As the financial crunch took place and Gramps and Gramma were reduced to living with their daughter and her hateful husband, their health failed.  First Saraleigh had her stoke, already tellingly summarized in medical terms in Gramps's "Something of A Diary," and the series of seizures and heart attacks that followed left her in a coma.  Then Gramps—railing and fuming and striking out against his oppressors, including some family members—had what he called his "affliction," which were probably a series of small strokes that went undiagnosed and untreated.  Hence the shaky handwriting, the advancing paranoia, and the attendant "real enemies" (Gramma  might spell it "realenemies," with that flair for melding compound nouns of hers).  Whatever you called it, the feelings of oppression and rancor were real and caused him to be a daily problem and torment to Ruth and Wayne.  Finally they committed him, or tried to, and when those efforts failed, palmed him off on my father in Seattle.  Stout-heartedly he accepted yet another major responsibility.

       But at the time of this wonderful, ebullient never sent- letter from my grandmother to the ghostly Mrs. Earhart, her mind was full of happy thoughts about the trip abroad.  Her own mother, Sara Rebecca Connelly, had just died after a long illness which she had nursed her through and she was at last free.   The itinerary was fixed and rigid.  They would leave from Montreal on July 6th.  The steamer would carry them down the St. Lawrence Waterway to the open water of the broad Atlantic.  And thence to Europe.

       It was The Grand Tour, as it is known throughout the western world, its properties pretty much established and unvarying.  It is the dream of a lifetime for many.  Knowing by hindsight what was to come for each of them—a painful lingering death brought on by stroke—makes the 66-day trip abroad especially poignant to me.

       For the details, we have Ruth's diary of the trip.

       Didn't I say that we Arnolds are not content to let life pass by without some kind of written acknowledgement?  Yes.  Each in our turn.

 

 

 

3

THE GRAND TOUR

 

 

My Trip Abroad" is bound in blue leather, with a flapped closure, and measures 4-3/8 by 6-3/4 inches. Aside from one early entry in brown ink, it is written entirely in soft pencil, and as the tour progresses, the handwriting becomes crabbed and nearly illegible. The diary is a gift, inscribed "From "Muzzie to Ruth Feb. 14, 1928." Most likely Muzzie was a school chum of my aunt's, or perhaps a fellow teacher at Starrett Academy for Girls. Below the dedication is one large red heart encircled by eight more little red ones, arranged in a random but artistic pattern. Women do these things with each other. (Insipid!)

The steamship is the Andania, the line Cunard, the captain M. Doyle (and he has autographed the entry after his name), the time of departure 3:30 P.M., July 6, 1928, and below this is a space on "The Log" for the ship's position, course, and dates. Ruth has carefully filled in most of this, but I will save it for the specific days of the crossing, and while the diary begins its first page with the 6th and their departure, a few pages hence it truly begins one day earlier, with Ruth and her mother's arrival in Montreal a day earlier. So I begin there, and use my own words, or paraphrasis, keeping as close to the text of the diary as is possible, and sometimes resorting to its words directly, when they are precise and charming and superior to anything I can come up with. (Which is often.)

Deep in the diary, under a section labeled "Memoranda," Ruth notes that they left Chicago at 9:12 A.M., Central Standard Time, on Wednesday, July 4, with no snide comment that it was hers and Mother's Independence Day, as well, leaving Gramps at home to manage his "realestate." They arrived in Montreal at 8 A.M., Eastern Standard Time, on Thursday, July 5. A full day was to follow.

A man named Lee met them at the station, as arranged ahead of time, and helped settle Ruth and her mother and their baggage into the Queen's Hotel in Montreal. That day she left her mother in their room to write some letters and went with him to Victoria College, McGill University. She sat in on a most interesting class in contemporary French poetry, taught by a Mlle. Lefame [?]. Also attending were Professor and Mrs. Davidson. Afterwards, she went to a rather unusual class in French Diction. Lee told her the teacher "had it," but Ruth didn't think so. When the class ended, Lee introduced her to various students and teachers, and then he took her back to the hotel and her mother. Along the way, he showed her the St. James Episcopal Cathedral and its beautiful interior, along with two or three large department stores.

Ruth found Montreal such a medley of the old and the new, with the street signs and almost all signs in stores rendered in both French and English. English, she noted, sometimes came first.

Later in a delightful French music store, where French and English were both spoken and understood with equal facility, she bought [sheet music? to] the popular song, "Ramona," with words in both languages.

They had lunch together at the Queen's Hotel and spent the afternoon seeing more of the city, which included a trip to the Bank of Nova Scotia to purchase additional travelers' checks. She and Lee had previously bought some at the Royal Bank of Canada. Then they headed for the French Quarter which "we found to be exceedingly interesting." Montreal, she states, is the largest city of Canada, with a population of over a million and has over 600 thousand French, some of whom can't speak English.

They first visited Place d' Armes Square, a typical French "place," in the center of which is the statue of Maison neuve [stet] who founded Montreal in 1641 under the name of Ville Marie and withstood hardships from the Iroquois with his little band of followers. The city was later called Montreal after the montain, Mont Real, or Mount Royal, just outside the city christen by Cartier, when he visited it (then the Indian village of Hochelaga, in 1535, 106 years before. On Mont Royal [stet] is a cross—always visible from the city and lighted with electric lights at night placed there to commemorate the cross which was carried by Maison neuve up the mountain and placed on the summit in fulfillment of a promise that he would do so if his people were saved from a plague that was then threatening to cut down their already scanty numbers.

Facing Place d'Armes square is the Cathedral of Notre Dame which they also visited—said to be one of the finest types of Gothic Architecture in America. Its interior is huge and very awe-inspiring and beautiful, with its high vaulted ceiling and continually burning candles around the various altars. Beyond—they looked into the chapel of Scarè Coeur—smaller, of course, but also very beautiful. The church of Notre Dame has a seating capacity of 10,000 and its great bell, "Gros Boudon [?]" weighs 24,700 lbs.; it is the largest suspended bell on the continent. Sometime earlier they saw the exterior (only) of St. James Cathedral, an exact replica of the famous St. Peter's at Rome, and just one quarter its size.

They took "a peek" into Chatealude Ramezay [?], now a museum of historical relics and the home, in 1704, of the governor of Montreal. Benjamin Franklin set up a printing press there in 1775. They visited the interesting old sailors's church down near the water's edge—Bon Secours, built in 1657. Hanging models of ships suspended from the ceiling is a different feature of this church, she adds. But most interesting of all is the Bonsecours [stet] Market, a typical old-world outdoor market; dirty, smelly—like nothing else in America.

Then they took a "street car" to St. Catherine St., the main street of Montreal, [brown ink begins a new page here] and took a sight-seeing bus around the city. The bus was one of those long topless affairs, she said, "like I am told they have in California." They saw some interesting sights, went around Mount Royal [stet]—not up it— you have to use a horse-drawn carriage for that, passed St. Joseph's Shrine, and saw the best residential section of the city, Westmount. Then they went back to the hotel and scarcely had time to bathe and dress for dinner. They were Lee's guest as Victoria College, McGill University.

Of course everyone in the huge dining room was speaking French but they had a table by themselves—Lee, Mother, and Ruth. After dinner she introduced Mother to Professor and Mrs. Davidson and they all had a nice time together. There was a dance at the school. She danced with Lee the first two or three times, then they started mixing the people and Ruth "drew" tall ones, one of whom was very nice, and two who came up about to her shoulder, one of whom could not speak English.

The diary now reverts to its beginning order of several pages earlier, and to the morning of the 6th, when the ship was to depart, which Ruth probably saw as the true start of their journey.

Lee came to the hotel about eight in the morning and had breakfast with Ruth and her mother. Then they took a taxi to the Cunard pier and the two women had to stand in line for almost an hour going through the red tape necessary before boarding. Finally, she reports, that was over and they walked up the gang plank, which was a thrilling experience. Shortly after boarding they learned that the boat was to be delayed in sailing "on account of a train wreck."

