The one day that made Grandma the happiest was Thanksgiving Day. That was the signal for the gathering of the clans, the day that challenged appetites, that brought fish-pond and grab-bag to the children and whist and fortune-telling to the grown-ups. For days ahead, Grandma schemed and planned. Candy-shops had to be canvassed for new kinds of sweets, every known kind of nut had to be cracked. The butcher had to be warned twenty times to give her three of the finest turkeys. The best spode had to be taken down and washed. The coin silver had to be cleaned. The parlor, usually shrouded in gloom, was opened and aired. The stuffed mallard duck and the canary under a bell-glass once more saw the light. Stereoptican slides were unpacked. The best-bedroom was cleared of chairs, and an enormous table–two tables, in fact–placed in the sitting-room. Grandma bustled about, sometimes with the silver nut-picks or the silver nutcrackers in her hand; sometimes with the gleaming cruets, or the white fruit dishes on pedestals. Dinner was an occasion, the games never palled, fish-pond and grab-bag prizes were numerous, but five o’clock was best of all.
At five o’clock Grandma would say to her two daughters, “Come, Della. Come, Emma,” and the three would disappear into the sink-room. They’s shut the door. You could hear laughter, and shrieks, and hammering. A voice would say, “It’s so cold I can’t hold it a minute longer. Another would answer, “Hand me those hot cloths.” Soon the door would open and Aunt Dell who was buxom would appear carrying a huge tray laden with bricks of ice-cream. The children would jump about like corn popping. After everyone had all they could possibly eat, other bricks were opened and the children carried them out into the snowy air to the neighbors. One went to Emma Stoddard, the spinster next door. One went to the five little McMorrows. The last was taken across the street, cautiously down a driveway of dark pines, to the haunted house. Old Mrs. Potter lived there. She had corkscrew curls and she lived in one room in the very back of the big house, which had never been finished. People said she had been rich when she and Mr. Potter had started to build, but she wasn’t anymore. People said Mr. Potter had given away too many turkeys and fine things to his workmen. Then when business began to fail, they didn’t have any use for him. He died very poor, but Mrs. Potter kept the manners of a great lady. The children loved to go. She always seemed so pleased, and gave them an odd pebble or a carved horsechestnut, or some enchanting thing of no value that just fitted into a pocket. “Tell your Grandma Thank-you, and you’re just like her.” We’d go back pleased as Punch. When we delivered the message we got an extra ten cents because Grandma seemed pleased, too.
Years later, after Grandpa had died and the children and grandchildren were too busy to have a minute for anybody, Grandma’s life changed. In those years she sat by the window mending stockings. Day in and day out, she and Maggie were alone. Many waved going by, but few had time to drop in, Thanksgiving celebrations were too hard for mother, said her daughters. The real reason was that they couldn’t afford to spend a whole day with any anyone any more. Things moved too fast. On grey days the phone would ring and Grandma’s voice with tears in it would say, “No one has been up to see me for three whole weeks. Can’t you send me some stockings to mend? The days are so long.” When we delivered the message to mother, she’d say, “It’s very unreasonable of her, when she knows I’m working night and day.” At the end Grandma was glad to go. It was too lonesome on earth.
