I never thought much about my grandmother. I came to live with her when I was about five, before I began going to school, and I don’t think that kids of five think too much anyway. I knew that most of the boys and girls I met at school lived with their parents. But they all had grandparents, and they occasionally talked about all the money they got from them on their birthdays and the good places their grandparents took them. None of them talked about their grandparents as though they really knew them, or even wanted to. I may have been a little embarrassed when I asked some kids to come home with me after school for the afternoon and introduced them to Grandmother and then waited for the question they all asked in their own ways. It is really funny to realize how tactful little kids can be in a blunt way. My favorite kid on this was Rosemary Mayer, who always had on neat dresses and did a lot of homework. When I introduced her to Grandmother, Rosemary turned to me and said, “And your parents, Mr. and Mrs. Ross, are they traveling in Europe?” That’s pretty good for a seven-year-old kid.
The thing about Grandmother was how orderly she was. Everything had a place and fit into its proper place or it was out—she’d have nothing to do with it, or she’d forget it if she could. She was a great one for saying “Don’t pay any attention” when some bum would come up to us on the street in Boston, asking for money. Or if something terrible happened, like the time I threw a metal compass at some kid I was mad at in school, she would pretend it had never happened after I had had my punishment, not because she was ashamed of me or anything like that, but just because it was too rough on her to think of what I was really doing when I did this terrible thing to that guy. I got nervous about myself after that episode. I can’t even remember what I was mad at now, but I certainly know that I have a temper. I really wanted to talk with her about this, but every time I brought it up even indirectly, she cut me off with a look.
When I look back over it now, it must have been pretty rough on Grandmother. I don’t know how old she was, but I guess she was over sixty. And here she was with this boy about to go into school when she must have been getting ready to relax and take things easy for life, as easy as she could anyway. Like I said, everything in her house had a particular spot, and God help anyone who moved it. Me especially. When I was a little kid, I naturally picked up a lot of things to examine them. This used to drive Grandmother buggy, and the buggier she got, the more things I picked up. First it was ashtrays. I figured it didn’t make any difference if I broke one because Grandmother didn’t smoke and always emptied ashtrays at the end of each cigarette when some visitor came. This was her way of curtailing the smoking of a second cigarette. But if that didn’t work, she opened all the windows in the room where the smoker was sitting, and he usually got the hint. Some people didn’t though, and Grandmother caught a few colds as a result.
I liked to pick up a lot of other things too, and it wasn’t long before all her stuff was either locked up or put up so high that I would have needed a ladder to reach it. This is what I mean by how rough it must have been on her. She had laid out her house without kids in mind, then had to lay it out again with me in mind. She didn’t make a great big thing of it though. She just did it. It was only a year or so before she died that she began to bring things out in the open again. I guess she never got a chance to be old in the way most people are.
She always tried to ask me questions about schoolwork and friends. She worked very hard at being a good parent. She never had the pleasure of being a grandparent. Poor good girl. Now she never will.
It was Grandmother who realized first that she was never going to bring it off and that with her and me it would always be a friendly, but awkward situation. When it got close to my eighth birthday, she said, “David, I’m not going to ask what you want this year. Is that all right?” I didn’t know what to make of what she said, so I just nodded. I had gotten a twenty-five-dollar birthday check from my father that morning, so it didn’t make much difference what else I got.
Two days later, on my actual birthday, when I came home from school, I heard a funny noise in the kitchen. I ran back to see what it was. There was Grandmother bending over a box filled with newspapers, stroking about ten inches of black dachshund. It was Fred. She picked him up and handed him to me.
“Happy birthday, David.”
My eyes must have gotten as wide as two tennis balls. I reached over to get Fred. He was wiggling in Grandmother’s hands. As I held him to me he squirted all over my jacket. Grandmother and I laughed. Fred, the nut, he just licked away at my face.