They found their stateroom to be a very nice one, clean and attractive. Many steamer letters awaited them, plus gifts, boxes of candy, a basket of fruit, and a book from a Mrs. Drybread, Paris in Seven Days. Lee gave them a box of candy. He arranged for their deck chairs and "steamer rigs." They had lunch together, but Lee soon heard the "visitors ashore" call and departed. Finally, the gang plank was pulled and the ship began to move "majestically and almost imperceptibly at first out into the river." Ruth says she will never forget the thrill of that all her life. It brought tears to her eyes.

The tugs pulled the ship out into the river, the St. Lawrence, and they waved farewell to Lee until he could be seen no more, even with binoculars. The other members of the Student Travel Club posed for a picture together. Then they had lifeboat drill. Ruth was dead tired; she returned to their stateroom and went to bed. Her mother awakened her for dinner. After it was over, she wrote the amorous Captain Horace B. French, her friend Becky, and a Mr. Matthews, perhaps from the school. The letters were posted from Quebec, which they reached early the next morning and she did not stay up to see it. She regrets not doing so.

The seventh was a Saturday, a wonderful day, warm and bright, with the sea so quiet that it seemed hardly possible the ship was moving. They spent the day in deck chairs, writing letters to friends, or strolling around outside for exercise, exploring the ship, sunning, studying the water. That evening they danced on deck, but Ruth reports a scarcity of men.

The next day was Sunday and religious services were held in the ship's lounge. The purser conducted them. In the afternoon, she played deck tennis with Molly, who became a shipboard companion. That night there were more services; these were held in the third-class dining room. Ruth stayed up to nearly 2 A.M., watching the northern lights and hoping for a glimpse of icebergs. She was disappointed at seeing none. Early Monday morning they cleared the Straits of Belle Island.

On Monday there was a lecture to entertain them. It was on "Literary Landmarks" and was conducted by a Miss Riley (perhaps a tour guide who accompanied them), but Ruth had to leave because her mother got sick. They stayed out on deck for a while, but Mother got chilled and went to bed. There the stewardess brought her lunch and dinner. For that and the next two days, Ruth's log reports rough seas. In the afternoon, Ruth read to her mother. It was a cold, damp day and not so nice out on deck.

That morning her mother and Mrs. Saunders got up early to see an iceberg, but Ruth didn't have "the pep to." Later in the day she saw several, some of them lying low in the water and others standing tall. Mrs. Saunders reported one that looked like a castle, with high pillars. At the time, though, Ruth was busy taking care of her sick mother.

That night she and Molly [whose last name was Kennedy] explored the ship and stood at the stern, looking over the rail at the wake. Ruth says she hadn't known until that moment how fast the ship was moving. On their way back to their respective staterooms, they got thoroughly lost.

There is a gap in the shipboard diary for the next five days and only entries from the crabbed and crowded log. She gives their position by longitude and latitude daily and a number indicating the length of the run. It may be in miles or knots. Whatever, it averages out to about 250 units per day. The sea that started out so smooth that Ruth could hardly believe they were moving on the second day became rough, though the day remained "clear and fine." It was followed by days of moderate breeze, strong breeze, and gale, though only the two middle days of their crossing contained clouds. On the 13th, the wind turned moderate, the sea slight, the sky fine and clear again. No mention of how Mother weathered it out.

A week later, they docked in Glasgow about 2:30 in the afternoon. Soon they were riding through the beautiful Scottish landscape, where they observed long, low, whitewashed country houses and hamlets. The houses were almost identical, the architecture with pointed gables, flat fronts (no porches, of course, she notes), and myriads of chimneys like this, and her sketch indicates a raised, flat surface with four circumcised penis pointing skyward, all in a row. She says sometimes there are 25 or more chimneys together.

The countryside is beautiful, rolling, without the mar of billboards, as in America. But it is really not country, as we are used to thinking of it, as only villages and hamlets strung close. The pair are traveling by train and the coaches are "solid comfort itself," each one two long seats facing each other and upholstered in bright colored material. The arms dividing each long seat could be put up, thus making a sort of bed that one can stretch out on. The doors of entrance are on the side and there is no aisle.

They enjoyed the ride so thoroughly that it seemed very short. Arriving at Glasgow, they were conducted to the St. Enoch Hotel. The railroad that had brought them there was the L., M. and S.—the London, Midland, and Scottish. The hotel was owned by the railroad and positioned right next to the station. They immediately had lunch and went to their room.

Theirs was huge, with beautiful flowered wallpaper, a double bed and a single, a Venetian mirror hanging over the wash stand and another mirror over the dresser, and a wardrobe with a full length mirror. Three mirrors ought to be enough for two, hadn't it? Afterwards they were told that the St. Enoch was the finest hotel in Glasgow and they couldn't doubt it.

She left her mother to rest in the hotel and joined the two Misses Richardson and Mrs. Richardson, presumably their mother, to tour the famous botanical gardens. It was her first glimpse of the streets of a foreign city and she thoroughly enjoyed it from the window of a tramcar. A tramcar is a cross between a bus and a streetcar in America, she notes. Glasgow is the second [largest?] city in Scotland and a manufacturing center. Though supposedly not very beautiful as cities go, they found the gardens to be beautiful anyway.

They met a very pleasant, agreeable Scotswoman who offered to take them around the gardens and of course they gladly accepted her offer. She took them into the conservatory, where they saw many beautiful and unusual flowers, among them fuchsias loaded with red and purple blooms that were cleverly trained to grow out across the top of the conservatory, some large Canterbury bells, and double begonias, etc. Afterwards, the woman took them outside and to the gardens themselves, with its wooded glens and narrow paths winding in and out of the trees, stones and rocks, and high banks on one side covered with moss. Their guide then returned the four women to their tram, which took them back to the hotel. Afterwards, Ruth went out and bought some postal cards with scenic views of Glasgow.

They dressed for dinner at, I presume, the hotel. Then she joined George Sutter for window-shopping, a visit to George's Square in the center of the city, where they saw the cenotaph to those [men] killed in the last war.

The following morning the tour left at ten in the morning for Edinburgh, the whole party in a big "char-a-banc" bus. They passed through some beautiful, typical picturesque country. It was mining country, coal, and an oil country. They saw a paper mill. There was very little agriculture, she noted. Most of the land between villages was pasture.

In this part of Scotland wheat, barley, and hay were grown, and Ruth noted potatoes and turnips. The houses were built of stone, none of them wood. Some of the houses were whitewashed, some of them set close to the street and many of them having bright yellow curtains in the window; she attributed this to Scotland's "notorious lack of sunshine" and the people's desire to brighten up their lives. The front yards were filled with colorful flowers and pretty, bright gardens that she found attractive. So far in their trip, though, they had been blessed with sunshine.

People tended to walk a lot and she observed many narrow, well-worn footpaths. She saw only two or three private automobiles and found the empty streets quite a contrast to Sunday traffic in our country. Still, the spell of Scotland had been cast around her from the first and she had fallen deeply in love with it on her ride from Glasgow to Edinburgh.

They arrived in the great city around 12:30 and were taken to a private hotel at 26 Royal Terrace. That street is high and from the top windows of their room they had a lovely view of the city. Without exception, she says, it is the most fascinatingly interesting city she has ever seen. Back of their hotel is a beautiful little garden bounded by a high stone wall.

After dinner they went up the garden path, through a gate in the wall into Royal Terrace Gardens, a large private garden in the rear of the street and meant for only the people living on Royal or Regent Terrace Streets and whose back garden gates open up on it. There they met an interesting, intelligent, and very good-looking Scotsman, Archie Bogle, though they did not learn his name until later. He very kindly offered to take Ruth, Mother, Mrs. Bennett, and Miss Harris through the locked gate; he had a key. They climbed the hill that led to Lord Nelson's Column and saw the unfinished work which was to be an imitation of the Greek Parthenon, built in honor of the soldiers [killed] in the Napoleonic War but was left uncompleted because of lack of funds. The monument was called the disgrace of Edinburgh.

