A Gift of Light: From "Sweetheart," in Her Own Words and Pictures

By Paul Priest

Rachel Wyse was a light in the world. Some amazing experiences in youth, including the instantaneous healing of a violent toothache and an encounter with Jesus at her mother's deathbed, left her with a quiet sense of wonder and beauty in everything -- people, nature, art -- that lasted all her long life:1864 in Salem, Massachusetts, to 1958 in Charlottesville, Virginia. She brought up her four children in Toronto, and afterwards travelled in Europe, Canada, Alaska, Mexico (well into her eighties), and once (alone, at 75) round the world. She was writing and painting all the time, often hurriedly, to show her family what she was seeing and doing, yet always looking and listening for the inner beauty. When she painted a portrait, even a quick sketch, the eyes always looked thoughtful. A flash of crimson bougainvillea was a marvel, but so was the old stone wall it grew beside. She was always lighthearted, fun to be with, not given to preaching. A man who once interviewed her on the radio thought she was like "a bird poised for flight." The life inside kept sparkling through. We first put this book together for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as she certainly would have wished, for she was devoted to them; but she also thought of the whole world as her family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Oct 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781481780636

Paul Priest

My grandmother and I were great pals, since I was very small, up to her death when I was 27. She lived in Toronto and my family went to see her every summer; later she came to live with us in Charlottesville, VA, for about half of each year. But I have hardly written this book -- mostly assembled it from her own writings, with a minimum of connective tissue between. My mother helped gather the materials, and did a little of the writing, but she was growing old, and the organization of the project is mine. For most of my working life I have been a teacher at college level, and most of that in England, where I moved in 1972 with my English wife, whom I met in North Carolina where she was studying. I taught English literature at a teacher training college under the University of Leeds, which has since become independent. Now retired, I live in Leeds alone, my three children and their small children being spread over the country.

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© 2012 Paul Priest. All rights reserved.

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transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/4/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-7819-5 (sc)

978-1-4817-8063-6 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed

since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do

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Contents

A Public Moment

Daisy

The Days of Rice

Wondrous Comings And Goings

The Family In Toronto

To Paris!

Italy In 18 Days

England And Ireland

Round The World

Nanaimo Revisited, And On To Alaska

Mexico

Caribbean, Arctic, Mediterranean

A Legacy To My Children

Two Letters To Us

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Rachel Thayer Gavet Wyse (Sweetheart), age 28, wedding photograph

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John Francis Henry Wyse ( Chiee ). age 32

Dear Family and Friends,

For a long time we have wanted to put together for you a selection from the numerous letters, diaries and other writings, sketches, and paintings of our mother and grandmother, saved in boxes in closets, some now more than a hundred years old, but all so lively, so fresh, so young, they give us hope that those who never knew her may receive some shadow of her delightful influence; and that those who did know her may remember it again.

All her family and friends knew her real name was Sweetheart. The word meant her, before we learned its common meaning. Strangers picked it up, even deliverymen. No one used her proper name, Rachel, or her childhood name, Daisy. It started back in 1892, on her wedding trip up to Nanaimo in far northwestern Canada. Her Chinese servant, Jim, taught her the Chinese for sweetheart: summunchiee. She and her husband called each other Summunchiee. Soon her name became Sweetheart and his became Chiee, down the family forever. And it fitted her. Sweetheart wrote this book for her family. She wrote the first, third, and last chapters near the end of her life, for her descendants. The letters were all to family members, the sketches quick impressions to show the family what Taxco or Tonga were like. She loved her family passionately, and did not have a firm sense of where it stopped. Just inside the door of her house in Toronto hung an old Welsh door sign:

Hail, Guest! We ask not what thou art.

If Friend, we greet thee hand and heart.

If Stranger, such no longer be.

If Foe, our love shall conquer thee.

So if you are a stranger, it is for you too. Come join her larger family.

All her words and pictures express her delight in things and people and God. She loved light: sunlight in her painting, spiritual light in people. A postcard from Oslo begins, without any salutation, It is very thrilling all the time. This is the note of her whole life-a continual wonder and admiration, which also sees the ugly and distressing aspects but is not quenched by them. She was wise as well as innocent, and the experience that assailed and tempered her innocence began in early childhood… But she will tell you herself. Come, meet Sweetheart.

