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Dear Muggs,
I’ve just come in from a nice long walk in the woods. I was taking advantage of the decent weather, which I’m sure will only last for a moment. It’s been so hot and humid this summer! Accordingly, it’s been freezing cold inside. Even in my own room, and even though I’m supposed to have my own air conditioning, it’s chilly enough to keep me in cardigans. What I’ll never understand is why the reverse is so much easier to take - I mean the winter weather, cold and damp outdoors and warm and cozy inside. My sister Mary always claimed that she was never really warm in winter - and I wonder if there wasn’t something wrong with her blood even then. I must say that I’d rather be too hot than too cold. There’s something terrifying about being too cold.
No danger of that today, even though the air was clear and the temperature was in the mid seventies - I hope you got outside to enjoy it. I walked for miles. The paths here go for miles in the woods. Douglas’ property fronts on one of the reservoirs - it’s got a really unromantic name, ‘East Collection Branch No. 2’ or somesuch - and it’s possible to walk all the way around. After a while I don’t even notice the high cyclone fence between the path and the water. (This is New York’s drinking water, after all.)
On the theory that the best handcuffs are the ones you keep the key to, I take a cell phone with me and call in from time to time. I didn’t have as much trouble learning how to use it as I thought I would. Of course I have nothing else to do, and a clear head almost all the time. Who knows what I couldn’t accomplish if I weren’t nearly eighty! Anyway, I call the house to say I’m all right. It’s usually Joe who answers the phone and he always sounds very glad to hear from me. I would think it a nuisance to have to run to the phone only to hear that it’s your employer’s crackpot cousin checking in from the back forty.
Besides, checking in always make me feel a little safer. I’m not alone back there, I find. In additional to the indigenous flora and fauna the woods are haunted by various juvenile delinquents and hooligans not so juvenile. So far they’ve been more afraid of me than I’ve been of them, but that could just be a lucky streak. I worry about coming upon a band of thieves burying their chest of gold. They’d make short work of me! They’d probably steal the cell phone, too, worse luck for them. On two occasions I’ve dialed 911. I was walking along, the first time, when I heard all this crashing about in the brush. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Then suddenly the crashing sounds moved rapidly away as I guess the predator chased the prey, and I never had to press ‘SND’ on the phone. (I can’t get used to the idea that dialing isn’t enough to make a call - you have to press this ‘send’ button as well. It makes me feel like I’m setting the fuse on a bomb.) The other time, I heard two men arguing - screaming - at each other. I dialed the number and then tiptoed backward. As long as they kept up the racket I didn’t worry too much but when they stopped I was tempted to run. Running seemed pretty far-fetched, though; I wasn’t sure I remembered how. So this time, I did press ‘SND,’ and someone answered just as the bad guys resumed their argument. I hung up, which was stupid, because as I realized a moment later, they can trace a call on 911 even if you hang up right away. Or so Douglas told me. I waited for days but we never heard any more about it.
When I him, Douglas wanted to know what the men were arguing about, and I had to my embarrassment to tell him that I hadn’t the least idea - I’d just been listening to the voices.
We had a break-in at the Elm Rock Road house once. I’m sure I told you all about it, because it happened while we were at Wellesley. Mother had gone down to Tampa for the winter and Father was staying at the apartment in town, because he hated being in the big house alone. But it had to be kept up just the same, so Andrei and Barbara, our couple at the time, were left in charge. Mother always said that they were careless about the lights. She warned them again and again to turn on the lights at twilight just as though everyone was home (and then of course to turn them off at a reasonable hour), but Father had decided to let the living room go unheated to save fuel, and Barbara hated the cold, so they just didn’t bother. The police later reported that the house was always dark except for lights in some attic windows, which of course were where Andrei and Barbara lived.
Fortunately the break-in occurred in the middle of the day. I say ‘fortunately’ because otherwise Andrei would probably have broken his neck. He and Barbara were in the kitchen conveniently polishing silver when the service doorbell rang. Barbara claimed that she warned Andrei not to answer it, but Mother never believed that, either, since it was Tuesday afternoon and the grocer usually delivered on Tuesday and Friday afternoons. When she got back from Tampa and was settling the grocer’s bill Mr. Detschmar himself told her how much chocolate candy he’d delivered over the past few months, and how little else. They lived on canned beans and rice so that Barbara could indulge in chocolate without running up the account. As Mother saw it, Barbara was undoubtedly in a frenzy of chocolate withdrawal when the doorbell rang. It wasn’t groceries though; it was a thug, and he knocked Andrei on the head with a big stick. Pretty soon the thieves had taken control of the place. Barbara put up no resistance other than screaming her head off until they gagged her. Andrei came to but had the presence of mind to hide it.
