It happens these days.

People move away from their parents and the town and people they knew when they grew up. They lose touch with the family members that would have, in earlier days, been an integral part of their lives. When my niece Kate asked me to tell her some family stories I started to explain who various people were, and what they were like, but it took on a life of its own. Here then, to the best of my ability, is a collection of my memories of our family.

This is the rst part. Im working on sections about places we lived and about our great grandparents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, parents and siblings. Alison

My Earliest Memories
The night I was born, my dad and Granny Abbott went out on the town together and got pretty squiffy. At one point Dad boozily introduced Granny to the doorman at the Colony Club. When they nally got to the hospital they learned that I had arrived, and Dad went and threw up in a linen closet.

They lived with Gaffer (my Dads father) in New York for a while, and when Dad got a sales job with Dickinson's Witch Hazel they moved to Essex, Connecticut. Jane Niles, who often worked for Granny Abbott's family, came to help take care of me. My mother (let's call her Polly) was always complaining she was too fat. Jane was thin and they joked that if Polly copied exactly what Jane ate she'd be thin too. Polly smoked. Jane probably didn't. I think she may have been Canadian from Cobourg, Ontario where the family went in the summer. Both my parents' families summered there, and I think that's where my parents met. Aunt Nancy told me that just before my father got engaged to my mother, he took Nancy aside into some bushes and practiced his proposal on her. When the U.S. entered WWII, Dad, who had been in the Army Reserves, was called up. He and Mr. Dickinson were friendly and he was promised his job when he returned. (But then, when he got back there was no job.) While Dad was in basic training we moved to a couple of places in the South. The earliest memories I have are of seeing a parade of little children going by the apartment house we stayed in. They were marching along in the dusk, chanting, "Air raid! Air raid! Air raid!" I wanted to go too, but I was too small. I had just had a bath and been put to bed in what I remember as a very high, grownup bed. I was nearly asleep when there was the most tremendous crash! The bathtub from the oor above ours had fallen through the ceiling. There was plaster and lathe all over the place and the upstairs tub lying crazily right on top of the one where I had just had a bath. Granny Abbott came down to visit us there and would sit on the porch and knit little squares using leftover wool. When she had enough squares she'd crochet them together and make a blanket. I called them Granny's Quares. After that we lived on Kershaw Street in the town near the army base, Fort Jackson, in Columbia, SC. I was made to memorize the address and I still remember the street name. I went to Google, looked up the street, and found a house that looks eerily like the one we lived in. I remember a front porch. Ours had a bench on the side, and for some reason 78 records had been left there. One day a lady came to visit. She sat down to wait for Polly who was probably in the bathroom or something, and CRACK! she landed right on the records. Those things were brittle.

I was walked to my nursery school past a big building my mother told me was the orphan asylum. I called it the Orcan Aslyum. I lost my rst tooth one day at nursery school. It hurt. I went home and was given a glass of milk and a sandwich at a little table. I was weepy from the pain and the big hole where the tooth had come out, right in front. The water heater had exploded that day, and every curtain in the house was covered with soot. Granny Abbott was expected next day for a visit and my poor mother had just washed and ironed all the curtains! They were the white cotton kind with rufes... I got zero sympathy. When she was in a better mood she called me, "My little Lamb Chop." My rst friend was a tiny black woman, possibly a dwarf. She had been hired to babysit for me, but I just thought she was there because she was my friend. Usually she had a ride to our house, but one day we drove her home. She lived in a sparse group of little wooden houses with dirt all around them instead of grass, and there was a well with a bucket in the middle. I'm not sure if it was the same woman, but my parents visited Granny and Poppy on Long Island during this time and brought along a black woman to take care of me. They stopped overnight in Washington, D.C., and were very upset that she wasn't allowed to eat with us in the restaurant and had to go somewhere else that catered to black people. I remember them arguing that she was with them and there to take care of me, but it was no use. I had a little baby carriage for my doll. One day we went to the grocery store. I was pushing my carriage. My mother had a shopping cart. I decided to help her shop. When we got to the checkout counter the baby carriage was riding low. It was full of cans! I was not popular that day. My mother was afraid the store manager would think we were stealing. I got scolded but I didnt really understand why. My pink rubber doll Oscars arm popped out of its socket. I brought it to Daddy, convinced he could x it, but he couldnt do it. But he did give me sips from his beer. My mother called him Bill so I called him Bill too. Later I found out the right name was Daddy. Ever week morning he got dressed and left us. He said it was because he had to go and crank the bread and butter machine. We had a dog named Callie who had nine puppies. One of them would only move backwards. I don't know what happened to them, or to Callie, but she got into a neighbor's chickens and after that... no Callie. One afternoon, playing by myself, I decided to climb on top of the car. It was a convertible and I fell right into the back seat, scaring myself into howls. I was ne, but the soft top was ruined. My parents were very upset about the top. The took me with them one night when they went out. I was delighted because they got the tiny white horse from their whiskey bottle and gave it to me. On the way back I was frightened. I didnt know what it was, but told them I had a mouse in my leg. I had been sitting on my mothers lap and my leg had gone to sleep and was all prickly. Dads training was over, and he shipped out. My mother and I moved to an apartment in New York. At night on the train north, we had a bunk together, and could look out the window. The train would pull into a station and passengers would get on and off, but we were

lying, hidden by a curtain, and could see out in the darkness. Porters with baggage carts and people were coming and going and there were lights and mysterious noises. It was very exciting. From our apartment In New York I could look down and see buses going along the street below. I wondered how the door on the bus got onto the other side when the bus came back down the street. I had a pair of little red shoes with a strap across the instep that buttoned down. I took one shoe and made it be the bus. When it got to the end of the imaginary street I turned the shoe around and the button (that was the door) was magically on the other side. I also had trouble guring out that although the windshield wipers in the car looked as if you could catch them, they were on the other side of the glass and you couldn't. My mother's youngest sister Aunt Nancy shared the apartment for a while. My mother was volunteering as a nurse's aide in a uniform with a pinafore with wide straps that buttoned in the back, and a cap. Her feet hurt and when she came home she soaked them in hot water and Epsom Salts. She liked to read in bed at night and would cover the bedside light with a silk scarf so as not to wake me. One night it caught on re! Then I got a lesson on crawling under hypothetical smoke and putting a wet towel over my head to breathe under. Kindergarten was at the Church of the Heavenly Rest. We had nap time, but I disrupted it and was exiled to the hall on my nap blanket for misbehaving. I still remember how deeply insulted I was by this. After all... I was only retelling the entire story of Red Riding Hood to the other kids. Muddy Abbott, my great grandmother, was in New York for the winter, and I was taken to visit her. I was sitting beside her in her bed and she asked me what I had been doing. I told her I was going to kindergarten. She didn't like that at all because it was a German word. I saved every scrap of tinfoil -- the wrappers for candy or gum, for instance -- "for the war effort." I had quite a big ball of it eventually. I lost another tooth and sent it to Bill encased in a huge wad of adhesive tape for safety! I wonder if my tooth made it all the way to Germany. Dad's sister, Aunt Gretchen, was living in New York then with Gaffer. She came over one day and found me hiding under a table in the hall. My mother was drunk and out cold in the bedroom. She took me back to their apartment at 1088 Park Avenue, and I stayed there for a while. It was on about the fth oor and you could look down on one side into a little courtyard in the middle of the building. There was a bicycle room full of bicycles and large toys to the right of the entrance, and the halls had a typical New York smell of dry oil-painted walls. Gaffer would take me for walks in Central Park. We visited the zoo. The penguins were fun to watch and had a water slide. Gaffer would call the squirrels to come to be fed peanuts by tapping his cane on the ground. My cousin David Thomas, Aunt Gret's son, was there then too, but was too old for me to relate to. His sister Rhoda was away at school. David teased me a lot. He had a model ferry boat. I thought it was a fairy boat and couldnt understand the difference. I remember watching Gaffer shave. He used an old fashioned straight razor and a leather strop. The shaving cream had a little brush to make it foamy, and he used old fashioned tooth powder to brush his teeth. Hed pour a little pile of it into his hand and dip into it with his wet toothbrush.

