CHAPTER FOUR
Have I Done Any Good In The World Today?...
Grandpa Albert Willing could best be described as like a sturdy piece of furniture — perhaps like the solid oak piece that stood in the front hall of Grandpa’s and Grandma’s house — a large, multi-purpose chair with a seat that lifted up to store caps and gloves, a large mirror forming the back, and hooks to hang coats. Grandpa would have laughed at the comparison; but he really was like the human equivalent of good furniture — except that Grandpa didn’t support coats and hats. He supported the family. Oh, not financially, although he would have been willing to lend a hand if needed. He was the patriarch, guiding and advising us. He was also Welcome’s lawyer.
Our little grandmother, on the other hand, was more like a pillow, soft and comforting, with pink cheeks and a beautiful cloud of white hair. I was proud to be named for her. Grandpa called her “Annie.”
When Grandpa brought his bride, the former Bethany Dodson to Welcome in 1888, he purchased some land about a mile out of town where, later, the state highway would bend to meet what was known as Welcome Road. While other farmers chose to live in town and travel out to their farms, Grandpa declared that he wanted his crops and livestock conveniently nearby. So, on his acreage, he erected a barn and sheds; he fenced his pastures and built a tall, red brick house.
Grandpa gave building lots to his two older daughters as wedding presents. The houses that were built on them sat side by side. Leatrice and I called them home.
I liked to play at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s. I also liked to play at Leatrice’s. In fact, I preferred her house to ours. They were similar in style, but Mamma and Aunt Mabel held different opinions on interior decorating.
I thought the brown leather and oak furnishings in our house were quite dull and ordinary; but I greatly admired the furniture that Aunt Mabel had bought: an electric-blue sofa and chair for what she chose to call the living room instead of the parlor; and Venetian blinds at all the downstairs windows. I thought it was fascinating the way they could be rolled up or down just by pulling a cord.
Uncle Roland thought Venetian blinds were just a passing fad. He couldn’t see why Aunt Mabel would waste good money on such an extravagance.
But, then, Uncle Roland worried and fussed about a lot of things: his tailoring business over in Prosperity; whether or not he was losing his hair; and what the Democrats were up to.
Over time, Grandpa had sold more of his land. By the time Leatrice and I came along, Welcome Road — which stuck out like a handle on the waffle griddle that formed the rest of the town — was well built up with solid, deep-porched homes.
When Grandpa’s youngest daughter, Francie, married Roger Winfield, Grandpa gave her some property, too. Their brand-new house sat about halfway between our place and Grandpa’s farm.
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While Leatrice and I had the general run of Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house, there was one room we knew we were not supposed to go into — Grandpa’s law office. He said there were writs in there we mustn’t touch. We wondered, were writs anything like rats? If we went in, would one jump out and bite us? Not inclined to venture into danger willingly, we stayed away.
One morning, the door to Grandpa’s office stood open, and we peeked in. Standing well back, so the writs wouldn’t get us, we looked around and saw hanging above the fireplace a rifle beautifully inlaid with silver.
Grandpa looked up, saw us, and beckoned us in. Stepping carefully so the writs wouldn’t get us, we asked him where the gun had come from. He said that his grandfather had been one of Brigham Young’s bodyguards and that President Young had given him the rifle in appreciation for his service.
So accustomed were we to having the past flow over into the present, we didn’t even marvel at seeing something that had been owned by our great-great-grandfather.
Nor, when we pounded out “Chopsticks” on Grandma’s beautiful, rosewood piano, did it seem strange to us that it had come across the plains by ox team.
A further description of things in Grandma’s and Grandpa’s home would have to include the carpet that covered the front hall and the stairs. It was a beautiful moss green with pink roses scattered upon it. We liked to play hopscotch on it, hopping from rose to rose.
The staircase had lovely polished banisters, unlike the stairs in our homes, that went up uninterestingly between a couple of walls.
There is just one way to go upstairs, of course: that is to walk upright, your hand on the railing, feet pointed straight ahead.