Charlottesville, VA

July 1999 Paul Priest Hartwell Priest

Thanks

-to our late niece/cousin Mowie for typing up the whole world cruise and the Alaskan and Norwegian trips, in about 1950, and beautifully copying many of the small sketches in the text. We worked from Mowie’s typescript for the world cruise, but had the originals for the other travels;

- to our living nephew/cousin Lawrie for very valuable information, reading, counsel and enthusiasm;

- to our nieces/cousins Betty and Nancy Anne for memories, counsel, and excitement;

- to Mowie’s daughter Teri for the same;

- to Lindsay Nolting for photographing the large watercolor paintings, in the garden in the sunshine;

- to Helen Priest for her support, her discernment, her creativity;

- to Betty Reynolds of the University of Virginia Copy Center for unfailing patience and cheer. Update:

The years since we first assembled this have sadly seen the deaths of Hartwell Priest in 2004, aged 103, and of my cousins Betty, Nancy Anne, Lawrie and Bruce. Of Sweetheart’s nine grandchildren only I and Frank Wyse are now left, and we are old men. The book goes forth to what she would have considered her larger family-whoever might catch her eye.

July 2012

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Prologue

A Public Moment

A lot of people met Sweetheart at once on May 23, 1949, when her granddaughter Betty Kynoch (now Van Aller), who was working in radio in New York, arranged to have her interviewed on a show called Mother Knows Best. We have a recording of it, one side at 78 rpm, and the voice indeed keeps enormous expressivity-light, almost birdlike, alert as a bird. Time and again you hear her cutting through the patronizing flattery of the interviewer, not by outwitting him, but by clear innocent truth. She is simply coming from somewhere else. The printed text is a pale shadow-we wish we could give you the recording with the book; still, this transcript may serve as a starter, as if you had your radio on-or heard her talking in a large room, before you could speak with her by yourself.

ANNOUNCER: Juan, here’s a great-grandmother who has made boats and trains her home and the world her back yard. Meet painter, sculptor, world traveller, Mrs. Rachel T. Wyse.

INTERVIEWER: Greetings, Mrs. Wyse. Now in order to give a picture of you to our audience, would you tell us-ah, approximately-your age?

SWEETHEART: I don’t think anybody lives long enough in this world to have any age. (laughter)

INT: Well, just approximately, ha ha, would you just tell us approximately-do you mind?

SW: I just don’t tell it. (laughter, applause) Not because I care a hoot-I don’t care a scrap. Only everybody would begin to plant all kinds of laws and limitations and regulations on me.

INT: Uh-huh-you just don’t want to be tied down.

SW: No-I want to be-foot-loose. (laughter)

INT: Well, I know one thing about you-you’re on the sunny side of something.

SW: There’s nothing but sunny side. (laughter)

NT: Sure. So do you travel the world all over by yourself?

SW: It’s about the safest thing you can do. (laughter) Safer than crossing streets in New York.

NT: It is. When you do light in one place, do you live with your grand-, or your greatgrandchildren?

SW: I live-I have my own home. INT: You would. (laughter)

SW: I go and see my children, but everyone has to live their own life. One has to in order to be a person.

NT: You know what? You’re the ruggedest individualist I’ve ever met in a long time.(laughter)

SW: I don’t know-it’s very funny ‘cause I don’t weigh much over a hundred. (loud laughter)

NT: Do you think-do you think the individualism sort of decreases with, ah, weight? SW: No-I guess people can have strong spirits. NT: Surely. Where did you grow up?

SW: I lived in New England. I lived in Salem, Massachusetts till I was nineteen. I’ve never been there to live since.

NT: Uh-huh. Did you always have the wanderlust?

SW: I came out in the Naval Academy-What did you say? (laughter)

NT: No, I’m wondering if you always had the wanderlust.

SW: No-perhaps-I didn’t know I had it. (laughter) I’ve just gone because I had the chance. Oh yes, I sometimes think it’d be nice to stay at home. Probably I’d get tired of it. (laughter)

INT: What’s the thing you look for when you’re, ah, gallivanting around the globe?

SW: I look for beauty-things of historical interest-and nice interesting people.

NT: Yes-What was the most beautiful thing that you remember seeing anywhere in the world?

SW: I don’t know-I think the thing I loved the very best was the Taj Mahal. INT: M-hm.

SW: I think that is the most spiritual thing that a man ever created. INT: Yes.

SW: But it looks as though poised for flight-just as though it would fly up and disappear any minute.

INT: Reminds us of you a little bit-poised for flight. (laughter) How do you communicate with these people you meet all over the world?

SW: There are signs-you don’t really have to talk.

INT: No-how do you approach them?