Travel was accomplished by taxicab. Some of them were large, and had jump seats so that you could t four people in the back. These seats folded at into the oor behind the drivers seat. There were buses and subways, but I dont ever remember taking them until I grew up and went back to visit. Polly took me to see the Disney version of Pinocchio. I loved it, but when the whale came leaping toward us on the screen I went right under the seat. We also went to see the circus. You could buy a chameleon on a string, or pin, and it would change color to match whatever you were wearing. Until the poor thing died, of course. We had two tiny turtles called "Peggy" and "Franklin." Tragically, they escaped into the kitchen and were nowhere to be found. After a while Polly noticed an odd hump in the linoleum. She pulled it up and there were Peggy and Franklin, perfectly ne! These little turtles used to be sold at Woolworth's, and other places. Usually they had colorful decals stuck to their shells. The turtles were found to carry salmonella and are no longer sold. I haven't seen a chameleon sold like that since 1945. My favorite food was fruit cocktail. It came in a can in syrup. I lived for the cherry and would save it for last. At about that time I had my tonsils out. I remember going to the doctor and having to pee into a special basin like a tray inside the toilet. I was told that I was having my tonsils out and next thing I knew I woke up in a big white bed, in a room by myself. I had the worst sore throat I can remember -- as bad or worse than when I had a strep throat in my 20s. I couldn't swallow and there was nobody there to tell, so I just spat under my pillow. Of course they found a big slimy swamp and I was grumped at, but I was only six! Afterward, I was taken to stay at Hitherbrook and installed in the blue front room to recuperate. About a week after the operation my mother came into my room and found me crying miserably. She asked me why. I had been promised ice cream when I had my tonsils out and I never got any! They had promised! I nally got some vanilla ice cream, but somehow it wasn't as good as it would have been if they had remembered in the rst place. This may have been the moment it was decided we should move out to Hitherbrook on Long Island and join Granny, Poppy, Aunt Hopie and Peter to wait out the war.

Hitherbrook
Polly and I lived with her parents, Granny and Poppy Abbott, at Hitherbrook during the nal part of the war. After that we visited every summer. We'd drive down through Connecticut, past elds of tobacco growing under white netting and the enormous restaurant called Ovide's. Once we actually stopped there, just to say we had done it. It had rest room doors marked "pointers" and "setters". Then we would take the Long Island Ferry to Port Jefferson. My youngest brother Frank was a big fan when he was little and excitedly pointed out birds he called "Segals". The ferry would signal when it pulled out of the harbor with a deep horn blast that terried small children. From Port Jefferson the ride to Saint James wasn't long. I always looked along the side of the road to see the restaurant that was in a real boat. Hitherbrook was the family's country getaway when they lived in New York City. In the summer they went to Cobourg in Ontario. After the 1929 stock market crash, Granny and Poppy put the New York house up for rent and retreated to the country. Later, my father helped to sell the New York house. My mother disliked Hitherbrook. She missed both Cobourg and New York. There was little of interest in St. James, and going to the beach every day with little children was boring. In winter there would have been nothing at all to do. We would drive through two high, curved white-painted wooden side gates, up a long white pebble driveway. It made a continuous crunchy noise under the tires. There was grass on the left side, backed by a long row of rhododendrons (pale pink in spring) and a eld on the right that was rented to a local farmer. Then you came to a little cottage on the left. Across from it was a defunct apple orchard and the large vegetable garden. The sales brochure, made when the house was sold in the 1970s, describes this as a "guest house." It was, in fact, rented out to a family named Haas after the days when the gardener/chauffeur and his family lived there. It had been empty for a long time. There were stables behind it. My cousin Peter was about three when I rst arrived. There was a governess briey, (I HATED her) who had a car. This was before Poppy built the garage at the main house, so her car was kept inside double doors at the stable. There were chickens there then, but they were later moved to their own chicken house down past the garden and the "playhouse" which was actually a tiny, two room cottage with a cellar below it. There were horse stalls and a tack room with a collection of prize-ribbons from horse shows that my mother and her sisters must have participated in. It was dark inside. There was a perfectly wonderful device there for sharpening knives. I watched my grandfather use it once or twice. It was a stationary iron bicycle-like object with a stone wheel attached. You rode the bicycle to make the wheel revolve and held your knife against it to grind it sharp. There was a smell of oily earth and many cobwebs.

A small barn was opposite the stable. The cottage had hydrangea bushes in front of it. If you put iron nails in the soil, it was supposed to make the owers blue. The rhododendrons continued past the cottage and stable, all the way to the garage. On the right, not far from the house, was a very tall pine tree, with branches that reached down to the ground like a skirt, creating a little room you could hide in, full of scratchy fallen branches and pine needles. An attempt to climb resulted in pine pitch on your skin and clothes that was fragrant, ugly, and difcult to remove. Finally, you came to a round grassy island outlined at intervals with white-painted rocks. The house was on the right. Across from the house, in the island, was a cedar tree, very tall, with the characteristic reddish, stringy bark. On the left was a huge oak tree with a swing for me and Peter.The garage, designed by Poppy, was built in about 1947 and had six sides and a pointed roof. It was white shingle like the house, but a Wedgewood blue line ran around below the edge of the roof, providing a perch and three open, arched entrances for my grandfather's white fantail pigeons. False arched doors in between the openings balanced the look. A ladder inside the garage led to a trap door so the pigeon loft could be accessed for cleaning.Once, to my horror, squabs were served at lunch. I couldn't possibly have eaten a baby pigeon.They were pathetically tiny. Between the house and the garage there was a tall, white lattice wall with an arched opening for tradesmen to access the kitchen door. It carried a fragrant rose that was pink in bud, but white when open. The house was surrounded by mature box bushes that had their own acrid, musty but pleasing smell. These bushes often had spider webs on them. They looked like circular handkerchiefs spread out on the surface, and in the center was a depression, as if someone had poked a nger in. Inside was the spider, waiting for prey. You can see the arched entrance to the kitchen courtyard on the left edge of the picture. The rose bush covered the entire lattice wall. Inside that archway was an area for a delivery van to park. The kitchen door had a wide step with a small seated stone lion on either side. They had a rather peculiar appearance because the grounds from the coffee percolator had been knocked out against the tops of their heads and some had stuck forever.There was a little entry porch with a screen door on either side -- one into the kitchen, one into the laundry -- with a wire device attached. The wire had a little rubber ball dangling downward. When you let go of the door, which had a spring to pull it closed, the rubber ball got in between the door and the jamb to keep it from slamming, and then swung aside allowing it to close quietly. Starting at the far left, you see the screened porch at the very end of the house. On the ground oor this was used by the cook and any maids that happened to be around to sit on hot summer afternoons, in large wicker chairs, to rest or to pluck chickens or string beans. Outside at the back were some clothes lines. As the years went by, the woods crept right up to the house and it got quite dark back there. If you went in through the porch, there was a laundry room on the left with a vast padded table for ironing. A smaller room on the right contained a washing machine and washtubs. I went in one day and found a bathing suit Granny had put to soak in a basin with water and Clorox. I lifted it out to discover it was nothing but bathing suit soup. Then there was a dark little corridor, with a toilet and basin on the right (under the smaller window you see on the second oor), and the main icebox on the left. The icebox was really an electric refrigerator with three compartments. They had lever closures with some sort of spring. Milk was kept in the center compartment directly