But, if you are nine-years-old, coming down your grandparents’ stairs can hold infinite variations. You can take giant steps, two at a time, fee-fi-fo-fumming as you stride; or you can inch down the outer edge of the steps, pretending that you are going past a swamp filled with hungry alligators; or you can slide backwards down the railing, going “Toot-toot!” and making believe you are a train warning people off the tracks; or you can make your way, carefully, backwards, like a mountain climber descending the Alps. But the very best way of all is to go down headfirst, like a snake crawling through a jungle of lovely, green grass and pink roses.
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Great-Aunt Salina May Roundtree Gillis had said more than once that Uncle Jack and Aunt Francie, Grandma’s and Grandpa’s two youngest children, got all the looks in the family; and she was right.
Uncle Jack had curly, black hair and a smile that could, as Great-Aunt Salina May Roundtree Gillis remarked, “knock the birds out of the trees.” In the winter, Uncle Jack went to the LDS Business College in Salt Lake. In the summer, he worked in the J.C. Penney store in Welcome, selling vacuum cleaners. It was the most popular part of the store. When Uncle Jack smiled, all the women came flocking.
We were very proud of having a J.C. Penney store in our little town. Our mayor had written to Mr. Penney and thanked him for granting us such an honor.
Grandma worried and Grandpa wondered why Uncle Jack was taking so long to get married. There were plenty of interested girls to choose from. Grandpa would quote Brigham Young to the effect that any man over twenty-five and not married was a nuisance to the community.
But Uncle Jack seemed in no hurry to make up his mind. He would drive off in the evening in his little roadster, a straw hat on the back of his head, whistling, ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’. The trouble was, there were too many “babies”.
Aunt Francie was very pretty, with dark, curly hair and beautiful brown eyes. She had a lovely singing voice, too, and always sang the solo part when the choir performed. When she sang “The Holy City” for the Easter program, it just gave me goose bumps.
Once, Leatrice and I were passing the high school and we saw Aunt Francie playing tennis on the court there with one of her boy friends. She was wearing white slacks, and she looked so pretty with her dark curls bobbing up and down as she swooped for the ball, we just had to stand and watch.
She was so lovely, we liked to hang around her just hoping that, perhaps, some of her beauty might rub off on us. We wondered why she wasn’t a movie star. She looked a lot like Olivia de Havilland.
Aunt Francie was a good sport, too. On one occasion, when our parents and Grandma and Grandpa had gone to a concert in Provo, Aunt Francie took care of us. She helped us make fudge, then let us go up to her room and put on her makeup, and her perfume, and dress up in her clothes; then she rolled back the parlor rug, and put a record on the phonograph, and taught us to dance — the waltz, and the fox trot, and even the jitterbug.
She was very popular. Aunt Francie could have married any number of young men. The problem was, as we knew, that she could not ask any man to marry her. He had to do the asking. But, so far, she hadn’t accepted any of the beaus that we were pretty sure had proposed to her. How come?
Finally, it all ended happily. Aunt Francie married Roger Winfield. We took all the credit for that. Here is how it came about:
Leatrice and I had been accustomed to practicing a certain ritual. It was a secret, and we told it to nobody
.
On days when Aunt Francie was at work at the bank, we would go to the farm, ostensibly to visit Grandma, but really to sneak up to Aunt Francie’s bedroom.
We would ask Grandma if we might go upstairs to play. She would say “Yes”, supposing we meant to play in the spare bedroom that used to be our mothers’ room.
We would climb the stairs and sidle, slither-eyed, hoping no one would see us, into the pretty pink-and-white room. We’d stand for a few moments, taking in appreciative sniffs of the perfume that lingered. It reminded me of lilacs.
Next, we would lie down on the bed, the pink bedspread under us, our heads on Aunt Francie’s pillow. Then, we would turn to her dressing table, pick up her ivory-handled mirror and brush, and preen a little, pretending to be as pretty as she was.
After that, we turned our attention to the closet. We buried our noses in the dresses arranged neatly on padded hangers, breathing in the fragrance that clung to them.
