Grannie & Grandpa [part II]

   I think of Grannie wearing walking shoes, cardigans sometimes tied around her waist, skirts, or later in old age, sack-like dresses (she got quite stout, which Grandpa never did).  I have no picture of her dressed up except some images of hats, round, low-crowned, not really dressy at all.  I do see her standing at the butcher's, her arm on the glass top of the display counter, speaking firmly, definitely, telling him just what she wanted, downright.  "Don't you know," not a question, was a favorite phrase of hers. Mother remembered being taken shopping for clothes when she was young, her mother requiring all the available dresses or coats to be brought out, then rejecting them all, leaving the shop without apology, Mother—almost incidental to the transaction—feeling shamed, angry and miserable.

   The fragrance of a large iris blossom sends me to the garden of the house on Appleton Street in Cambridge, the house my grandparents built in 1909.  I am walking on red-brown tiles among the flower beds and parceled lawn, watching bees start off and return to their hives near the grape arbor—not concord grapes but those sweet brown ones, very small and so good to eat, but we hardly ever went to Cambridge when they were ripe.  In spring, wisteria climbs in sunlight over a porch that feels secretly secure, as if the same sunlight warmed springs long ago.  The red-brown tiles, set as diamonds, divide the front lawn down to the lilac bushes that hedge off the sidewalk.  On the dark side of the house, lillies of the valley grow along the walk, and near the underground garbage pail that's covered by a lid with a foot pedal, grow strange yellow flowers called colt's foot that push up through the shaded earth and bloom on naked stems without leaves.  Inky mushrooms cover an old stump in the fall, and melt to black liquid all over its roots.  The front porch has columns, round and green, fluted wood.  I run my hands up the troughs where bubbles of paint lie, tough and crusted, yet I can press these blisters with my finger and they give way and the green skin collapses.

   When I step into the house, into the cool, dark and wood-lined front hall, I smell a peculiar, not unpleasant fragrance that I've recognized in other houses in Cambridge; I don't know what produces it.   On my right, a small room glows with sunlight on shelves of books and a chest in the window.  An old upright telephone stands in shadow by the other window.  The story goes that Grannie, when the phone was first put in early in the century, lifted the earpiece one day and heard a voice say, "Imagine me sitting in a sunny room in Africa!"  I once sat waiting in this room and took down a book called The Eater of Darkness; I tried to make out what this was, some sort of ray, I think.

   Across the hall a complicated passage of wooden steps and doors leads to the kitchen where Katie Landers mulls over her missionary tracts, sitting in a low rocker near the dark stone sink.  The sink in the pantry is copper; its spout is high and curved.  Off the low landing is tucked a small bathroom.  All the bathrooms interest me for in each one, beside the toilet, on a large bent pin like an opened paper clip, hangs a block of yellow toilet paper, each sheet rectangular, thin and crisp.

   I love to wake up in the upstairs back bedroom on a summer morning, smelling fresh and fragrant air from the garden below, listening while in bed to the grating yet almost musical crescendo and diminuendo of the streetcars sounding over the city from Mt. Auburn St. and Harvard Square. One summer night I waited for my bath to fill, a thin stream of water dribbling into the great tub from its old-fashioned tap, reading The Journal of the Plague Year that I found somewhere in the house.

   I see Grannie and Grandpa in the dining room at Sunday dinner, Grandpa intensely irritated by the series of overcooked, almost indistinguishable vegetables that Katie brought in.  On the last Sunday of her life, in the fall of 1949, Grannie ate mushrooms on toast sous cloche with a good appetite. 

   The fireplace in the  back living room seemed always to have too many ashes in it; the logs were laid on a slope of them, which  made me uneasy. We would be given for our amusement a white cardboard candy box that contained the elephant orchestra, tiny metal elephants each playing a different instrument, one a conductor.  The box's torn label said "...ATE MICE," which remnant immediately carried me back to very early childhood when we first were given and then ate the chocolate mice with their soft white insides, the essence of all that is delicious.

   I spent several months in the Cambridge house when I was just one year old, and again when I was in nursery school or kindergarten.  I must have spent a good deal of time in the upstairs living room—or was it Grandpa's study?  The high desk stood there, its glass-fronted cabinet (filled with books) above the roll-top base, a desk that had been sent around the Horn to California in the 1800's and no doubt came back east on the train.  This room was full of sunlight shining onto the window seat above the wisteria blooming outside. 

