Noon - An Autobiographical Sketch

NOON AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY KATHLEEN NORRIS GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE COMPANY 1925 COPYRIGHT, 19245 1925, BY KATHLEEN NORRIS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, W. T. First Edition TO TERESAS CHILDREN JIM, ROSE3S fi RY, ANT ICA THLEEN You were so tiny and she towered to Heaven Hove shall you ever measure her, how bind her, Unless our words some light through her are given, That, having lost her, you some day shall find her NOON AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH NOON AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH I FORTY years ago, in what was then Cali fornias largest city, a bank clerk upon the modest salary of three thousand dollars a year could enjoy almost all the luxuries of life. One such bank clerk, at thirty-five, owned a little seven-room brick house, with iron balconies and a deep garden, upon one of San Franciscos seven times seven hills, and could employ two good servants to keep his wife and his five first born children comfort able therein. These children had for their earliest memory the little iron balconies over the garden, and the garden itself, with its paths neatly outlined in white stone bottles, and the fresh salty tang of the sea, which lay i NOON at the bottom of the street, only a few blocks away. This was a simple day. Remembering the middle eighties, one remembers ones elders humming The Mikado, one remembers bustles, bonnets, tin bathtubs, smoky stoves, and much use for the word genteel. There was a general conviction that children should be repressed, silent, obedient, and industrious, and so we were perhaps, to the adult eye. But among ourselves for I was second in this group of five a busy sub-life went on. Myearliest recollection is of intrigue and plot. We murmured interminably together, we planned, discussed, dissected everything that went on about us. We liked or disliked, usually with violence, every caller, every casual pedlar at the gate, and we had a sort of club-life among ourselves. I was the oldest girl there was an older brother, always the object of a painful and intense idolatry, and after me a sister, not two full years younger, and then two smaller brothers. The youngest of these brothers was destined to leave us, in his third hand some sturdy little year, and much later there NOON were two more children, of whom my mother used to speak lovingly as her second family Lovingly that was my mothers word. She was a tall, silent woman, who would have been beautiful in her thirties and forties to day, but who was then quite content to fade into beaded mantles and close bonnets. She never thought of cold cream or face powder, she never had her magnificent masses of copper-red hair touched by any other hands than her own, in her life. She was quiet, even delicate, wrapped in her children, and in her music. What she felt for her children was an actually consuming devotion and concern. She built about us a world of love. Some times she would get all five of us as close to her knees as possible, or into her arms, and amuse us with the histories of her childhood, in the floods and quicksands of a pioneer cattle ranch, or she would tell us of our irre sistible charms in babyhood. She made us feel that of all wonderful achievements the acquiring of a family of small children was the most worth while. We idolized the baby brothers and the sister, in turn and I may 3 NOON say that every oneof us to this day so many worlds later has so far inherited her feeling as to become ecstatic upon the mere sight of a baby. My mother was extremely religious, and we were brought up strictly in her faith and my fathers the Roman Catholic Faith. But she was also practical in a way not common to such devotion, or perhaps my fathers sane and sunny common-sense worked upon hen From the earliest days I can remember she never permitted angry words in the house, arguing, or altercation...