Occasional Prose (41 page)

Alice Brayton did not come from Portsmouth. She was a Fall River woman, from one of the ruling mill families; Lizzie Borden she claimed as a cousin or cousin once removed. The Fall River gentry—Hazards and Durfees, Bordens and Braytons (there was also a “Satan” Drayton)—were plain people, largely undisturbed by their wealth. In Fall River, I was told, husbands and wives were seated side by side at dinners, on the ground that at least they would have something to talk about. Practical, hard-headed people; the main business block was called “Granite Block” and looked it. Another Brayton I knew, a granitic young lawyer with an office in the block, gave me his matter-of-fact prescription for surviving the “wild” late-starting (6:30
P.M.
) cocktail parties of a Westport Harbor hostess: “I have my supper first.”

In fact, as I now know, the Portsmouth house was not a family property but a purchase Alice Brayton’s father made. It was normal for well-off Fall River people to have summer houses near the seashore, which was how, I suppose, “Green Animals” started out. But the vicinity of Newport, for Miss Brayton later a strategic height to be scaled with rope ladders, was a little “different.” Usually Fall River men did not take their wives and children so far; they went (and still did in my time) to Westport Harbor, Sakonnet,
à la rigueur
to Little Compton. I would love to have seen the inside of Alice Brayton’s “real house” in Fall River; if I remember the outside right, it was gray, stone, square, without frills—no gazebo on the lawn, not so much as an arbor. But she had not lived there for many years when it was pointed out to me, on Cliff Street, naturally—she herself never spoke of it, as though it were a divorced relation.
*

Now, ten years after her death, I learn from a book on Eastern public gardens that her father, Thomas Brayton of the Union Cotton Manufacturing Co., Fall River, bought the Portsmouth house in 1872 and that the topiary dates from 1893. According to this authority, he had seen topiary work in a botanical garden in the Azores and hired a gardener, Joseph Carreiro, a native of the Azores, to make something like it for him on Narragansett Bay. But
is
there a botanical garden in the steep volcanic Azores, mainly noted for the growing of pineapples? And what was a Massachusetts mill owner doing in the Azores anyway—hiring Portuguese labor to sweat? I feel very skeptical about that part of the tale. It sounds like a typical Alice Brayton invention, very much in her narrative vein, and has the virtue of providing her animals with ancestors.

Miss Brayton was a fabulist. I do not think she lied about other people (she was mischievous but not malicious), nor to obtain advantage or get herself out of a scrape. She was a pure spinner of tales and myths centering on herself and her life story. She lied constantly, inveterately; it was almost one of her charms. You discovered to your amazement that you could not trust anything she told you pertaining to herself or to anything she owned.

And did she sometimes catch herself lying? If so, what an awful experience. She professed to hate liars, and I believed her. As she grew older, she grew more class-obsessed, and it distressed me to hear her talk more and more wildly after her second martini on themes of class and race—I felt ashamed for her. One of her phobic convictions on the subject of “them”—Portuguese, Catholics, Irish, the whole race of millhands—was that they lied. When the fit was on her, she liked to explain that the difference between “us” and “them” boiled down to the fact that “we” never told a lie. As an observant little party, she knew better. It is a puzzle to me where she got her obstinate delusion of being a truth-teller either as an individual
or
as a representative of her class. I wonder whether for her it may not have figured as a synonym for outspokenness, the habit of speaking her mind. Maybe she honestly did more of that than the lesser breeds—she could afford it.

But to leave general speculation and get down to brass tacks:
did
she plant the pair of Turkish oaks that stood at the head of the garden, by the water-lily pool? She maintained that she grew them from two acorns that she had buried at the spot when she was a little girl. Oaks are slow growers, yet here the two were, nodding as she told their story, ninety or a hundred feet tall. Years ago, alas, when I looked them up in a tree book with the thought of planting a pair of my own, I found reference only to a “turkey oak” (
Quercus laevis
), a small Southern variety whose popular name is said to derive from the wild turkeys attracted to the sweet acorn—no resemblance to the ones on Cory’s Lane.

