My Dear Neighbor,
My Friend has disappointed me about the car. Tomorrow is the last day Mr. Curley has and the Children all wanted the Picnic so much. The Men can walk to the Pond but it is too far for the Children. I see your Friend has a car and I hate to ask this but could you possibly drive us to the Pond tomorrow morning? It is an awful load but I hate to have them miss the Picnic. We can all walk back if we just get there.
Very Sincerely Yours,
Carmen Sennett
The next morning my guest and I put them all in the car. Everybody seemed to be sitting on Mrs. Sennett. They were in beautifully high spirits. Mrs. Sennett was quite hoarse from asking the aunt if the children were making too much noise and, if she said they were, telling them to stop.
We brought them back that evening — the women and children, at least. Xavier carried an empty gin bottle that Mrs. Sennett said his father had given him. She leaned over to the front seat and shouted in my ear, “He likes his liquor. But he’s a good man.” The children’s hair shone with cleanliness and John told me that they had left soapsuds all over the pond.
After the picnic, Mrs. Sennett’s presents to me were numberless and I had to return empty dishes by the children several times a day. It was almost time for them to go back to school in South Boston. Mrs. Sennett insisted that she was not going; their father was coming down again to get them and she was just going to stay. He would have to get another housekeeper. She, Mrs. Sennett, was just going to stay right here and look at the bay all winter, and maybe her sister from Somerville would come to visit. She said this over and over to me, loudly, and her turbans and kerchiefs grew more and more distrait.
One evening, Mary came to call on me and we sat on an old table in the back yard to watch the sunset.
“Papa came today,” she said, “and we’ve got to go back day after tomorrow.”
“Is Mrs. Sennett going to stay here?”
“She said at supper she was. She said this time she really was, because she’d said that last year and came back, but now she means it.”
I said, “Oh dear,” scarcely knowing which side I was on.
“It was awful at supper. I cried and cried.”
“Did Theresa cry?”
“Oh, we all cried. Papa cried, too. We always do.”
“But don’t you think Mrs. Sennett needs a rest?”
“Yes, but I think she’ll come, though. Papa told her he’d cry every single night at supper if she didn’t, and then we all did.”
The next day I heard from Xavier that Mrs. Sennett was going back with them just to “help settle.” She came over the following morning to say goodbye, supported by all five children. She was wearing her travelling hat of black satin and black straw, with sequins. High and sombre, above her ravaged face, it had quite a Spanish-grandee air.
“This isn’t really goodbye,” she said. “I’ll be back as soon as I get these bad, noisy children off my hands.”
But the children hung onto her skirt and tugged at her sleeves, shaking their heads frantically, silently saying “No! No! No!” to her with their puckered-up mouths.
1948
Gwendolyn
My aunt Mary was eighteen years old and away in “the States,” in Boston, training to be a nurse. In the bottom bureau drawer in her room, well wrapped in soft pink tissue paper, lay her best doll. That winter, I had been sick with bronchitis for a long time, and my grandmother finally produced it for me to play with, to my amazement and delight, because I had never even known of its existence before. It was a girl doll, but my grandmother had forgotten her name.
She had a large wardrobe, which my Aunt Mary had made, packed in a toy steamer trunk of green tin embossed with all the proper boards, locks, and nailheads. The clothes were wonderful garments, beautifully sewn, looking old-fashioned even to me. There were long drawers trimmed with tiny lace, and a corset cover, and a corset with little bones. These were exciting, but best of all was the skating costume. There was a red velvet coat, and a turban and muff of some sort of moth-eaten brown fur, and, to make it almost unbearably thrilling, there was a pair of laced white glacé-kid boots, which had scalloped tops and a pair of too small, dull-edged, but very shiny skates loosely attached to their soles by my Aunt Mary with stitches of coarse white thread.
The looseness of the skates didn’t bother me. It went very well with the doll’s personality, which in turn was well suited to the role of companion to an invalid. She had lain in her drawer so long that the elastic in her joints had become weakened; when you held her up, her head fell gently to one side, and her outstretched hand would rest on yours for a moment and then slip wearily off. She made the family of dolls I usually played with seem rugged and childish: the Campbell Kid doll, with a childlike scar on her forehead where she had fallen against the fender; the two crudely felt-dressed Indians, Hiawatha and Nokomis; and the stocky “baby doll,” always holding out his arms to be picked up.
My grandmother was very nice to me when I was sick. During this same illness, she had already given me her button basket to play with, and her scrap bag, and the crazy quilt was put over my bed in the afternoons. The button basket was large and squashed and must have weighed ten pounds, filled with everything from the metal snaps for men’s overalls to a set of large cut-steel buttons with deer heads with green glass eyes on them. The scrap bag was interesting because in it I could find pieces of my grandmother’s house dresses that she was wearing right then, and pieces of my grandfather’s Sunday shirts. But the crazy quilt was the best entertainment. My grandmother had made it long before, when such quilts had been a fad in the little Nova Scotian village where we lived. She had collected small, irregularly shaped pieces of silk or velvet of all colors and got all her lady and gentleman friends to write their names on them in pencil — their names, and sometimes a date or word or two as well. Then she had gone over the writing in chain stitch with silks of different colors, and then put the whole thing together on maroon flannel, with feather-stitching joining the pieces. I could read well enough to make out the names of people I knew, and then my grandmother would sometimes tell me that that particular piece of silk came from Mrs. So-and-So’s “going-away” dress, forty years ago, or that that was from a necktie of one of her brothers, since dead and buried in London, or that that was from India, brought back by another brother, who was a missionary.
When it grew dark — and this, of course, was very early — she would take me out of bed, wrap me in a blanket, and, holding me on her knees, rock me vigorously in the rocking chair. I think she enjoyed this exercise as much as I did, because she would sing me hymns, in her rather affectedly lugubrious voice, which suddenly thinned out to half its ordinary volume on the higher notes. She sang me “There is a green hill far away,” “Will there be any stars in my crown?” and “In the sweet bye-and-bye.” Then there were more specifically children’s hymns, such as:
Little children, little children,
Who love their Redeemer,
Are the jewels, precious jewels,
Bright gems for his crown.…
And then, perhaps because we were Baptists — nice watery ones — all the saints casting down their crowns (in what kind of a tantrum?) “around the glassy sea;” “Shall we gather at the river?;” and her favorite, “Happy day, happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away.”