   Beyond the porch roof, covered with the wisteria vine, you could see the garden, the bees and grape arbor, and over the fence beyond these a wilderness that half concealed an enormous white and yellow house topped with a widow's walk.  I never knew how to reach this house, and later when I was in college it seemed to have disappeared.  It remained mysterious. Grannie used to sing "Good morning merry sunshine, how did you wake so soon?"  When I hear this tune, I see an overgrown garden, maybe the one over the fence that I never found, where an old woman stands in the sun.

   Grannie's memory failed when she was in her late seventies.  I remember her being good-natured, watching tennis and croquet, pretending to be tipsy after one drink on a summer evening, blowing out sparks on purpose when David lit her cigarette instead of inhaling.  She died suddenly.  I was a freshman at Radcliffe in October, 1949, when my mother's younger sister Alice called one morning early to say that Grannie had died the night before and we would all meet at the house on Appleton Street that evening.  I'd been using Grannie's ticket to the Friday afternoon symphony, and that afternoon an old woman was in my seat so I sat on one of the shallow steps in the balcony at the rear of Symphony Hall through Beethoven's Seventh and the whole Art of the Fugue.  I took the subway and then the Huron Avenue trackless trolly out to Appleton Street, walked up the hill, up the diamond-tiled path to the house, wondering what it would be like.  The door opened to laughter.  Mother, Jenny and Alice were telling stories.  David was there, and Katie.  Even Grandpa was amused.  He was sad of course to have Grannie die, but glad she had had no long sickness.  She was eighty, and that was a good age.

   Grandpa came from California.  His story is told elsewhere.  The only one of his brothers and sisters I remember at all is Uncle Whitney, and my only memory of him is of a picnic at the granite quarry in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, Grandpa and Uncle Whitney skipping large pieces of slate on the water.  Aunt Eliza may have seen me when I was a baby, but she died before I could remember her.

   My cousin Susan tells me that Grandpa read to her, holding her on his lap.  I have no such memeory for either myself or David—well, I do seem to remember Grandpa reading the OZ books to David.  I never read them at all. I think of Grandpa as sometimes charming and sometimes formidable, not affectionate, usually irascible, occasionally merry, often silent, a hard worker whether in his study, his shop, the garden or the forest, where he loved to cut cordwood for the Cambridge house and for his friends in the city.  I can see him in old brown trousers tucked into leather boots, a faded blue shirt or a white undershirt, work gloves on his hands, a crushed fedora or cloth cap on his head, handling one end of a cross-cut saw, pouring kerosene along the blade to cut pine pitch (that would be after the hurricane), or pushing a length of hardwood toward the big circular blade of the portable saw, sweating, a drop hanging at the end of his nose.  I can see him working with Mr. Keegan and his horses, hauling a boulder out of the tennis court.  I once watched a horse being shod; I can see the hoof parings and almost recall their sickening smell.  I can hear the whine of Grandpa's table saw in the basement of the barn, can hear it all over the whole place.

   Grandpa was tall—probably a foot taller than Grannie—and in his youthful pictures handsome.  He wore a mustache and goatee, reading glasses with plastic rims, informal clothes, a jacket probably  made from suiting material woven by my mother, rarely a more dressy suit.  He used to go to Cambridge on the bus every so often to have his beard trimmed, and on that day Mother would buy fresh mackerel and Charles would cook it on charcoal outside.  Grandpa didn't like the smell of it cooking.  Once he came back early and the grownups were all embarrassed.

   Grandpa's bedroom and study combined was a bare room off the kitchen on the ground floor of the house.  There he worked at the revision of Dana's System of Mineralogy, seated at a brown roll-top desk.  Twice in my life I've been salaamed when I said I was Charles Palache's granddaughter, from which I gathered he was greatly revered in his somewhat esoteric field.  He used to take David and me to see his office in the museum at Harvard, with its spiral staircase, and to see the crystals in a case in a dark hall where they were lit by strange light that made them glow in vivid colors.  Once he showed me large coral-like fronds of gold put away in drawers.  He used to be amused that people would leave the exhibit of crystals saying, "They can't be real!" and leave the famous exhibit of glass flowers next door saying, "They must be real!"

