The Downstairs Bedroom

ALMOST all New England houses had a bedroom on the first floor, sometimes called the parlor bedroom, or the downstairs bedroom. Often, in addition, it was the spare room, used only for guests.

In our house, the downstairs bedroom was at the end of the hall behind the parlor, a large room with one window opening into the back yard and two facing the drive at the north side of the house, with a pleasant view through the trunks of the trees across Miss Bateman’s lawn up the street. One door opened into it from the hall, and another led out into a long cold storeroom with a door at the end, from which two steps led down into an open, arched passage with a stone floor, which connected the house with the woodshed.

After my grandmother died, my grandfather always occupied the downstairs bedroom, and it was spacious enough to serve him as a study as well as a sleeping room. His tall mahogany secretary with the glass doors in the top, divided into diamond-shaped panes, stood between the two windows. There were bookcases near at hand in the corner, and also his ‘whirligig,’ a wooden stand of open shelves revolving on a central standard, which held more books and papers. In the other corner, by the one window at the back, stood his washstand, with pitcher and bowl, and against the wall at that end of the room his massive Victorian bed, with the huge ugly walnut headboard. He always used a Windsor armchair at his secretary, and in front of the fireplace, with the black marble clock on the mantel, were grouped other big chairs of the ample, stuffed type, and a rocker, all of them a little shabby from hours of comfortable ease. In winter, a big iron stove stood on the hearth, its isinglass doors fiery and glowing, its black sides radiating enough heat to warm every part of the room except the space near the storeroom door, which was always a trifle drafty.

To that downstairs bedroom came not only the family and friends and legal associates, but occasionally some odd and rather startling guests. At that time my mother was an unmarried woman still quite contentedly close enough to girlhood to be spoken of as ‘a daughter in her father’s house,’ a designation which implied dignity and some maturity, but not yet a position of hopeless spinsterhood. Once late at night, upstairs in bed, she heard unusual sounds in the hall below, steps pacing back and forth, voices speaking in undertones. Wondering uneasily if ‘Father was all right,’ she pulled on her dressing gown, and went and stood unseen in the dimness at the head of the stairs. Below her, she watched her father and a man strange to her — who, she learned the next day, was a well-known thief — going through the motions of a curious little performance. My grandfather had doubted the testimony of some witnesses as to the possibility of a man’s watch being spirited away out of his pocket by fingers so agile that the man could remain completely unconscious of his loss. So this expert had been called in to give a private and personal demonstration of professional pocket-picking.

Here too came Mrs. Crawford, the Norwich Town woman accused of poisoning her husband by slipping arsenic daily into his breakfast coffee until her purpose was accomplished. In those days of his criminal law practice, my grandfather defended all sorts of supposed malefactors, but he never did so unless he had some assurance of their innocence. He led her into the downstairs bedroom and seated her politely in the rocker by the stove, while he paced the quiet room for a moment, his hands behind his back. Then he faced her, and, no doubt with full recognition of the histrionic element in his appeal, said harshly: —

‘Now, Mrs. Crawford, there is no one in this room but you, and me, and God Almighty. Are you a guilty woman, or are you innocent?’

Unquivering, she looked him squarely in his blazing blue eyes as she raised her hand.

‘Mr. Hoyt,’ she replied, ‘before God Almighty, I am innocent.’

‘God Almighty’ was a name often invoked by my grandfather in as many ways as he had emotions. If out of temper with the weather, — and he always was the instant that he saw the rain start to drip or the snow to fall, — he would work himself up into an absurd but perfectly genuine passion, and, standing at door or window, his face purple, shaking his clenched fists above his head, he would explode with: —

‘Any fool could run this universe better than God Almighty.’

Cut if the weather was fine, and he felt fit, and things were going his way, then his exuberant high spirits would allow him to be on better terms with his Maker. Such a moment occurred one morning in court, when he was opposed by two lawyers named Jeremiah Lathrop and Solomon Brewer, whose arguments were long, dreary, and pompous. When, at last, they were done, he rose quickly to his feet and turned to the jury with a wicked spark in his eye.

‘ Gentlemen,’ he remarked, ‘ you have just listened to the lamentations of Jeremiah, and the wisdom of Solomon. Now prepare to hear the Lord God Almighty.’

There were many sides to his nature, elements as contradictory as his love of fine china and his delight in coarse anecdotes. As a younger man, he occasionally turned literary, like almost everyone else in Connecticut. To his delight, one of his efforts appeared in print, together with the offerings of others, in a small book, published in Hartford, called The Moss Rose. Most of the contributions were in verse, but his was a prose piece, a highfaluting mediæval romance with the title of ‘Clarence de Courcy.’ The style and the sentiments were in complete contrast to his racy, cynical, and often profane conversation.

All women interested and attracted him, but he had a special admiration for the intellectual woman, seeking out such literary ladies in Connecticut as Lydia Huntley Sigourney, ‘the poetess,’ and Mary Perkins, who wrote historical sketches. Perhaps this was due to his mother, Felicity, who, like many other eighteenth-century ladies, wrote long and carefully composed letters. On the other hand he often burst out in praise of some matron as ‘ a great, splendid, double-breasted, flat-bottomed creature’ — that Victorian phrase which was scarcely suggestive of a mental type. Certainly his wife, Elizabeth, and his daughter, Mary, were not literary, and also neither bore any resemblance to the Amazonian warrior suggested by his description of another kind of woman. But evidently Mary’s companionship sufficed after Elizabeth’s death, for he never remarried. If she lacked bookishness, she shared his keen appreciation of personalities, and both possessed, to an astonishing degree, the power of charming and managing people. But in this respect their natures, if alike, also diverged, for his democratic tastes led him anywhere and everywhere, while Mary, like her grandmother, had many of the characteristics of a snob. This she knew and even admitted with considerable pride. ‘If I had money enough,’ she would say with that arrogant lifting of her lovely head, ‘I should be a complete snob.’

