THE WARFIELDS

FLORENCE MACNAUGHTON

“ ‘Twas the 18^th of April in ‘75/Hardly a man is now alive/Who remembers that famou date and year/The midnight ride of Paul Revere.” So Grandmother Florence MacNaughton Warfield made the claim that her birthday was the hundredth anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride. After she turned 90 she added back on the two years she had subtracted when she married Allen Warfield so that she would be 25 instead of 27 when she married him and not two years his senior. She was curious about the world, unashamedly snobbish, a good story teller (the Warfields all were) and good company.

Florence was the oldest of four sisters, most likely considered the clever one. Adele, the family beauty, died young. Jean, everyone’s favorite, married a doctor, Ed Harris, and moved to Snow Shoe, Pennsylvania. Jean and Ed were the parents of Father’s only first cousin, Ted Harris, who was older than Dad and his hero. Agnes, the fat disagreeable one, married a staid banker named Bremer Brown. (When Brown died it turned out he had a mistress, a huge shock to the family.) Grandmother outlived all her sisters and had in her possession four or five diamond engagement rings* we figured she must have acquired upon the demise of her sisters and cousins. She was a magnet for pretty or valuable things, an inveterate auction-goer. She never had a house of her own but when the last apartment of which she was the mistress was closed, the story went that there was enough antique furniture to outfit three households.

When I was a child she spent the winter with us and the summer with her daughter Jean and Jean’s friend Gladys at Shadow Lawn in Pepperell, Massachusetts, until Gladys died when I was fourteen. At our house her possessions were reduced to her jewelry and a box of photos, cards and letters under her bed. She promised her jewelry to each of us in turn, giving us much pleasure. We laughed hard when we realized that she had bequeathed it so many times. She made fabulous scrapbooks, one for each of us, from magazine pictures and greeting cards and all sorts of scraps, cutting ever so artfully with tiny German scissors. I assume that decoupage had been a hobby for girls in her youth and this was the source of her exquisite cutting skill. She was naturally acquisitive as I have said, and it was hard for her not to have space to pack things away. “Pack rat” was the term we used then rather than the harsher “hoarder.”   Still, the only time I saw my mother really lose her temper with Grandmother Warfield was when she sneaked an empty perfume bottle to Grandmother Litz as they parted after a visit. Mother blew her top at this wicked instance of enabling.

*My Aunt Jean gave me the pick of these rings when I married the first time. We had only been able to afford an aquamarine in a gold setting. Lee chose for me grandmother’s own ring, the best stone though not the largest. Jean was somewhat dismayed by this, having no way of knowing that Lee had spent chunks of his childhood browsing the Smithsonian collection of gems and minerals and knew how to judge diamonds with his keen naked eye. I lost this stone out of the ring while gardening and never wanted another diamond. I have had bad luck with rings, each a sad little story. Now I wear a copy of my 1961 American Academy of Athens ring, the original having been given to a marine in Hawaii by my beloved sister Philippa when she was at Maunaolu Junior College.   This was one of the many things in life we both felt equally bad about.

ALLEN ADGATE WARFIELD

“I picked a lemon in the garden of love where they told me only peaches grew.” That’s what Grandmother Florence MacNaughton Warfield said. (You can find this old music hall song on YouTube.)   It was the only outright admission we girls heard growing up that marriage could be just–bad. But of course the beginning wasn’t bad.

Wedding notice from Alexandria newspaper

Evidence of the romantic courtship: the sheet music to “The Road to Mandalay” and “Crossing the Bar” along with other parlor songs for baritones were to be found in our piano bench. Grandmother’s wedding ring was inscribed “Mizpah” (the Lord keep watch between me and thee when we are absent one from the other) as well as the date of the wedding. Allen was a travelling salesman for the Aetna Insurance Company so there were lots of absences. My father said that the first fourteen years of the marriage were happy. (Not sure how he calculated this number, but that’s what he said.) Aunt Jean was born in 1906 and my father Alan (“Buddy”) was born in 1915. By the time she was expecting him, Florence was not keen on having another child. She freely admitted to having jumped off chairs and done anything else she could think of to dislodge the baby. But once Buddy was there, he was adored by Florence and his big sister Jean.

But first, a bit more about the lemon, Allen Adgate Warfield. On the positive side, he was handsome, extremely well dressed, and funny. He was a graduate of Randolph-Macon College, majoring in German I think, and worked as a German translator during the First World War. I think his delivery must have been engaging because Jean and Dad would reminisce, about his catch phrases. “Remember how Papa would talk about getting a ‘great big enormous check’?” His humor—judging by the only two stories I know—was a bit confrontational. At a gas station, a woman was having trouble starting her car, and he asked her politely, “Madame, what causes that buck jumping?” As he well knew, only bad driving caused this automotive problem of the past. Another time he was on a train and a woman stared at him until he was moved to address her, “My, you’re looking well today.” He travelled with his own catsup and Worcestershire sauce because he faced so many boring meals on his travels.