From Calton Hill they had a lovely view of Old Town of Edinburgh—the Royal Mile, or in other words the slums of the city, which stretched between Holyrood [?] Palace and Edinburgh Castle. From the other side of Calton Hill they could make out another portion of the city and, beyond it, the Firth of Forth, with the island Inch Keith in it. They climbed down the hill, led by Archie Bogle, and passed through the gate, which he unlocked again, and he took them to a spot where they got a wonderful view of Holyrood Castle and Arthur's Seat, a mountain somewhat in the shape of an elephant and supposingly a fortification of some ancient Arthur[ian] king of the Scots.

Holyrood Castle is the imposing, historical building no longer occupied by the Royal family when in residence in Edinburgh. It is associated rather closely with Mary Queen of Scots and where she spent some of the tragic years of her life. Next to it is the Abbey built by David I in 1128. Mr. Bogle stayed with them a little longer, then went off in search of his shaggy little black dog, Buddy, which was his inseparable companion and from whom, during the hill climb, he had gotten separated.

They returned to their hotel enthused, but were prevented from further explorations because the sky began to pour down rain. Instead of more they had tea and waited. Skies cleared and Ruth, Mother, Miss Green, Miss Demarest, and Miss Harris took a tramcar to Princes Street, which was the main street of Edinburgh and one of the most beautiful in the world. There they visited the Walter Scott memorial again, one of the most beautiful and graceful structures she had ever seen. In the center stood a statue of Scott. They circled it admiringly. It was surrounded by statues representing chapters from his novels.

Then it was on to Edinburgh Castle, where Ruth stood drinking in the beauty of the lofty castle on its impregnable heights, the first sight of which had taken her breath away. Recovering it, they returned to the tramcar and the ride back to the hotel, where they had supper. Afterwards, Ruth and her mother took the two Misses Richardson and Mrs. Richardson out to the gardens in back of the hotel and over to Terrace Gardens, where they were delighted to find the charming young Mr. Bogle again pottering about. He agreed to take Ruth to the top of Arthur's Seat and Mother permitted it, since one of the Miss Richardsons was going along as chaperon.

It was a long, stiff climb, she reported, but she wouldn't have missed it for the world. It was a little too much of an effort for her friend, so she waited while Ruth and Mr. Bogle completed the ascent. The view was wonder, superb, but they could not remain their for more than a few moments, for the rains had begun again and the patient Miss Richardson would get wet. They returned to the hotel quickly and Ruth reports dryly that they made it by about 10:45, without mishap.

The next day was Monday, July 17. They traveled from Edinburgh to the Trossacks and back, leaving about ten in the morning, under a glorious sunshining sky. One of the first things she had learned was that Edinburgh was not only the home of the inventor of the steam engine (Watt) and the telephone (Bell) but also of chloroform, whose inventor was celebrated with a statue which the tour soon passed and learned about. They were told about, but did not have time to visit, a statue of Abraham Lincoln in the old Calton cemetery, the only such memorial outside of the United States. Imagine that.

They passed a real gypsy caravan, which Ruth found interesting. The countryside was fascinating, though substantially the same as they had experienced traveling from Glasgow to Edinburgh. She was impressed with the beauty and neatness of the picturesque cottages, with their washed steps and door knockers and brass plates made to shine so.

One of the first towns they passed through was Kirkleston, where there was an old Roman church built at the time the Romans had invaded what is today Scotland, and they all had to see it. The countryside was given over to mining and Ruth noted mounds of waste material that resulted. Oil is mined in Scotland just as coal is elsewhere and is afterwards distilled. They passed Lilinthgow Palace, the birthplace of Mary, the queen who lost her head; it was the royal residence for hundreds of years. James IV had left there for the Battle of Flodden, where he was killed. In the town was a statue of the first governor-general of Australia, who was the Marquis of Lilinthgow. Lilinthgow is one of the oldest and most historical towns in Scotland. Its old, old houses and narrow cobblestone streets bear witness to its age.

They passed the River Aston, with its many-arched stone bridge, and went through Pulnet, Lourston, and finally Falkirk, the center of the iron industry, which their guide said was to Scotland what Pittsburgh was the USA. They came to Camelon and crossed a bridge like the earlier one over the River Carron. Sarbert [?] was the next town.

Everywhere they passed huge estates buffered by stone walls, and in front stood vine-covered lodges by the barred gates. She could see a road winding off to "the hidden, invisible manor house." The guide told them that a great many of these places formerly were owned by the landed nobility but are now empty, or rented out, or sold; some were turned into boarding houses or hotels. Taxation on the land is so high that it has "killed off" the owners. Accordingly, they saw a sign reading, "To Fen [?] or to Rent." One of the vacant estates belonged to the Earl of Callendar.

Soon after leaving the coal-mining town of Pleen, they saw rising majestically above them Ben Lomond and knew at once they were approaching the town of Trossachs. But the next town proved to be Bannockburn, where the Battle of Bannockburn was fought in 1314. They observed the monument and flagstaff where Robert The Bruce planted the Scottish standard in their battle against the British. They came to Sterling and got a glimpse of Sterling Castle and the monument to Sir William Wallace. The guide told them they would be stopping by the castle for a tour on the return journey, as they sped on.

The range of hills in the distance were the Ochill. They crossed the River Forth. The passed through Sterling and observed in the distance Blair Drummon, a beautiful castle now belonging to Captain Muir. Crossing the beautiful River Teith, they came upon a lovely view of Doune Castle and on the other side of them an equally lovely view of Dounston House. The former is owned by the Earl of Moray, a descendant perhaps of the half-brother of Mary Queen of Scots, and the latter by Lady Muir.

They came to Landrick Castle, owned by a Mr. Strand, a big-game hunter, and then to Cambus Moor, the beautiful mansion where Scott lived when he wrote Lady of The Lake. They got out and the guide allowed them to poke around grounds, where Ruth took a couple of pictures she hoped would be good. They had lunch at Callendar.

Soon after they entered the Trossacks. They are indescribably beautiful, somewhat like Branff but on a smaller scale. They got out of the tour bus again and walked around Loch Katrine, with Ben A'an, Ben Ledi, and Ben Lomond looming above them, until they came to Ellen's Isle, where Scott's Lady of the Lake presumably lived. They all enjoyed the scenery and took several "lovely" pictures, which Ruth said she hoped they would be lovely. For insurance purposes, when they got a chance they bought some postal cards with the same scenic views, the place being so beautiful.

The return trip was equally pleasurable and Ruth, her eyes tired, only mentions a few of them. One was the town of Allowa, famous for its knitting wool. Another was Airth Castle, just outside of the village of Airth, which was partially destroyed, their tour guide informed them, by "Mussolini." When asked how this was possible, he added, "The English Mussolini."

They crossed over the Union Canal, which runs between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Before returning to Sterling and its castle, they rode past Binns Castle, now owned by a Captain Deel. His forefathers raised a troop of calvary to fight against the Coveranteers. These troops later became the Scotch Greys. Beside the castle is a monument to the Scotch Greys. Lately the castle has been turned into a windmill to pump water.

Before coming to the town they stopped at the Castle Sterling and climbed the steep, narrow, cobblestone stairs to the turret, from which they had a lovely view of the town, the fields, and the Wallace Monument. "A rather snappy guide" showed them some of the castle, which is now headquarters for the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders. Ruth took as picture of one of the soldiers in his kilts. The grounds, the gardens, were very well kept up and bright with flowers; the dungeons where prisoners were kept was now brighten with electricity and lights. The guide reminded them that Mary lived in the castle as a baby and a child, before she was sent to France for her education.

In the chapel of this castle Mary was crowned queen when she was only nine years of age. [Pen and brown ink resume here for a few pages.] It is called the Royal Chapel. Ruth and her mother bought some postal cards and two books as souvenirs in a tower room at Sterling, where "there were many other interesting things" they did not buy, including a pulpit of John Knox.

On the return trip they stopped for a few minutes at Lilinthgow and viewed from the outside only the palace they had seen earlier; it was where Mary was born. Also, a cathedral was there and they glimpsed it. Across the bridge over the Forth they went, a bridge built in 1895; it took seven years to build and was the engineering feat of its time. In the distance was the home of Andrew Carnegie and it was pointed out to them; they all squinted to see.