The rich aristocrats and the humble working people of her time she understood and accepted, but between those two extremes — in that wide expanse of the commonplace, which abounded in so much smugness, pretentiousness, and false gentility — there she moved with complete and cold disdain.

My grandfather swallowed life whole, with both palate and digestion strong enough to savor and digest the entire mixture of ingredients. He watched and welcomed with tireless interest the changes in his town, his state, and his nation.

During his long lifetime he saw the Irish pouring into Connecticut in great numbers, and they were a people in whom he had faith, and whom he understood. He used to boast that he could remember the day when there had been The Irishman in Norwich, and people went to inspect him as though he were a singular kind of beast. But that first bizarre specimen swiftly multiplied into hordes. They were then the hod carriers, the ditchdiggers, and at best the servants. Illiterate, uncouth, they passed the house swinging their black lunch boxes, smoking their vile-smelling, stubby pipes, enlivening the street with their rich voices and their incomprehensible speech, which somehow always rose and fell with the rhythms of poetry. Standing waist-deep in ditches by the roadside, they lifted those broad, droll faces with the small, sharp eyes, and the immensely long upper lips, grinning and spitting, queer as leprechauns in this sedate Yankee town.

My grandfather lived to see them dig themselves out of the ditches to walk abreast with the descendants of the earliest settlers, their children and their grandchildren become dressmakers, contractors, lawyers, and business men. The brogue disappeared, and the comical facial contours softened and sobered, but the coarse and fiery strength remained to be poured into restless ambition that drove them everywhere. And fire and coarseness and restless ambition were the very core of my grandfather’s own heart.

His memory ranged back a long way into the history of his country. Felicity had told him vivid tales of the Revolution, and he himself, as a tiny child, dimly remembered the War of 1812. The Civil War had taken his only son, Philip, and just how deeply that blow struck into him he never wholly confided to anyone. But, unlike his wife, he did not allow it to kill him. Somehow he made peace with his own heart and went on, more eagerly than ever, with his energetic life.

He wanted more than anything to be governor of his state, to stand at the head of his well-loved ‘old Connecticut.’ More than any other, that honor, he felt, would set the perfect seal on both his youthful dreams and his manhood’s labor. And he also often expressed the wish to live to be a hundred, to see the turn of his own century. But he did not realize either ambition.

Before he died, he lay almost two years in that wide walnut bed in the downstairs bedroom, slipping away from earth very quietly and gently for one who had lived with such fierce activity. But his family was around him; even Ned and I had been born; and my mother nursed him herself, caring for the frail old man as tenderly and as conscientiously as she had for her babies when they were small and helpless. He wanted no one near him but herself, but her he wanted almost constantly, ringing for her, wherever she might be at her other tasks in the house, with a big brass bell kept on a table at his bedside. Her patient devotion seemed inexhaustible, and often, as she came to him, to bathe or rub or merely soothe him, he would say to her, as he had said so many times during the long years: —

‘Mary, you’re one woman in ten thousand.’

Lying there in the downstairs bedroom, he was far less remote and lonely than he would have been anywhere else in the house. So close to kitchen, woodshed, and driveway, he could listen to all the small, important household noises — tradesmen, coming and going, Hannah bustling in the kitchen, the calls and laughter of his grandchildren, Mary’s quick steps just outside in the hall, or up and down the stairs. Winter days, the azure coals would hiss softly in the big stove, and out on the road he could hear the bells on the sleighs, sweetly ringing as they passed, or the slow wheels of carts creaking over the packed snow. Summer evenings with the windows opened, the light breeze in the deepening twilight stirred the leaves in the maple trees — those trees that he had planted himself so long ago.

Before his increasing feebleness had forced him into bed, he had liked to sit on the small front stoop those summer evenings, and watch the people passing on bicycles, those curious ‘new-fangled contraptions’ which were ridden, not only by men, but — astonishing sight even without bloomers! — by women, too. He always counted them, and when he went in for the night told the number to his daughter.

‘Well, Mary, I counted fifty-seven to-night.’

What a world! What was it coming to? If he only knew, if only he could wait to see and hear and share in its destiny — in all its destinies.

After he went to bed, he spoke less and less. He who had been so voluble, whose words had been dramatized with such imagination and variety by his mobile face and the gestures of his small, shapely hands, of which he was so proud, now lapsed into silence. Only once in a while his spirit flickered up in some momentary reminder of its former bright flare.

One day I passed through his room on my way to play in the woodshed. He did not object now if my brothers and I went in and out. His desk, where he had so hated interruptions, was closed forever, and the papers on the whirligig lay neat and undisturbed. I was a pudgy little girl by this time, with legs rounding out under my starched gingham dress, and two braids of flaxen hair bobbing at my shoulders. My mother, sitting by his bed stirring a glass of medicine, watched the old man’s gaze as it followed me across the room and through the door. For a brief instant in those fading eyes she caught a ghostly glimmer of the old sparkle. She said quickly, bending towards him: —

‘What are you thinking about, Father?’

Very slowly he replied in the hoarse whisper which was all that remained of his voice: —

‘I was — just thinking — possibly — some day — that that’ — he nodded in the direction I had taken — ‘might make — a very showy woman.‘