Читать книгу Wickford Point - John P. Marquand - Страница 10

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It was hard to imagine that Aunt Sarah had once been young. My usual assumption was that she had always been exactly as I saw her first, since she had then reached the stage, peculiar to old women, when physical change is nearly imperceptible. She wore long gray gingham dresses which were made for her downtown, according to a pattern of the late seventies. Her thin iron-gray hair was coiled in a tight uncompromising braid. Her eyes were a watery blue and her lips were thin and wrinkled, particularly when she removed her teeth. In the summer she covered her head with a sunbonnet when she went to walk, and replaced it by a moth-eaten beaver cap in the winter. In cool weather she always wore a Paisley shawl pinned with a cameo brooch that a Mr. Brindley had brought her from Rome when she was twenty-one. She took with her out-of-doors her father's ivory-headed stick and a small basket from Nantucket in which she carried chips or pine cones or food for the pigs. I remember that she referred to the pigs as her "hairy doves." She also kept a clasp knife in her pocket when she walked.

Aunt Sarah slept in the southwest room by the twisting staircase in a bed upon which, she said nearly every day, she was born and on which she hoped to die. She arose every morning, summer or winter, at five o'clock and for two hours she read in German and Italian, which she had taught herself. After breakfast she walked for an hour to the point, around the south orchard and through the pine woods, and then in the open months worked for another hour in her garden. She took particular pains with her tomato plants, which she always placed in the same bed with her flowers. Her reason was that tomatoes were front lawn ornaments when she was a girl—"love apples," she used to call them, "each one like a valentine." She was back in the house by the time the postman came, in order to read her mail, which was generally from distant connections of the family. Then she did cross-stitch embroidery for an hour. After lunch she rested for fifteen minutes exactly, and then sewed her gingham ironing-holders or worked upon a hooked rug. After this she walked up the hill to see the view, and was back in time to read Homer in the original and to write in her diary before supper. After the evening meal she was in a relaxed and social mood. The lamp was lighted on the round table in the front parlor; every window was closed and the wooden shutters were drawn tight. The only thing of which I knew her to be afraid was the idea that some unseen face or some unseen thing might be staring at her from the dark. By eight or nine in the evening the air in that hermetically closed room was difficult to breathe, particularly in cold weather when an anthracite fire was burning in the grate. Cousin Clothilde's sister Sue would always be there with her after supper, and Aunt Sarah would read aloud tirelessly for hours to her or anyone who might care to listen. Her favorite book was Pepys' Diary, which she finished at least once a year, but when I was sent to Wickford Point as a boy, she went to considerable pains to read what she thought might amuse or interest me. She read me all the Waverley novels, and once she told me that she had first been obliged to peruse Ivanhoe behind the lid of her desk at the Northville Female Academy because it was considered a trashy novel. She also read me the complete works of Dickens, although in her opinion Dickens was not a gentleman. Sometimes she would take up Thoreau—"Dear Henry" she used to call him—and sometimes she would read the essays that "Waldo" had written—she was referring to Ralph Waldo Emerson. She had known all the intellectuals of that period and spoke of some affectionately and of some acidly, giving details that I wish I might remember. By half-past ten o'clock it was Aunt Sarah's opinion that the day's work was over.

"Get the backgammon board," she said then, and she would usually add: "My father brought it home from Lisbon the third time he sailed back from Canton, and I wish he were here to play on it now, so I wouldn't have to play with Sue."

I have often wondered how Cousin Sue stood it with the air in that small parlor growing closer all the while, but unflinchingly she rattled the dice and shifted the counters evening after evening. Toward the end she played Aunt Sarah's board and her own too, very quickly for an hour. At half-past eleven Aunt Sarah drank a half-pint of milk from her great-grandfather's silver ale can, and afterwards went to the side entry and took down her presentation copy of one of the works of John Brill, the Wickford Sage.

"It is time for a treat now," she used to say. "We can't go to bed without hearing from dear John." She always called him "dear John," and when she closed the book she always said:—

"I don't know what ever induced him to marry that woman. I told him he was a fool."

