Eliza

Today would be my grandmother Eliza's 93rd birthday. I know I haven't written in a long time. Part of that is due to the fact that she loved to write and she loved my blog and it was just too painful after her death in early November to keep posting. That being said she would be incredibly disappointed if I didn't continue with it. She was the most supportive person I will ever know. It didn't matter what you were doing even if it was just running errands like grocery shopping and laundry she would send a text about a page long telling me how incredible that was and how she bet I looked fantastic doing it. I miss those texts. It still seems crazy to me not to just reach out and send her a message just telling her that I was thinking about her.

She lived a long and fantastically adventurous life. She really lived and I am grateful that I got as much time with her as I did. Of course one always wants more time with their loved ones, but more time wouldn't fix that problem. It would never feel like enough time was spent with a loved one. In honor of her birthday today I decided to begin writing in the blog again and vow that I will keep up with it because it is what she would have wanted. I also wanted to share a piece of her writing because as she always said:
"Write write write. Write everything down. It doesn't matter if you think it's important or not just write it all down."

The Pale Moon of Chad
By Elizabeth H. W. Lloyd

The year I was five my cousin Chad was born. For several months Aunt Isabel pretended not to notice he was very special. Although we saw Aunt Isabel and Uncle Nat often, a nursemaid named Patty Stocking took charge in the nursery shortly after Chad arrived.

I did not know what was wrong. Whatever it was, I was being denied my rights to bathe, hold, wheel, and in general claim the only real baby in the whole family of aunts, uncles, and cousins. No one actually saw Chad, but no one was complaining, except me.

Aunt Isabel and Patty Stocking kept him swathed in butter-colored Dresden silks. “Washable,” said Stocking, as she was called. His teazledown-filled, satin baby pillows, scalloped and knotted with narrow blue satin-backed bows, were always plumped around his head, deep in the cavernous depths of his pram.
The pram had high Bessemer steel wheels and a self-locking brake. I heard Stocking say it was the finest grade woven reed. The bentwood handle was ebony black. Lined with ginger colored damask, a softly stitched roll of ginger colored velvet across the curve of the bottom, the pram had a bonnet hood with a glass porthole on either side.

While Stocking was inside the house drinking her endless tea, I would stand slant legged, my feet on the metal undercarriage, my hands on the wicker side pressing down with all my might to tip the pram into a better viewing position, craning my head like a mother bird, trying to get a look at Chad.

There was a small stamped brass label just inside the hood that said Cream City; later I knew it meant Cream color, City pram, but for a long time I thought it was the place Chad came from.

I spent a great deal of time that summer trying to make contact with him. Stocking would wheel him over to our house, taking all the shady side streets while Aunt Isabel shopped for a while in town, met someone for lunch, and then dropped in to visit with my mother or Gran. Chad would be snugly wedged between the pergola and the Souvenir de la Malmaison hedge of old fashioned rose beds. I would look in at one of his glass portholes and see only teazledown and gossamer wafting a bit of fleece up and down as Chad, presumably, breathed. I would go around to the pergola side of the pram and see only the green and heliotrope of the garden.
Gran embroidered him a bonnet with a diamond center at the crown. Inside the diamond shape, in ivory French knots, it said, “a little beauty.” That was more than I could stand. The next time I had Chad and his pram all to myself I pulled hard on the whole bundle of pink gathers and ties. He came over the side all in one lump and I hugged him tightly under my chin as I ran around to the granite front steps. The hem of his cashmere cloak felt like a long skirt around my feet as I ran. We left a trail of featherstiches and Swiss mull. “Never mind,” I said to him as we rounded the corner past Gran's Italian wellhead with the frieze of cherubs and dancing goats.
Mr. Fotterole, the postman, was sorting letters in the shade of the wisteria and I said, “Wait till you see what I've got.” I sat on the bottom step while he put the mail through the slot, then he sat down with me and I said, “This is Chad.” Mr. Fotterole said, “Wwwhhheeew, he's quite a baby,” and he put his arm around both of us and I let him hold Chad. I walked Mr. Fotterole down the graveled front drive, kicking my feet up to keep Chad's cloak out of the way, and Mr. Atkinson from B. A. Freeman's market was just lifting down Grannie's order from the back of his truck. I sat on his running board and he sat and then I showed him Chad. Chad's face was round, round as a moon, and his eyes rolled back and forth rapidly; “Just look at that,” I said proudly. Mr. Atkinson said with a worried look, “I hope it's gas; then he hoisted Chad up on his shoulder and patted him as though he had known Chad forever. He handed him back and swung the box of groceries up with the same easy swing and headed for the back door just as Mrs. Whitney Haddock and the Merriam twins came down the street. The Merriam twins circled around us on their new balloon-tired bikes and Mrs. Whitney Haddock said, “Turn him around the other way so he doesn't look at the sun like that; it's making his eyes roll.”

