Moose photo credit: Myrabella / Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
In 1948, when I was 13 years old, my father, a petroleum engineer, was transferred from my native California to Houston. Neither Mama nor I had ever been to Houston, nor did we know much about it, only that it was in Texas, where there was lots of oil.
Each of the three of us approached Houston in our own frames of mind. Papa was angry but resigned. He had been promised a job in Los Angeles, with a promotion, but Jack, the man he was to replace, had decided at the last minute not to retire just yet and to stay on another year. The oil company ask Papa to be patient until Jack’s retirement, and they found Houston as a “parking place” for him for that one year. Papa, a devoted company man, accepted.
Mama looked on the move as an opportunity to start over again in a new community. She hated Hillsborough, the upper-middle-class suburb in northern California where we had been living for the last six years. She would eventually find other reasons to dislike Houston, but her complaint was first directed to Hillsborough. She’s say, “The people here are all snobs.”
“Not the Hammonds!” I protested.
The Hammonds were our next-door neighbors. They had two daughters, Kate, six months older than I, who had auburn hair that she wore loose around her shoulders, and Jane, six months younger, who had light brown hair, tightly braided, a style I would later copy. They became my best friends. I played with them almost every day, usually at their house, where the atmosphere presided over by Mrs. Hammond was warmer and more relaxed than the brittle atmosphere of our house created by my prim and cautious mother. Our mothers’ respective everyday dress styles personified the difference. Mama wore straight wool skirts, black or gray, with starched white blouses and cardigan sweaters, curiously red in color. Mrs. Hammond wore blue jeans and blue work shirts, perfect for the gardening she loved.
“Yes, the Hammonds are snobs,” Mama nonetheless declared. “They come from an old family in this area. Their family even had a Spanish land grant, and they certainly let people know about it.”
Mama’s judgment of the Hammonds made me furious. She felt they looked down at us because in addition to being an old family they were our landlords. They had never been snobbish with me. Kate and Jane were in the same public school, the same Girl Scout troop, even the same Sunday School class at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church as I. My parents liked to sleep in on Sunday mornings yet required me to attend Sunday school, which I didn’t mind since Mrs. Hammond drove me there along with Kate and Jane. I felt I knew the Hammonds a lot better than Mama did.
I liked joining their family. Mrs. Hammond was always kind to me, unexpectedly so. I came to feel more at home in their big old 19th-century house than I ever did in the modern house we rented from them next door. It seemed more lived in than ours. I even had a favorite room in their house, the den downstairs with the brick fireplace that they actually used. Over its mantle was a benevolent-looking stuffed moose head with antlers above our reach, but with a stiff little beard that hung down far enough for us to caress. The family called the room the Gun Room, because Mr. Hammond, who was a hunter, stored his hunting rifles there, in locked glass cases. Despite the guns, I thought this room was the friendliest in the house.
It was here that we girls ate the chocolate chip cookies we baked under Mrs. Hammond’s gentle supervision in the big family kitchen, in an old-fashioned oven on legs. We drank cambric tea, a nearly caffeine free brew containing a lot of hot milk and very little tea, but which we felt so grownup drinking.
One day, Mrs. Hammond said to me, “I know how much you love our old house. It is never locked, you can come in whenever you want, even when we are not here. Our home is yours.”
When she told me that, she made me feel a part of their family. So different from our own house, where Mama kept all the doors locked at all times, sometimes inadvertently locking me out, and where I had to keep quiet so as to nearly disappear when Mama took her naps.
I treasured that feeling of belonging at the Hammonds’. I went to their house often, even when no one was home, but I never abused the great privilege Mrs. Hammond had given me. I considered the parents’ bedroom off limits, spending the most time in the Gun Room, caressing the stiff little beard of the stuffed moose head.