below the ice. Nobody ever defrosted it, so the ice compartment was enormously swollen out with white ice. In spite of its size it really didn't hold very much. It was on legs, about as big as three double-height bread boxes. The motor, which also ran another small refrigerator in the pantry nearest the dining room, was in the cellar to keep down noise. Under the two side-by-side windows was the kitchen. It was a large oblong room with a long, center work table. Glass-fronted cupboards on the garden side contained kitchen china. Pots and pans lived below the counter. A small table and chairs sat under a window in the middle on the garden side. The gas stove was at the left end, by the door that led to the refrigerator. On the back of that door was a roller towel. It was a heavy cotton loop hanging from a round roller. As it got dirty you just pulled it down to use a clean place. In an alcove under the stairs (tall arched window) was a big old black iron wood-burning range. Granny used to keep her mason jars and canning supplies on the shelves and stove top. In about 1958 the Cooks were living at Hitherbrook while their house was being built and Uncle David surprised poor Granny by building a wall that enclosed all but the front lip of that stove. He painted it a bright robin's egg blue. She showed me this with tears in her eyes. She was too kind to tell him after all his work that she didn't want her stove entombed like that! Cooks were interchangeable but we had one very stout one. I used to lie on the kitchen oor and try to look up to see if I could see her underpants. One of these women slipped on spilled grease and fell down on the wooden landing just outside the kitchen door. She broke her leg. An ambulance was called but it took two hours to nd us. Poor woman, she sat there all that time, on the oor, in pain, outside the screen door among newspapers that had been put down to absorb the grease. During the war there was also an Irish girl who helped the cook, did dishes, and helped with laundry. She and the cook lived in the maids' rooms on the third oor. Peter and I often visited the kitchen and ate some of our meals there. They had much better comics in their newspaper, including one called the Teenie Weenies I particularly loved.

I had to eat all alone in my room when it wasn't convenient for me to eat in the kitchen. I was fascinated by boiled onions. If you mashed one with your fork a smaller onion would slide out. Then a smaller one again until you got to the middle. The center part of carrots would also come out. Later I graduated to the real dining room, but usually only for lunch.

Moving from the kitchen toward the main house you next came to the cellar door on the right, with the back stairs curling around above it. Opposite was a sink for arranging owers and some deep drawers that held things like tools, wire and miscellaneous accumulations of interesting junk. They were extremely heavy and so full they were very hard to close. On the garden side (opposite the stairs) was a Dutch door out to a sort of no man's land outside the kitchen where a sand box had been placed for me and Peter, and a jungle gym. I wasnt able to make my way across the overhead monkey bars. Peter could do it. I just fell off ! If you went down the stairs you came to the cellar under the kitchen. This was quite small and low-ceilinged but contained what must have been one of the very rst freezers. It had three big square compartments and one more compartment for the motor. Access was from the top. The freezer contained many little waxy containers of vegetables, a soup that Granny made by grinding up pounds and pounds of mixed vegetables and then cooking them, and "Raspberry Water Ice." The soup was a strange brownish color sort of like army uniforms, but tasted very good. It was thick, and you probably could live on it. Raspberry water ice was used for dessert sauce or even straight from the container as sherbet. It was raspberry syrup from Granny's enormous raspberry patch and it was heaven. At the entrance of that room there was a cupboard with doors that had chicken-wire panels. Bottled stuff like Granny's wonderful applesauce (think huge chunks of apple in light syrup, tinged the faintest pink) and pickles ("Mary Mahoney Pickle" was green tomatoes, celery and things -- a sort of piccalilli) were kept in there. There was a loud bang from the cellar one day. Then another! And another! Something had gone wrong with the canning process. Nobody dared go down for about a week for fear of explosions and ying glass. The cellar under the main house contained a gigantic coal furnace. It had to be stoked all the time during winter, and produced buckets of clinkers (byproduct of burned coal) that were emptied in the woods behind the garage.It must also have heated the water. Poppy had arranged it so that the pipes circulated hot water all around the house constantly, so you never had to wait for it. You turned it on and it was hot. Water was pumped from an artesian well in the woods near the gardener's cottage. Back upstairs, you came to the pantry next to the dining room. On the side looking out to the garden was a lovely double copper sink with a wood surround and an arched faucet. There were glass-fronted china cupboards above all the way around the room, and drawers and cupboards below the counter. There was a broom closet (liquor lived above the brooms) on the dining room side, and opposite that was the smaller refrigerator. It contained ice cubes, lemons, and cocktail-hour food.There was also some milk. Poppy sometimes liked a nightcap before he went to bed. He made it with half whiskey and half milk in a water glass. Aunt Nancy told me that after the war the little icebox in the pantry exploded. This was dangerous because it ran on natural gas. Uncle Gus was upstairs with a bad back, but had to come down and deal with it, and they called the re department fearing a re might touch off the gas fumes. Under the window, there was one of those rolling butler's tables with a collection of African violets. For special occasions, we would sometimes get a cake. It would be un-boxed in the pantry. Granny had several "little old ladies" that she got cakes from, or who did sewing for her.This cake came from a pair of elderly sisters who supported themselves by baking. It had very thin, white sweet and sour lemon icing (on the sour side) and a thin spreading of red jelly in between the layers.

The Dining Room

In the dining room the wooden screen on the right masked the swinging door to the pantry. It had two big shelves inside that held a toaster, various salts and peppers and a little brass lady with a bell in her skirt. There were also some pill bottles and vitamins, however there was one house rule that although you may have had to take it,

medicine was not ever to be mentioned. I once used the word "putrid" at the dinner table and this was not tolerated. Under the table there was a humpshaped electric bell so you could ring for the next course. It was hidden under the rug, with a wire that ran off toward the kitchen. The bell wasn't attached to the oor, so gradually it crept further and further away from Granny, until she was practically lying down, trying to reach it with her toe. One day we were all eating corn at the dining room table. The new variety "butter and sugar" had just been introduced. We were talking about how some people eat corn neatly, nipping off a couple of rows of kernels at a time, and some people make a mess of it, getting corn all over the place and leaving a messy looking cob. Poppy remarked that when I grew up it would be a perfect test for a prospective husband. We would see how he addressed an ear of corn. I took that seriously at the time, but now I realize how funny it was. By the replace was an antique high chair. It was a regular little chair with a rounded, woven wicker back, sitting up on a matching wooden platform. The baby was held in by a round wooden bar that went through the arms of the chair and had a knob on the outside that screwed on to keep it in place. When a baby was in residence it got to sit in this chair at breakfast or lunch. I didn't have dinner with grownups until I was seven or eight years old, and then only on special occasions. Behind the chair, the replace was faced with blue Delft tiles with pictures on them. I amused the grownups once when ngerbowls were distributed between the main course and dessert. I was very pleased to nd a pansy oating in it, took it off, and drank the water. Granny had a big collection of Canton and Fitzhugh china. There was matching round-topped cabinet set into the wall on the right of the study door and more china on the two sideboards that anked the double doors to the hall. She used the china, too. On a winter visit with a school friend I remember being served the most wonderful rich, hot borscht in tall cups with lids. Under the lid I found the hot soup with a spoonful of sour cream on it. By the French doors, out of view in the pictures, was a barrel chair where Poppy used to read the paper. One morning when I was a teenager Granny and I were lingering at the breakfast table. She was eating her usual toast with marmalade. She made her own marmalade. She had diverticulitis and had been told never to eat anything with small indigestible lumps (corn, seeds, orange peel) so she ground up oranges with the meat grinder. It was very good. She'd put one bite's worth of marmalade on the buttered toast, eat that bite, then prepare another bite, and so on. She was talking about various things, and said something about Poppy. We hadn't realized he was sitting quietly by the French door in the chair, reading. A voice came suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere: "I didn't realize I would be Talked About!" For a moment Granny was taken aback, worried that he wasnt pleased by this. Then we both began to laugh. Very amusing Opposite the French doors that looked out to the lawn and garden were the study doors. The doors to the entry hall were across from the replace. All these double doors were usually kept open.