At this point somehow, the thieves dragged Andrei and Barbara into the library and tied them up back to back. But because he was not unconscious the way they thought he was, Andrei was able to stick a finger in the rope somehow so that when the thieves locked the door and left them alone Andrei was able to untie them in a minute. Barbara complained bitterly, later on, that Andrei refused to take off her gag. It seems he knew what he was going to do from the start. You remember all those secret passages and hidden doorways at Elm Rock. One of them was in the library. It opened on a staircase leading down to the coal cellar, and thither he now conducted his fair wife while the thieves were merrily amassing all the silver in the pantry.
It was all plate, most of it worthless. In Mother’s opinion it was foolish to have sterling when plate looked just as good. And if you lacquered it, she claimed, the plate never needed polishing and consequently never wore off. This was easy for her to say, since she died before the lacquer started to decay, peeling and leaving everything a hideous root-beer color. Douglas asked me once what I intended to do with it all. I thought he was asking me to give it to him so I was very prickly. I said I was keeping it for Catherine’s children. Well, he didn’t want it at all. He just gave me his estimate of how much it would cost to re-plate. After he picked me up off the floor he suggested that I just unload it, because it was so depressing to look at. I thought about this for a week and saw how right he was (as usual). I had the firm send someone out to box the stuff up - I could still get away with that kind of thing - and sent it down to Tom (Catherine’s husband) with a note explaining that it was his turn to keep the stuff for the children. He was very frosty for a while after that, saying he wondered how I could have let ‘valuable family heirlooms’ get into such terrible condition.
I’ve been wondering if I’ll go down to Richmond for Thanksgiving this year. I’m sure it’s all right if I do, and yet under the circumstances I can’t help feeling that I’d better get written permission from everybody concerned - Douglas and Tom both. I didn’t make it last year, but at least I got around to telling Tom I wouldn’t be coming. It was the year before, right after my unceremonious retirement, that I just didn’t show up, without a word to anybody. The phone rang and rang, and I presume it was Tom calling, but I didn’t feel like talking to anybody, and Douglas hadn’t yet bought me an answering machine. I wrote to Tom later. I told him that I’d retired and gone on a cruise, and completely overlooked Thanksgiving. He wrote back to say that he understood, and that I was welcome next year. It was hard to tell from a letter how heartfelt this welcome would be. If I decide to go.
As customs go, Thanksgiving in Richmond isn’t an old one. I went for the first time the year mother died, and I didn’t have to go to Florida. Didn’t have Florida to go to, I should say. Tom asked me very nicely at Mother’s funeral if I wouldn’t like to join him and the children for turkey day. Tom is always very courteous, but it seemed he actually meant it, and so I went. I hadn’t been to Richmond since Catherine’s funeral a few years before. All the children were there, the oldest with their spouses and even Tom’s first grandchild. Rick’s wife was a professional decorator and she had redone the house, which in effect erased every trace of her late mother-in-law. The place looked much better, since Maureen (Rick’s wife) actually knows what she’s doing, whereas Catherine never knew how anything would go with anything else. Not that I’m any different. Nor poor Mary. Mother knew all of that stuff, but she didn’t pass it on.
Everyone was very nice to me. Of course I knew why. Dad left his whole estate to me, on the understanding that I’d distribute it to Catherine’s children in my will. They should have talked a little more about Catherine. It was as though she’d never existed. Tom was ‘dating’ another woman. He still hasn’t remarried, but I gather he’s always got a companion. I couldn’t quite figure out whether the woman lived in the house (when I wasn’t around) or whether Tom lived with her somewhere else, but I think it was probably the latter. The place was awfully tidy.
One of the girls is named Alicia after mother and me, and I’ve gotten to know her fairly well, since she’s visited me several times in New York. That first Thanksgiving was when we got to know each other. She seemed very interested in family history, and had drawn up a lot of genealogies. There wasn’t much that I could add, partly because Tom already knew so much - I suppose Southern gentleman always do make it a point to find out about their wives’ families - but mostly because I really wasn’t sure of anything. Take Uncle Bart Vincent for example. Whose Uncle Bart is he, I wonder? He was a terribly old man who lived in the Catskills near Mohonk. He kept a spittoon in his living room and smelled of hard cider. In the summer we would drive over and visit him. We would stay at the Mountain House, because Uncle Bart’s house hadn’t been modernized and lacked all the amenities. Mother always fussed, and once she put her foot down and wouldn’t come along, but I believe that the connection was on her side. Of course it may be that the man wasn’t related to anybody. Tom said he’d never heard of him. That’s not surprising, since Uncle Bart died when the twins were about five. I suppose they stayed at home with the nurse. My niece Alicia found this all very frustrating.