I was so happy when Mama asked the Hammonds to be substitute godparents at my belated baptism in the Episcopal Church. I wished they could be for real. I never even got to know the Campbells, the godparents my parents had chosen for me. Mr. Campbell was in the oil business, like Papa, but with a different company. He was working outside the States, in Venezuela, and Mrs. Campbell was there with him. They never came to see me. For me, the Hammonds were my real godparents, and the Campbells were usurpers. I wanted to live next door to the Hammonds for the rest of my life.
Then my relationship with the Hammonds changed, abruptly. Once day after school in January, Mama summoned me to the master bedroom as she got up from a nap. She had something important to tell me. She did not beat around the bush.
“Papa has been transferred again,” she announced. “We will be moving away from here in June, right after school ends. We are moving to Houston, Texas.”
I was shocked speechless. I had never lived anywhere but California, and now we were going to a strange city in a strange state, where I didn’t know anybody, where I would be graduating from 8th grade the following spring, not with my friends, but at a different school with total strangers.
But Mama’s hardest blow was still to come. She told me, “Between now and June, you must tell no one we are moving.”
“Not even the Hammonds?”
“Especially not the Hammonds.”
“Why not the Hammonds?” I asked.
“Because they are our landlords, and they might ask us to leave before we are ready to go.”
“They would never do that!” I protested. “I know them too well to believe such a thing.”
Mama ignored my protest. She added, “We only stayed here as long as we did because of the war. I have always hated this suburb. Every time you tell me you want to stay here for the rest of your life, my heart sinks.” And she repeated her line about the town being full of snobs.
When Mama mentioned snobs, I thought of kind Mrs. Hammond in her blue jeans, digging in her flower garden, her hands getting dirty.
“Mrs. Hammond is not a snob,” I said quietly.
Mama said nothing.
I didn’t know what to do. I could not go on as if nothing had happened, I was too devastated. I was also very much afraid of Mama. What if, when I was playing with Kate and Jane, I accidentally blurted out my awful news? Mama would be furious. She would surely give me her worst punishment, a spanking with the tortoise shell back of her hairbrush. The tortoise shell was very hard, and those spankings really hurt.
After considerable agonizing, I decided to break off my friendship with Kate and Jane. I wept in my room just thinking about it, but I knew it was the only way I could keep the secret for Mama.
I stopped playing with Kate and Jane without telling them why. By doing that, I killed forever what should have been a lifetime friendship. I had betrayed them because I felt I had to obey my mother. But I was awash in guilt. The damage was irreparable. Kate and Jane were hurt. In June, when I could and did reveal the reason for my behavior, they simply walked away. I could not blame them. I was not a true friend. After we left Hillsborough, I never saw Kate or Jane again.
I did, however, visit Mrs. Hammond once, during a brief period when I was in college in Northern California, in 1954. The girls were away at their own colleges in the East, Mrs. Hammond told me, but she said little else about them. Instead, she talked about my other friend, the old house. I could see that it had been drastically remodeled in the seven years I’d been gone. My favorite room, the Gun Room, had been amputated. The moose head with the cute little beard that used to stroke was nowhere to be seen. The house now ended with the front hall. I couldn’t hide my dismay.
“I know you’re shocked by the changes in the house,” Mrs. Hammond said. “It had to be done. Kate and Jane are in college now, and that costs a lot of money, especially since they’re both going at the same time. We sold the back meadow, and the buyers have built a house on it. We had to tear down the gun room to make way for an access road for them. I know that room was your favorite. I’m sorry. I hope you can understand.”
I did understand. The Hammonds had fallen on hard times. I said, “You had to sacrifice one part of the old house to save the rest.”
“That’s it exactly,” she replied. “Thank you.”
When I returned to my dorm room at the university, I was glad my roommate was out. I lay down on my bunk bed and let my stricken heart weep out its pain of loss, until the last tear I had in me had been shed. And yet, I could not stop missing the warm and welcoming family atmosphere of the Old House, which was briefly mine, although never really mine at all.
© 2025, Alice Evleth
