Looking Around

By Marjorie Roth

Looking around my dining room where I am choosing a few things to be polished for the holidays, I spy with my little eye a number of things that are important to me.  Some have already been polished and are shining out, demanding attention.  I spy the well and tree platter which will hold the turkey on Christmas.  But outgleaming it is my emotional favorite:  a hot chocolate set so attractively designed it speaks to me whenever I see it.  It consists of a round silver tray with a beaded edge, a sugar bowl and a creamer, also beaded, with each shaped in a particularly delightful way.

The centerpiece is the hot chocolate pot, long-stemmed with a lovely delicate shape.  It doesn’t really hold a lot, so on the few occasions I’ve tried to put it to use, I have had to use demitasses.  Because of their delicate nature I’ve always felt I was playing house when I have used it.

What makes this hot chocolate set so special is that it was my grandmother’s and was given to her by her firstborn son, Everett, from the first money he earned on his first job.  So, the date of the gift was probably about 1880.  It was prized by my grandmother, who adored this son and said it was the first present she had ever received….which I doubt…but made the gift especially important. 

I interrupt this story to explain that my grandmother (who had eight children and many abortions!) was especially attached to her sons.  I believe she always wanted to be their primary attachment, and so she resisted taking second place.  And I believe that Everett at the time of the gift I spoke of was engaged to a young woman he was madly in love with, and that my grandmother, in this first experience of being replaced, was making Everett’s live unbearable.  So one day when he was in his late twenties he shot and killed himself in his bedroom.  With another son, Arthur, the story was different but the act the same:  Arthur had a successful business that then became troubled.  He had a 100,000 dollar life insurance policy which covered his debts,  and so he killed himself, too.

These events occurred in Kissimmee (Florida) and the Bronx after they moved north.  As I write this I started to think that the move north may have been precipitated by Everett’s death:  it was always explained by the need to get their brood decent educations, but I wonder, as I have always wondered, how these traumatic events were experienced at the time.

Part of my regret about all this is my failure to talk more with my grandmother.  When I had the opportunity she was more ready to reminisce with me, but I had my life to get on with so I didn’t ask more questions.  I remained the same child who loved to hear stories of the South and the Civil War and the adjustment they have to make to become Yankees many years later.

But I love to see the hot chocolate set in my dining room without thinking of all the tragedy.  I gives me a warm feeling, to feel the connection to my grandmother and the joy she once felt about it.