Upper Bohemia by Hayden Herrera

Author:Hayden Herrera [Herrera, Hayden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

Afternoon tea was a formal event for Gaga. She sat in the middle of the sofa with the tea tray set on the low table right in front of her. She wore one of two tea gowns, one red, one blue, both full-length and made of soft silk velvet. After letting the Hu-Kwa tea steep, she would pour us each a cup to which she added milk and a lump of sugar. The best thing on the tea tray was the cupcakes with vanilla frosting that Bessie made fresh every day. Almost as good was the thinly sliced white bread spread with butter. At teatime the slices of bread were laid out on a plate in an overlapping row. You picked one up and folded it into four and put it on your small plate. Sinking my teeth into the buttered layers was an immense pleasure. Hoping no one would notice how greedy I was, I took at least three slices.

Bessie showed me how she sliced the bread on a circular blade attached to a kitchen counter—a dangerous-looking machine that we were warned never to touch. Sometimes I went with Bessie to buy this bread at the bakery a few blocks away on Linnaean Street. She would also buy a newspaper and give me the page with the funnies. On weekends we were allowed to visit Bessie and Annie on the third floor. Their bedrooms had low, slanted ceilings and their beds had iron headboards painted white. Annie taught us how to knit. The hardest part was putting the first row of wool onto the knitting needle. I loved the click and then the sliding noise when I put a needle into an existing stich. As my ball of wool became a scarf, I marveled: I had actually made something!

After tea Gaga read to us. Her favorites were Kipling’s Jungle Books and what she called the “Lobster Books,” which had stories about lobsters living at the bottom of the sea. Sometimes Gaga had guests for tea, mostly men. Like my father, Gaga was a brilliant flirt. She was brought up that it was good manners to make other people feel they were delightful. Her intelligence, wit, and her charming dimple drew people to her. A frequent guest was the poet Archibald MacLeish, who had just started teaching at Harvard. He was so distinguished looking that I didn’t dare open my mouth. In any case, in those days everyone told us that “Children are to be seen and not heard.” So, it was okay to be shy. Another formidable Harvard professor who came to tea was the lawyer Archibald Cox, who twenty-three years later was appointed special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal and whose firing by President Nixon became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Arthur Schlesinger, then an associate professor of history at Harvard, came at least once, and there was a man named Mark De Wolfe Howe, a Harvard Law School professor who was Gaga’s close, close friend.

Mr. Howe had three daughters.

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