TRYING TO GET IT RIGHT THIS TIME: MY REMINISCENCES  by Mary Macomber Leue  Part I My Antecedents   Chapter 1 My Mother Hattie Frances Seaver: her early life - from a tiny apartment by the railroad tracks in Boston to a mansion in Beverly Farms on the North Shore   Having mentioned the issue of controversy in my introduction leads me straight into the yet unrecorded events in my parents' history concerning their relationship(s) that ultimately led up to my birth. I suppose it all starts with my mother's childhood, the objective details of which are given in her own account. Until I became pubescent, I was my mother's chief confidante, and loved hearing her vivid and sometimes seamy tales about our family; and, especially, about her own childhood. In the written account she left us in what we call "The Red Book," compiled by both my parents, she doesn't go into some of the gorier aspects of her childhood in her account, since this is an "official" autobiography written for the sake of future progeny, and she is clearly using the opportunity to get in some last-minute propaganda concerning child rearing while skipping over some of the more sensational details. But for me all the truth of my history (or at least my inner image of it) as I actually lived it has become an integral part of my inner life, and so, is an essential aspect of my story! Also, I have the shining example of my aunt Katie's vividly truthful memoirs before me. How could I do less? So we must start with my mother's own account of her early life: I was born on February 9th, 1885, on Monument Square, Charlestown, directly in the shadow of Bunker Hill monument, and in the home of my grandfather Brown. Probably my earliest memory is of having diphtheria there, and of being taken for airings by him up to the sunny side of the old obelisk, during my convalescence. I am afraid that a great part of my childhood was spent in bed, as I was a sickly infant and a puny child subject to every contagious outbreak that came near me, and with fairly chronic bronchitis filling in the intervals. ... ..............Tiny Hattie Seaver.............Lillie Frances Brown Seaver Two brothers had been born, and had died at the ages of around a year, slowly dying of starvation brought on by their inability to tolerate cow's milk when their mother's milk "ran out!" The pitifully skeletal images of her in her long white gown, gazing with those same soulful eyes huge in her thin baby face is so poignant as to be barely tolerable - knowing as one does that my mother's mother had had the photograph taken because she believed she was dying, according to my mother. I have also seen similar pictures of Hattie's two baby brothers, who had in fact starved to death at about this age, so her mother's impulse is not a fatalistic one! Hattie herself did almost die of starvation at that age (nearly six months), as she describes below. I have good reason to believe in the accuracy of this account, since I myself nearly starved from the same cause at the same age - and so did my second son Peter! The cause of the familial inability to digest cow's milk was finally diagnosed as lactose intolerance in at least three of its victims - myself and my sons Peter and Tom, since powdered milk-based formulae from which the lactose had been removed were tolerable to the three of us (although only barely) but the two youngest babies, my daughter Ellen and my son Mark, could not manage milk in any form! Ellen's problem was diagnosed as an allergy to cow's milk, and she managed to adapt her digestive system to a soy-based formula. Mark, however, could not even tolerate this substitute. Fortunately, the infant formula manufacturers had finally developed a meat-based formula, and he throve on this, Baruch Hashem! There were probably two reasons for my survival; first and foremost, a tough constitution from ancestors who lived to be a good old age through trials and tribulations, and second, a determined grandmother. My mother overheard my doctor say to my grandmother, "She doesn't expect to raise that baby, does she?" - this after my two older brothers had died from malnutrition. Mother says that she threw me in despair on her mother's bed, and cried, "Take her, I just give up!" Whereupon the wise old grandmother, who had never had faith in "those baby powders (Mellin's Food) and doctors' formulas," secretly took me down to the basement kitchen, minced up rare bits of the breakfast beefsteak and fed them to my hungry, smacking lips. Probably she also gave me a pap-ball to suck, a chunk of bread soaked in sweetened milk and tied up in a square of cloth; that was the pacifier of those days. Anyway, I pulled through the critical transition to solid food, but at three I caught diphtheria, the child-killer of those days, and barely survived it. I well remember the heroic treatment. Every morning I was tied in my high chair in the window, while my mother and grandmother held my legs, and the doctor pumped a river of permanganate solution through my nose and throat to wash out the fatal membranes. After it was all over, he would say, "Now, chuck the whiskey into her!" No wonder that highballs and old fashioneds are distasteful to me now. But he pulled me through, either because of the afore-mentioned