“Oh,” I said, “he does that anyway.”

Lydia, Gran's Elkhound, came around the corner and tried to jump on the Merriams, so they left but not before I had a look at their balloon tires and they had a good look at Chad. They really liked the way Chad stuck his tongue out and left it there.
Right over Gran's front door is a stone mask of Neptune glaring out to sea. He has seaweed in his beard. When Stocking came out the door, after I got back from showing Chad to the policeman on the corner, she looked like Neptune around the eyes.

I held on tight when she tried to take Chad away from me. “I haven't shown him Swinging Shoo-Fly or Rocky Boat yet,” I said. Swinging Shoo-Fly is a dapple grey rocking horse, and Rocky Boat is the big wooden boat on long rockers on the side porch. Rocky-Boat was Grandpa's when he was little, and even in winter it is left out on the side porch, “so you can rock during a snow storm,” I whispered in Chad's ear, “if they let you out.”

Part II - The Full Moon of Winter

When snow came Chad went into a red swan sled under a fleecy white polar bear carriage robe. Underneath it he was tucked up in silvery blankets and the fleece around his face went up and down smartly as he slept on. His rapid eyes were open more often and were as silver as the moon. Stocking made us Irish tea with Irish whiskey, sweetened with Bar-le-duc and topped with a lemon slice.

“In case of avalanches,” Uncle Augustus would say approvingly, if he was coming through the back way to visit Gran. Stocking and I would start off with Chad through the snow to Clayton and Bell's for peppercorns and the extra large capers Gran liked, or perhaps a vanilla bean in a long glass vial with a tiny bright lid.

As Stocking and Chad and I went down the drive, Margaret would begin sautéing the eye-of-round that had been standing in red wine and cloves for four days, in the ice box, a wreath of carrots and bay leaf bobbing around it whenever Margaret opened the huge wooden door. Sometimes Uncle Augustus and Aunt Julia stayed for supper with Gran, and Aunt Isabel would call Uncle Nat in Boston to come to Gran's instead of going straight home from the station.

That winter my Aunt Julia had a very visible baby that never seemed to stay tucked into anything. My cousin Farr claimed her, even though I got to their house before Grandpa-doctor had finished tying off the dangling cord. She was the color of orange Necco wafers, and her hands and feet waved like butterflies as she cried while Grandpa snipped the thread ends of the knot he was making.

Grandpa reached down to us, his shirtsleeves rolled, his fine silk hair closely cropped, his watch chain exactly where it always was--he reached down to us and showed us Aunt Yi's brand new baby. The baby didn't have a stitch on and Mrs. Browning, who always helped Grandpa with the babies, was waiting with a flannel-lined scale.

Aunt Yi was in her deep four-poster bed leaning on her elbow and saying, “Augusta, let's call her Augusta,” and everybody was laughing. My Uncle Augustus was pouring brandy and calling the baby Julia.

Mrs. Hinkley came in to the bedroom with a huge basket of fresh linen and John Trow thumped an armful of firewood into the heavy walnut chest outside the bedroom door. A fire was burning in Aunt Julia's pink and white checkered marble fireplace, and her bed had been pushed to the opposite end of the room.

“In case I had to have ether,” explained Aunt Julia, “so that everything wouldn’t explode.”

