2. My Mama

After an enchanted hour in the little shop, Uncle Worth and I (with my small hands filled with the new toys) would come blinking out into the bright sunshine.

On the shady porch, Grandma and Mama would be seated, Grandma quite frail and wan, sitting placidly with empty hands folded on her lap, her deep-set, half-open, inattentive eyes leveled at the far horizon, Mama rocking vigorously, discoursing on whatever issue happened to be of urgent interest to her.

Mama was an indefatigable crusader. Maybe that’s why I never headed a parade. Crusading was a tiresome trade. It took too much out of you. Loud talk always distressed and confused me. And I distrusted it, too. My childish instinct told me what experience much later confirmed: when people have to shout their opinions they are usually on the wrong side; and they suspect that you know they are.

I would be for running over at once to display my pretty gifts, but Uncle Worth would veer off toward the old stable.

“We’d better not interrupt them,” he would explain. “We’ll go out behind the stable and dig some worms.”

The truth was that he didn’t want to be drawn into an argument: a very quiet fellow, was Uncle Worth. Perhaps, you may surmise, he got his complacency from Grandma. But that’s a bad guess. The old volcano had burned out now but once upon a time it had been active.

When I was a grown man my papa told me that old Sam Cassel had once told him, in a hush-hush consultation, that when Grandma was in her rip-roaring forties she would go out to the far end of the potato patch and yell “till they heard her clear down to Ryder’s mill!”

There was more than a touch of this excitability in the distaff heritage.Mama had all the relentless courage and zeal that martyrs are powered with. She lacked only some wide-open opportunity to have become a great leader. I mean that! Even after this long lapse of years I am persuaded that this is so. Mama could easily have been a Florence Nightingale (though the books say that Florence was mighty hard to live with after she came home from the Crimea). One is reminded of Mr. Churchill’s remark about one of his top generals, “Indomitable in defeat; insufferable in victory.”

One of my mama’s older sisters was also high-geared, startlingly precocious, and anxious to beat the drum. But she couldn’t find a drum, and—at middle age—went completely off her rocker, and spent several years in an institution; though there were special reasons for her crack-up. Uncle Henry, who was said to be a competent and conscientious physician when sober, lay sprawled in a drunken stupor while their three-year-old twins were dying of scarlet fever in my Aunt Amanda’s arms. When dawn came, the babies were dead and their mother was hauled away to the madhouse… Not much wonder my mama used to tighten her small fists and grit her teeth when she sounded off about hard liquor.