   When Grandpa first came to Harvard in 1896, he lived "in a brick cell on the fourth floor of the University Museum, rent free, to guard the gems" and worked rearranging the museum's mineral collection.  I recall a story that he once came back to the museum to find it full of smoke and discovered to his relief that a magnifying glass had focused the sun on his felt hat and caused it to smoulder, luckily not to burn.  I believe he kept a rifle in his room, but I never heard that he used it.

   I've mentioned Grandpa's bees in the back yard in Cambridge.  He gave away most of the combs of honey he harvested each year from the five or six hives.  I can remember as a child watching the bees walking about at the entrance of each hive and in and out at the slit, taking off, arriving, a scene of apparently highly conscious activity.  Once when Mother was in architectural school, she came home to find the bees swarming in front of the house near Appleton Street.  Some children gathered to watch her cope with the swarm, which she knew how to do only from seeing her father do it. She told the children the bees would stay where she put them if the queen was with them.  One child asked, "Does the queen wear a crown?"

   Grandpa lived to own one of the first long-playing record machines, a primitive rig indeed.  He often listened to music:  the Dvorak cello concerto, the Archduke trio, a Brahmes symphony, the Rassoumovsky quartets. I think Grandpa did not go to concerts.  He didn't go out much.  He told me once that he did go to a wedding reception with Grannie, who probably enjoyed the crowd—she loved a party.  He did not enjoy it.  He retreated before the crowd into a corner where he managed to sit on a large vase and wet the seat of his pants.  He got out through the basement and walked home—and never went to another reception.  He sounded disgusted, just thinking of it.

   Two contrasting images of Grandpa from my mother.  1) He is in a "black depression" because it has been discovered that the Latin Orator at commencement has put an obscene acrostic in his Latin poem, that the first letters of every line spell "bullshit," but the poem has been read, it is too late.  2) It is New Year's Eve in Jaffrey, everyone staying up—for what?  Grandpa suddenly says, "Let's climb the mountain!"  And they do, to see the sunrise from the top of Mt. Monadnock.

     One weekend when I was a freshman at college, after Grannie died, my aunt Alice came to Cambridge from New York.  She and Grandpa and I walked over to the museum through the Gray Gardens, wandering among the beds of withered plants under a cloudy November sky.  All the plants had been killed by frost and the gardens looked dismal, yet decay shows a kind of richness. I felt baffled and cheated when I next walked that way some years later to find the gardens gone, a housing development in their place.  Now they are, with Grandpa, with the strangely-lit crystals and the spiral staircase, part of my long-gone past.

   My parents bought an old farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1949, and Mother designed a house around the barn's stone silo for Grandpa when he sold the Cambridge house.  He moved to Virginia in 1952.  His living room was the large round top of the silo; the cement floor of the old barn became a terrace surrounded by garden beds.  Grandpa ate breakfast in his house, then walked the few hundred feet to eat lunch, and later supper, with my parents. 

   One day in December, 1954, when he was at my parents' house for lunch, my father handed him the new Italian translation of his book,Labor and the Law. Grandpa reached out to take the book and fell to the floor; he died about a week later, in his 86th year.  He was intending to split a cord of apple wood that had just been delivered in the front yard.

Judith Palache Gregory in Jaffrey, NH, ~10 yrs old.

   I want to end with my favorite story of Grandpa.  I was about ten years old.  We were all at lunch in the house in Jaffrey, I probably barefoot, with nothing on but shorts, my brown hair thick in messy bangs.  Grandpa is at the end of the table, I a few seats away.  Someone said that Gandhi had taken a sip of orange juice, and they talked about his fast.  I said, "He must be some kind of nut." and Grandpa looked at me, directly, and in a dramatically deep voice said slowly and emphatically, "ALL THE WORLD IS QUEER BUT THEE AND ME, AND EVEN THOU ART A LITTLE QUEER."  Though he sounded so very solemn, I could tell he wasn't angry.  I realized that what he was saying was important.  I believed him.  I felt he spoke to me.  I didn't feel at all put down; I felt very much heard and recognized.  Grandpa could indeed be charming.

   I once dreamed of him standing by a road looking out over a vast dark forest at evening.  In another dream, he and I are alone at Jaffrey.  A thunderstorm approaches.  I look out from the upstairs bathroom window and see Grandpa by the light of the coming storm.  He walks onto the big flat rock in the path, dies, and falls.