Kathy was the daughter of Grace who lived about a quarter of a mile down the road in Randolph. She was a little older than I and she was my best friend during the summers that we sent there. They were Christian Scientists and they were incredibly healthy. Once Kathy had a cold and everyone, Carol, her sister, and Ellen, and Carlton and Alan, her half-brothers and sisters, were reading for her and she got well in a few hours.
There was an old turkey coop up the hill up the hill from their farmhouse, which was red and had a picture window looking out over the most beautiful view in the world – the hills across the valley from Randolph – Hebbard Hill, and Randolph Center, and, to the north, Bear Mountain.
The family had a barn and kept cows.
One day Kathy said to Mistletoe and me, ―I‘ll show you the hut!‖
We followed her up the hill, trying to avoid cow plops, and we got to the hut. We sat inside. I thought it was wonderful.
It started to rain.
―This could be our clubhouse!‖ I cried. I was very influenced by Little Lulu. ―We could publish a newspaper with our stories in it. We could staple the pages together and hand it around for people to read!‖
―Oh,‖ said Kathy, and that was the things about her, she was very self-deprecating, I loved her, ―I wouldn‘t know how to do that!‖ So we just sat there.
It was raining quite hard.
―We‘d better go back,‖ she said. I had felt sort of stranded there.
We walked back through the cow plops.
Our mother was at the family‘s house, furious,. She had driven down with our rubber boots.
―I didn‘t want you to walk all the way home in the rain, ― she said. ―Where were you?‖
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She stuffed our feet into our rubber boots and marched us into the car.
When we took off our boots, at home, they were full of cow manure.
A red carriage house stood across the road from the family‘s farmhouse. Kathy and Mistletoe and I used to go up in the loft, where there was a radio. Kathy would sing. She knew all the songs, ―Que cera, cera,‖ and ―A Blossom Fell.‖
―You should sing on the radio, ― I told her.
―Oh, I couldn‘t do that,‖ she said, pushing her nose down with her finger. She used to do that when she felt humble.
When girls graduated from the Randolph high school, they went to Montpelier to work as secretaries and find husbands.
Kathy married a soldier and moved to Germany.
Ellen, who was really the best, married a wealthy man she didn‘t love, at Grace‘s prodding, and got a divorce.
Carol, who was thin and lovely and small and petulant, married someone strong and gentle. We went to her wedding. As we drove down the hill she was standing in front of the house waiting for her husband- to-be to drive her to the church. In her white dress and her white veil, and with her very pink cheeks, she looked like a rose.
We had been to Grace‘s wedding, too, when she married Edmund. Grace‘s husband had died and she had moved the family from Maine to Vermont. I was seven. It was the first time I had ever been to a wedding. I wore a white dress with embroidered flowers on the front. I was a flower girl. The service was in Grace‘s living room.
It seemed very solemn.
In the evening we used to go down and watch Lawrence Welk and ―the lovely little Lennon sisters.‖ We didn‘t have a television. Grace would make popcorn and bake a cake, using condensed milk, and we would all sit around on the brown and red plaid sofa and chairs focused on the TV screen, while outside, through the picture window, the hills were completely dark. Then we would watch a movie. I saw Linda Darnell in – is it about a newspaper editor who can see the future and foresees his own death? Sometimes we would just watch a program. One night the woman announcer said, ―This is a very touching and moving story.‖
―‘This is a very touching and moving story,‘‖ said Mistletoe at home. ―It touches you, you move.‖ But I was enthralled by all of this.
And ―As the World Turns.‖ They introduced it to us. We used to walk down there every day at 1:30 to watch Penny and Jeff fall in love and get married, and Dr. Cassen and Claire try to work something out.
―I think Dr. Cassen must be a wonderful doctor,‖ said Grace.
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Our mother actually ran into him on Madison Avenue once in New York. She came home and told us that she had seen a man who looked very familiar but she couldn‘t remember who he was, and she had smiled at him, and afterwards she had thought, That‘s Dr.
Cassen. She said, ―People must smile at him all the time.‖
My mother‘s friend Sylvia saw Greta Garbo going into a store on Fifth Avenue. She said she was wearing dark glasses and a hat and a scarf, but that she was unmistakable.
We kept watching ―As the World Turns‖ when we got back to New York. It was hard because we had to go to school, but if we were sick we stayed home and watched it. Jeff Baker was acquitted of murder on my mother‘s birthday, which was April Fool‘s Day.
The Basses, Grace‘s husband‘s family in Randolph, were wonderful: Grandpa Bass, Grandma Bass, Becky, Dorothy, and Margaret, Edmund‘s sisters. Grandpa Bass had built their huge old farmhouse and they had a great vegetable garden with delicious sweet corn. Grandpa Bass said to my mother one evening, ―Mary, down in the city they think up here we‘re just hicks. They don‘t know what fun we have!‖
He told my mother, and she used to repeat it, of his brother coming back from death after a heart attack and saying, ―I seen ‗em all!‖ and he told his family whom he had seen who had died. He said, ―You have nothing to fear from death.‖