Mary S. Allen on Grandma Ruth

When my grandfather, Joseph William Alexander Stewart, D. D., became engaged to Miss Ruth Quinby, eyebrows escalated and Spode teacups clattered in Rochester parlors. A most incongruous couple, indeed: he, a ferociously handsome Baptist divinity school dean, coveted by literary circles, but hardly a society figure; she of the old Quinby family, daughter of the redoubtable Captain Quinby, who despite his millions considered small legacies adequate for the lifestyles of maiden daughters. But this had bothered Miss Ruth not a bit. She had organized a fashionable dancing school, clerical details handled by her sister, poor dear Carrie. But what about Miss Quinby's protegée, the orphan, Lois? What of her?

Even as a child I deduced this was a bizarre union. My first meeting with Grandma Ruth (called this to distinguish her from my recently deceased real grandmother, a frail saint, unpublished poetess, mother of seven) was at one of our family picnics.

All were clustered about this disturbing newcomer, a towering, black-clad, pink-orange-haired dowager, wearing a boned white net about her neck. After some brisk conversation and sharp opinions, she whipped out from the folds of her garments a cigarette, which she lit and puffed gleefully.

My grandfather, flinching, cackled, "Now, Ruth." But he was a bridegroom, after all, and this must have been exhilarating after a marriage to a saint.

Somehow, the marriage worked. Grandmother promptly adopted her ward, Lois, and shipped her off to a boarding school. Grandfather, who had herded six sons through college and nudged four of them into the ministry, was now ready to lead a more relaxed life. They gave little teas; he began to meet her more worldly friends. They read to each other from the great literary figures. He would even sip an occasional glass of port - for his health.

She abandoned the dancing school to manage his homes. In summer, he and Ruth would amass trunks, canned goods, and board trains and boats to Alderside, Dwight, Lake of Bays, his ancestral summer place in Canada. Grandma Ruth assumed enthusiastic command of activities there.

The ten bedrooms, built to accommodate the numerous Stewarts, were always teeming with assorted sons, grandchildren, cousins, friends, and Lottie, a sullen maid of all work from one of the backwoods lakes.

My father's legends of Dwight summers were to become real to me. One June day Grandma Ruth appeared at our house to pick up a brass oil lamp she was borrowing for Alderside. Grasping the lamp in one hand, she impulsively invited my sister, Helen, and me to spend the summer there. Our mother, impulsively, consented.

On a humid summer evening we stumbled off the Lake of Bays boat, plodded down the dirt road to Alderside, our baggage toted by an uncle drafted to escort us. Grandma Ruth met us on the wide Alderside verandah, looking tall as a church steeple, black skirt just clearing her high buttoned shoes. In the dutiful kiss exchange, I inhaled the scent of mothballs and old carpets, her and Alderside's distinctive fragrance.

My sister and I reveled in the tingling lake waters, the pine woods behind Alderside. We and our boy cousins became a noisy, unkempt tribe. But there were limits. Bedtime was at seven. Breakfast was at eight sharp -- around a long table where eggcups greeted all daily. Invariably my egg, however carefully tapped with a knife edge, slithered along my fingers.

Breakfast could not start until Grandma Ruth descended into the dining room. Often she was delayed by her morning ritual of washing her nightgown and hanging it on the back clothesline. If we so much as lifted a spoon before she appeared, she became incensed. "Rise and stand until I am seated," she would shout. We rose.

At breakfast work details were outlined. We children were sent to a farm for milk and vegetables, or to the spring for drinking water. But any hapless guest who had arrived in in a car could plan to spend a day trundling over dirt roads on Grandmother's hunts for second-hand furniture for Alderside.

One breakfast when my Uncle Hugh had completed details on a family fishing expedition up the Oxtongue River where the bass were biting, Grandma Ruth halted him. Before leaving we all must drag the rugs from our rooms, hang them on the clothesline and beat them clean. Glumly we obeyed. Uncle Hugh thumped his rug so vigorously that the entire clothesline collapsed, Grandmother's nightgown going down in the dust.

After breakfast all knelt for prayers of an hour's duration. How funny adults looked on their knees! At the final Amen Helen and I would burst out into the glorious air.

Grandma Ruth saw us only at meals. Her sister, poor dear Carrie, acted as our nursemaid. A pink-haired sparrow of a woman as childish as we, she would hide fairy gifts in trees for us to find. We loved her.

In midsummer, the ward, Lois, joined us, as she had been asked to leave Miss Case's camp for young ladies: She was sixteen and fascinating.

"I am not their daughter," she told us; "I am a bastard."

One afternoon when Aunt Carrie's back was turned, my sister and three boy cousins, under Lois's guidance, pranced nude in the pine woods. Lottie, the maid, spied this obscene ballet and whispered to Grandma Ruth about it. My sister was forced to kneel with Grandma Ruth for an hour of prayer. She cried all the next day, and for several days would avert her eyes when she passed one of her partners in crime.

At the Alderside gate, Carrie (left rear) and the
partners in crime: back row,
Gordon M. Stewart, Lois.
Front row: Mary, Harold Jr., Helen.

On Sundays Grandfather preached in the tiny white summer church near Alderside. His voice resounded across the lake. Grandmother Ruth would make her entrance in church, usually late, and kneel, with sharp creaking of pews and rustling of taffeta. The congregation, of a few summer people but mainly Dwight natives, would crane their necks to watch this un-Baptist ritual. She and Grandfather, whom they had labeled "the Doctor" gave them grist for conversations for their long, bitter winters.

When we held family parties in the boathouse, Grandma Ruth, her bony limbs articulating smoothly, would lead us through the Virginia reels. When we were engaged in digging a well next to Alderside one hot day, she suddenly appeared, dressed like a laborer, in overalls and a cap, shouting in an Italianate accent.

Most of the time, though, she spent in a spare room stitching remnants of rug material together for Alderside floors, remnants she had wheedled from the trustees of an abandoned backwoods church.

Even when Rochester friends drove in for dinner, food portions were meager, and we were warned that this mutton stew was to extend for the supper meal also. (One piece of such mutton stew was plucked from my constricted throat one noon by second cousin Ally Grafftey. Grandfather was discoursing on Coleridge that day, and no one else noticed my gasps).

Grandmother's dreams for Dwight as a thriving family complex materialized into three handsome cottages she designed and had built, and a tennis court, which cracked the following winter. The closest cottage was to be for Lois.

But Lois eloped at eighteen with a lackluster interior decorator; she died a year later in childbirth.

Around our table at home my parents, Helen and I disparaged Grandma Ruth for her audacity, and her foibles. When she was discovered floundering into the Genesee River in a park in Rochester one fall day, we were silenced by feelings of guilt. Indeed, she had only waded in; she had been rescued and for a while was sequestered in a private sanitarium, weeping for "My poor, dear Lois." A few months later she died.

My grandfather lived to be ninety-six. He died quite unexpectedly one spring afternoon of a heart attack. A brunette school headmistress had just left. They had been reading the poems of Keats together.

About Grandma Ruth