Grandma’s only competitor in our childhood affections if you except Merrill Hubbard’s turtles an our pony, was Uncle Charlie. He was father’s youngest brother, with curly hair and the bluest eyes. No diamond ever twinkled more brightly, no spurt of blue fire ever flashed more dangerously. As a baby Uncle Charlie had been trundled all over the city on the back of his wet-nurse, wild Nora O’Callahan. At the age of ten he had been shipped to a Brothers’ School in Montreal, but the monastic discipline failed to subdue him. He escaped in the dead of winter, rode a freight-train, and appeared at the Boston City Hospital where father was serving as intern. Father took one look at the pinched little fellow under the big fur hat–coatless and hungry–and hustled him off to a good restaurant and a nearby clothing store. Not until then did he ask questions. Later, Uncle Charlie ran away to sea, but came back to Harvard. he couldn’t decide whether he’d be happier as a carpenter or as a surgeon, but finally, quite by chance, chose surgery and mastered Harvard Medical. Harvard did not master him. He announced to a startled family that he was going to Berlin for his doctorate and off he went, after wheedling the money from Grandmother, in return for building her a pair of steps. She said she could have built a house for the same amount. Armed with a tennis racquet, a great deal of nerve, and a sublime ignorance of the language, he entered Heidelberg. At the end of a year, he got into an altercation with a famous professor, and transferred to Berlin University. He was supremely happy there, playing tennis with the distinguished pianist Josef Hoffmann, and completing his thesis on the brain of a bird. When Charlie opened an office in New York City, the family sighed with relief. But he took frequent vacations. Without warning he would descend upon us, with the cryptic remark, “I am here to start something.”, and he certainly would. In three days, the calmest child would be inspired to throw talcum on his immaculate blue serge suite, to pick up a table lamp and threaten to hurl it at him, to brandish scissors and attempt to pierce his eyes. One St. Patrick’s Day mother drove up to the house, just as the Police Platoon was leading the Parade down Main Street, to discover her home draped in green to the highest peak. Uncle Charlie knew mother came from Quaker stock, and banked upon the decorations bothering her. They did. Invariably he would try father’s patience by barricading his bedroom door. No doors were locked in our house. In fact, the keys had been lost long since, and nobody bothered to replace them. “What makes you pile chairs against your door?” father would demand angrily. And his brother would retort, “I’m not going to have my pants pinched. Why in New York___” Thereupon, he would regale us for hours on the iniquities of New York. He usually ended by rehearsing certain events of his walking-trip in Greece, when savage dog-packs and bandits met him at every village. Though the children dreaded his pranks, he was exiting and they adored him. At the breakfast table he would announce, “Well Joe, I’ve been around here long enough. I’m off to Egypt tomorrow.” And he’d go to the ends of the earth, as casually as he’d walk down Main Street. You had to love a man like that. But Uncle Charlie died young, from pneumonia, in his late thirties. He was at home, and not in some foreign land, but the best care could not save him. Mother grieved most of all, and said Charlie was as fine a young man as she’d ever known. His eyes would have twinkled at that, but I know he was fond of mother too. When father’s sisters, convent-bred, called mother “the mechanic’s daughter”, despite the fact she was a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, and had passed the State Board of Medicine, Charlie had always picked up the challenge. “Emily”, he would say “will be remembered when you people are part of the dust of Taunton. The only thing I have against her is she game me goose on Thanksgiving. And goose in New England is a sacrilegious bird”
One of the worst legends about Uncle Charlie centered about his visit to Aunt Martha in Manchester, England. She had been the housekeeper to Dr. Charles Oscar Murphy, Grandfather’s brother, for whom Uncle Charlie was named. He had been a surgeon of considerable wealth who lived in an enormous house on Alexandra Park. He was a pompous man. After Grandfather had married, Great Uncle Charles paid him a visit in the states. Father, then in medical school, fell into his bad graces because he answered a note on a single sheet of paper, a business sheet that was the style of the times, with father’s name printed neatly at the top. Single sheets were not countenanced by Great Uncle Charles. When he died, he left not a farthing to the Murphy’s. His home, after Aunt Martha, was to be turned into a convent. The rest of his wealth went to a Brother’s School in St. Louis. Uncle Charlie always nursed a grudge. In one of his many peregrinations to England, after Uncle Charles’s death, he landed at Alexandria Park. There he questioned and cross-questioned docile Aunt Martha within an inch of her life. Had she really been married to Uncle? The records did not prove it. Aunt Martha was shocked. She was an ardent Catholic and had been married in the Church, but had not legalized it by an additional civil ceremony. Another loophole was emphasized–did she realize that he, Charlie, could prove that she and her husband had concealed the Fenians. In fact one outlaw with a price on his head, had been hidden in Aunt Martha’s clothes. When, in distress, Aunt Martha wrote to the American relations about the digging up of a vivid past, they arose in her defense. Charlie was bombarded with letters. In fact his brothers called him a blackmailer and ordered his immediate return to the Continent. As they were his bankers, he complied and harbored no malice. He never could understand why Aunt Martha took it so seriously, and would murmur in glee, “I had the old lady worried”. For Aunt Agnes’s soothing letters to Alexandria Park, she received at Aunt Martha’s death, the sum of ten thousand dollars. Charlie insisted he was their real benefactor, for the old lady wouldn’t have thought of it otherwise.
Jessica's Family Genealogy 