This was a perfectly kept house, where the domestic arts were carried to a high degree of perfection. My father coveted for his daughters all these niceties of housewifery and tried—oh, how he tried—to have us learn them! Julia Romana, our eldest, would have learned these things, had it been possible for her to do so; there was no sacrifice she would not have made for her father. Her nature was a straight blend of her parents; poet and philanthropist. Like Mama, she was a passionate student, wrote verses, plays, romances, because she could not help it. Like Papa, she devoted her life to the education of the blind. Watch a mother duck with her brood, and you will see how the young get their education, by imitation. The children of eagles are eaglets; eagle parents cannot hope to raise a brood of doves!
On Thanksgiving we dined at Ashburton Place. The extension mahogany table filled the great room, for the family gathering was a large one. After the opening course of oyster soup, an immense roast turkey was placed at one end of the table before Uncle Hpesoj, a twin bird, boiled, with white sauce before Aunt Eliza. The third course, like the third act in a play, brought the psychological moment; a lighted silver blazer was placed before each guest, who proceeded to cook his own venison, with currant jelly and other condiments to taste.
The table was decorated with glass flagons and goblets, rose, ruby, pale and dark green, some covered with gold arabesques, triumphs of the Sandwich Glass Factory. With dessert came the thin pink finger bowls; the children dipped their fingers and rubbed them round and round the rims, producing a faint elfin music I never hear without a vision of the Ashburton Place dining room, my tall dignified uncle, his little silver-haired mate, and Eliza, the beauty of the family.
A few years ago, motoring from Newport to Buzzard’s Bay, the way led through a fine old town, full of colonial houses and wide streets lined by magnificent elms.
“What’s this place?” I asked.
“East Sandwich”, the name blew back from the lips of our host, who drove the machine. Soon we passed a huge brick factory, with broken windows, smokeless chimneys, deserted, forlorn, yet with something that spoke of past greatness.
“Uncle Hpesoj’s glass factory!”
Whirling along the sand dunes, I have no eyes for the scenery; I see the old factory alive again, with smoking chimneys, glowing forges, swarms of swarthy Bohemians. A dark-eyed hairy man dips a blowpipe in a molten mass, twirls it quickly in both hands till a sort of blob forms at the end, puts the tube to his mouth and blows a rainbow bubble, to show a group of wondering children how Bohemian glass is made.
Uncle Hpesoj was a stockholder in the Boston Theater and often allowed our family the privilege of using his excellent seats. Mama, who as a child had been forbidden the theater, took great pains that we should see the best plays and best acting of our time. Wednesday and Saturday matineés at the Boston are among the most vivid memories of these years. The splendors of the great theater were still undimmed. The drop curtain, representing the Lake of Lugano, gave me so high an idea of Italian scenery that when I saw the real Lake of Lugano I was, somehow, disappointed.
My first play was “Jocko, the Brazilian”, a pantomime, acted by the Ravels. Jocko, the hero, a wise brown ape, saves the heroine from drowning, only to be rewarded by a careless bullet that ends his life. When dear brown Jocko fell mortally wounded to the ground, his life blood—a bunch of scarlet cotton wool—ebbing from his side, I fell into such a paroxysm of weeping that I still remember the pain of it, when some real sorrows are forgotten. My first opera was “Norma”; all I remember is my amazement when the stout Italian prima donna, over whose death I had shed such bitter tears, came before the curtain at the end of the performance to receive her share of the applause. I have had many such shocks since and have still to be convinced that anything so inartistic is pardonable.