Grannie & Grandpa [ part I]

Judith Palache Gregory in 2001

Notes by Judith Palache Gregory of her grandparents, Helen and Charles Palache, appear below.

Judith is a daughter of Mary Palache, Charles and Helen's second child.

Today she lives in New Hampshire, just a few miles from the Palache home in Jaffrey noted below.

4th D R A F T
Judith Palache Gregory 17 March 96

Grannie & Grandpa

Helen Markham Palache & Charles Palache  

Judith Palache Gregory

   My mother's parents came to Jaffrey, New Hampshire in 1910, looking for a summer place.  Someone [Mr. Poole] at the Ark, the inn they were staying at, told them that an old farm was to be sold at auction that morning, so they drove up the road and bought the farm that very day.  Grandpa (who, with his brother Whitney, had built the first tennis court in Berkeley, California) calculated with his skillful eye that a tennis court would just fit between the barn and the road.  The white farmhouse, built soon after the Revolutionary War, supposedly by a Hessian deserter, stands slightly back from the road across a lawn shaded by two enormous sugar maples.  The Diamond Match Co. had recently cleared off most of the pine on the property.

   Grandpa moved the carriage house and fitted it out for his sister Eliza. He set it on a ledge from which we look up to Mt. Monadnock and down into a stand of high white pines spared by the hurricane of 1938, which downed most of the other trees on the place that had grown up since 1910.  Just before the hurricane, the barn  was moved several hundred yards, placed on a new foundation, and inside turned into a sleeping loft for David and me, kitchen and bath and bedrooms below and half the barn wonderfully open to the beams and the roof.  A driveway enters the curtilage by the tennis court, snakes among the buildings and returns to the road below the barn.  My grandparents lived in the house, my family in the barn and my aunt Jenny and her family in the carriage house that we called the bungalow.

   So I knew my grandparents from my first year.  I suppose we met in Jaffrey when I was about four months old.  We have a short movie taken in Jaffrey in that summer of 1932, in which I am lying in a basket waving my arms and legs, and in one scene sitting up.  Grannie and Grandpa are shown among others on the lawn.  They were both 63 that year.  As well as during many summers in Jaffrey, I came to know them in their house in Cambridge, Massachusetts and—except for Grandpa's final years in Charlottesville, Virginia, rarely or never saw them elsewhere.  They  may have visited us in Chicago, but I don't remember it.  I believe they never came to the Vineyard, or maybe once.  Mother felt that Grannie was very jealous of our time at the Vineyard, and I heard Mother say that Grandpa disliked the ocean, though I never understood why.  If it was true, he is the only person I've ever known to feel that way.

	Main house at the Jaffrey, NH farm. Undated photo. Courtesy of Judith Palache Gregory.

     Grannie used to tell us she was born in cold water.  She was born in Coldwater, Michigan.  When her sister Jeannette set off for Radcliffe College (then called the Harvard Annex) and later when she herself came east to teach in Cambridge, I believe they were living in Atchison, Kansas.  I'm not certain; I know far less about the Markhams than about the Palaches.

      Grannie had an older sister, Alice, who eventually settled in Memphis, married to a man named Kavanaugh.  She used to come to New England frequently.  She brought us boxes of Pickaninny Peppermints, so we called her Peppermint Alice.  Mother told me she was in her youth so beautiful that people turned on the street to watch her go by.  She played poker as well as bridge, which impressed me tremendously when I was a child, for no one else in the family played poker at all.  My aunt Jeannette (whom I call Jenny or Jen) told me she always thought Kavanaugh was some sort of con man.

      I remember Mother's stories about Talbot, Alice's son, that he used to tease her, shut her once in a closet and once left her in a rowboat by herself with no oars.  His sister Marion was a good deal older than Mother and Jenny, who nevertheless felt close to her, for she spent long periods in Cambridge, first in their house at 6 Buckingham Place and then at 106 Appleton St.  She was courted by two men, one in Memphis and one (backed by Mother and Jenny) in Cambridge.  She rejected the Cambridge man, who offered her bread and butter, saying she wanted jam.  McKee played the cotton market at both ends, according to Mother, and gave my parents their wedding silver when the market—one end or the other—was up.  The story is that he drank himself to death in a hotel room, where his valet set up a bar for all comers.  Mother often said that Marion, who never drank at all, was gayer than anyone else at the party.

   Of the four McKee children I knew only the girls, Alice, a good deal older than us and Little Marion, who wrestled with David and me on the grass at Jenny and Russell's wedding on Labor Day in 1936.  We danced the Virginia Reel outdoors after the ceremony.  I remembered Little Marion—I had a crush on her—but I doubt if I ever saw her again.  Alice went to Radcliffe, and I believe she was with us in Jaffrey during the great hurricane of 1938.  My first political memory is of the grownups hearing some tense news of one of Hitler's agressive moves over the radio just before the power went out in the storm.  I can see Alice McKee sitting on the sofa.