The Study

The study at Hitherbrook was oval. Originally the room had been the kitchen, but when Poppy renovated the house he redesigned it, adding curved walls. He liked curves and arches as well as secret doors. The two little sofas on either side of the desk had curved backs to t the curve in the walls. Two lighted scenes made by a friend who did theatrical scenery were set into the bookcases above the sofas. The one on the left of the desk was a pirate on the deck of his ship under a huge sail that disappeared up into the frame of the box. I think he had a parrot on his shoulder. The other was of Jean Valjean, shivering and crouched, going down a narrow Paris street. Each scene had a cord with an oval electric switch. We were allowed to turn on the lights sometimes, as a treat. I have the two candelabra that are on the mantel. When I got them I was surprised to nd that the crystals were yellowed plastic. They were probably made in Russia (I think my grandmother went to Russia with Grandfather Vauclain) and are copper and brass. The tops come off so you can also use them as single candlesticks. The portrait in the black and white picture is of Aunt Nancy as a little girl. The man on the right is my grandfather's brother Wainwright. Poppy had died the year before. This was taken the evening before Sheila Cook's wedding. I am talking with my grandmother and you can see the concealed door to the telephone booth behind us. It had book backs with joke titles ("Polly's Folly," "Hopie in Love," "Nancy's Adventure") on it to resemble a bookcase. The oval frame contained quartz arrowheads Poppy had found while raking the white pebble driveway.

Peter and I used to crawl through the kneehole in the desk. There was a little space behind it where below the window that just t a small child. It was a "partner's desk" and had drawers on both sides. One of the drawers on the accessible side contained a big box of crayons for us. In latter years my grandparents spent their evenings here with a re going, watching TV. Perry Mason was a big favorite. Granny (who in some ways was quite innocent) seemed to think the program was real. There is a china lion in the bookcase. I have a brass one on my dining room mantelpiece that I bought the moment I saw it. I don't know if it's because I saw things that I liked in this house and remember them, or its because theres a "family taste." I found the furniture, how it was arranged, the colors, and the pictures at Aunt Nancy's apartment in Philadelphia to be almost eerily familiar. She ended up with some of the furniture and small objects like the china lion from Hitherbrook, but it wasn't only that. For instance, she, my mother and I all share a fondness for pieces of small furniture, either made for children or salesman's samples, and I love dollhouse furniture too.

The Hall
The door bell worked by pulling a brass knob that yanked a wire. It rang all the way back in the kitchen. The barometer worked. Hanging below it there was a wooden box to hold gloves, and a stand for umbrellas with a drip pan under it.

Someone has removed all the hats from the coat tree for the picture, but it always had a few on it, particularly a disreputable straw one Poppy wore while raking the pebble driveway. Beyond the coat tree is another door into a deep coat closet. Peter and I used to play in there among the galoshes. It was a triangular space with one side that bulged inward because of the oval study. Galoshes were black rubber, had tall sides with oppy tops and smelled interesting. They had several metal fasteners on the front that clamped shut to close. One side was like a little ladder and the other was hinged to pull through and clamp down so you could adjust the tightness. They went on over your shoes. The closers jingled when the galoshes were empty. There are three steps down to the marble oor inside the front door. One day when Peter was about four, he began to roll the big glass bottle encased in a rafa basket.

It sat on the right side of the big chest in the picture. The bottle got away from him and rolled faster and faster, all the way down the hall. Then, to our dismay, it rolled briskly down the steps and smashed to smithereens on the hard marble. The bottle was like the familiar Chianti bottle but big enough to have held about 3 ten pound bags of potatoes. Or maybe four. Granny was devastated. Under the stairs was a lavatory with a long, glass-topped, chintz skirted counter and bench, where ladies could sit and repair their makeup. There was a long horizontal mirror and a powder jar there in case you needed to powder your nose. I loved the two pottery fan-tailed pigeons on the chest, and have been looking for similar ones for years.The portrait is the three Abbott sisters, done when they lived in New York. Just past the portrait on the left you can see a line on the wall, and a little green glass doorknob. The door opened into a tiny phone booth that just t between the hall and study walls. It was triangular, tting into the oval study wall. Inside the phone booth was a little jump seat that folded up out of the way to enable you to pass through, and an old black phone on a little shelf beside the Social Register Granny used as her phone book. There was also an extension in the kitchen and one in Grannys bedroom. Another hidden door at the foot of the stairs opened into the living room, concealed on the living room side by false book spines. It had been converted to a closet with shallow shelves between the two doors, but when we buried my grandfather the doors were opened for the minister to go through. The funeral was held in the living room. Granny refused to allow Poppys body to be taken to the funeral home, so he was laid out in the kitchen. After the service Dad and Uncle David, remembering Poppy was also a Yale man, began to sing Yale songs a little too enthusiastically in the dining room among the guests. Granny was suitably scandalized and they were quickly hushed up. Granny had a long, narrow bench at the end of her bed. This had a attish cushion and a round bolster at each end. Peter and I used these as horses one day to ride down the stairs, galumphing across the landing and then riding the cushions down again into the hall. At about nine in the morning there would be the sound of Grannys backless bedroom slippers as she came down the stairs to breakfast: kaLOP, kaLOP, kaLOP. The window seat on the landing was a nice touch, but it was very hard, and not a particularly good place to spend any time. The stairs continued upward from the second oor, ending in the attic but were strictly utilitarian by the time you got to that nal ight. There is a slight curve at the top left of the rst ight of steps, no doubt designed by Poppy, carrying out the curved theme he was so fond of. I watched once when the glass lantern in the stairwell was being taken down for cleaning. It was a near nervous breakdown for everyone as this involved a tall ladder and a great deal of direction giving.

The clock lost its real insides long ago. It looked authentic, but it ran by electricity. Granny loved soft colors. The Chinese wallpaper with scenes of trees, birds and owers was on a soft buttery cream background. On the left of the French doors was a built-in cupboard, above a radiator hidden in the wall. It was quite large and was lled with odds and ends like old tennis racquets and board games lling the shelves on one side. Peter and I managed to climb up into the cupboard and could close the doors and be completely hidden. Peter had discovered how to make terric snoring noises. One day we were in there with the doors pulled shut, having a contest to see which of us could snore the loudest. I heard grownups going by outside, stiing laughter. Opposite the cupboard there was a magnicent Chinese chair made of carved wood with rose medallion panels on the seat and back. The narrow arched cupboard let into the left wall of the alcove held china, and on the bottom shelf, some decorative pottery gures, Chinese "Mud Men." We went to Hitherbrook for Christmas one year just before Poppy died. There was a re in the hall replace that was very welcoming and cozy. That Christmas my grandmother placed three trees in the alcove side by side. They were white pine, with long needles. She had the tops cut off so that the whole space was lled, and the decorations were only silver balls, silver rain and tiny white lights. It was one of the most beautiful things Ive ever seen. I went down alone at night to see it. The smell the pine and effect of all that silver were unforgettable. A friend of grannys waiting in the chair.