tough streak or because the treatment really worked. All this of course was before the days of antitoxin. But she did survive - only to succumb to what was probably a mild case of polio, which she also survived, but which left her with somewhat withered calf muscles throughout her lifetime - with what she termed "pipestem legs" - which were a source of embarrassment to her, especially during her teens and twenties! Those thin legs of hers never in my experience kept her from trudging sturdily along in the rear-guard position of our family's single file as we hiked up and down innumerable mountains at our father's behest, however! Or prevented her from scurrying to keep up with his longer stride on level ground! But that's much later in the story! When Hattie was three, the family moved into Boston, to a tiny apartment off Copley Square, not far from the public library, where they lived until my mother was four years old. My mother writes very movingly of her father, a summary to accompany his picture in an album she left for me: Francis Williams Seaver, son of Nathan B. and Caroline Williams Seaver, was born in Taunton, Mass., June 25, 1852. He married Lillie Frances Brown of Charlestown Dec. 26, 1881. After leaving school, he entered the office of a mechanical engineer in Chicago. After a few years of training, he was designing iron R.R. bridges and supervising their construction. One was over the Ohio River. The U.S. government engaged him to build an artificial ice-machine for the use of an army post in San Antonio. It made 4 tons of ice every 48 hours. He was called back to Chicago to plan wharves for the C.B.& Q. R.R. About that time he contracted tuberculosis, but continued his projects stubbornly. While in Chicago he designed a steam-powered truck to transport beef from the R.R. yards to the processing plants, possibly Armour's or Swift's. But they could not get a license to operate them, because they frightened horses. In Nashville, an English syndicate who owned the "Great Eastern" asked him to design a refrigeration plant for that ship, so that beef could be transported from Galveston to Liverpool. His poor health forced him to refuse this big opportunity. He returned to Boston, and my mother became a cataloguer in the Boston Public Library. I remember those days very clearly. She continues in more detail in her reminiscences: …by this time my father was in the last stages of tuberculosis, yet able to continue his mechanical drawing. To reach Oxford Terrace you went down a long flight of wooden steps, about opposite the present Trinity Court. They led down the big fill that enabled Dartmouth Street to have a bridge over the Boston and Albany tracks. There was a vacant field at the foot, alongside the railroad, then a row of brick houses. I can remember the fascination of being allowed to play out, all alone, in this field filled with the usual trash of such city lots, and with trains constantly choo-chooing past the high wooden fence. At twelve o'clock my father would lean out of the window of our second-floor flat and call, "Dinner's ready, Hattie." He was a good cook, so I came a-running. I used to sleep on a trundle-bed pushed under their bed every day, Never a window could be opened, for fear of the dangerous night air! Certainly the Lord gave me a precious resistance to the two dread diseases of that day. But it was the fear of TB, whenever I developed my graveyard cough, that made my mother bring me up practically swaddled in cotton wool, and forbidden to join in normal sports like skating and swimming. Poor little me, it certainly made a timid sissy of me! My father died there when I was four. I was taken to the room of a friendly neighbor during the funeral (which, by the way, was conducted by Stopford Brooke, father of our friend Edith Baker). They had bought a little painting book to amuse me, and I can actually recall the picture - of children playing under a striped umbrella on a beach - that I colored that afternoon. It is strange how a vivid experience, like a death in the family, makes insignificant details memorable. .... Frank Seaver and his brother Mark   My grandfather had also lost his two brothers from TB in their early thirties. Judging by their sepia-tinted images, the Seaver brothers (at least these two) had been beautiful young men, although Mark's expression is a bit strange - which may be a result of the state of the art of photography in the 1880s. On the back of my grandfather's photograph he has written, "That Villain," - but my mother's account makes him anything but that!   