To my Wickford Nymph, was written in rusty ink on the fly-leaf, from her Shepherd across the Valley.

"Of course," Cousin Clothilde told me once, "Aunt Sarah must have had some sort of affair with John Brill. It wouldn't have been natural if she hadn't. People were dreadfully queer about those things in those days, and they made such a tremendous point of them. He was a dreadful old man with tobacco stain on his beard, and what's more I don't think he ever washed."

When the tall clock in the dining room struck midnight, Aunt Sarah would rise.

"I shall get my candle now," she always said, "the one that has a fish on it. My father brought it from Peru, the time he was nearly arrested by the Inquisition." Once she said to me, and I remember it because it was almost the only thing Aunt Sarah ever said to me that was not impersonal, "I wish you might have seen my father. He was red-haired and very handsome, vastly handsomer than you will ever be. You would have admired to see him."

Such small details as that sometimes possess a poignant sort of significance. Once, for instance, I knew a man whose grandfather at an early age had seen the elderly General Washington when he had made a triumphal tour through our neighborhood. The little boy distinctly recalled that the general had asked for a tumbler of water, had taken a paper of powders from his pocket and poured the contents into the tumbler. I have always understood General Washington a good deal better since hearing that account, although I do not know just why, except that it showed the presence of human frailty.

Aunt Sarah's father, Samuel Seabrooke, seems to have possessed no weakness whatsoever except a desire to stray away from home. He had impressed her completely with his perfection, until her recollection of him was as coolly symmetrical and as stilted as the copperplate calligraphy in the diary which he kept of his travels, and as impersonal as many of his statements in it concerning the wind velocity and the weather. Considering the chances he had of seeing interesting places, his observations have recently seemed to me surprisingly obvious.

"It is difficult and not infrequently painful," he wrote once, "to make headway against the westerly gales in the vicinity of Cape Horn."

"The yellow fever," he observed again, "carries off many in Havana every year."

"The native population of the city of Canton," he also recorded, "is very dense."

Aunt Sarah never explained, and certainly no one else can, what induced her father to take over Wickford Point in the early eighteen hundreds and to settle his son, his wife and his three daughters on the farm, unless he may have enjoyed contemplating the peace of Wickford Point when he was away from it. Like some of his descendants, he was away from it a great deal. Aunt Sarah often intimated that he was a "great gentleman," and various legal papers such as title deeds confirm her estimate.

"An agreement," they read, "between Mark Kennedy, yeoman, and Samuel Seabrooke, gentleman."

His picture in the small parlor also answered this description. Our great-grandfather was always young and endowed with the spare Federalist beauty which is somehow reminiscent of the architecture of his time. His reddish weather-beaten face with its high cheeks, its complacent mouth, and its chin stiffened by a white cravat, did not show the slightest sign of self-indulgence or the enervating effect of humor. It was the countenance of a determined, active man with an adequate supply of physical courage. Aunt Sarah once told me that he defended a French plantation against the Negro revolutionists in Haiti, leading a charge himself, and he may very well have done so. When he was at home, Aunt Sarah said, he was at great pains to drink the water sparingly which came from the red pump under the elm tree across the road. His reason was that his travels often took him to dry countries where it was important to do with as little water as possible. This strict regimen perhaps resulted in the physical disabilities which were a prelude to his premature decease.

Besides Aunt Sarah's stray remarks he left other mementoes of his stay at Wickford Point. He used to teach Sarah and Georgianna the classics every morning before breakfast, and his collection of books remained behind him in the back parlor now that he was permanently away. These small leather-bound volumes of his gave the room an intellectual beauty. They stood beside the set of Molière from which his wife, when she was conducting a female seminary, had snipped the naughty words with a pair of scissors, giving no consideration to the context on the back of the page.

"Well, well," Aunt Sarah used to say, "Mother was always sweet and charming and quite the most broad-minded woman I have ever known. She smoked a pipe when she was eighty, a most unpleasant habit, but times were hard after my father's death."