But wait. Hers, I now discover, trying an older book, must have been
Quercus cerris
, also known as “turkey oak,” a fast grower that was brought to England from the Turkish peninsula and became fashionable with nurserymen in late Victorian times. So Miss Brayton stands vindicated; even the dates tally. If the trees had reached their full height when she was seventy years old, she could well have been eight when she planted them. There is just one bothersome note: in today’s descriptive flyer, issued by the Newport Preservation Society, no Turkish oaks are listed, and in the spot where they ought to be, bordering on the lily pool, is “White oak,
Quercus alba
,” a common native article, of which in the diagram there do appear to be two.

And what about the stair carpet she tacked up the front stairs, “for Mother,” because Father would not let Mother have one? “Drugget,” said Miss Brayton, with a droll little sniff to show she was speaking figuratively, drugget being a lowly cotton material, brown or dun colored, that one read about in old novels where the characters are struggling to make ends meet. With the memory of tears in her old gray-blue eyes, she drew a word picture of herself on her knees on the bare treads, with hammer and carpet tacks hastening to finish the loving task before Father came home. It was her notion that I, though in less cruel circumstances, might use a strip of tan canvas (from Wilmarth’s in Newport) for our front stairs in the old Coggeshall house on Union Street. I obeyed, and there is still a runner of tan duck (no, not the same one) on the front and back stairs of my house in Maine—people often ask me how I came to think of the idea.

Concede her mother’s stair carpet and the Little Dorrit figure kneeling with tacks in its mouth while Father thunders, concede her the Turkish oaks of Victorian taste, but what of her claim to have run welfare for the city of Fall River during the Depression? The city was bankrupt; unemployment figures stood at 50,000—half the population; Roosevelt had not yet moved in with the Civilian Conservation Corps and Public Works Administration or perhaps he had not yet taken office. In the background was a history of strikes and labor violence. Into the crisis stepped Alice Brayton, enlisted by a desperate mayor to run a relief program. It was not clear how the city happened to turn to her. She had had no previous experience; her education had stopped with Fall River High School, where they gave Greek and Latin but scarcely economics or urban administration. Yet for her, embarking on the story, apparently it went without saying that her city should have called her in its hour of need. And matter-of-factly (as she told it) she put up the money, out of her own pocket, to tide over the initial crisis. How much that amounted to she did not say—only that every cent was repaid.

I forget all the unique features of the relief plan she ran. The main outlines were that it was cheap and gave value. She cited her first decision: every man on relief should receive a pair of shoes. To ensure good quality (cheaper in the long run), she checked on where the men in her family got their shoes and ordered the same, with the choice of low shoes like her brother’s or high like her father’s. Next she bought shirts: every unemployed man had the choice of work shirt or dress shirt of Father’s or Brother’s brand. That was her picture of democracy in action—every man jack wearing Father’s shoes.

For groceries she issued food stamps redeemable at the family grocer’s. In fact, she claimed to have invented the food-stamp idea. The mayor of a big English city—Manchester or Leeds—came to Fall River, she well remembered, to study how her methods worked. As with any public-spirited action, criticism was inevitable. But upholding her hand throughout was the Catholic bishop of Fall River—Bishop Cassidy, I think it was—who became a friend and steady admirer, figuring in more than one of her narratives.

Naturally, she was anti-bureaucratic. From a small office in City Hall she administered the program single-handed, receiving all complaints personally. And complaints were what Alice Brayton knew how to handle. She liked to tell the story of the man who objected because his groceries weren’t being delivered. Your average welfare administrator would have used the rough side of his tongue on him, giving fresh grounds for complaint. Not Alice Brayton; she agreed to delivery and
outsmarted
him. She hired a boy to follow the complainer from the office and observe his goings and comings. That done, the same little boy was detailed to wait in a doorway opposite the man’s house till he had gone out for the day, then quickly deliver the bags of food to his doorstep, making sure to leave them in the sun. Soon the man was back in Miss Brayton’s office asking to have the special service discontinued. ...