They were beat when they arrived back at Edinburgh and had a late dinner. But—tired as they were—Ruth wanted more of the Royal Terrace Gardens. Myrtle wanted to see them, she had heard so much about them from Ruth and her Mother. So they went, but the handsome Mr. Boyle was not there; he was evidently walking Buddy somewhere else, or else had retired for the night, for it was late. Ruth and her mother consoled themselves with reading the life of Mary Queen of Scots before they went to bed.

On Tuesday the 18th, they remained in Edinburgh and left in mid-morning for a tour of the city and its principle places of interest. Their guide was "efficient, capable though sometimes unintelligible"—perhaps because of his brogue or because he mumbled. He led them down a street on the way to Holyrood Palace and they came to a stone turret, which he informed them was Mary's bath. What? At the palace itself, there are apartments in which the royal family stays when they come to Edinburgh. The present building was built by Charles II, though the south-eastern tower where Mary lived goes back to the beginning of the Sixteenth Century.

The first room the tour entered was a portrait galley, containing paintings of all the rulers of Scotland, starting with Robert the Souce [?] and continuing in chronological order around the hall. One item that interested Ruth was a glove box with a picture of Robert Burns in the middle of it. It was a gift to Queen Victoria. It contains 365 spaces, one for each of the days in a year for different pairs of gloves. Imagine.

They saw Lord Darnley's bed rooms and dressing room. From his room they climbed the narrow stone stairs to Mary's rooms, her audience chamber, her dressing room, her private supper room. The conspirators who murdered Rizzio, Mary's faithful Italian secretary, climbed that stairway, after having entered through a secret gateway into the palace, entered the private supper room where Rizzio was one of Mary's guests at a dinner party, attacked him, dragged him from the protesting queen's side, and finally left him dead on the queen's audience chamber. That spot on the floor is now marked with a metal plate.

In Queen Mary's bedroom we saw several interesting objects. On the wall hang two portraits of her bitterest enemies, Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth. On the table is Queen Mary's work basket and in a glass case nearby is a large plate presented by Queen Elizabeth on which the infant James VI was to be carried to his christening. We saw a picture of a tear bottle into which Mary's tears are supposed to have fallen and which she used instead of a handkerchief. Also there was an ancient mirror on the wall and the tour group was told that anybody who looked in it might have three husbands or may be beheaded. Ruth doesn't say whether she looked or not.

They next visited the ruins of Holyrood Abbey next door. It was founded by David I in 1128. Many ancient Scotch noblemen and their families were buried in the courtyard and the bones of many rulers of Scotland were in a vault back of the high altar. Queen Victoria was responsible for gathering together the remains of so many kings and queens, and placing them all in their final resting place, there.

A few of the tour group went on to view the state apartments in the palace, but most of them, including Ruth and Mother, went back to the bus. First though they saw the monument to King George III, which Ruth states is really to King George, because if they entered the number "III" after it they would have to acknowledge the other rulers named George before him, which they were loath to do. Then they headed for John Knox's house, but not before Ruth—greatly moved and inspired—wrote down the little rhyme quoted by the tour guide, as they came to Radical Road, which ran up to and around Salisbury Craigs: "Round and round the radical road the radical rascals ran." Now, how many ars are there in that?

Answer, there are no ars in that.

John Knox's house was an interesting old place in an old, old street, crammed full of interest, formerly a very fine street, full of "closes" and "winds," where many famous and interesting people used to live or stay, and now was very dingy, dark, and dirty. They entered a house with low ceilings and doorways, being warned to watch their heads. The guide inside explained the "different objects of interest" to them. [One wonders if Ruth ever came across anything that did not interest her.] Knox's was the only pre-Reformation dwelling house in Edinburgh still preserved with its original architectural features, she notes.

Knox (1505-72) lived in the house during different sojourns between 1559 and 1572, and died there. The house itself dates from 1490. On the walls of the first room they entered were pictures of various events in Knox's career, with the dates when they took place recorded above them. His motto was printed along the top of one wall, but Ruth does not give it. Ruth records more of what the guide told them, but I omit it here and hasten on to the next point of interest, which was Parliament. There she saw some of the advocates in their gray curled wigs and black floor-length robes. The king's counselors had white shirt fronts additionally. All were engaged in earnest conversation, she reports. The group went down to the Advocates's Library, where they saw an interesting old manuscript of Scott's preserved in a glass case, a letter in Queen Mary's handwriting to a cousin in France, and a letter from Charles I, when he was only the Duke of York, to his father, James VI. Ruth copied it down, and I relate it in full. It begins nicely, "Sweete Sweete Father. i learne to decline substantives and adjectives, give me your blessing I thank you for my bestman/Your loving son, York."

After viewing more of the library and advocates at work and engaged in talk, and noting another statue of Walter Scott, perhaps the best [one] ever, but the sculptor sadly unknown, they went on to Giles Cathedral, whose spire they all had admired from a distance. A cannon was fired, signifying one P.M. Then the ball rose to the top of Nelson's Column, but they could not make it out. They returned to their bus. The guide told them that James IV was not really who he said he was, since he didn't behave like a Stuart. Perhaps he had been "done away." Edinburgh Castle, built in 1089, was used presently primarily as a barracks for soldiers, but they got to visit the ramparts and had a magnificent view of the city. Outside was a dog-and-cat cemetery, where the soldiers buried their pets. Exhausted, a few of the tourists managed to revive back at the hotel, and set out to visit the National Art Gallery, where they viewed Van Dyke, Reynolds, Rubens, among others, until it closed at five. After dinner they packed their bags, for they anticipated an early start in the morning.

However, before they could leave for Kessvick, via Abbotsford and Melrose, there was an altercation to endure. It had to do with a waiter at the hotel and became heated. The waiter "accused" the Misses Richardsons of having a guest at dinner, for whom they had not paid, and tried to get Ruth identify her, saying that Ruth had been at the same table with her another evening. Miss Fairfax, their chaperon, who was supposed also to be their "conductor," finally shut the waiter up and he went off grumbling about "these Americans who make such a fuss about paying sixty cents."

Ruth was disappointed that there wasn't time to see more in Edinburgh. After all, hadn't Scott described the city as "mine own romantic city"? She felt the same way about it. Scott's statue beamed down from on high, as though blessing it, and Ruth's own visit had been extraordinary for a girl from Chicago. Nonetheless the tour bus pulled out.

She was enchanted with the Lake Country. But before leaving the Scotch countryside, she recalled more mysterious walls and gates, with roads behind them wandering off to unseen mansions that Ruth could only try to imagine. Perhaps the tourists were all the richer for having to guess. On the way in to Abbotsford, they saw white-washed cottages with thatched roofs and flowers blooming in well-tended gardens; Ruth lists the colors of the flowers as red, yellow, blue, and purple.

At Abbotsford they were shown Scott's mansion, which he built in 1810 and in which he did most of his writing, and where he died from worry, strain, and overwork in 1832. Ruth was specially responsive to these problems. Scott's great-great-grandson was the present owner and occupant of the mansion. He was Brigadier General Maxwell Scott. The mansion was the handsomest one she had ever seen, she who by now had seen many. An interesting young boy took them through the house with relish. Even the hallway Ruth found most interesting, since all the panel work on its walls had been done by monks. Inside there were some weird instruments of torture preserved and hanging from the walls, including one "iron arrangement that went over the head and had a bit which went into the mouth—for those who talked too much."

Also displayed on the walls were the coats of arms of the Lowland families, because it was Scott's wish that this hall be like all the others he had seen. In a glass case was preserved the last suit of clothes that Scott wore. They visited his study and saw the very table and chair at which he worked. They followed a private stairway that went up to his bedroom, which contained bookcases that held materials for his novels. A small, adjoining room was his "speak-a-bit," where he conducted private conferences and which now held his steel death-mask. The paneling of this room was made from the wood from the bed in which Mary Queen of Scots slept when she was sick in Jedburg in 1566.

Ruth found a glass case full of many more interesting items which she says she didn't have time to note them all down, but adds that they included Bonnie Prince Charlie's wine cup, which was rather small and made of pewter, Bobbie Burns's huge drinking glass, a book and a pen used by Napoleon, and the ivory crucifix carried by Mary Queen of Scots when she went off to be decapitated. There was even a bit of her gown from that day and a lock of hair from Bonnie Prince Charlie.