SW: You can meet, you can meet a great many people like that I had a very dear friend on the Tongan Islands when I was a little girl, and I never said a word to her in her own language or she to me.

INT: How did you do it? Tell us the secret.

SW: Main thing I found out was-after you’ve been a foreigner you find there aren’t any. Nobody’s a foreigner to me.

INT: Yes-

SW: They all seem like my own family. If you really feel like that, why people-they know it too. (prolonged applause)

INT: That is one very large thought, you know that? SW: Is it? (laughter)

INT: Well, to say that this has been a fascinating and enlightening talk would be a very very gross understatement, Mrs. Wyse.

SW: Well, you’re very kind.

INT: I’m not kind-I just love ya! (great applause)

SW: (through the applause) I love you-

Chapter One

Daisy

Late in life Sweetheart wrote out a few pages about her very earliest memories.

Until I was five years old I lived in the Fabens house on Lafayette Street in Salem, Mass. There were two Fabens houses-a long white one and our brown one, both with gardens right down to the beach, the ocean. I can remember being taken down there by Papa, and the rabbit hutch at the top of the garden. When I went there I was only a few weeks old. A little boy lived next door in the white house. He would become the father of Andy, who married Rachel, my eldest. Mama told me how Gussie his father brought him out in his high chair with his breakfast and put him on the bit of lawn beside the front door so that he would eat his breakfast better by having the pleasure of watching the horse cars go by.

On the other side lived Mr. Benjie Fabens. His wife came from French Guiana and spoke a sweetly broken English. She had a daughter named Adele, whom she had before she married Mr. Fabens, and a Fabens son, Louis. They were the most united family one could possibly imagine. They never failed to cheer and support anything that one of the others happened to say or do. And when one of them went anywhere for pleasure-they all went. Even if it were a walk, or a call on a neighbor, they would all go together. Louis was very fond of spending the evening in our house. But Mama said when she heard his voice she knew they would all be in the parlor when she came down. I loved him almost better than anybody in the world. Louis was the first word I said. And when, in a later year, I heard about someone who was blind and asked Mama what it meant and she explained, I cried, O dear, O dear, can’t they see Louis Fabens?

I remember the devoted old colored servant we had there, who called me honey chile. There were some little boys across Lafayette Street, older than I, who were sometimes rough with me I guess, for I remember well this large colored person appearing always to rescue me, to hold me safely and tenderly up in her arms. She always seemed to come when she was needed. I wish so much I could remember her name! I think it may have been Linda. I remember some bigger girls trying to play dolls with me. They wanted me to be their doll, but they were not large enough to carry a tiny child around. Linda rescued me.

I have one clear memory about my Aunt Marianna in that house. I had just had scarlet fever and had been allowed to be up for the first time, and was sitting in my own little rocking chair on a rug in front of Mama’s bureau. Aunt Marianna was telling me a story and doing some sort of sewing at the same time. And Linda came into the room and interrupted us, and I turned to her and said, Go right out! And shut the door! And I plainly remember Aunt Mamie dropping her work and leaning forward to tell me I should be so kind to poor Linda who loved me so much.

George Peabody lived on Lafayette Street at that time. He lived very modestly and never kept a carriage. When he needed any such thing, if there were no horse-car for the purpose, he always used Mr. Jelly’s cab. Mr. Jelly was one of the funny old Salem characters who lived long enough for me to remember him well. He had a white cab with a white horse. He was very popular with the old timers, but much laughed at by the younger crowd, which he did not condescend to notice. He met every train at the depot. His head was exactly like an egg, with not a hair on it. His eyes were a grey blue with all kinds of wrinkles at the corners, and indeed over most of his face. His cab might not have been exactly white, but it was definitely not any other color. When you sat on the back seat you were sitting on his money, and when you got out he lifted up the seat and made change for you.

One time a great dinner was given Mr. Peabody in Washington Square, and many notables from Boston and other cities attended. When George Peabody drove up to the doors of the mansion in Mr. Jelly cab, all the stylish turnouts were parked around that part of the square, and the other coachmen all hooted and jeered. And old Jelly looked around at them from his perch and called, Ye may laugh if ye like. But I have the biggest toad of the puddle.

But my happiest and keenest memories of those years lie around the visits I made every Saturday to Grandma and Grandpa Gavet. They lived down town, I think on Turner Street and Derby. It was one of the old, enormous, brick houses. There was a large parlor facing on Derby, the door of which was usually shut. The furniture was of mahogany, very heavy and forbidding looking. On one table was a tall gilt and white openwork fruit dish filled with apples and pears and grapes etc. of wax, which Grandma had made herself, and so perfect that I could never get tired of looking at them. Grandma’s mother, Grandma Clapp, came to visit every year from New York, but would not use the dangerous and noisy steam cars (railways had just come in), but came by stage coach.

