Now I am writing these things just as I was told them by my grandmother.
For I have utterly no remembrance of my mother. Consumption ran in her
family. And bearing and giving birth to me woke the inherited weakness
in her. She was not even strong enough to suckle me.
* * * * *
I was born in the early eighties, in Mornington, Ohio, in a section of
that great, steel-manufacturing city which was neither city, suburb, nor
country,--but a muddy, green-splashed, murky mixture of all three.
* * * * *
They told me, when I was old enough to understand, that my mother was
English, that her folks lived in Cleveland and owned a millinery and
drygoods store there ... and that my father met my mother one day in
Mornington. She was visiting an uncle who ran a candy store on Main
Street, and, she girl-like, laughed and stood behind the counter, ready
for a flirtation....
My father was young, too. And he was employed there in the store,
apprenticed to the candy-maker's trade. And, on this day, as he passed
through, carrying a trayful of fresh-dipped chocolates, he winked at my
mother and joked with her in an impudent way ... and she rebuffed him,
not really meaning a rebuff, of course ... and he startled her by
pulling off his hat and grotesquely showing himself to be entirely bald
... for he had grown bald very young--at the age of sixteen ... both
because of scarlet fever, and because baldness for the men ran in his
family ... and he was tall, and dark, and walked with rather a military
carriage.
* * * * *