The drawing room was hung with the original wallpaper from 1810. The room contained a beautiful Chinese cabinet that formerly belonged to the Marquis of Montrose. The walls held paintings of Scott's daughters, James IV, Scott's mother, and one of his great-granddaughter, who was the mother of the present owner. Also hung there were portraits of Scott by Raeburn, one of Scott's wife, and a rather terrible painting, Ruth notes, of Mary's head, after it was separated from her body. And there was one of Dryden and Hogarth doing Hogarth, plus fine screen embroidery by Scott's granddaughter. The French chandelier in the drawing room represented the rays of the sun, they were told, and thus the cracks in the ceiling gave the effect of clouds.

They entered the armory, where suits of armor stood round the room. Bonnie Prince Charlie's iron fighting suit was there and so was an iron jewel box of Mary's. There were two dueling pistols donated by the Duke of Wellington—given him by Napoleon, it was said. And there were more wonderful items of torture—thumbscrews and a set of "bleeders" used by ancient surgeons. The tour guide pointed out to them that, today, bleeding was performed by hotels, and everybody laughed appreciatively.

The next room contained etchings of a comic nature by a friend of Scott's: probably the W. E. Hill of those times, Ruth notes.

They left Abbotsford regretfully, admiring the beautiful gardens there on the way out. They moved on to Melrose. The old abbey had been built in 1136 by King David I. Edward II burned it in 1322, and it was rebuilt four years later by Robert the Bource; his heart is buried within it. Richard II tried to burn it again in 1385 and was partly successful; Lord Hereford wrecked it during his expedition in 1545. At the time it was a beautiful old ruin, its architecture still magnificent, its stones colored dull reds and browns. The tour group was not allowed to entered the abbey, though, and had to content itself with viewing the ruins from the porch of a nearby house. Ruth was greatly disappointed. Still, they enjoyed the Gothic windows and the "romantic glamour" that seemed to hover over the place, in the bright sunlight, and which enhanced the burdens it had lived through over so many centuries.

They lunched at "the George" at the Abbotsford Hotel and were served a good meal by a genial old Scots waiter, whose effervescent spirits and ebullient manner enlivened them all. Again they found pictures and busts of Scott everywhere. There were two drawing rooms and they were filled with beautiful old etchings and pictures, plus bric-a-brac and antique furnishings. They learned that on the next lap of their journey they would not even be passing near Dryburgh Abbey, which they all had counted on seeing because it was the burial place of Scott and Earl Haig.

They departed Melrose, passing through some more rolling wasteland with clumps of brush and heather; these were the moors which were probably the site of Scott's Bride of the Lammemoor. They came to the border between Scotland and England and all piled out; Mrs. Grounds [?] took a picture of the cottage on the Scottish side, while Mr. Grounds went over to the English side, and then they shook hands with each other across the border, while everybody laughed. Then it was on to Keswick.

Ruth found the English countryside beautiful, but not so wild and rugged; hilly instead. A few brick houses began to appear—quite a contrast to Scotland. The gardens were equally well-tended and lovely, perhaps a bit more formal. Again there were fields of oats and barley and wheat; the oats were yellower than in Scotland. Instead of stone walls dividing fields were now neatly clipped hedges. In Scotland there had been black-faced sheep, whose wool she was told by the guide was sent to the United States because it was so coarse; in England there were many more sheep in the meadows and on the hillsides. The first English town they stopped at was Carlisle

They arrived at Keswick about six in the evening. It too was beautiful, picturesque, with its narrow, shady winding streets, delightful little shops, and charming houses and gardens. Their hotel was nice, with an abundance of blue China and pewterware. The gardens were the best to date, with the trees and bushes trimmed in the shape of pyramids. There was an arbor at one end and at the other groomed rock and flower gardens. The roses were huge—four or five inches across the blooms, the largest she had ever seen. Ruth recalled the fields of both Scotland and England, and the wild flowers she saw there—Shasta daisies, wild foxglove, and poppies.

 

* * *

 

Ruth was coming down with a cold and, consequently, was unable to go for her usual long walk around the visited town. She missed seeing the most beautiful view in England, according to Ruskin, which was from Friar's Crag, where there was also a memorial to Ruskin she wanted to see. Instead, she and Mother contented themselves with a short stroll around the hotel garden. They returned early to their room and bed, "blowing" themselves to a blaze in the fireplace. It felt good because the weather was quite chilly, though the days were long now and it was as light out at ten as it was at home at six in the evening.

The next day was Thursday, the tenth. They traveled from Keswick to Windemere by way of Dove Cottage. It was but a short drive and they had the luxury of a late start, not getting underway until ten. At breakfast, Mother asked her waiter if it would be possible to buy one of the beautiful blue and white dinner plates and, after a conference with the management, one was given her as a souvenir of the hotel.

They drove through the famous Lake Country for only two hours, Ruth wishing they had more time. They stopped at Dove Cottage. The Lake Country was so beautiful that Ruth was at a loss for words and said she didn't dare try to describe it but that she could well understand how it had inspired the poets living in its midst, with its wooded hills, sparkling lakes, winding shady roads, and picturesque cottages sitting at the foot of their hills, surrounded by their bright flower gardens. She hoped she would never forget the sight.

The stop at Dove Cottage was most enjoyable, very much as she had imagined it to be. Their guide was a woman, very much up on her Wordsworth. She showed them through the tiny rooms of the cottage. When Wordsworth had lived there, his annual income was only about $400 per year, his rent $40 a year. Imagine. They saw the living room, the larder, Dorothy's room, the family sitting room, where many of his poems were corrected or read to Dorothy. The poet liked to write outside in good weather, only moving indoors for more work. All of the furnishings in the house were from his time, but the counterpane was embroidered by school girls with quotations from his poems.

Scott slept in the spare room when he came to visit Wordsworth in 1805; three of Wordsworth's children were born in the adjoining room of Dove Cottage. A room built on as an addition somewhat later is now a museum containing first editions, original manuscripts, and letters from William and Dorothy to each other and to friends and relatives. The garden, Ruth relates, was kept very much as it was in his time and is very beautiful; it is where he composed many of his most beautiful lyrics.

They moved on. At Windemere they enjoyed more of the beauty of the Lake Country, arriving at their hotel in Bolso-on-Windemere about noon and visiting the terrace gardens overlooking the lake. Before luncheon they had a few minutes to write some postal cards and Ruth wrote more afterwards. Then they went into the village and bought stamps, more cards, film, and pictures of the Lake Country, as prudent travelers often do, in fear that their own pictures won't turn out. They visited a drug store and a linen shop, where the articles were all handmade by the women of Windemere and there was linen for sale woven by the men. Everybody bought something. Ruth purchased a towel with beautiful cutwork and some dainty handkerchiefs. Then the tour moved on to an antique shop, where after much deliberation she bought an antique silver bracelet for her friend in America, Becky.

There were only moments in which to dress for dinner. Afterwards, they hung around the dining room, sipping coffee. Then she and Myrtle went across the road to see the view of Lake Windemere from the hotel opposite. It was lovely.

The next morning was Friday, the day they were to leave for Chester. With much regret they departed Windemere; in fact they hated going and knew well they would not see such scenery again and could have gladly spent several days or weeks there. As they sped along on the bus, behind them stretched the vanishing hills and lakes, and the landscape grew flat and "incidentally less interesting."

As they approached Chester, they stopped at Treston for an early lunch. It was a good thing nobody was hungry, because the food was terrible and the hotel was awful, smelling of alcoholic beverages. There was no lounge for them to relax in, however briefly. The tour bus moved on. They arrived in the ancient city of Chester about two. At the hotel, on the board, they learned the rooms to which they had been assigned and went to them immediately. They rested and cleaned up and then set out to explore the city. They located the old East Gate and went up to the old city wall, built ages and ages ago. They walked along the wall and located the Chester Cathedral, which was not so imposing on the outside but promising "an excellent example of the transitional style" on the inside. However, a service was going on inside and they could not enter, so it was on to the Phoenix Tower, where Charles I saw his troops defeated in 1645 at the Battle of Rowton Moor.