Grandpa came home at noon always-and he always brought me something in his pocket, usually candy. I was always on the watch for him at a window beside Grandma’s sewing table. And when he came in and I ran to him, he always began a funny dance about the hall, very rhythmic and unpredictable. Sometimes he would hold the pocket of his overcoat open with one hand, to entice me, and the next moment be pirouetting at the opposite end of the hall. Sometimes I would climb the stairs a little way and reach through the banisters, hoping to grab him as he passed, but it never worked; I never could catch him. At the end he would stand perfectly still and hold his pocket open for me to fish into it and find what was mine all the time. In this memory he is so immense, that he seems well over six feet, six feet four perhaps, yet he was really a short man. He had a very large head with a shock of heavy black curls, going slightly grey.

Once he brought me some barley fishes. And since I knew the cook was frying some for dinner (for we had it at noon), I went into the kitchen and threw two of them into her frying pan. She didn’t see me do it, and was very puzzled later when the family complained of sugar in the fish, and I demanded my fishes.

After dinner Grandpa always lay down on a large sofa, put his handkerchief over his eyes and apparently went to sleep immediately. I was sent out to play in the large yard. Once I found a robin lying on the ground. I picked him up, and found he was cold. So very cold I couldn’t warm him, and I took him in the house and looked in the dining room, and there was Grandpa snoring away with an afghan over him. So I stole up very quietly and opened his coat a little very softly-and put the little, cold bird way, way in where it was so nice and warm-and left him and went out to play.

It seems that Grandpa had an abhorrence of touching fur-or feathers. It is hard to understand. It is a purely physical thing, because he was very good to animals, but simply could not bear to touch them. I remember this incident distinctly-because of the uproar he made when he woke up. So utterly unlike Grandpa, so kind and gentle and good.

Once when we went away for a week Grandma offered to keep my rabbit, and Grandpa fixed a sort of pen for it in the yard under the dining room window by the fireplace. One afternoon when Grandpa was there alone, a terrific downpour occurred. Grandpa was afraid the rabbit would drown or die from exposure, and since he could not carry him inside, he put on a raincoat-opened the window-and held a large umbrella over the rabbit until Grandma got back.

One Saturday my boy cousins were going coasting, and Lola, my little Spanish cousin, and I both cried about it because we wanted so much to go. Grandpa told us of course we could go coasting. He took us both out in the kitchen, took the long ironing board and stood it up against the kitchen table at a gentle angle. Then he put a pillow on the floor-and proceeded to pick us up and set us on the ironing board, by turns, until we had all the slides we wanted.

I can remember what probably was my first attempt at painting. Aunt Fannie bought me a box of colors and gave me a book, some old book of hers, to paint the pictures in it. They put something down on the large sofa, I remember, to protect it, and let me stand up to it, like a table, and paint, it being just the right height for me. The pictures in the book I can see now were very black looking-heavy and dark-and most had crowds of people. As I think of it-I imagine it as a history textbook with pictures of battles-or meetings of legislative bodies. Small as I was, I felt the impulse to brighten them up so I could see them better. I remember taking the brush, which was large, and smearing this battle scene with blue paint. This made it very much worse-I could now hardly see the men. It was discouraging. But looking at the paints I saw a red, and that certainly was bright, So I pushed a great deal on the brush and rubbed it onto the other paint-and this made it all mud-you could see nothing.

The family didn’t know enough about paints to give me a sheet of white paper. It is funny how even today I can remember my baffled disappointment and frustration.

One day I stood at my favorite window where I watched for Grandpa, watching the children playing on the other side of the street. I was never allowed to go out and play with them, and I envied them. One little girl was wheeling her doll’s carriage up and down with a doll in it that seemed to me very beautiful, and she brought it to the window to let me look at it. The doll wore a kind of scarf that was fastened down in front with a real gold pin with a large blue stone in it, that had the face of a woman on it. It was to me the most elegant pin I had ever seen-and for a doll!!