Receiving my impressions of my grandfather from her sense of devotion and inner loss, I can feel a pain in my own gut when I recall the day of his funeral in my mother's young life - and the photographs I have of her taken during those early years have a wistful quality in the eyes that gives me that same pain! In fact, it is this gut ache that reminds me most vividly of the "inwardness" of my relationship with my mother, which I experience as a kind of ghostly haunting by those images and memories of hers - in which connection, it has occasionally occurred to me that my lifelong latent inner pain may at least partly represent an unacknowledged (but real!) choice to "carry" my mother's pain! And if that is indeed the case, I surmise equally that this memoir may also represent a choice to lay down that unintended burden, particularly since most of the time, now that I am in my eighties, I no longer seem to carry that pain - which is a great relief! There are better ways to stay connected, I find. Enter Lillie Brown's sister Lizzie into little Hattie's life as a dea ex machina or fairy godmother! Now, sister Lizzie had married a young man named Arthur Luke, whose ambition to succeed labels him a "self-made man," in the parlance of the day. Arthur had left his native town of Newton, Massachusetts, to seek his fortune in New York City. He must have been an extraordinarily talented, forceful young man, because he managed to land a job, first as a bank clerk, then as personal secretary to J.P. Morgan, who was already a Wall Street sensation as the "robber baron" CEO of United States Steel Corporation! Arthur not only became Morgan's firsthand man in the financial world but also, being without a wife in the big city, a regular customer (like so many other men of his time) of whorehouses, from which practice he contracted (in addition to his relief from sexual tension) a dose of gonorrhea - and later, syphilis! When he returned to his home town - as the new Treasurer of US Steel - seeking a wife, he found her in Lizzie Brown. For their honeymoon, Arthur ordered a private Pullman car for their comfort, and the young couple set off on their journey fully supplied with chef, porter and waiter at their beck and call. Alas, by the time the train steamed into Chicago, the young bride, burning with gonococcal fever, had to be carried off the train in a litter and taken to a hospital to be nursed back to health! She recovered fully and was brought back home to their splendid new house in West Newton, but the gonorrhea had left such extensive scarring in her Fallopian tubes that she was never able to conceive, and so remained childless throughout her lifetime despite her longing for a baby! Visiting her parents in Charlestown and making a comparison between the relative penury of their circumstances and the opulence of her own, Lizzie begged her sister Lillie to let little Hattie come and live with her in West Newton! Lillie was enjoying her job as a librarian to the fullest, and so, did not wish to stop working, but was evidently very glad to let Lizzie take her little girl. And so began a new phase of Hattie's childhood. Here's her account: We soon moved out to West Newton to live with my mother's sister Aunt Lizzie, and Uncle Arthur Luke. They had never had children, to their great disappointment, so I became the idol of two mothers, a dubious blessing. My mother continued to work at the Library, because it gave her independence, and she loved the work, but my aunt certainly took the full care and support of me. Young Hattie The visual record of that time is extensive, because Lizzie was a good photographer, and loved doing it! I have an image of Hattie standing at the bend of the dark staircase, barefoot and in her white nightgown, the ends of her long hair tied up in rags to create the fashionable sausage curls mothers loved. She carries a lit candle in a long candlestick in one hand, and the other is on the banister. One foot is raised to ascend the stairs, and her gaze is afar. It is the look of a child who allows her picture to be taken, may even enjoy the drama being created by her auntie's photographic hobby, but who, inwardly, is somewhere else. My mother describes her aunt as follows: She was a very energetic person, full of skills and enthusiasm. She painted china beautifully; had the finest perennial garden in our neighborhood; gave the most elaborate lunch, dinner and card parties; drove a horse and buggy, kept at the local livery stable; made all my clothes and her own, played games and loved puzzles like charades, ardently. She was an early photo fan, with a long box-camera that held a roll of one hundred films, her entire summer's take, and left a clear record of my girlhood in journals of our vacations that show an easy fluid style of writing, though perhaps the contents are only interesting to me. So Hattie lived with her aunt and uncle in their West Newton house during the school year, and, during the summer months, at their seaside summer place in fashionable Beverly Farms, north of Boston. Our summer vacations were always spent at Beverly Farms, where Uncle Arthur's parents had a lovely place built high on a ledge of rock overlooking Misery and Baker's Islands. Just below us stood Oliver Wendell Holmes' summer home. His birthday came in August, as I remember, and when he had his eighty-second, he gave a party for all the children of the neighborhood. I must have been about six, because I remember being taken on his lap - and told to pull up a tulip that seemed to be growing in a pot on his desk. Very hesitantly I did so, to his amusement, and found that the "earth" was just a cover for a dish of candy that he then invited me to sample. That may well have been his last birthday - and I was very fortunate to have had that contact with greatness. Lizzie's pictures portray a large, elaborate house with many windows open to the sea breezes and a wrap-around "verandah" complete