|
chance had been sold she bought all the
rest. Oddly enough, in the drawing the single chance
won the doll.
My father had one brother, Uncle Ned, who died of mastoid
a few years before I was born. My grandmother blamed herself
for not getting him to the doctor soon enough, and for the rest
of her life she refused to go through Weston center because it involved
passing near the Concord Road house and stirring up unhappy memories and
when she came to visit us she got off the train at either Tower Hill or
Riverside.
Soon after my parents were married my grandparents gave up
the Marlborough Street house and moved into the Hotel Vendome where they
lived the year round, except for a month or two at Palm Beach in
the dead of winter. One summer they hired a house on Love Lane (now 106)
which was a reasonably successful ven- ture, but the following year they
tried fixing up the main part of our farmhouse, now 26
Love Lane, and furnishing it with Marl-borough Street items. This
experiment was a failure. Our foreman George and his wife Alice occupied
the kitchen wing. Alice was quite a tippler which was bad enough, but
about the third night her lover came and tippled with
her and there was a terrible fight between him and George which ended up
with George being locked out of the house. My grandparents found all the
shouting and swearing quite disagreeable and they moved back to Boston.
When I was nine, my grandmother had a stroke that paralyzed her
physically and mentally and she lingered on for eight more years
during which time I was taken into her room to see her
only once — my parents felt that the sight of a helpless invalid would
be bad for me — and unfortunately my memories of what she looked like
stem from that single visit. |
