Guardian Angel

I remember when I married my first wife her descriptions of living with her mother and father.  She was an only child, born to older parents with whom she had a kind of peer relationship in the sense of the three of them thinking of themselves as a team of three confronting the world.  It made her secure in a way it took me a long time to decipher; she was never worried about directives from on high, inexplicable mood changes from which she was so distant that they came as a complete surprise.  I was one of six living in a house of many rooms, peopled with not only my siblings but nannies and maids, cooks and cleaning persons supplemented by those who came in by the day.  Somewhere in the front of the house in the bedroom that had been my father's resided my mother, the nerve center of the entire operation, to whom these people reported, to whom we were brought daily in the afternoon for a salutation.  She occupied my father's bedroom because he was gone, killed in an automobile accident; his bedroom, his throne, there she was, the widow.  It was a household in which one could get overlooked; one of my older sisters attributes her good nature, her easy going manner, to the fact that, as she describes it, being "lost in the crowd."  As one of the youngest I was easy to dismiss and forget, and yet I was the second born male, if the fifth child, born to parents who valorized men as the makers and shakers for an audience of women.  Soon enough Daddy was gone, and I doubt that mother knew what to do with me.  Certainly no one threw the ball with me, no one took him fishing or horseback riding as my father was said to have done for my brother seven year older than I.  It wasn't much of a stretch for me to turn into a precious little sissy fruitcake.  They say I was darling, already at that tender age, witty and bright.  Seen from a different angle I could have been labeled obnoxious, and looking back I can see that this indeed was no doubt the verdict of several parents of children with whom mother approved my playing.  But I had a grown up friend and supporter.  As I spend my days now packing up this Massachusetts household for the move to Florida I have been organizing my things to put in boxes and come up with such treasured memorabilia.  They were all gifts of a woman named Lois Blanche Corder.  She  had been my father's surgical nurse, and as he advanced to the Head of Surgery at the University Hospital she became Dean of the Nursing School.  She lived in an apartment in the University complex to which she often invited me for dinner all by myself, picking me up and driving to her place, when I was perhaps in the range of nine to twelve years of age.  Unlike our house which, although grand enough, had the well worn look of a place through which so many passed on a daily basis, her rooms were elegant, smart, every object in them a well thought out aesthetic pleasure, the table linens fresh and crisp, the table service impeccable.  That is how she surrounded me on my visits to her dinner table; we did not talk of books and ideas at table; we talked of fine things, their provenance, their workmanship.  And she gave me gifts that seventy years later I still possess, which turning over in my hands now, makes me remember her, a small pewter letter opener, shaped like a Florentine dagger, with a stylized plume as the element grasped by the hand, a small leather box somewhere between red and brown, tooled with gold leaf, lined in brown silk, into which I was to place my "valuables"--I can remember her telling me this.  It still holds a number of my father's cuff links for evening dress, and the studs, and then from the sixties some sets of earrings for pierced ears only one of which I wore.  In addition she gave me a small metal serving dish, again pewter with a gold rim, with an elaborate Ottoman design.  What was a child to do with this?  I set it on a table, always on display, empty and useless other than providing the pleasure that good looking objects always inspire.  That I have no doubt was exactly what she wanted--that I have these objects of beauty at hand, that my inherent preciosity be nurtured and encouraged.  God bless her, I hope that she can handle that I have used the Ottoman serving dish in my kitchen as the place for heads of fresh garlic.  And thus I think of her every day, have done so for the past seven decades.