It is easy to touch upon trivial details such as these that come upon one out of nowhere in the middle of a wakeful night. All I know of my great-grandmother is that she smoked. She had acquired the taste from an old Negress who came as a fugitive slave in the Underground Railroad. The old slave's name, Aunt Sarah told me once, was Granny Cadwalader, and she stayed in the house for six whole weeks and helped on the hooked rug which is in the north chamber. My great-uncle Joel, who married Aunt Georgianna after the Brook Farm experiment in West Roxbury, was another ancestral smoker. He said it helped the misery in his joints, although Aunt Sarah always maintained that no one ever suffered from rheumatism who drank from the red pump, because there was iron in the water. My own grandfather, I remembered, often suffered from severe indigestion when he came to Wickford Point from New York City, and once I heard him say: "It's that God-damned water from the red pump."

The library of Samuel Seabrooke, as I have said, stood beside the set of Molière. It contained the works of Fielding and of Smollett and of Sterne, and several volumes of Defoe, a good deal of Voltaire, of Racine; Dryden, Calderón, Petrarch and Boccaccio; Pope's Essay on Man; Paradise Lost; Dr. Johnson's Shakespeare, and also the Doctor's Dictionary, the Portuguese poets, Cervantes, and Gil Blas, all mixed together in exactly the same order that he left them. Probably he had always meant, as most of us do, to read them and arrange them once he had the time. On the shelf below were the Iliad and the Odyssey, Xenophon and Thucydides. "He always admired to read Greek at sea," Aunt Sarah said. Then there was his Latin—Horace, Tacitus, Suetonius and Plautus, and two volumes of Plutarch's Lives. Beneath the classics was the shelf of books that I believe he read more frequently, a Bowditch, a Coast Pilot, a set of charts, The Ship Master's Assistant, Cook's Voyages, and some guidebooks of Mexico, Peru and Brazil, in Spanish and Portuguese.

There were other books in the house left by older and more completely forgotten individuals, such as local books of sermons and Cotton Mather's Magnalia. But my great-grandfather had left something more poignant than his books. He was evidently the type of person who always brings things back and who enjoys being surrounded by objects from distant places because of their reminiscent value. There used to stand upon the mantelpiece in the little parlor an unobtrusive piece of black rock, which Aunt Sarah said had been chipped from the topmost peak of the Andes. Beside it was an Inca tobacco-pestle made in the shape of a llama. Until Cousin Sue lost them in some unaccountable way, there were also two pearls which it was said had been given him by a chief of the Sandwich Islands. Cousin Sue was convinced that one of the Irish maids had taken them in later years from the little drawer beneath the shaving mirror on her bureau, but in a house always full of possessions, where nothing was ever thrown away, things were apt to be mislaid. Once Cousin Sue looked for three weeks for her great-grandmother's silver ring box, only to find it in the cracker jar in the closet off the dining room. On another occasion she kindled the fire in the long parlor by mistake with a packet of her grandmother's letters containing some stray locks of Samuel Seabrooke's reddish hair. It was too late when she tried to reach them.

He also had brought back a number of pictures on religious subjects, which used to hang in the narrow hall upstairs, and downstairs were two pictures painted on copper, which he had found somewhere near Granada. Aunt Sarah was always careful to explain that all his more priceless possessions had been lost or sold. As it was, we used to eat off his Canton china every night until the cat chased a mouse around the second shelf of the china closet, and even after that stray eggcups and saucers would appear mingled with the Wedgwood that my grandfather had sent from New York.

For the rest, everything about him is silence, although I seem to know more than most people know of their great-grandfathers. He died leaving the shades of the Federalist period in the house and a young wife and family to make their way as best they could on the farm at Wickford Point. Aunt Sarah used to return, particularly when her mind was failing, to the great days, those magnificent moments when her father was coming back from the sea, and once near the very end I heard her say:

"Father is coming back tonight. He is bringing me a Chinese puzzle."

Perhaps he brought it; perhaps Aunt Sarah was a little girl once, although it seems impossible, and now Samuel Seabrooke is the only Chinese puzzle that is left.