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JessieNovember 21, 2009 Another one from To Be Rather Than to Seem. It's a companion piece to the one I posted about my paternal grandmother on November 13. Two more companion pieces are in the works, one about my uncles and one about Grandma's house. Jessie was the only adult we were allowed to call by her first name. In the decades since, the rules of etiquette have relaxed, or perhaps the whole concept has unraveled, but where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, any adult who wasn't an aunt or uncle was Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So. Adults often called other adults Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So, especially in formal or business settings, unless they gave each other leave to use their first names. My mother called the garbage man Mr. Lingley. (I called him Stubby the Cucumber, for reasons I can't remember, but never to his face.) Jessie, however, was Jessie. No one called her Mrs. Webber. Jessie had been my grandmother's cook and housekeeper since my father and uncles were boys. My family and my uncle Nat's -- his wife, Cathy, and their daughters, our only first cousins, Christine and Jojo -- were often at Grandma's for Sunday and holiday dinners. These occasions tended to be stiff, with us kids in dressy clothes and on our best behavior. For relief we escaped to the spacious country-style kitchen where Jessie presided. She was as warm and welcoming as Grandma was cool and circumspect, and she'd often let us help out or lick a spoon or eggbeater thickly coated with whatever we were having for dessert. On rare occasions her husband, Frank, would be sitting at the kitchen table. Frank was a sailor, so he was away a lot. He was the only man I knew with tattoos. In the dining room, however, formality ruled. Grandma sat at one end of the table, her back to the tall windows that looked over the front lawn toward South Avenue, serving vegetables and other side dishes. My father, at the other end, carved the roast beef or turkey, chicken or lamb. Jessie, in what I long thought was a nurse's white uniform, came around at intervals, serving dinner rolls or refilling water glasses, always starting with my grandmother and moving counterclockwise around the table. The Jessie who brought food to the table, took empty plates away, and occasionally retrieved a dropped napkin was not the Jessie we hung out with in the kitchen. From watching the adults, I figured out that we were supposed to act as if Jessie weren't there, as if the rolls and water were serving themselves, as if the plates and bowls were vanishing like magic. We might murmur "please" or "thank you," but that was it. According to both my parents, Jessie pretty much raised my father and his two brothers. Neither Grandma nor my grandfather Sturgis, who died seven years before I was born, was parentally inclined. For their time and place this was not unusual: the children of New England's WASP upper crust were often raised, in whole or in part, by "help." Grandma's house had "servant's quarters," two small bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor that were accessed by stairs from the kitchen. Jessie lived there while Dad and my uncles were growing up, and during my childhood she sometimes spent the night there rather than drive back to her central Massachusetts home after a dinner party or other evening social occasion. The family's bedrooms -- five altogether, including the master bedroom and the guest room -- all opened onto a broad carpeted hall that overlooked the landing of the main staircase. The door to the left of my Uncle Neville's room opened into the servant's quarters. That door was always closed. It was easy to forget there was anything on the other side of it. As children, though, we could pass from one world to the other without activating any internal alarms. The stairs that led up from the kitchen to the servant's quarters were the next best thing to a secret staircase and a fine place to hide or elude pursuers. Mounted high on the kitchen wall was a call box. If someone elsewhere in the house pressed a buzzer, a bell would ring and the location of the call would pop up in the window. If I stood on a chair, I could read the little labels, with "parlor," "dining room," "master bedroom," and so on printed on them in cursive script. By the time I came along, the buzzers were rarely used except by us kids in our games; some of them no longer worked, and if we got too annoying we were told to knock it off. When the adults wanted anything from the kitchen, they'd come get it themselves or send an available child to let Jessie know that more coffee was needed in the living room. But it was not hard to imagine earlier decades in the life of the house, when host or hostess might discreetly press a buzzer and have Jessie or an assistant appear out of nowhere to fulfill any request. Jessie was the only adult we were allowed to call by her first name, and the only adult we were expected, on certain occasions, to pretend wasn't there. Things were rarely explained in my family, and this one I couldn't figure out for myself. When I was about nine, maybe a little younger, maybe a little older, I started sassing Jessie at every opportunity. I talked back, ignored her requests, called her names, and generally acted like a spoiled brat. I didn't treat relatives, teachers, scout leaders, room mothers, or anyone else like that: I knew for a fact that I'd never get away with it. With Jessie I didn't know what I could get away with. I wanted to find out what the limits were. Jessie didn't say anything, but my father did. He took me aside and told me my behavior was unacceptable; Jessie was part of the family and I better start treating her that way. Whether Jessie mentioned my rudeness to him or he noticed it for himself, I never knew. It didn't matter. I shaped up. Sometimes we pick our issues. More often, I suspect, our issues pick us. Class has been one of mine all my adult life. This was my introduction.
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