The Living Room

The living room was the comfortable public gathering place at Hitherbrook. The room was large -- one whole side of the house, with plenty of places to sit.The sofa was absolutely huge, easily seating about four people, with chairs on either side. In early days there was the piano to hide under, and the large standing radio/phonograph.

There were children's books on a low shelf near the door, and the whole inside wall was a bookcase.

There were four sets of French doors, so that if you wanted, the whole room could be opened. We often used the ones that went out to the terrace and garden. On the right side of the door, hidden behind the painted screen, a panel of buttons controlled all the lights for the room. When you pushed in the top button to turn a light on, the bottom button popped out, and vice versa. One afternoon, at a loose end and unsupervised as usual, Peter and I began pulling the rubber tubes out from the underneath of the player piano in the living room. These had been dangling for a while, but suddenly we became obsessed and once we started pulling we couldnt stop. We had a wonderful time and soon the oor was covered with rubber spaghetti. The tubes were a little crumbly anyway but this destroyed forever the piano's ability to play by itself. The living room was changed not long after that and two sofas at the far end supplanted the piano and radio. There was a huge painted tin Chinese tea chest under the window that looked out to the driveway. It was big enough for a child to hide in. Every evening before dinner Granny would come downstairs after changing into her tea gown. This was a dusty rose color, oor length affair with long sleeves and a pleated center panel that was sort of black and white speckle. She would go into the pantry by the dining room and make up a plate of Ritz crackers with salmon roe caviar and sour cream with a little lemon, or mash some cooked chicken livers through a strainer, add a little fresh onion juice and dried herbs and make up a plateful of crackers. She'd make a small shaker of martinis the old fashioned way. 1/3d dry vermouth and 2/3ds gin with lots of lemon peel, a good squeeze of lemon juice, in cracked ice. The grownups would then gather in the living room to listen to the news. This was introduced very dramatically by an announcer who said, "And now... Here is LOWELL THOMAS with the NEEWs." When Peter rst learned to talk he called him "Lower Thomas." After the cocktail hour, when dinner was announced, the grownups would move into the dining room. One night I came downstairs and drank up all the martini-avored ice-melt in the little green votive glasses the martinis were served in. I still have one. There was a table near the French doors that opened to the terrace. It usually held some books and a ower arrangement. There were lots of interesting drawers in the living room furniture. One drawer held a collection of brass bells from India. Deep drawers in chests on either side of the big sofa contained photo albums. Other drawers had that wonderful miscellany that always seems to gather in drawers. Ashtrays. Keys. You never knew what you'd nd. The table by the replace had a collection of jade objects and brass pieces on another table. Two small sets of drawers on legs faced each other. Originally they would have been set against a wall, but because the backs were exposed, they had been cleverly covered with green silk damask panels. Granny occasionally threw an afternoon bridge party. Furniture would be moved away, and six or eight card tables and chairs would be set up. I would be allowed to put on one of the maid's uniforms that hung in an attic closet, complete with small white apron and cap and pass little sandwiches or bon bons. One day I was putting marshmallows on a plate. (This is an odd choice of a treat to serve at a formal bridge party, but it may have had something to do with wartime sugar scarcity -- I don't know.) I was intrigued by the consistency and was squeezing them with my ngers as I took them out of the bag, when a needle emerged from one of them. There was talk of enemy sabotage, however no more needles were discovered and the furor died down. Once a year a little car would come up the drive. A short, middle aged, bald man would come in with cases of embroidered or lace-edged place mats, handkerchiefs, tablecloths, pillow cases and knitted baby clothes. He'd spread them all out in the living room and some would be chosen and paid for. He was always referred to as "The Blind Man" because the prots from his sales went to support blind people. We were told not to call him the Blind Man while he was there. I did wonder how a blind man could drive. Part of my confusion stemmed from the fact that he had extremely thick eyeglasses. One afternoon I was lying on my stomach on the living room rug, just thinking. A tiny brown mouse went scooting across the room, never noticing me, and went away, somewhere near the replace.

Upstairs
The blue bedroom was directly to the left when you got to the top of the stairs. I considered it mine. This is where I found myself after my tonsillectomy and where I usually stayed on visits. It had low twin beds then, and pictures on the wall above them. One of these terried me so much I was careful not to look at it. I think it was a Biblical scene with a cloud that seemed to resemble a big face. That cloud was SCARY! The door had a key and one day I turned it. The whole household went into emergency mode. Poppy climbed up a ladder and came in the window after a good deal of shouting through the door had no result. There was a cedar tree outside the window then. One summer I could see a birds nest with blue eggs inside. This room had one of the several Olson rugs Granny had made for the house. Another was a very long runner in the corridor that led to the wing. These rugs were made out of clothing and rugs that you collected and sent away to the Olson factory in Chicago. They turned the scraps into a rug with a pattern of striped squares, and shipped it back. They were a pink and gray color, mostly. I think these rugs were quite ugly, but they weren't expensive and lasted very well. The company still exists. Otherwise, the room was pleasant. It had blue wallpaper except for the wall behind the beds. That wall must have become stained somehow, and unable to replace the paper, they tried to match the blue with paint. The closet near the window was a ne place to hide out and play. The one next to the replace had shallow shelves for quilts, bedspreads and that sort of thing. There were two side-by-side windows on the right (out of view) with a tall bench under them. It hid a long radiator, and was high, perfect for suitcases. The bench had a rather hard upholstered cushion in dark red to match the pelmet over the windows. There was a child's wing chair, upholstered in pink chintz on the right near the dressing table, and behind it, a bookcase with the entire set of "The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew" in it. Between the beds and bathroom was a big bureau with a thick sheet of glass on top. I was just tall enough to put my face up to it. Inside, if you looked at the edge of the glass, was a many-layered green world that stretched up, down and away. Fascinating! When I visited as a teenager I would raid the freezer in the room below the kitchen for a tub of raspberry water ice, and eat it, sitting up in the four-poster bed that supplanted the twin beds of my extreme youth, reading New Yorkers in total bliss. The chaise longue was a soft blue color with pinstripes.

The bathroom was opposite the door to the room, by the beds. The tub was long enough to lie down in completely, even after I grew up. There was shaving tackle in the medicine cabinet. When there was no guest, Poppy would use that bathroom instead of the connecting one between his and Granny's room so as not to make noise and disturb her. On the oor was a felted wool Numdah rug with owers and animals on it. There was large built-in cupboard in the upstairs hall with an assortment of useful medicines inside. There were more in a cupboard in Poppy's room, beside the door to the bathroom. It had such an interesting smell -- shoe polish and adhesive tape and iodine. Band-Aids were white cloth and had their own funky characteristic sort of smoky, medicinal odor. If you got a cut, rst iodine was applied from a small bottle with a glass wand inside the cap. It delivered the iodine one drop at a time and it stung like mad. Think screams and howls from small children... There was a painted wardrobe in the hall that held sheets and beach towels, with plenty of lavender in little bags. Across from that was a heavy, dark chest. On top of it were tidy stacks of New Yorker magazines. When I visited the rst thing I'd do was take a pile of these to bed with me. Long before I was old enough to understand the stories, I would scour them cover to cover for the cartoons. Across from my blue bedroom, just past where the stairs continued upward to the attic, was Poppy's room. It was darker in there, with a soft moleskin colored carpet. Across from the door was a large, mahogany wardrobe, and high on top of this was a glass dome containing many tiny, brilliantly colored stuffed birds. He had a four poster bed beside a built in closet. Above the bed on the right side, was a picture of the actor William Gillette, portraying Sherlock Holmes. I think Poppy had known Gillette in New York. There was a replace and to the right of that, almost undetectable, a secret door ush in the wall that led into Granny's room. The door to the bathroom was held open by a black iron bootjack. As a little girl it never occurred to me it might be racy. When Sheila Cook got married friends of the bridegroom took it, probably to tease the wedding couple. It was returned soon afterward.

