The first journal I ever kept was of the trip to Europe with Mama. “The historian,” Gramp used to say, “is superior to his class, inferior to his habits.” I don't suppose Mama ever felt she was making history, but her war against the British was a well-fought series of battles, except that instead of drums and cannon, we used a tzigane playing his Magyar fiddle-music and czardas, whom Gramp had found in a small eating place near the India docks below Limehouse Reach. He played louder than better.
Mama's war started when we got to London from our boat train. It was at a neat, over-aged hotel called Ormsbee Arms. From the window of our suite we could see St. Paul's and Old Bailey silhouetted against a dull, loosely hung sky. London smelled like a Long Islan horseshow.
Aunt Fran and I sat down, and Gramp went out to get a Schweppes lime… he said. Mama pulled off her gloves an looked around the sitting room of the suite, like a painter rejecting a soiled nude.
“Has it been aired since the Queen slept here?”
The manager said softly, “The Queen… bless 'er memory… she slept in the other wing.”
Aunt Fran yawned. “Show us that wing and we'll creep under it.”
“Hit's been pulled down,” said the manager, closing the door with him on the other side of it.
Mama took off her hat, brushed some soot from the end of my nose, and patte the clean handkerchief in my jacket pocket. “Now Stevie, just remember, the English are a great race and very strange.”
“Is Aunt Tillie strange, too?”
Mama called me a jughead and made me like down for an hour.
I suppose Aunt Tillie was the only one of us who ever spoke back to a king (“Be yourself,” she said to Edward, son of Victoria, on his yacht one day. “I never let a man with a beard kiss me before dinner.…”). Aunt Tillie ha been a great beauty, and everyone went around saying what a great shame it was that she had begun to fade at forty… or was it sixty? Her age was a Masonic secret.
She had also begun to wrinkle, crackle, creak, and sag. “Hell,” she used to say, smoking one of her little black cigars shaped like a cigarette, “there's plenty of life in the old girl yet… but who wants it? Nobody!”
Aunt Tillie was Gramp's youngest sister… and the only one at that time still alive. She had left home one night at the age of eighteen… dropped ten feet from her room into the arms of a stockbroker (who had not as yet been caught short a half a million dollars in customers' money). They went to Nice, where the stockbroker was run over by the first of the automobiles only a short time after he said, “The auto will never amount to anything.” Aunt Tillie found that the money hadn't lasted very well. She married a retired major of Bengal Horse and went to live with him somewhere below Southwark, where he had a villa. It didn't last. Aunt Tillie was a betting gal, and she went to see the Derby run one warm day and never went back to the Major. The Major claimed she had lost the address. Of course, we all knew Aunt Tillie had been read from the family circle—and that she was something in French that meant she was a lady of loose leisure, or something, an we always said we hadn't heard from her in years… as if she had started for the North Pole.
She was really very advanced for her times. She was arrested twice for asking for the vote, once she chained herself to the gates at Buckingham Palace an shouted, “Women are human, too, your Queenship! Give us the vote…!” (She got six months hard for that.) She was also the first white woman to tell Kipling he was a dreadful poet, and to buy a Monet painting. Then Aunt Tillie dropped from the public eye.
After Edward (who was son of the Queen) became king, she surprised us all by settling down and marrying a mil little man who imported cheese, and was very rich, and loved Aunt Tillie very much. Aunt Tillie went respectable with a bang… or without a bang… for she became very much the wife of a great importer and gave up almost all of her interesting habits. For fifteen years no one had heard of her.
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