All the children went up to the third floor and stood in the stair-hall room under the flooding light from the skylight. We stood around the mahogany railed stairwell and looked way down to the first floor and wondered about the dangling cord. My cousin William said, “If it's a boy he's in trouble.” He thought Grandpa had been hasty in saying it was a girl. Farr just turned up her nose and told William to make up his mind he had a sister named Julia, and said that she was going to start calling her Yi-Yi right away.

Down in the kitchen Grammie Phippen was telling Mrs. Hinkley to serve lunch, and I heard her say that Grandpa's hours would begin at the usual time. Grandpa had his office in the front of the house, just to the right of the front door. A tall case solar system clock chimed the quarter hours and hours, and the sun and moon and constellations moved slowly over the dial in pale colors on gilt-washed metal. Farr and I carried Aunt Julia's tea up to her in a Chinese basket with padded silk lining into which the teapot fitted exactly. A handle-less bowl fitted snugly beside the pot in a niche of its own. The silk lining was the color of persimmons and the lacquered top fitted down tightly with padding to match. When we poured the tea for her it smelled like my Gran's house, like Hua Kwa, smoky Lapsang, and open bowls of summer verbena.

The baby was asleep in the bed beside Aunt Julia and Uncle Augustus had gone back down town to his office to finish the day. Mrs. Browning was catching forty winks in Aunt Julia's dressing room and it was starting to snow big wet flakes outside the window. “The biggest snowflake of all” was lying outside on the granite window ledge. Stocking was reading The Snow Queen to me at night, and we were just coming to the part where the snowflake grew bigger and bigger until it became the glittering, glaring queen.

“I think it's going to blizzard,” said Aunt Julia, happily sipping her tea. Uncle Augustus had brought her a huge hydrangea tree in a silver tub. It was covered with heavy blossoms of cream and pink.

Downstairs we all had chicken and chopped onions and mushrooms and butter and apples and thyme and browned bread crumbs and gold raisins and two stirred eggs and two chopped lemons in a casserole. Grandpa poured Madeira.

“Not too much, Frank,” said Grammie, as he poured us each a thimbleful.

Aunt Yi brought little Yi over to our house quite often that winter, and she was never out of sight. When she was hungry she nursed with her eyes intent on Aunt Yi's breast, chastely concealed by crepe-de-chine and the embroidered fireplace screen. I was allowed behind the screen, though, and was quick to notice the large pink nipple dripping thick milk whenever Yi-Yi stopped nursing. I thought to myself that this baby was nothing like Chad.

On the other side of the screen Stocking would produce a huge honeycomb bib as soft and thick as a waffle, and Chad would be fed, after a fashion. His moon eyes rolled in his pale moon face and he tried to catch his tongue with his hands. “Aunt Yi’s baby does not do this because she is a girl,” I whispered to myself.

After that I had a serious talk with Uncle Nat at his house. I sat in his study under the picture of Harding standing on his front porch, which was under the flag of all wool bunting. He handed me a bon-bon called an Imperial and I said, “All babies are not like Chad.” He ate an Imperial with me and we were silent together. I said, “All babies are not so wrapped up.” and he agreed. He handed me a Snowdrop, which is a special kind of caramel, and I couldn't speak again until I got home.

Part III - The Moon Shutters of Deletion Street

After lunch, William and Farr and I bumped our sleds down the granite backyard steps to Deletion Street, a narrow, one-way, uneven street, which was down hill to its dead end. No motorcars came on Deletion Street, and the houses were all very old and low, and hung over the hill. We could slide here without any grown-ups and we grated our sleds up the side cement path of the Chinese laundry to call for Harry and Norman and Myrtle Chin. They had a practically new baby brother named Lester, and twin sisters who were two years old. The twins were called Fuzle and Vroom. Once I had asked Mr. and Mrs. Chin if I could exchange Chad for either Fuzle or Vroom. Their cheeks were fat, like his, and their eyes were different too, but perhaps not quite as different as Chad's. I thought Chad might understand the quick, whistling sing-song of the Chinese they spoke to each other when they didn't want us to know what they were saying, or when the side room, with the piled brown bundles, filled up with people who had lost their laundry slips.