The bathroom contained a tub as well as a separate shower bath. This was in the corner, so it was pie-wedge shaped and completely tiled in white. On the glass shelf above the sink was an antique cut-glass water goblet. Granny liked to use it for her Haleys M-O. Looking through the bathroom door into Grannys room, her bureau was on the right. There was a wiry, little leather leprechaun with a wizened face perched high on top of the mirror. He had on a tiny, green suit. Granny said that at night he came to life and capered around the house, and I believed it. Her telephone sat on the right-hand corner of the glass topped bureau. Sitting at an angle across the corner on that side of the room was her dressing table with painted perfume bottles, silver brush and comb, and a three-panel mirror.

The left side of her four poster bed was always full of books, her pine-needle pillow, and an electric heating pad for her back. At the foot of the bed was the long, narrow bench with cylindrical pillows at each end. In the opposite corner by the closet was a folding screen. This hid her sewing machine and what she called the rats nest, her term for a mess, which was a big pile of mending. The machine ran by pressing a long lever with your knee. Granny used it to do things like sides-to-middle sheets. When the middle got thin and worn out, the sheet was cut in half from top to bottom, and the two sides were sewn together to make a new middle for the sheet. She also used to make her own slips. They had a characteristic scalloped bottom that she must have done by hand. She also covered many a bed with the blankets she made by crocheting together knitted squares of left-over wool. She had an accident once and sewed her index nger with that machine. The nail remained a little lumpy and impressed me with the idea of being very careful when using a sewing machine. Between the two windows overlooking the garden there was a little hanging cabinet above a small chest that had many deep little drawers containing sewing supplies. One day she was poking around inside the cabinet to nd something and was delighted to nd a longforgotten piece of chocolate wrapped in paper. We shared it with pleasure even though it had been there quite a while, had gone white on the outside, and tasted sort of musty. In the distance, out Grannys windows, you could see a trace of blue that was Long Island Sound. Every few years Poppy would have some trees cut down to retain Grannys water view. View out upstairs windows taken the day of Sheila Cooks wedding

Both Grannys room and the yellow bedroom on the other side of the hall had a whole wall of built-in closets with paneled doors that folded so that you could open the whole thing. The oor had a slanted platform for shoes, with a ridge to keep them from sliding off. Above the closet there were cupboards to the ceiling. I got into Grannys upper cupboard once by standing on a chair. I was just curious to see what was up there. There were boxes of all sorts of things folded in tissue paper; linens, underwear... And they found out because I never thought to put it all away again. Aunt Hopie voted for punishment, but Granny defended me and nothing was said. Each bedroom had a replace. In Grannys, over the mantel, there were Venetian sconces and a mirror. Across from the replace was a tall narrow closet with many shallow shelves. They held Grannys shoes, neatly lined up, all with Cuban heels and pointed toes, left over from the 1920s. Between the cupboard and replace was the other side of the secret door that went through into Poppys room. Sometimes an old spool bed crib would be set up in Grannys room for a visiting baby grandchild. Coming from Grannys room, if you looked to the right, youd see her desk. This was a heavy oblong table with a bronze bust of her father in the middle. It was by the window at the end of the upstairs hall, opposite the stairway. The desk was always deep in papers. Every night after dinner Granny would sit here and write letters to friends and family until about eleven.

The bust was large, made of metal. I used to particularly admire the nose, which was imposing.

Directly across the hall from Grannys room was the yellow guest bedroom with low twin beds. When Dad came back after the war I was overwhelmed with love for my parents and wanted to give them something. The only thing I could think of was to give them the lovely smell of baby powder, so I went in while they were at dinner downstairs, and under each pillow I put a big heap of powder. They were not pleased. At all. I heard cries of rage in the night. I was very sad that they didnt like my surprise. The mantelpiece in the yellow room had a beeswax candle in the shape of Red Riding Hood at each end. They were painted like dolls and were about a foot high. Between the windows that looked out to the garden was a dressing table, painted with designs and owers. It had a folding mirror that came up from inside. There was a covered container of pink face powder on the top of this table. One morning Sheila Cook came in while I was just waking up. She was idly stirring the face powder with one nger, came across something in the depths, pulled it out and exclaimed, OH! A Chocolate BIT! I was given the yellow room on a visit after I had grown up, and felt there was something amiss, but couldnt gure it out until I realized that a tall, rather heavy bureau that used to be in the corner by the bathroom wasnt there. Later, when I came again, the painted dressing table had vanished. It was Granny, gradually selling things to raise money for her grandchildrens educations. Between the two guest bedrooms, the upstairs hall had an arched opening to a long, narrow, rather dark corridor. It led down into rooms above the kitchen and laundry. If you ran down the hall it echoed nicely. CLUMP CLUMP CLUMP, all the way down. There was an extra linen press on the right about halfway along, and pictures on the walls of the rooms in the house they used to have in New York. There was also a photo of someone in uniform who had died in WWI. I asked once who it was, but Granny choked up and changed the subject. Since nobody in the immediate family was killed it remains a mystery. There were two odd little doors, about the right size for a gnome, at the end of the hall. They opened to reveal the plumbing for the blue and yellow room bathrooms. At the end of the hall was a little foyer with a re extinguisher complete with a woven hose behind a small glass door, and an ironing board secreted in the wall. Back stairs went down to the kitchen, and up to the attic, and there were two nursery bedrooms, separated by a bath. At the very end was the screened-in sleeping porch. It was large and airy. When Peter and I were little it was a big treat to be allowed to sleep there on very hot summer nights. Another narrow hall ran alongside the back of these two bedrooms. There was a low bookcase that contained childrens books under a window there, and in the middle, using the space on the other side of the bathroom, was a big, deep closet. This is where we could go, shut the door, achieve complete darkness, and whiz our tin sparklers.

The Eidic
In spite of the heat, Peter and I loved nothing better than to spend hours playing in what he called "the Eidic." This meant the attic in general, but particularly the long peaked part above the wing. We also laid waste to the storage room at the very top of the stairs in the main house. It had a very wide shelf that ran around the whole room, waist high for grownups, big enough for us to climb up and sit on. We opened boxes and poked around, and one day we found a round, sealed tin box. It wasn't easy to open, but that made it more of an interesting challenge, and when the top nally came off there was a beautiful candy thing inside. It had white candy owers on it and was hard as a rock. We ate it. The grownups were upset, but it was gone by the time they found out, so there was nothing they could do. It had been the top of Aunt Hopie and Uncle David's wedding cake being saved for a future anniversary. We spent whole afternoons playing above the wing. This was a very long room with a peaked middle and very low sides. At the far end was a big chimney, behind which was a small space where things like an old bedpan had been stored. The only air came from small, louvered opening at that end. It was insanely hot up there, but there were all sorts of objects, trunks and boxes to look through and we could be pirates or explorers. There were costumes galore. In one old trunk we found the velvet suits the three Abbott sisters wore in the big portrait downstairs in the hall. They were deliciously soft, a wine red with a hint of brown. Another costume resource was the cedar closet in the main part of the attic. It was packed with clothes, including evening gowns left over from the 1920s and 30s, as well as hats and some furs. It smelled strongly of both cedar and camphor. There was also a shelved closet in the hall between the two bedrooms that anked the bathroom. It had stores of folded material. I found some wonderful amethyst velveteen and asked Granny if I could have it. She agreed. I took it home, but didnt nd anything to use it on. About a year later she asked for it back! Aunt Nancy told me Granny often did that. She said she was a famous Indian giver. The attic was a useful place for Granny to sort through things that ended up at Hitherbrook when various family members died or moved. She would lay things like a large set of Imari china out on a bed, for instance. Then either shed sell the things, or pass them on to other family members. The main attic had four maid's rooms and a bathroom as well as the storage room (once a bedroom too) and the cedar closet. During the war at least two of them were used by the cook and her helper. One of these rooms still had some maid's uniforms, aprons and a cap or two in it. Each small room had a bed, painted bureau with a mirror, and perhaps a chair, but little else. The closets had openings into the eaves of the house, possibly for ventilation. I had a secret, private clubhouse inside one with a lamp and books to read. The at roof at the top of the back stairs was accessible through a window, and this was where Granny would put out a big white enamel pan lled with strawberries and sugar, with a large sheet of glass tilted above it. The sun heated the contents, the water evaporated and ran off the glass and made Sun Jam. It was very good. I have recurring dreams about the house, and particularly about the attic that include costumes hanging as if for sale, and a feeling that somewhere there is a treasure if I can only nd it.