A few years later, when Alicia married, I sent her the few pieces of sterling that I owned. They were still in the apartment, where they’d always been. The funny thing was that Alicia herself had polished them on her last visit. They were black until she got to work on them. She spent a day and a half at it and made them shiny as new.
Mother only had plate at the house, as I say, and this is what the thieves were merrily removing from the dining room and the hall and the living room, doubtless thinking it was valuable, while Andrei and Barbara cowered in the coal cellar. Mother thought that Andrei probably tied Barbara up in there, because she was such a pest and one of her uniforms was missing when Mother came back North. Andrei made his way through the basement to the boiler room, which was where the fuse box was, and, next to the fuse box, Father’s latest improvement, a fire alarm.
I remember endless discussions about where to put the fire alarm. You could put in several but that ran the price up, and Father was sure that he could find the one best place for it. What brought him to conclude that the best place was in the basement next to the fusebox, two floors below most of the bedrooms (three below mine) and at the other end of the house from practically everything, I couldn’t say. It was near the basement door, the one that led to the steps that were hidden by the big shutters. So if you were outside on the lawn in back and saw that the house was on fire, you could get to the alarm easily enough, provided that you had the key to the basement door. I got very preoccupied by this key (after a few glasses of champagne) at Mary’s wedding. Mary had her big reception out on the lawn - suddenly I can’t recall why you couldn’t come; I just remember that you couldn’t. She planned it that way from the start. We all said, but what if it rains, the house is big but it isn’t that big. She said the weather would be fine, though, and it was. Typical Mary - great luck until the last. While I was out wandering among the shrubberies it suddenly seemed imperative to find out if anybody had a key to the basement. I asked Mother and she gave me a look. I asked Father and he actually went through the keys on his chain, until I started to giggle. Then he gave me a look. I asked Andrei, who was passing things. He gave me a different kind of look and said, ‘Please, don’t remind me.’ So I didn’t ask Barbara either. I asked a few more people whom I don’t remember until Catherine came storming up brandishing a key. “I have the key!” she shouted. “I have the key!” Pretty soon Jack Harrell came up and asked to take me for a ride in his new car. I thought I’d better go along peacefully. Later, the twins started the story that I had to be taken away from the reception because I was planning to burn the house down. I think I would have, if they’d been locked up inside it.
Andrei found the alarm. It was one of those boxes with a glass window and a little hammer. He took the hammer and broke the glass as gently as he could, putting his hand over the hammer and getting cut up for his trouble. The glass made so much noise falling to the floor that the footsteps above came to a stop and Andrei was sure he was done for. Otherwise, the alarm didn’t make a sound. Andrei wondered if there was something else he had to do to make it go off. Since his English wasn’t very good, the printed instructions didn’t help. Then he heard footsteps on the stairs. Mother said that at this point Andrei must have sneezed, because he always sneezed under stress, but whatever he did he pulled the handle toward him, and that activated the alarm. It wasn’t much of an alarm, though. It was a little tinkling bell attached to the bottom of the alarm box.
While the thief came slowly down the stairs, Andrei backed behind the boiler. The thief got to the bottom of the stairs and came over to the alarm. He looked at it for a minute, then turned and ran back up the stairs. Andrei heard a lot of shouting and shuffling, the slamming of a door, and finally complete silence. He couldn’t believe that he’d come through his ordeal safe and sound.
Two years after I didn’t show up at Tom’s for Thanksgiving, and after I wrote Tom and Tom wrote back, Alicia called me up and asked to come visit; she wanted to do some Christmas shopping, and if I could put her up it would be a great help. I told her to come right up, I wasn’t doing anything - but I didn’t believe that it was shopping that brought her. She’d been appointed, no doubt, as the niece/nephew closest to me, to come look me over, see how likely I was to pop off. She protested that this wasn’t true at all, but two days before she was to come she called to say that something had come up in her husband’s business. I guess her nerve failed her.
When he felt it was safe, Andrei went looking for Barbara. When he called out she didn’t answer. Then he remembered that he’d left her gagged. As he was coming out of the boiler room, he got hit on the head again. When he came to, the firemen were bending over him and he was upstairs in the kitchen. “We got the girl,” said the fireman. “The guys got away but we got the girl. Caught her red-handed.” Sure enough, there was Barbara, hurling invective at everybody in Polish. Andrei would never admit it but Mother asked him more than once if he wasn’t tempted to let them take her away. He always said he was too busy thanking Father for installing the fire alarm.
There now, I’ve only told you good old stories from the old days today, and I don’t want to hear that you’ve been crying again.
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