with porch swing, wicker chairs and tables. Here we first see Hattie, at the age of six or seven, with her best friend Ethel Jaynes and another younger child with long, golden curls and a white blouse and full ruffled skirt. All three are holding up their right hands to show the photographer - or perhaps waving to her on command. All three wear grave expressions. The littlest one appears to be a girl, but isn't. This is standard upper-middle class garb for a three-year-old boy - who turns out to have been her little cousin Tyler Bliss. In another image we see Hattie at around eight or nine, teaching her cocker spaniel to beg, with Tyler Bliss watching beside her, both barefoot, both in middy blouses - she in a full, mid-calf white cotton skirt, he now in shorts and with his hair cut short. Or we see them playing cards at a little wicker table on the verandah. Or, as she grows older, perhaps fourteen, reading to Tyler, sitting in the grass near a large boulder, she dressed in a checked, mutton-sleeved top and long skirt, her thick braid hanging over one shoulder, he listening, lying on his belly in the grass with his head propped on his hands. She says of this time: Another result of our summers in Beverly was learning to sail a boat. Unitarians seldom go to church in the summer, so Uncle Arthur engaged a comfortable, tubby catboat called the "Ralph," every Sunday morning of every summer that we were there. Our usual run was over to see the yachts gathered at Marblehead, but once we went up the coast to the Isle of Shoals, which gave me my first taste of cruising. In later years we actually lived on his big schooner, the "Corona," and sailed many times from New York to Mt. Desert. But until I married, my sailing was pretty theoretical, largely learned by watching others. However, the love for the sport was all there, and perhaps the best days of our [married] lives were spent in boats, working up from the little "Zephyr" to the "Georgie Bowden," in which we spent nine months, getting as far south as Havana, Cuba. Hattie's earlier sailing adventures have been visually chronicled by her aunt, like the images above. Her costume in them is a fashionable-looking, mutton-sleeved, hounds-tooth-checkered top and dark skirt - a dressmaker's creation, suitable only for a "ladies' day" sail on which the pulling and hauling of sheets, halyards and painters are being done by others, most likely by paid employees in sailor suits! The wistful, faraway look on her young face in many of these photographs makes the image poignant and irresistible to a daughter for whom this could be a story written by Frances Hodgson Burnett (author of so many poignant Victorian children's stories) entitled, A Poor Little Rich Girl. In still another image she sits, now a young lady with a "Gibson Girl" pompadour, entirely clad in elegant white from neck to toe, perched on the arm of her uncle's dark wicker armchair on the deck of his cup-defender schooner/yacht "Corona." Her expression is still dreamily remote, even less revealing of her inner self than the earlier ones. Her uncle, nattily attired in a naval outfit, dark coat, white trousers and captain's peaked cap - strikingly resembling Josef Stalin, walrus mustache and all - is gazing upward, perhaps at the sail. When they were at the house in West Newton, Hattie went to school nearby, and developed a lifelong friendship with another girl, Dora Burr, from whom she received a thick bundle of letters (which I still have) after Dora moved away - and with the Unitarian minister's daughter Ethel Jaynes. Of the two friendships, with Dora Burr and Ethel Jaynes, my mother says: In early years my best friend was a girl of Scottish descent, Dora Burr. We played with and dressed dolls, big and little, bicycled and made candy together; in fact, we were inseparable. If I were to criticize my good aunt Lizzie, it was that she was too perfect a housekeeper. My dolls and I were relegated to a cold attic room, and friends, muddy, messy or otherwise, were not exactly welcomed. So I played at Dora's almost every afternoon for years, until our Unitarian minister, Mr. Jaynes, built a house on Prince Street nearby, and his daughter also wanted to be my "best friend." That was the first rift in the lute; two's company, three's a crowd! and oil and water just can't be mixed. Ethel Jaynes had the advantage of going to the same church and dancing school with me, thus having many identical social affairs, but I was honestly very fond of both of them, and had to steer a course of diplomacy from then on until I left West Newton. Ethel was much more of an outdoor girl. She it was who organized the street games; we spent innumerable afternoons playing croquet on her lawn (even on Sunday since it was completely hidden from the street. (Oh, those wicked Unitarians!) There were monthly sociables for the young people, at which each Sunday School class in turn took over the entertainment, so we were often involved in plays or programs together. Dora drew into her Scottish shell, a little hurt and, I am afraid, a little jealous, but I did my best to keep up our friendship. I had to admit that there was more fun at Ethel's house ... Since she and Ethel lived close to each other, they would often go to each other's