The Beach Club

Every sunny weekday in summer saw us at the beach club. It was about a twenty-minute drive and Peter and I would joyfully chant the landmarks. It must have driven Polly and Aunt Hopie crazy. At the turn onto Moriches Road it would start. "Red door, red door! Red door, red door" And that would segue into the next one. Granny's friend Mrs. Dixon's driveway was one of the landmarks. "Mrs. Dixon, Mrs. Dixon, Mrs. Dixon, Mrs. Dixon, Mrs. Dixon, Mrs. Dixon!" A few times we were allowed to go there (Dixon's Beach), where it was very stony, but you could play among the rowboats. Hallie Dixon telephoned Granny every day to discuss life, but she was so deaf her maid was the one that called. Granny would tell the maid what she had to tell Mrs. Dixon. Then the maid would shout it, get an answer and tell Granny, and so on. The only time I ever saw Granny cry was after Mrs. Dixon died. At the beach club we would park on a sandy bluff and go past tennis courts down a steep, horrible little rutted path full of stones, past the small, shingled club house. It had a little window where you could buy Cokes, popsicles and Good Humors. These were vanilla ice cream on a stick, with a thin chocolate coating. You had to eat them fast before the chocolate detached itself and slid off. The club house was also a restaurant in the evening and had an enclosed porch-dining room facing the water. We used the main bath house to change into our bathing suits. This was a large building on short stilts, so you could creep underneath, peek up through the oorboards at people changing (you would be punished for this if caught), and look for loose change that might have fallen out of pockets. It had many dark little booths, each with a seat at the back, and a big open place in the middle for those who weren't modest. There was a large galvanized tub and a cold shower outside for washing the salt off. In a little house next to the bath house there was the "Ladies" dressing room, but that was off limits. It had a little sort of parlor with chintz curtains and a chintz-skirted dressing table. A private toilet. I don't remember ever seeing anyone in there, though.I snuck in to see what it was like. We always brought our own picnic lunch. Sometimes I was allowed to buy a Coca-Cola (when I got old enough not to be afraid of the lady in the little sales window) and we had crustless chicken or ham sandwiches and lemonade on the round, outdoor tables. Then we had to wait for an hour before we could swim again. Everyone knew if you went swimming before that you got a cramp and died. Granny rarely came to the beach club but she did go in swimming a couple of times. She had a long, droopy bathing suit, white rubber bathing shoes to protect her feet from the band of stones near the edge of the water, and when she swam her head was as far above the water as possible so she wouldnt get her hair wet. I taught myself to swim at the beach club. I became very good at the dog paddle. It was on the Long Island Sound side, so there were no real waves. Peter had a tendency to get cold when swimming and he would shake and his lips

would turn blue. He would be ordered out until he was warm enough to go in again. Nobody paid any attention to me until it was time to go, so I could paddle around or make sand castles using the dribble method, or possibly dig out a horrid big soft-shell clam. Once I brought one home and watched with mingled admiration and revulsion while Poppy ate it. There were rocks to climb but they were crusted with erce white barnacles. When the rocks were dry the barnacles closed their little sliding doors, and when wet they would open up again. Most of the summer was spent barefoot, and the ends of my pigtails were salty.

More About Hitherbrook

Hitherbrook was a big, square house with a wing that had been added by Poppy. He originally planned the wing to be curved like an arm reaching out from the house, but suddenly they ran out of money. The box garden at the foot of the lawn replaced the original owners tennis court. A separate service driveway would have curved far around to the kitchen from a second set of curved white gateposts, but was never completed. Later, the Cooks built a house on the land and were able to use the gateposts and the beginning of the second driveway. Originally there was a cottage for a gardener with stables attached, and a clay tennis court between the house and the vegetable garden. I found the tennis court later as a teenager, with saplings growing in it. Hidden in the woods above the house there was a rustic round or sixsided folly made of bark-covered trees. Peter and I came across it by chance one day when we were exploring. If you went out the white iron gate at the end of the formal box bush garden, there was a narrow path that came to a tiny forgotten playhouse. It had a child-size stove and drifts of leaves inside. Hitherbrook was full of possibilities for a child. When I was very small and arrived there for a visit, Granny told me the rst thing I would do is run around everywhere to see if I still "reckernised" everything. I used to go to the vegetable garden with Granny often in the mornings. She would pick peas or beans for the table and there were two long rows of raspberry bushes. The garden had a lush grass path down the middle and a gate at the far end. When you went through the gate you came to a little two-room cottage with a stone chimney and a tiny root cellar underneath. We called it the playhouse, but it's possible it had once been lived in. The new, long chicken house was a little farther along. It had a roomy chicken-wire enclosed area for the chickens on the left side, and inside on the left there were six or eight small doors along the wall, about four feet from the oor. Each hen had a cubicle with a nest in it on the other side, and a door opened at the back of the box. You could reach in and get the eggs right out from under the disgruntled chicken. At the far end there was a small room with a big tree stump in the middle. That is where the chickens met their end, neck to stump, from an ax. I never saw this happen, though. We did eat chicken fairly often. The lawn was surrounded by woods and tall pines. When the wind blew in the winter the pines made a low roaring noise that was very atmospheric. In the hot summer we spent time on the terrace outside the living room or dining room, depending on where the shade could be found. Sometimes the children sat or played on the grass. Peter had a little red wagon. He and I would get into the wagon, poise it on the steepest corner and use it like a toboggan, rattledy bang, all the way down the hill. At the bottom of the hill to the right of the house there was a large area solidly lled with daffodils in the spring. In the late summer the woods were full of peepers. I don't know if they were frogs or cicadas but there were so many of them there would be rocking waves of sound, like a round. Little brown rabbits would come out to play on the edge of the lawn in the twilight. My life's ambition when I was six and seven was to catch and own one of these. Uncle David helped me construct a trap made of a cardboard box ("CAR-ton" as Granny and Poppy called it) propped up on a forked stick, with a carrot for bait, but although the trap was often sprung, no rabbit would be inside the box. I was very disappointed. Gaffer and Aunt Gret took a cottage nearby at this time. I was sent over to visit and spend the night. In the morning there was show of great excitement. They said there was a rabbit outside! I went out, and there was a stuffed toy rabbit, sitting up at the outside edge of the garden, in a big patch of poison ivy. It was almost life size. But the thing was hard. It seemed DEAD. Not real. I was crushed and began to drizzle tears. They didn't understand my ungrateful response. They'd gone to considerable trouble to nd a lovely toy rabbit for me ... and I was inconsolable.

