Tabitha Wheelwright Quotes

“Whether she died that quickly, I don’t know; but she was dead by the time Mr. Chickering reached her. He was the first one to her. He lifted her head, then turned her face to a slightly more comfortable position; someone said later that he closed her eyes before he let her head rest back on the ground. I remember that he pulled the skirt of her dress down—it was as high as midthigh—and he pinched her knees together.”

“The crack of the bat was so unusually sharp and loud for a Little League game that the noise captured even my mother’s wandering attention. She turned her head toward home plate—I guess, to see who had hit such a shot—and the ball struck her left temple, spinning her so quickly that one of her high heels broke and she fell forward, facing the stands, her knees splayed apart, her face hitting the ground first because her hands never moved from her sides (not even to break her fall), which later gave rise to the speculation that she was dead before she touched the earth.”

“My mother stopped the car and hugged him, and kissed him, and told him he was always welcome to come with us, anywhere we went; and I rather awkwardly put my arm around him, and we just sat that way in the car, until he had composed himself sufficiently for his return to 80 Front Street, where he marched in the back door, past Lydia’s room and the maids fussing in the kitchen, up the back stairs past the maids’ rooms, to my room and my bathroom, where he closed himself in and drew a deep bath. He handed me his sodden clothes, and I brought the clothes to the maids, who began their work on them.”

“What does he do, Tabitha?” my grandmother asked. That was a Wheelwright thing to ask. In my grandmother’s opinion, what one “did” was related to where one’s family “came from”—she always hoped it was from England, and in the seventeenth century. And the short list of things that my grandmother approved of “doing” was no less specific than seventeenth-century England.”