They climbed up into the tower and stood where Charles had stood to watch the battle, saw several souvenirs of ancient Roman coins, weapons, and armor, and viewed the imprint of a soldier's foot in clay or some other substance that had hardened. There were also relics of the Norman occupation, including a sedan chair that had been used in Chester until 1870. At the foot of the tower they bought postal cards from "a very interesting, typical old woman" who had a shop there. They went on past the Goblin Tower to the Water Tower. The old walls along which they walked dated back to 61 A.D. and the Roman occupation. The top of the wall was commissioned by the daughter of Frederick the Great in 907.

The watch tower only went back to 1322. On the tower was a placard, words of which Ruth was moved to write into her diary: "Bonewald Esthomes or Water Tower. Built in the 12th Century. Was used to guard the city approach from the river. The lower or new tower was built in 1322 at a cost of about 100 pounds. In 1645 during the civil war the Roundheads placed [?] a battery at Breweas [?] Hill Farm and bombarded the two towers, but without the desired result." [Handwriting pretty jerky here.]

In the tower a young artist had his studio and many of his etchings were on the walls. The artist's name was W. C. Turner and his work seemed to be very fine. They had heard of him before and that he would probably be famous some day. We studied his etchings and Mrs. Bennett bought one. Then they retraced their footsteps and returned to the hotel. They were pretty tired because they had walked several miles.

She found Chester a quaint old town and one of the more interesting in the whole country. Their room at the Westminster Hotel was very nice and the dining room very interesting and quaint. However, the napkins were soiled and stuck in their drinking glasses. Everybody sat at a single table and was served by one of two maids in stiffly starched aprons and caps. The meal was typical English food—soup, fish, meat, potatoes, and one vegetable. Dessert was a sweet, served with cheese and crackers. Instead of going out again that evening, they returned to their room, packed their bags, and turned in early.

They started out early on Saturday, the 22nd, because they had a long drive ahead on the way to Warwick and many interesting places to see. The tour was scheduled to go through Litchfield, the home of Samuel Johnson, where there was a famous cathedral, and through Coventry, where George Eliot had lived and worked, and Lady Godiva had been made notorious through her ride, but the driver detoured and took them instead to Shrewsbury, where he had been stationed during the first war at the headquarters of the Royal Air Force. What a disappointment to a person with a strong literary background. Nevertheless, Ruth managed to find it interesting, but then she would find an abandoned coal mine " interesting."

Though the city has many famous parts, they saw none of them. It was famous for its cakes and its many half-timbered houses dating from the 16th century. She does not say whether they got to sample the cakes or see any of the houses. Instead, she turned to the gift book, So You're Going To England, by Clara Laughlin, where she learned it was the birthplace of Charles Darwin. They had a delicious lunch at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham, a large manufacturing city and the largest city they had been in in England, so far. They drove on to Stratford-on-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare. Ruth cautions that the house they visited was probably not where he was born, but it surely was where he lived as a child. There were two houses, actually, and they were next to each other. Both are 400 years old.

They were shown "Inspiration Chair," where The Bard supposedly sat and wrote a great deal of his work. They were told that people often sat in it "with good results." Naturally, Ruth and Mother promptly plopped down in it. By the fireplace was a large saltbox; the fire kept the salt—which was expensive—dry. A great oak beam ran across the ceiling over the fireplace and was said to be hundreds of years old. On the wall was a picture of London in The Bard's time; also a picture of the Globe Theater. Ruth notes that men took women's parts in Shakespeare's day and women themselves did not appear on the stage until the time of Charles II.

Upstairs they found a bookcase with early editions of The Bard's works. One wall held the famed Ely Palace [?] portrait of the Bard, thought to be the most authentic. They left through a lovely little garden in back of the houses and bought some postal cards and souvenirs. Then it was on to Anne Hathaway's cottage, "a dream of a place," Ruth reports, with a beautiful, fairyland garden. I must say, if there was a garden any place, Ruth would find it and it would be lovely.

The small, low-ceilinged rooms had been lived in by Anne Hathaway's descendants until the middle of the Eighteenth Century. Ruth found the old, courting settee an interesting sight; it stood by the fireplace, where the warming pans still shone from their many polishings. She saw some quaint old China, and a wooden plate that was square in shape and hollowed out in one corner to hold the salt that was so expensive that it had to be protected from getting wet and ruined. They came to two bedrooms, the first and largest with a heavy, carved bedstead and chest, the other opening off of it and reportedly where Anne Hathaway slept. Old-time flowers continued to grow outside in the garden, which Ruth found perfectly beautiful.

The tour moved on to Trinity Church, and it did not fail their expectations, for it contained the tomb of The Bard and members of his family. The registry of the parish contained the dates of his baptism and burial. These were 1564 and 1616, respectively. The font was consecrated for Holy Baptism more than 1500 years ago and is still in use. The Bard's grave was in the chancel, and when they stood over it in the midst of the quiet of the old church, they were filled with quiet awe and a feeling of reverence. The grave bears the familiar old inscription, "Good friend, for Jesus' sake, forbear," etc., and more words to the effect that he did not want his tomb disturbed after he had been laid in it. This was carved in stone, which was badly effaced by time.

Next to him to the left is laid his wife and in the same row his granddaughter's husband and Susannah, his favorite child, and her husband. Reluctantly the tour left Trinity Church and drove on to Warwick Castle, which Ruth found perfectly beautiful. There was a long, tree-lined drive leading to the castle and they walked it. Ahead loomed the outer wall; on the right rose Guy's Tower, in the middle the Gateway, and to the left Caesar's Tower. Guy's was completed in 1394 and was 128 feet high, while Caesar's was done between 1350 and 70. Its height in not given. They entered the castle by way of the chapel entrance and the first room they came to was the drawing room. On the wall they found a portrait of Margaret, the wife of Charles II; the top part was done by Van Dyke and the lower by Sir Joshua Reynolds, about one-hundred years later. They saw a cabinet crammed with family silver and tortoise shell, with a carpet that bore the coat of arms of the Warwick family. The chandelier was of Italian crystal and delicate Venetian glass.

The red drawing room came next, or rather The Red Drawing Room. The wainscotted panels of the walls were a deep ruby color, with gilt molding. On the wall was a portrait of Martin Ricot, done by a pupil of Van Dyke, and against the wall stood a beautiful cabinet of Chinese lacquer. The floor was covered by a Turkish carpet. Both this room and the first were full of portraits, Ruth hastens to add, for she had not mentioned this aspect.

The oldest part of the castle dates from the eleventh century. The walls are ten to twelve feet thick. A fire destroyed part of the castle in 1871, and when the rooms were restored, "clerestory" windows were discovered in the great hall and the new roof was placed above them; this made it much higher than it had been. In olden times, the chambers probably existed over the hall, Ruth adds. From the three large recessed windows of the hall, which were of modern construction, they had a wonderful view of the Avon and Castle Bridge. In the recess of the right window was a huge iron cauldron; it is called Guy's Porridge Pot. It holds about 120 gallons and is in reality a garrison cooking pot.

The hall was used as a smoking room by the present Warwick family and contained a collection of old armor, including a knight in German Fluted Armor on a horse in English Armor of the Fifteenth Century. They spotted a helmet attributed to Oliver Cromwell and it was due to him, they were told, that the castle was still left standing. Also preserved in the castle was the marriage chest of Isaac Walton and on the wall a huge French tapestry representing an army on the march. The old mill wheel in the castle river, the Avon, was now rebuilt and used to generate electricity for the castle.

The Great Dining Room was lighted by a Genoese Crystal Chandelier. In this room was a large picture of Charles I on horseback by Van Dyce, one called "Lions" by Rubens, and a remarkable collection of Chinese Luster china. Next was the Dancing Room. Here they found a wonderful Seventeenth Century Florentine table, the work of a lifetime, with precious stones inlaid in black marble. Over the mantle was a painting, "The Spanish Warrior," by Murtello [?]. And there was the portrait of the Earl of Stratford painted by Van Dyce just before his execution, when he had been informed of the upcoming event involving him. Ruth says the expression on his face was remarkable. There was also a portrait of Prince William of Orange when he was a lad, wearing his cap and plume. Then they returned to the private chapel of the castle by a route they had seen on the way in. The chapel had a window of old Flemish glass artfully pieced together. Again there were portraits on the wall to admire.