You only need one fatal negative to be a lemon in the garden. Allen was a dipsomaniac alcoholic who would be dry and quite well behaved for months but once he started drinking he would not stop, sometimes, in later years, until he had to be hospitalized. When Buddy was born he was missing for three days. He was verbally cruel to my father when he was drunk, calling him Liver Lips and other nasty names, and swearing shockingly. He was exacting and demeaning to the little boy, making him shine his shoes perfectly and do other menial tasks. (I know how hurtful he could be because we received the echo of this behavior as we grew up. My Dad really knew how to devastate verbally.) At my parents’ engagement party my grandfather was so drunk he crawled across the lawn. Embarrassed and embarrassing he was a great trial and sorrow. But he supported the family and I think loved his children.   He worked at Aetna until he retired and my grandmother had a pension after he died (the Aetna Unremarried Widow’s Pension, which for some reason we all thought was amusing).

The marriage really went quite wrong. Alcohol was not the only issue. Florence was not domestic.   They lived in rooming houses for the early years and, after Jean was born, in apartments that weren’t quite big enough for all of them, arrangements involving screens and curtains across the living room to accommodate a bedroom. Sometime after Buddy was born Allen took up with the Widow Brown who lived across town and was always glad to see him, as Florence eventually was not. Both households knew about each other and there was communication when the ambulance had to be sent for Allen. Jean always said that if Florence had been willing to keep house for Allen he probably would not have had a mistress. My mother said that Florence was willing to do anything

–entertain children, converse, read aloud, play cards, darn socks—except housework. So there you are.

When they met at our house for Thanksgiving, Florence and Allen were quite unpleasant to each other in a quiet way, murmuring for instance, “My you’ve put on weight,” or “I don’t know how you manage to eat so much.” More of the family weight problem and weight obsession presently.

One story I know about this couple is that before they had Jean they had had another baby who died. This baby was laid out in a tiny coffin in the parlor and a beautiful little satin quilt was tucked in with it. Years later, according to Aunt Jean, Florence and Allen each told the story on the other that he/she had taken the quilt out before the coffin was closed because it was too nice to bury. Thus do disaffected partners make their accusations of callousness, greed, and pettiness. Probably neither remembered what really happened in their fog of grief and disappointment in each other.

Their housekeeping such as it was was distinctive. Allen kept a barrel of oysters on the balcony and it was Florence’s task to feed them corn meal to clean them. (Oh, I forgot, she could also make rice pudding.) Jean did the cooking by the time she was in her teens and she was undoubtedly the warmth that kept the little family going. (Allen’s mock grace at table was “God bless the four of us/Thank God there’s no more of us.”) Jean was an excellent cook and superb company. Anyone would rather hear her tell about a party than go themselves. When she was sixteen she was diagnosed with TB and sent to a sanatorium for nearly two years. She was the center of the family and everyone held their breath until she was “cured”. One of her lungs remained only partly functional.   She and Buddy slept on a sleeping porch year round after that, under down comforters in the cold damp Washington winters.

Papa Warfield was always good to me when I was a little girl, though I don’t really remember it, and my mother was very fond of him.   He had helped my parents get married by getting legal advice to speed a divorce my Dad needed in order to marry my mother. Dad had got a girl pregnant at college (Margaret, Chicago, that’s all I know) and married her. He quit school and started working as a soda jerk and saving money, taking it all very seriously. But when he went to visit her family in Chicago it turned out she wasn’t pregnant after all and hadn’t let her parents know she was married. She told Alan to “take care of it” and that was that. So when he met mother he was in the habit of dating girls only once or twice because he wasn’t “free.” Probably part straight arrow and part embarrassed to admit his mistake. Mother put a stop to that and neither of them was willing to wait three years for a divorce on the grounds of desertion, so Grandfather called a lawyer friend and did something to hurry the process. Mother was always grateful.

Papa Warfield had a series of small strokes in his sixties. One time when the doctor was called, by the time he came Papa was feeling better and announced that he was getting up and going to the races, which was what he liked to do best. The doctor left in a huff saying he “would not be responsible.” Jean pleaded with her father to “consider other people.” And Papa asked her quite seriously, “Who else is there to consider?” A sociable, lonely soul with an isolating problem. I think of his dipsomania often in relation to my own food addiction.