   Grannie's other sister, Jeannette Markham Scudder, read about the Harvard Annex, I think in a newspaper in Kansas, and found someone to help her enroll and go east.  In order to support herself, she sought a job as a tutor or governess, and was hired by Col. T. W. Higginson to tutor his daughter.  He was so pleased with her work that he and his friends persuaded and enabled her to start a school, the Buckingham School (which still exists, merged with Brown & Nichols).  She soon asked her sister Helen to come east to join her.  Once a week they lowered all the desks in the big schoolroom through a hole in the floor and gave a dance, to which they invited the younger members of the Harvard faculty.  Grandpa was one of these, and he fell in love with Helen.  We have pictures of Helen and Jeannette and Charles and friends canoeing and picnicking along the Charles River, looking very jolly and very thoroughly dressed (maybe it was cold).

   Jeannette was director of Buckingham for some years, then married Winthrop Saltonstall Scudder.  (Mother told me he was once hired by Houghton Mifflin so they could use his name on their letterhead.)  They built a house at number four Willard St., backing on Longfellow Park.  Jeannette had no children.  She was an extremely important person in the lives of Mother and Jenny and their younger sister Alice.  She took them to art museums, read to them, bought them "drumlins" of ice cream, and of course founded the school they went to, though by their time she no longer taught there.  At Buckingham they learned much, poetry especially, and art—wonderful productions of Shakespeare with Miss King and Miss Coit, who later started a drama school in New York City.

   Aunt Jeannette had some eccentric habits.  She gave to the man who collected her trash a tepid decoction of cocoa shells, which he drank out of politeness.  She threw her house key (a small ribbon attached to it) into the lilac bushes when she left the house, and kept a ladder against an outside wall, a bucket hanging from it, so people would never think she was neglecting to wash the windows.  She always sounded to me like a delightful person, with much imagination, knowledge especially of the arts, and style. Uncle Winthrop remained a cipher.  I never knew either of them.

   My mother called her mother "notional," a snob, also a lover of parties, of gaity;  in my father's words, she was "the goddamnedest woman I ever knew."  In 1903, when my mother was an infant learning to crawl, the family took the train to California (they always said Mother "crawled to California").  Grannie had ordered fresh milk for the baby at regular stops all across the country.  Then she realized that they were leaving on a Friday; that would not do, and all the milk deliveries had to be rescheduled, I suppose by telegraph.  I hope Grandpa was amused.  He was almost certainly indulgent.

   Grannie was indulgent though not, in my memory, affectionate, with David and me when we were children.  She loved an excuse to give us money—a quarter in the toe of each of a pair of socks she'd knit for us, a penny for every ten nails we picked up after the barn was moved and renovated (nails covered the ground).  She hated snakes and once told us she'd pay us to kill the garter snakes that lived under the stone steps.  We found some old croquet mallets and waited by the steps for the snakes to come out and sun themselves.  We killed one and were about to throw it into the meadow when Grandpa saw us and told us never again to kill any snake anywhere.

   David and I would pick blueberries, then make rough signs of boards and paint to put up by the road to try to sell the berries; when a car approached and looked as if it might stop, we'd get scared and dive behind the wall.  Grannie always bought the berries from us.  She played croquet with us endlessly on the very rough and sloping front lawn.  She didn't actually cheat but she "shoved" occasionally.  I never saw Grandpa play; I wonder why he stopped.  They said he had more than once gone all around the course in one turn, starting fourth.  I never saw either of them play tennis, or drive, though I was told they used to do both.

   Grannie read to us, but I don't recall any of the books; I do remember her telling us that she wept reading Bob Son of Battle to herself, but I think she never read it to us.  She loved to play bridge, played a lot in Cambridge and when she could in Jaffrey.  She had a friend whose husband, Hector, had just died, yet in one hand she trumped her friend's ace triumphantly using her usual phrase, "That ace is as dead as Hector."  I have no sense whether   she felt shame on hearing herself say this, or not. She played rummy and mah jong with us, and later cribbage.

   Sometimes Grannie cooked, sometimes she hired a cook.  She made delicious penuche and always jam in the summer and brandied peaches.  Pushed into quart jars with as much sugar as could be fitted in, these peaches turned to brandy in the cellar over the winter, and made an unequalled sauce for ice cream.  Grannie had a notion that Mr. McCarthy, who sold them the farm in Jaffrey, had hung bottles of liquor in the walls, but she never found them.

   Her bedroom in Jaffrey was upstairs, one window looking west over the tennis court, two out through the maple trees toward the road.  I slept in her bedroom the night of the 1938 hurricane, for the barn was leaking and David and I had been escorted over to sleep in the house, and in the morning I woke to sunlight broken into rainbow colors through a prism on the window sill.

   Grannie and Grandpa sat at opposite ends of the table in the dining room. He carved and Grannie served the vegetables.    Someone would ask her for a few more peas, and she would hold up the spoon and with a comical air dribble a few peas onto the plate.  Grandpa would wince.  You could tell she was deliberately teasing him.  Grannie kept the coffee pot by her at breakfast, a pot with two connected glass globes that sat on an electric heater.  Firey red drops formed at the bottom when the water began to boil. The water then rose through a tube to the upper globe where the coffee grounds sat.  When the water floated the grounds, Grannie always lifted off the cover and stirred, stealing a glance at Grandpa, because of course you're not supposed to stir, but it was so tempting, and Grandpa could barely restrain himself and sometimes sputtered a bit.  I never knew him to get angry at her, but they certainly were different.