In The Boudoir hung the famous original of Henry VIII by Holbein, a portrait of Anne Boleyn, and one of her sister Mary and many other famous paintings. Ruth found them interesting. The ceiling of this room was done by Italian workmen and there was a lovely Florentine mirror; also there was a clock that had belonged to Marie Antoinette. The clock still ran.

The furniture in the old State Bedroom was presented by George III to George, Second Earl of Warwick, and formerly had belonged to Queen Anne. Accordingly it was called The Queen Anne Bedroom. Its walls were hung with an old Flemish tapestry that took 300 years to make and was finished in 1604. The bed of salmon-colored damask had coverlets and counterpanes of satin richly embroidered in crimson velvet and the traveling trunk bearing the initials A.R., surrounded by a crown, formerly was the property of Queen Anne. There was a large picture of her in coronation dress of brocade with the collar and jewel of the Order of the Garter. They came across two more portraits of unusual beauty, one of the grandmother of the present Earl of Warwick (now 17 years old) and the other a Van Dyce portrait of the actress Mrs. Sarah Simmons.

The Armory Passage was a narrow corridor at the back of the State Bedroom and The Boudoir; there they saw a fine collection of medieval arms, a suit of chain mail, a Turkish beheading knife, some genuine and some phoney armor of Cromwell's soldiers from 1642, the revolving gun from which Colt got his idea for his revolver, and the first revolver made by Colt. There was also an old jack-leather [?] pitcher from which beer used to be drunk. The manner in which the black-jack pitcher had to be raised in order to drink from it gave rise to the expression, "More power to your elbow," Ruth adds. They also saw a square-toed leather boot formerly worn by one of Cromwell's Roundheads and a helmet bearing the crest of the Earl of Warwick.

Their cultivated and courteous guide completed their tour, he turned them loose at the gate through which they had entered, hours ago, and they retraced their path down the winding, tree-lined drive until they came back to their bus. The tour group moved off to the Kenilworth Castle ruins, the last item on their sightseeing program for the day.

Ruth had not realized the castle was so destroyed. Still, the sight was very romantic, for the ruins were covered with ivy and what was left of the high walls and graceful arches gave them a faint idea of how vast and imposing the castle must have been in its time. She recalled that it was the seat of Scott's novel, Kenilworth, and had inspired Tennyson to write the familiar lines, "The splendor falls on castle walls/And summits old and in story."

The castle was enveloped in a romantic haze, which even the bright sunlight could not dispel, although she could imagine it even more romantic in moonlight and could picture to herself "the hosts of nobles—the luxury and splendor of the time when Elizabeth [the Queen] was entertained on such a magnificent scale there." [Brown ink again.] The guide took them up to the top and showed them what used to be the lake where the great pageant was held when the Queen visited and was to be entertained. Again Ruth was reluctant to leave a place of such historic import and return to her hotel in Warwick in time to get ready for dinner. Mother had wanted to drive to Coventry that evening, but it was so late that they knew there would be no one to drive them there, nobody who knew anything about the place, that is, so again they retired to their room and turned in rather early.

Unusual for her to do, Ruth underlines these last three words. Perhaps it only means that they were tired, though they may have been disappointed, as well.

On Sunday, the twenty-third, they left for Oxford, being allowed first the luxury of sleeping in. It was not very late. The drive was not a long one. They arrived before dinner and had a fair meal, after cleaning up a bit. On the way they passed through Branbury and stopped for Professor Grounds to buy some of the famous cakes sold there, which he and his family graciously shared with the others. Dinner being the main meal and served at around noon, the afternoon stretched before them. They headed for the college about 2:30 or 3, but since it was Sunday, most of the buildings were closed. Their "fairly competent guide" managed to show them the quadrangles and buildings of most of the colleges, each college being separate, distinct, and of a unique nature.

Oxford students have breakfast and lunch in their rooms, but get together for dinner in the dining hall of their particular college, she learned. She notes that choosing a college is rather like choosing a fraternity in the States. Often they select the college of their ancestors or else of their friends. All the colleges offer the same courses; each has its own dormitories, dining hall, and chapel. She found some of the quadrangles beautiful, others small and not so attractive. Each boy had his own two rooms—a bedroom and a sitting room. Most instruction was by private tutor and attendance at lectures was more or less optional.

The first college they were shown was Exeter. It was founded in 1314, and it was followed by Jesus College, by Queen Elizabeth. The Radcliffe Cameron [?] Library was the oldest and third largest in the country. It was built by one of the pupils of Sir Christopher Wren. A remarkable system of tunnels and subterranean passages ran beneath the library, with "trained runners"—messenger boys who when given the name of a book could fetch it for you in a very few minutes.

They saw first the exterior and then the interior of St. Mary the Virgin's Church, dating from the Thirteenth Century. Cardinal Newman was formerly the vicar there. The church contains the tomb of Amy Robsart, immortalized in Scott's Kenilworth. Degrees used to be conferred here, but were now passed out in the Sheldonian Theatre. Another interesting college was Brasinose [?], which counted among its students Haig and Heber. Heber was the author of the hymn that began, "From Greenland's icy mountains. . ."

They visited All Souls College, the Law College, and the Sheldonian Theatre, where degrees are conferred, some amid hectoring and raucous taunting from the assembled students, who hold no one (no matter how distinguished, she observes) in awe. Christopher Wren was architect for the theatre.

Wadham College was being done over at the time of their visit. This was the college of Wren. The Wadham College Gardens were extensive and the site of the famous Oxford pageants. The chapel contained a particularly beautiful window, dating from 1622. They visited the college dining room, which was typical, and each night the boys assembled at six to eat their meal. The walls were covered with portraits of famous men who had gone there.

They went on to New College, not so new, actually, being built by the Bishop of Winchester in 1348. The chapel window was by Joshua Reynolds. The main figures are life-size and represent Faith, Hope, and Charity; this chapel was the largest at Oxford. Out in front were statues of the saints and ones marking the birth and ascension of Christ, carved of marble. The ceiling inside had carved figures representing angels. They went into the gardens, which she found beautiful and extensive; the gardens butted up against the old city walls. They spotted several students sitting under the trees, reading and studying. Through a window in the trees they could just glimpse the tower of Magdalene College. (It is pronounced "maudlin," she notes.)

They went on to the smallest of all of the Oxford colleges, St. Edmund and its hall. St. Edmund only had 40 boys. (Perhaps Ruth liked it best because it had the same odd name as her brother, a name that went back to the early rulers of Britain.) Their Oxford guide permitted them a glimpse through the windows of the quarters where the boys lived. Though they could not see well, Ruth thought the rooms rather dismal and unattractive. The group moved on to Magdalene, where the Prince of Wales had gone and which was the most famous college. It was founded in 1448.

Magdalene was famous for two things. One was windows of the Prince of Wales's rooms. [Edward, who was to abdicate the throne] The other was the pulpit set into one college wall, where services were held on June 24, St. John the Baptist's Day. She found the chapel "a little gem of beauty." It boasted of, among other things, painted windows done in brown tones. She apologized for forgetting the name of the artist. There was also a picture of Christ taken off of a boat in the Spanish Armada. [?]

Again there were gardens to explore, at the end of which was a gate that led to a shaded path named Addison's Walk because the famous English writer used to frequent it while a student at Magdalene. Across from the gardens was a wooded space known as Grove Park. Some wealthy individual died and left it to Oxford, along with 40 pounds for its maintenance and to keep deer in the park. There was also five pounds for the Magdalene cat. Ruth reports that there is a cat, to this day, but the deer seem to have disappeared.

Ruth interrupts her narrative for "one more little item of information," before she continues describing her tour. It is that there are 24 colleges for men and eight for women, with 4500 male students and 950 women. Seven years previously those colleges were opened to women.

