No one knows what went through Raymond’s mind the day he bought a ticket for a one way trip from San Francisco to San Diego on the coach. No one ever knew because no one ever cared enough to dig deeply into anything involving Raymond. When he showed up on the porch of my grandparents’ house, claiming to be an old friend of Mabel,Stover, her declaration of ‘I don’t know this man from Adam’ firmly slammed the door shut where his place in the Phelan world was concerned.
What occurred then was nothing short of extraordinary. My grandmother, being a very genteel woman with a proper upbringing, invited him to dinner in the same way she would have opened her door to any stranger coming from afar. Raymond therefore came to dinner.
Even as a child, I recognised how much class and occupation as well as other quite rigid judgements defined the world of my stepfather’s family. I knew that the Robinsons considered Vera had married own by marrying an Irishman. It was a family of strong women who surrounded the one surviving spouse in the person of Fred, and the precious single egg in the basket who was named after his father and thus a ‘Junior’ for over half his life.
Raymond, having been the driver of a coach, was a social embarrassment to Mabel. She could not acknowledge, let alone value his unswerving and heartfelt devotion. It was in fact a source of some shame.
As children, I do not recall that we ever protested against the rather shabby treatment Raymond received. He kept coming to the house, even after ‘Mimi’ gave him the coldest of cold shoulders. As genteel people, Vera was worn down by his daily presence at the dinner table to the point where she grudgingly invited him to a future family holiday or birthday. That represented a milestone for Raymond.
He must have been very lonely, craving the comfort of a family, even one that never really accepted him. The Phelans accepted my mother’s two daughters from her previous marriage instantly. We never were made conscious by them of the fact that we were not of their lineage. My mother, on the other hand, never was accepted completely. She was a divorced woman, after all. She ultimately had her revenge on the entire clan when, having oulived my stepfather, she was able to declare she had inherited five estates.
Meanwhile, Raymond rented a little flat in town, and made the pilgrimage to the house on the hill every day, often with a box of See’s pastels. I do not think they even make those now. They were similar to pastilles in shape, but basically were sugar. That was what the older generation liked best. I never really acquired a taste for them. I loved the Bordeaux and the California Brittle and the Butterscotch Squares. They may have had different names in those days, but I definitely was not excted by those pale pastilles that were very pretty but lacked flavour to some extent. As every one apart fom my immediate family kept their teeth in jars at night, I realise now that the Nuts and Chews would have been arduous for them to manage. As a child, I was not really at a point where I thought too much about the ‘whys and wherefores’ of life as Bilbo Baggins put it.
Anoher random memory that has nothing to do with Raymond specifically but definitely is related to See’s is the way my mother would commandeer any box given to any one in the family. She then ould take a small bite from every chocolate ultimately, consuming the ones shevliked, but leaving the others in the box. It was rodent behaviour really. I since have found Easter baskets with the chocolates that somehow were hidden in the grass or otherwise left behind, and at some point before the next Easter, the tiny teeth marks and nibbling of mice would be apparent. At best, some tiny creature probably would make countless stealthy raids to consume all of it, leaving only finely shredded foil and a few hard pellets in the place of the chocolate egg. It always makes m think of my mother and how she decimated a box of chocs.
Sad to say, I have nothing more to tell about poor Raymond. Wherpther he specifically named Mabel as his heir or simply died unmourned and unlocated by his family, his meagre possessions were absorbed into the Phelan estate. They included an old upright piano, which came to be known as Raymond’s piano and lived for decades then in Mildew Cottage. The estate includes five pianos and two organs. The title to most of them would be contested were it worth the effort. Poor Raymond’s Piano is of little value apart from being his one legacy to our world. The Steinway, hotly disputed, exists in a mutated condition as it had been converted into a player piano at one point, after which an attempt was made to return it to its original condition. Regrettably, that never will be entirely possible. Like the breaking of a girl’s hymen, evidence of the little box that was added and then removed forever altered its size.
No comments:
Post a Comment