The anecdote, of course, is a story against the poor, of the classical coal-in-the-bathtub type but with retribution added. Miss Brayton was a prankish moralist. Most of the fables she related of human wickedness showed people getting what they asked for, in perfect justice. The Christmas party she gave every year was a neat illustration of a morality play. Neighbors and relatives, old and young, arriving by tradition in mid-morning, found the tall spruce tree by the back door hung with brightly wrapped presents and beside it in the snow little Miss Brayton, wearing a hat and muffler and stamping her feet to keep warm. There were no names on the presents, and when you began to unwrap the one she had pulled down for you, you knew—or if it was your first time somebody explained—that what you got now didn’t matter, you would be able to exchange it inside. That was the point of this Christmas.

Inside, in the dining-room, the long table had been converted into an exchange, and the guests, having taken off their outdoor things and been given a glass of hot mulled wine and a biscuit, circled slowly around the table, on which were laid out bolts of tweed and silk, cars and tracks for electric trains, paint boxes, gloves, golf balls, scarves, sweaters, stockings, bottles of sherry and claret, flower vases, books, games, perhaps a chess set of little ivory men, delicate batiste place mats, a French cheese, a piece of old lace ... Some years there was a lazy Susan in the middle to hold more presents, and once a whole electric train was whirring around on a sort of trestle. You turned in your door-present and chose from the table the thing you wanted most. Some chose fast and some kept circling, undecided, fingering, looking at a label.

The exchange was a character test. Whatever you took, or failed to take, you gave yourself away. Children, inclined to grab without second thoughts, came off better than their elders, inhibited by an awareness of our hostess’s watching eyes. But there was one year when a ferrety youth earned, I thought, Miss Brayton’s eternal contempt (not to mention that of his brothers and sister) by picking
something for his mother, to help her in her cooking,
rather than the top or kite his natural heart should have craved.

The table was full of traps for hypocrites. One year she set out her bait almost too crudely. A single small flower—let’s say an unseasonal hyacinth—stood in a small container between a large box of Louis Sherry chocolates and a Nuits St. Georges. “Food for the soul,” Miss Brayton, behind us like a tempter, could not forbear hinting. Whereupon the silly man next to me in line leapt forward with abandon to claim the
spiritual
remembrance.

As usual, that year I picked the most expensive thing on the table. Those traps of hers held no terror for me. Being a hypocrite about my wants was never one of my faults. Hence I greatly enjoyed those Christmas mornings, though for some of her guests (and I fear she intended it) they must have been quite an ordeal. To covetous children who, intoxicated by the display, chafed at being limited to
one
present, to adults who felt they had taken a present that was much too big or else not big enough, the exchange “taught a lesson,” and “learning your lesson” was maybe not in the Christmas spirit. Was it our Redeemer or our Judge whose birth we were celebrating?

Possibly Christmas brought out an ambivalent imp in Miss Brayton. The giving of gifts was a provocation to naughtiness. With many generous people, the pleasures of bestowing have their counterpart in the joy of withholding, or at any rate in a barely controllable reluctance to part with something one has. The coexistence of the two in Miss Brayton was never more marked than in her Christmas-morning reception of the monks from the Priory across Cory’s Lane. Every year an invitation went out, though relations were never what they had been with Bishop Cassidy of Fall River and were strained almost to the breaking-point sometimes by a boundary dispute. But Christmas was Christmas, and the monks always came—last, after the guests had gone and after the servants had received their gifts.

The once-groaning exchange table must have been down to the hard-core remains when the Prior, by appointment, knocked. There were never witnesses to what happened next, but doubtless it varied from year to year. Sometimes it seems to have been a decidedly convivial party. Then there was the dreadful time referred to only in reminiscence: “Yes [musing], that was the year I gave the Father Prior bubble bath.” Often, I suspect, the exchange-table procedure was followed normally, albeit with diminished stocks. But I remember hearing of a time that was still close to the telling when she was boasting of it, like a bantam cock. That was the wicked Christmas when the monks were shown to a sumptuously laden table: wines and cordials, fruit pastes, cheeses, liqueur chocolates, Turkish delight, nuts—everything calculated to speak to the Friar Tuck in a “black” Benedictine. Then, having allowed the poor men a full minute of contemplation, she barked, “Well, you’re monks, aren’t you? You’ve renounced all that,” and marched them out of the room. And there was another year, I think, when in the same taunting spirit she gave them all
books
. Religious books, irreligious books, books on the Index, the story did not specify. But they might have been books written by herself and published at her own expense.