The Chins were finishing soup plates of Irish stew and bowls of caramel rice pudding, and we could have some because Mrs. Chin loves to feed people, just the way everybody in Budleigh loves to feed people. We said, “Hello,” to the three old Aunties who help with the ironing and folding that goes on all the time at the Chins'. They had Hoover aprons on and white cotton ankle socks, and white, flat sandals from Grants's. They were eating Chinese dumplings and thin noodles, and we could have had some of that, too.

Harry and Norman and Myrtle have one long sled, and we have three short sleds so that we take turns sliding down Deletion Street Hill, in different formations, except that mostly Farr and Myrtle and I use the Chin's sled because William and Norman and Harry just won't get off the three small separate sleds until Stocking comes along and makes them give us a turn. Mrs. Hinckley was been looking down through the back yard out Grammie's kitchen sink window, and when she sees Stocking she disappears.

“There,” says Stocking, pushing Chad's red swan up the concrete path to the laundry to pick up Uncle Nat's shirts, “She’ll have gone to put the kettle on, and after I've seen the little stranger and had a cup of tea, you be ready to walk back to your Gran's with me.”

The three laundry Aunties, ironing at the side windows of the laundry to keep an eye on us, nodded approval as we started to build an igloo in the jog of the house, where the laundry winged out to form a T. William and Harry cut wedge shapes from the hard snow banks using Mrs. Chin's dullest, blunt kitchen knives, and Myrtle soaked the wedges with water and set them in a circle to freeze overnight. Norman worked on slanting the top of each block with a real Eskimo snow knife, made of ivory, which he got for his birthday. Farr and I piled up new snow to use for stuffing between the blocks if there were spaces. I thought about the Snow Queen and pretended the snowflakes were alive and coming down in regiments to be the sentinels. I said, “Do Eskimos have sentinels?” and Harry said, “No, they have musk oxen that use their sharp hooves like knives to cut down the dwarf willows of the tundra.” We all pawed through the snow with the cutting edges of our large hooves trying to find “leaf, bud, bark, and root,” Harry said. William said he was a thousand-pound polar bear and could see a mile off, and Myrtle said she was a ten thousand pound polar bear and she could see ten miles off, and while I tried to see ten miles off down Deletion Street, which is only a little short street with a steep hill, I noticed that all the shutters on Deletion Street had new moons cut out of the upper half, one to each shutter, way up high.

Stocking waved from Grammie's kitchen window to let me know she was coming for me soon, so we all belly flopped down the hill on sleds, except I had to go to the bathroom and I asked Mrs. Chin in a very polite whisper if I could, while everyone else was traveling down the hill, two inches off the ground, at a hundred miles an hour. I followed one of the Aunties while she showed me where the bathroom was because their bathroom moves around. “It's portable,” Stocking said when I had told her about it. It's white wicker like a small armchair and has a white painted board you lift up. I was embarrassed to have to ask but I could tell I would never make it home to Gran's. The Auntie went out and closed the door and I lifted up the white lid. There was a shining clean, green enamel pot underneath, painted with a green enamel peapod exactly in the middle, on the bottom. Myrtle said it was so everybody would get it just right. The Auntie came back when she thought I was through, and she brought a pitcher of water and a basin, and we had a washing of the hands ceremony, and she went off with everything, the shining green pot covered with a freshly ironed square of cloth, the enamel basin, and the water pitcher, and I got out of there as quick as I could, hoping everybody was at the foot of the hill and would never guess where I had been.

On the way home Stocking said that the Chin family’s bathroom arrangement was one of the natural wonders of the world, and I said that all the shutters on Deletion Street had new moons cut in them, and I tried to walk a little ahead of Stocking so that I would be level with Chad’s head. Stocking said that once all the houses in Budleigh had outside bathrooms with new moon crescents, and maybe when they were taken down everyone on Deletion Street had bought the shutters, but she did not think it likely. She thought it was more likely it was just another natural wonder of the world.

Chad's eyes were open and he was looking in all directions at once.

“Like Chad,” I said.

“Yes, like Chad,” Stocking agreed.

Part IV - First You Find Polaris

Aunt Julia says she can tell an oak tree from a chestnut tree, especially if she is in Paris. She and Gran are discussing new possibilities for Gran's garden, even though it is snowing on top of deep, crusty snow. Outside the trees are so covered with ice they lean over and jingle in the storm.