We got down on our knees, then, and looked at Aunt Francie’s shoes, lined up with shoetrees in them. We marveled that she actually had four pairs of shoes in addition to the ones she was wearing. We picked up the sparkly, silver ones she wore to dances and tried them on our own feet. Alas, we were like Cinderella’s sisters. The shoes did not fit.
What was our purpose in all this? We couldn’t have explained it then; but I think we were trying to absorb as much of the essence of Aunt Francie as we could. We didn’t mean to snoop, and we would never have taken anything. But, it was pleasing just to be where she stood, and sat, and lay, and to handle the things she used.
One day there was something we had not seen before, a photo album lying on Aunt Francie’s cedar chest. We sat on the bed and looked through it.
Among pictures of family members and girlhood chums of Aunt Francie’s, there were snapshots of young men, the beaus who asked her out. The one pictured most often was Roger Winfield. He was the loan officer at the Welcome Bank where Aunt Francie worked. In group photos, Aunt Francie had indicated Roger with an arrow and his name written in the margin.
Could Aunt Francie be sweet on him?
We liked Roger. Once, when we were playing hopscotch on Grandma’s front walk, Roger had come to pick up our beautiful aunt for a date. When he saw us, he got down on one knee, and talked to us, and asked how we were doing. Then, he pretended he couldn’t get back up again. With grimaces of mock pain, he begged us to help him to his feet. Giggling, knowing that he was just fooling us, we grasped his hands and hauled him upright. When he thanked us and walked on into the house, we found he had left a dime for each of us in the palms of our hands. A whole week’s allowance!
Roger was handsome, too, with beautiful, wavy, blond hair and nice, gray eyes. We thought he was even handsomer than Nelson Eddy.
If Aunt Francie was stuck on Roger, we would help her.
Down to the bank we went and hid in some dusty bushes until the employees came out at noon. We watched as Aunt Francie came down the steps, arm linked with a girl friend. They headed off downtown toward the drug store lunch counter.
Roger was among the last to emerge.
We leaped out of the bushes and said breathlessly, “Roger, we want to talk to you.”
“What about?” he said and sat down on the steps.
We sat down beside him. Leatrice asked in her blunt way, “Do you want to get married?”
His blond eyebrows rose. “Yes — sometime. Why?”
I took the bull by the horns. “We know a girl who’d like to get married.”
“And who might that be, you little gossip mongers?”
We didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound very flattering. It surprised us, coming from Roger. But he was smiling, so we were encouraged to continue.
We had argued about whether to tell Roger our suspicion that Aunt Francie was sweet on him. Leatrice had been all for telling him.
“But,” I had said, “If we tell him, an’ then he tells Aunt Francie, she’ll know we snooped in her book — an’ she might be mad.”
So we decided on caution.
“Oh,” I said, casually rolling my eyes, “just a girl.”
He sat silent for some moments rubbing his chin. Then, “Might it be your Aunt Francie?”
He’d guessed it!
“Well — yes.”
“Oh, she does, does she? And how do you know she wants to get married?”
I gave a shrug meant to be nonchalant. “Oh — she just looks kind of lonesome.”
Roger laughed. “I’d have thought a popular girl like your Aunt Francie wouldn’t have a problem with that. I’ll bet her date book is filled just about every night.”
“She’s awfully pretty!” I said, implying that such a prize was likely to be snapped up if he didn’t get a move on.
“There are a lot of pretty girls around. I’d just like to do my own looking — O.K.?”
We stood helpless, drained of argument. Roger stood up briskly, brushed off his trousers, and went off whistling.
We went home disappointed. But, we still had one other source of help to turn to. We knelt down in Leatrice’s room and prayed:
“Heavenly Father, if Aunt Francie has got a crush on Roger, please tell him to propose to her; and, please, make it fast, because Aunt Francie isn’t getting any younger. Amen.”
A month later, they were engaged; and at Christmas time, they were married. We knew it was all our doing — with a little boost from Heavenly Father.
We never went in Aunt Francie’s room any more, now that she was married to Roger. The bed was still there and the dressing table; but Aunt Francie had taken all her personal things to the new house. All that remained to remind us of her was the lingering scent of her perfume.
As Lambs to His Fold Page 5