The other thing about twilight, besides rabbits, was reies. Imagine the heat of day gradually fading, the light fading too, and the lawn and bushes lled with minuscule, moving greeny/white lights. I was able to catch a few sometimes and put them in a jar. I would go to sleep with the tiny lights winking away in the jar. Next morning they would be dead, but I would free them anyway, hoping they would y off and be reies again. Long Island is both hot and humid in the summer. Salt cellars always contained rice to soak up the extra moisture and keep the salt from turning into a wet clump. When it got really hot, Granny would hold her wrists under the cold water faucet to try to cool off. In the center of the box garden inside a round patch of incredibly prickly low-growing evergreens, was a small statue of a little boy. He was holding up one nger as if to tell you to be quiet, and listen. Originally he was seated by a basin of water, and there may have been a fountain. As the prickly bushes grew taller he disappeared, so he was placed higher on a column and the little pool was left behind in the undergrowth. One day Peter and I discovered some odd metal boxes with covers that swung off sideways embedded in the grass at intervals on the edge of the box garden. Poppy explained that they were for water. Inside the boxes there was something that turned, probably with a wrench, but the system didn't work any more. Then, there were the moles. They would tunnel just under the grass causing long humps. The grass where it had been raised would die. The garden roller would be employed to atten these humps, and sometimes mole traps would be set. They had wicked, long metal teeth that plunged down into the ground. We spent a good amount of time outside, and when the governess, who was English, was with us, every time a plane lumbered over she'd shriek "V for Victory" and raise her hand with the rst two ngers in a V. If you went into the woods behind the garage, and walked for a while along a narrow path, you came out into the sunlight on a road. To the right was a big Victorian shingled house, and if you continued on to the left you came to the Thornton estate. We called it the Fairy Palace. It did have the air of an enchanted palace from a fairy tale. It had formal gardens in perfect condition, lawns mowed, owers growing, but the house was empty. It seemed as if it were sleeping until the spell wore off and the people returned. Granny had permission from the Thorntons to gather lavender for her linen cupboards, so Peter and I went there with her or with the hated governess. You could peer inside through the windows and the emptiness of the rooms added to the abandoned feeling. There was a small, round hidden room with a stone seat around the outside, sunken inside hedges and beyond that, a sweeping lawn with a rectangular grass play area and the lavender bed. The house was torn down during 1955 and 1956 and other houses have been built on the land. There were many amusements besides closets and interesting spaces under beds. One rainy day Peter and I were introduced to a large cardboard carton that had been placed in the upstairs hall near Granny's desk in the alcove at the far end. It contained furniture, tiny plates of articial foods and lots and lots of other wonderful doll house items. We spent hours unwrapping piece after piece from the white tissue paper they were in. Later, poor Granny must have had to re-wrap everything.

This furniture may have belonged to the big doll house in the cottage that was just past the vegetable garden. It stood on a platform and must have been four or ve feet high. It may have had electric lights. I think there were wires and little china knobs. Peter was about three and a half years younger than I was, and late to talk, but very smart. He had an erector set and was able to build structures with it, while I just looked on with amazed admiration. The set of children's books in the living room had examples of things you could make as science projects. I made a cardboard box smoke ring machine from directions there, and then had to get a grownup to smoke into it. When you tapped the paper panel at the back of the box, out would come perfect smoke rings, one inside the other. Someone occasionally came to mow the large expanse of lawn that surrounded the house, and there was a gardener, Adolph. Adolph and his wife, Helen, who was cook for a while, were Polish. Adolph knew no English and took out Granny's beautifully established (it takes two or three years to get going) asparagus bed and planted strawberries instead. She seldom got angry, but this time she was furious. He had one thing to say: OI YOI YOI!! Peter, being too little to realize Adolph couldn't understand a word he was saying, would tell him things and he'd get Oi yoi yoi's. Worked perfectly. Helen once asked Adolph to mail a letter, but because he couldn't read English, he confused the mailbox with something with a similar shape, probably a metal trash container. They, like Mary Mahoney, lived in Saint James. Aunt Nancy surprised everyone by arriving for a visit driving a truck. Gasoline was rationed, but you could get it if you had a truck. She told me the real reason for the truck was that Granny had given her a four-poster bed, and that was the best way to transport it. Later, in the 1950s she arrived one summer sporting the new fashionable haircut. It was a "poodle cut" -- just a few inches long and curly all over. Polly told me that Hopie once decided to dye her hair black. This was not done at home in those days, but she tried it. As soon as she went out in the sun her hair became a sort of iridescent purple, like a grackle. Aunt Hopie was good-looking and enjoyed being glamorous. As a girl she had two beautiful red setters that she would parade around with. We just had Ian, also a red setter, who we called "Eeny." He was a gentle dog, but once he stole an entire roast off the long table in the center of the kitchen and departed with it. The veterinarian had to be summoned once when he was in real distress, pawing at his face and whimpering. The vet took a look, stuck his nger into Ian's mouth, and out popped a big chicken bone that had wedged itself from side to side between the upper teeth. He had a good dog life, being able to run free in the woods and come home for love and dinner. I spent some time wandering around in the woods myself. Long Island ticks carried Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, so Id be stripped to my skin and gone over with care. Grannys friend Mrs. Dixon had one on her back. It got under her skin and she had a bad infection. The other thing that was constantly watched for was poison ivy. Gaffer and Gret didnt realize they had walked me through a huge patch of it. I was washed immediately with laundry soap. Polly and Bill both had a terrible time with a bad, persistent poison ivy rash and had to have shots for it. O'Berry's GARRahge (as Granny and Poppy pronounced it) was one of the stops when Peter and I did errands with Poppy. They had Mobil Gas and could x the car if something went wrong. We would go to Saint James on Sunday and buy the newspaper at the train station. There was a small grocery store there that stocked one of my favorite things, chocolate covered raisins. I asked for them once and found out they didnt carry them in the summer. The raisins got worms! We would go to the lumber mill, and to Smithtown, but rarely, and would always admire the statue of the bull. Legend says that after rescuing a Native American Chief s kidnapped daughter, Smith was told t the Chief would grant him title to all of the land he could encircle in one day riding a bull. There was a way to get to Stony Brook through the woods on an extension of Hitherbrook Road that had a big gate. This was a private road and would stay private as long as the gates were closed once a year. Stony Brook was where Mr. Brush the barber cut our hair. He had a board that tted across the arms of his barber chair. You would be draped in a huge, striped cotton cape that closed at the back and sometimes he would nish your haircut off by singeing your bangs by running a ame along the cut ends.

Also in Stony Brook there was the Three Village Inn with an enticing gift shop. There were chairs made from barrels in the bar. The best thing of all was the wooden eagle on the Post Ofce in the center of the row of shops at the top of a rounded hill. At twelve noon the eagles wooden wings apped. Once in a while we were given a bag of bread crusts to feed the swans. Their pond was at the foot of the hill, below the village. Granny knew several old ladies who made money by making clothes for people, or baking. One of these lived near Stony Brook in a tiny cottage with a big black wood stove in the kitchen. I only remember two downstairs rooms, the living room that opened directly to the street, and the kitchen. We were there to collect a box of cookies and I was given one. Granny had come late to driving a car and she would press down on the gas to get the car going and then as it slackened speed shed give it more gas. I didnt suffer from car sickness, but my friend Katama came for a visit once and turned green on the trip to Long Island from the train. Poppy did most of the

driving when I was there.

*** It was very difcult to enter the work force with oods of young guys coming back from the war. Polly's rst cousin Ann Worrall was married to Fortune Peter Ryan. The Ryans lived in a duplex apartment looking out on the East River in New York. It was exactly like a house inside with stairs and many rooms... Peter Ryan got Dad a job as salesman for the Royal Typewriter Company in Boston and we moved from Saint James to Lexington, Massachusetts, and I entered the second grade there.