She and Mother left the tour at this point because they intended to return to Magdalene at six for vesper services. They went wandering down the street in search of a place to buy some ice cream. Along the way they spotted a shop featuring postal cards with pictures of the various colleges of Oxford and, of course, they stopped and bought some for their growing collection. A warm day, they continued their search for ice cream and found a shop selling it, but it was only marginally good. Still it was cooling. On their way back to Magdalene, they stopped at Mary The Virgin's Church and viewed Amy Robsart's tomb; at least they saw what they thought was it; they had no one with them to tell them what they were really seeing.

At Magdalene Chapel, however, they were distraught to find the service had already begun and they probably wouldn't be admitted. They were very disappointed, "for their hearts were set on it." The attendant told them there was a place further on where they could at least stand and hear the music. So they stood there, "desolate and woe-begone," and a few minutes later the attendant came by and told them they would be admitted, along with a couple of other late-comers, much to their delight; there were no seats left in the middle, but there were some along the sides, which was just as good for their purposes because they wanted to hear the very, very beautiful music and it did not matter if they couldn't see the choir.

It was a short service and soon the last notes of heavenly music died away, but still there was the spectacle of the priests—Episcopal, of course, Ruth adds—in their long, flowing vestments passing by. Then it was over. On their way out they gave a long, lingering look at the beautiful window facing the altar. Both left the church feeling they had had an experience, the memory of which would always be special to them. They spent the evening writing cards and went to bed early.

Monday, July 24, dawned, and they left early for London by way of Windsor Palace, Hampton Court, and a place called Stoke Poges. A busy day loomed, but it was only one of many that now trailed behind them. They reached Windsor Castle shortly before noon and had time before lunch to visit part of the castle; the rest they would see after they ate. But first they were "waylaid" by a man who wanted to take their pictures for only a couple of shillings, telling them that the pictures would be ready immediately. Ruth says they didn't know any better and fell for it. He delivered, all right, but apparently the pictures weren't fixed, for they quickly began to disappear and by evening were entirely faded out, in spite of their efforts to protect them from the light and air. The pictures weren't bad, she states, and other people in the tour group had the same experience of watching their pictures vanish right before their eyes.

They entered the grounds of the castle by way of Henry's Gateway. Henry VIII's crown, with its royal symbols, rose [in replica] over the entrance. The first building they came to was St. George's Chapel, which stands over 13 acres of ground; it is also known as the Chapel of the Knights of the Order of the Garter. The chapel was begun under Edward IV in 1478 and finished under Henry VIII; Edward VII was married and buried there.

Three kings were imprisoned at Windsor Castle, one Scotch, one English, and one French. Charles was made prisoner in his own castle by Oliver Cromwell and later taken to Whitehall and beheaded. King John of France was a prisoner there, too. He was released to get his ransom, was unsuccessful, and returned—an honest man, Ruth interjects. And I guess the other was Henry, though she does not mention the third.

From the top of Round Tower she could see ten counties. Here the most prestigious and highest order of English nobility was founded. It happened when the Countess of Salisbury was unfortunate enough one day to drop her garter. Edward III rushed forward and picked it up and in that natural way the order was established. Its motto is, "Honi soit qui mal y pense"—which translates, "Evil to him who thinks evil."

They visited the long, low, red building where The Merry Wives of Windsor was first shown. Nearby Curfew Tower dated from the time of Edward III and was where Anne Boleyn was held prisoner by Henry VIII, they were told.

Ruth again reprimands herself for not telling first this bit of history: the castle stands on a site presented by Edward the Confessor to the monks of Westminster Abbey in the Twelfth Century. The site was later purchased by William the Conqueror for the purpose of erecting a castle on the isolated hill at its center. Henry I and Henry II extended the building. Edward II caused the old castle to be taken down and a new one erected by the Bishop of Winchester.

From the grounds of the chapel they could see the Curfew Tower and had a glimpse of the Thames. The name Windsor means "Winding Shore," she relates.

They were next taken to view the exterior of the Royal Apartments. The buildings were used by various members of the Royal Family when they were in residence. There are three towers. The base of the Victoria Tower dates back to 1260. It is where the present Queen lives, when she is there. There is a beautiful three-mile drive leading up to it. Fragmoore—where Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert, are buried—is open only on May 24th, so they did not get to see it. And the third important building they saw was the Alfred Memorial Chapel. It dates back to Henry III, and Henry IV had it heightened. It was eventually made into a royal tomb by George III and his tomb was the first one in it. Now forty kings, queens, and princes are buried there. The building was further restored by Queen Victoria in honor of her deceased husband. There is a large, beautiful memorial to him and around the walls are busts of their many children.

Just before lunch they were shown the Windsor Town Hall and told an interesting story about it. It was built by the famous architect, Sir Christopher Wren. After it was finished, the Town Council of Windsor objected to the way it was built, saying that the expanse of ceiling without any visible support was dangerous. They demanded that Wren add pillars to bear up the ceiling's weight. Wren refused. The Town Council appealed to the King. The King must have intervened, for Wren built four pillars, but none come within inches of touching the ceiling and provide, of course, no support, for none is needed.

They had a good lunch. Afterwards, they got to see the State Apartments. The place was jammed with sightseers. They had a long, tiresome wait; they were conducted up the Grand Staircase. On the landing they encountered a robust fellow in armor on a horse. It was Henry VIII. In more armor, they came across Charles I. And then they saw the sedan chair in which the wife of George III used to ride. The first of the luxurious State Apartments they entered was the Charles II Dining Room. The ceiling was painted with flowers and fruit, representing a banquet of the gods. On the wall were portraits of Charles II's wife, Charles I at age 21, and his sister, Queen Elizabeth . . . of Bohemia. The next room was the Rubens Room. Some of the famous artist's works adorned the walls, including a portrait of the Holy Family, one of himself, and one of his first wife. There was an old French clock in the room that needed winding only once a year.

Without noting anything in particularly, the group passed through the following states chambers quickly: the bedroom, the King's bed closet, the Queen's bed closet. Then they came to the Picture Gallery. They saw four painting by Holbein, two of Lorranine's landscapes, a painting by Titian, and one by Andrea del Sarto.

The next room was styled the Van Dyce Room, where were hung portraits of Charles I, one of his children, two of Queen Henriette, and one of the Duchess of Lorraine. In the room were some beautiful silver tables with mirrors whose design matched them. In the Queen's Audience Chamber there was a painted ceiling, which was 250 years old and a beautiful handwoven tapestry by a French artist representing the story of Esther. They saw yet another portrait of Mary Queen of Scots, and she was holding an insert picture in her right hand of her beheading.

In the Queen's Presence Chamber there is a painted ceiling in which there are 100 figures. The central figure—as in the portrait in the Queen's Audience Chamber—is the Queen herself. And the tapestry of the story of Esther is continued in this other room. [Italics Ruth's.] Chairs in the room date from the Seventeenth Century and were made in Venice.

In St. George's Hall, which is the banquet hall, 874 Knights of the Order of the Garter have received their decoration during the last 600 years. The coats of arms of all the knights of the order adorn the ceiling. And in the drawing room is a tapestry representing the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, with a beautiful huge vase that was a gift from the Emperor of Russia to Queen Victoria.

Chairs in the next room have beautiful royal blue velvet seats. The Prince of Wales was made a knight of the order here [recently]. They then paraded through the Ante Room to the Waterloo Room, in which there were portraits of statesmen of Waterloo and its long table with rose-seated chairs. But the most remarkable thing about the room was its huge carpet; it was 80 feet long and half as wide. Handmade, it was produced in one piece by prisoners in India, they were told. It weighed two tons. There was not time to visit the Dolls House and their hasty tour of the State Apartments ended here. They clambered into their tour bus and were off for the Stokes Poges.

Their guide was very competent but rather condescending, and explained to them the highlights of the various towns they passed through on their way to London, the first one of which was Old Windsor, where the palaces of the Anglo-Saxons used to be.

 

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Notes in the back of the diary amplify this portion of their travels but only a little. She writes something about the Bills of Onzley and I. Walton. She records the word "Runnymead" and notes that King John "sealed"