Uncle Augustus and Aunt Julia are spending the night, and Stocking is staying a few days with Chad to give Aunt Isabel time to recover from her garden club.
Gran says she would like ten thousand white tulips set out in drifts around the pergola, and some new Japonica, Alba, of course. “Bamboo, camellias, and lotus,” she says.

Uncle Augustus and I turn back to our book studying the constellations of the winter skies, as Gran decides on her Chinese Rectangle, her Persian knot, and, perhaps, new winter hats all around.

I love to have Uncle Augustus set out to teach me something. First he gets the open fire kindling briskly, and then he warms the brandy snifter. After he makes his blazer out of blended whiskey and bourbon and brandy he adds one-third of a cup of branch and gives me a Gibraltar, then he settles back.

“First you find Polaris,” he says, pointing to the open page.

We go farther up to the brightest star and take our time tracing all around the Big Dipper, then he tells me that Polaris is very important, even though it is not one of the fifteen brightest.

“Po-LAR-is,” he says, and takes a sip of his blazer, “is the only star that never changes its place in the sky,” sip, “not so you notice anyway.” He drew a line up from the two stars in the bowl of the Big Dipper and hit Polaris right on the head.
“No matter how the dipper stands, those two stars point towards Polaris.”
Then he told me that Polaris is the North Star, and that if you stand facing it, you are facing North, with South behind you, East to your right, and West to your left.
Way in the back of the house I could hear the hall doors opening and shutting and the back door closing. Margaret and Nancy were going to church for Solemn Vespers, and Stocking was giving Chad his bath and supper.
“I think,” I said, “I'll go tell Chad.”

“By all means,” said Uncle Augustus, “it's a handy piece of information.”
“In case,” I said.

“Stocking loses her compass,” he said, as I went past the Etruscan terra-cotta foot Gran keeps on the Kingwood commode, beside the Chinese porcelain sauce tureen in the shape of a field mouse. I go right between the silver stags and disappear as Uncle Augustus is telling Gran to consider an allée of little-leafed lindens, or a planting of tulips shaped like a wooden shoe.

I love Uncle Augustus, especially as I go through the second back hall, which is very dark and has a ghost that I have felt much better about since Uncle Augustus told me it once ate a ton of sherbert during a dinner party.

Stocking is sitting in front of the stove with Chad. Gran's kitchen has an Othello range with an extra large oven and Stocking has the oven door open, with Chad's fleeced French flannelette Gilbert sacque and his silk flannel nightgown, with the string bows and the graduated lace loops, warming on the shiny nickel door.
There is a bowl of oatmeal, and a bowl of apricot snow bishop on the scrubbed high chair tray, and Stocking has swung the tray toward her because she is holding Chad in her lap. Stocking is sitting in a large Comfort Rocker from the laundry, and Chad's teddy bear is propped up on the high chair, its black shiny eyes staring toward the platter closet.

Chad eats noisily while Stocking spoons it swiftly down and I tell Chad about Polaris. I am always afraid he will swallow his tongue or his eyes will turn white in his head. You hardly know what to expect from Chad but Stocking gets most of everything down.

When Mrs. Haddock, or the Aunties at Lee's, ask Stocking how Chad is coming along, she always says, “Much of a muchness,” and Stocking shows them her latest Brownie snaps of Chad in which he is bending towards the light like a geranium. Gran says Stocking means any sort of all-pervading sameness in a situation, and I think she's right.

Stocking undoes Chad's waffle bib and changes him into his warm night things. His hair crackles and stands on end and he cuffs his ears and convulses his face.
“Tired as a cat,” says Stocking, smoothing him out on her lap. “Derry, down derry, and up in the air,” Stocking sang as Chad rolled around,

“Baby shall ride without pony or mare.” Chad was quiet and stared at the ceiling, his hair bright brown and shiny as molasses.

“Clasped in my arms, like a king on a throne,” Stocking shifted him up to her shoulder, rocking him gently,

“Prettiest rider that ever was known.”

 

Elizabeth Lloyd
February 9, 1922 – November 9, 2014
Image: Barbara Swan