She finally told me that it had come from a popcorn package you could buy at a shop around the corner, Aunt Fannie came into the conversation-and when she heard about it, said I should have a popcorn package. I remember how thrilled I was when Aunt Fannie put on my things and we set out. I distinctly remember that when we bought the package, though I was trembling with excitement, we brought it home unopened-perhaps I was too overawed-and then I broke the top and offered Grandpa and Grandma and Aunt Fannie some, and they took some. Aunt Fannie said, Shake it all out on this plate and get your pin. So I shook it all out-and at the very bottom there fell out-a big black pin!! It had a round green head-something like a hatpin. I stared at it, not believing my eyes-and then ran away and cried as though I would break my heart, and they couldn’t console me at all by offers of another bag of popcorn-I was inconsolable. It was not just disappointment-which could be remedied. It was worse than that-much worse! I had never been deceived before. It was something so awful, so hard and cruel, I shrank from another popcorn package. It was deep grief.

When Grandma and Grandpa came to dinner at our house, and I had been put to bed, I remember staying awake for Grandpa to come upstairs and lie down on Mama’s and Papa’s bed, which was beside mine. He would put his hand through the bars of my crib, and then we went to sleep together.

In those years before I was five, Mama took me up to Oxford, New Hampshire for the summer, where Papa joined us for his vacation. Oxford was just across the river from Fairley, Vermont, which stood at the foot of Fairley Mountain. There was a covered bridge over the river to Oxford. It will always be to me one of the loveliest spots in the world, The best houses of the village were all along a high ridge above the village street, and between them were lanes, with a picket fence all the way to the top. The lanes to a child were quite long, and very sandy-a lovely pinkish-white and very dry sand that I loved to handle and play in. Mama bought me spoons and plates and covered boxes-all of tin, for me to play in the deep sand.

At one of the Willard houses I remember finding once a big litter of baby pigs. They were just born and very small. Cousin Everett promised me that when they were a few days older I should have one to play with. I went there with my doll’s carriage and dressed the baby pig in a blue doll’s cape with a bonnet tied under his chin, and had him for my own for weeks-with much joy. But what I liked best were the lambs, I spent a great deal of time with them. Uncle Henry used to let me feed them salt. I stayed in that field so much, playing with them, that he finally gave me one for my very own. I loved it with all my heart, and really believed that it loved me. I have never really forgotten the grief I suffered when I was not allowed to carry it home. For all my life I have looked for some opportunity to own a lamb.

And once when I was very little we must have stayed very late at Oxford, for at Halloween the Silver boys had great yellow pumpkins, with eyes and nose cut out and a candle inside, stuck up on poles. I was so thrilled and full of half-fearful excitement that they finally made me one. When it got dark, they were planning to go out and scare the world, and I was to go to bed. But the boys put up such a manful fight for me, promising to keep hold of my hand and take care of me, that finally Mama, knowing Louis’ trustworthy devotion to me, relented and let me go. My little pumpkin was nailed on to the end of a long stick-and Louis took my hand tight and proceeded to open the little white picket gate that led from Uncle Willard’s grounds to the lane between him and the doctor’s. It got dark. I had never been out after dark. The doctor’s house with lighted windows looked quite terrible. I had never seen them like that before and I can distinctly remember the awe of it. The boys held their pumpkins to the windows to scare ‘em none of the shades being drawn. That was not the custom in Oxford. It was the first real adventure of my life and I certainly remember it vividly. I and my stick were much too short to reach up to even those first storey windows. But I was perfectly satisfied to have my escorts do it, and bask in a reflection of their glory. It was quite enough to be there, to have that honor and hold on tight to Louis’ hand.

Hartwell writes:

In her house in Salem, the window of Sweetheart’s room opened onto the flat roof of the kitchen. The branches of Grandpa’s pear trees hung over the roof, and when she climbed out on the roof she could reach the ripe pears. One day when her friend Louis from next door had come to play with her, the cook sent him home for some reason or other; whatever it was, it did not seem justifiable to Sweetheart, and she was very incensed. She felt she had to punish the cook. She happened to have a large pear in her hand and the stove chimney was nearby. Just the thing! She tossed the pear down the chimney with real satisfaction. At this moment of wicked glee, a large bee stung her on the forehead. Oh, oh, she was being punished! And she deserved it. She never forgot her humiliation.

During the summers, when Daisy was seven or eight, she and her brother Louis were taken to a farm in Oxford, New Hampshire, where they enjoyed the animals and the fun of being in the country. They particularly loved the chickens and turkeys and geese and the wonderful experience of seeing young calves and colts. At summer’s end, back at school, Daisy was asked to tell the class about her summer. She told them she had carried a calf upstairs to show it to her mother. The teacher interrupted to say this was not possible.