houses and play after school, very often making fudge together. She herself makes much of the candy-making and eating, both with fondness for the memory and with severe self-judgment, which she later passed on to us, her six children: [T]oo many of my afternoons were spent indoors, making pans of fudge and penuchi, pulling molasses candy, and peppermints. My aunt too was inordinately fond of candy, and drove home from Bradshaw's, the dear old couple who turned out delicious home-made candies in Newtonville, every week with five pounds of assorted sweets; chewy chocolate caramels, guaranteed to locate and remove any unwary filling, crunchy peanut brittle, to break off a few chips here and there, marvelous sugared almonds, chocolate sugared peanuts (they were the cheapest, so she usually bought ten pounds), and most devastating of all, molasses taffy, wrapped in yellow oiled paper, that would even extract any first tooth that was approaching rejection. These were all stored in the top drawer of her desk, subject to petty larceny at almost any time, and so plentiful that the larceny was hardly discovered or even suspected. The result - my mother often received dentistry bills of $100 or more, and I spent wretched Saturday mornings all through the years, none of us ever dreaming of the cause. Pure candy couldn't hurt anyone. No wonder I joined so cooperatively in the No-candy regime when we had children of our own. We were considered hard-hearted by our fellow parents. I remember that one of Grandpa's aunts came from California to visit us, bringing the customary guest gift, a five-pound box of chocolates. She never tired of repeating the tale of how I opened the box and turned to the six small children present, "Children, come here, here is a chance to smell of chocolates," and they all gathered seriously about, each in turn burying his little nose as close as possible to the delectable odor. To her it was the acme of cruelty, to them with their keen noses a genuine treat. Of course when they entered public school, our control over sweets weakened. The twins, our most rebellious offspring, started having caries. Our logical answer to that was to make them earn half their dentists' bills, in hard labor. Jeanne, who never cared for candy and ate very little, had some trouble, possibly due to the poor circulation on the paralyzed side of her face [Jeanne developed polio as a young child], but Mary, Billy and Peter got to college age without a single cavity. Could I fail to believe that the candy ban, plus plenty of milk, oranges and a well-balanced diet had made the difference between their teeth and mine? I remember my mother's account of this fudge-making vividly because she would open her mouth to show us the many filled cavities left by the ravages of tooth decay brought on by this indulgence in the eating of candy! She and my father brought the six of us up with a dietary taboo as strict as the Catholic ban against the eating of meat on Friday or the Jewish/Islamic taboo on pork and seafood, albeit on the grounds of health rather than that of an injunction from God Himself. Ours was: "No candy, no concentrated sweets of any kind, no fried foods, no pastry, no cake, except sponge cake on your birthday, dredged with powdered sugar." My personal opinion is closer to Auntie Belle's shocked reaction to such dietary fundamentalism! But then, I may be a bit biased, having lived with the flip side of the pronouncement. Every time my mother mentioned her own childhood pleasures in the making and eating of such quantities of candy, I was filled with a double resolve - never to allow my teeth to be filled by a dentist (which my mother described as torture from hell!), and to eat as much candy as I wanted when I was grown up! How those two resolves might be meshed didn't enter my thinking at the time. But, returning to the account we have been following, we find my mother now living in Newtonville with her mother and grandmother. Reading between the lines, it feels to me as though my mother is beginning to experience the impact of the gradual breakdown of her aunt's and her uncle's marriage as the effects of their venereal diseases and other dysfunctional patterns take their toll. She spends more and more time with Ethel's family, especially with her mother, whom Hattie adores: ... [T]here were periods when I practically lived there, especially when Mother and I moved to my Grandmother's in Newtonville, so that I could attend Newton High School, my uncle having moved to New York. I went through the entire public school system, up to the sophomore year in high school, and believe it was an excellent education, lacking only on the cultural side. I didn't stay in Newton High long enough to study with "Andy George," the only stimulating English teacher I can recall, so when I moved to New York to rejoin the Lukes, and entered my first private school, the Brearley, I found myself severely handicapped in modern languages and English, but better grounded in Latin and mathematics than my classmates. The account of my mother's life as a young woman continues in Chapter Three - but first, we turn to my father's earliest years. Move to Chapter Two Back to the preface Back to Table of Contents  Write me at maryskole@aol.com