Ancestors (21 page)

My Grandfather Blinn won the case, who didn’t need to win it. My Grandfather Maxwell, as I have said, was on the opposite side. My father used to say that it was the first case my Grandfather Maxwell ever had where the fee was substantial, that the part he took in the trial considerably enhanced his reputation, and that if he had continued to be Miss Jessie Gillett’s legal advisor he would no longer have worried about the bill from Boyd’s Dry Goods Store.

Instead, his health broke down. Other lawyers attended
to Miss Gillett’s legal affairs, and my grandfather spent the remaining year or two of his life in and out of bed.

Because of my grandfather’s failing health—so intricately are the strands of human life woven together—Professor Hieronymous met with his comeuppance. Given though the Disciples were to arguing among themselves, there was one principle that was held by all Campbellite preachers and teachers to be self-evident and never disputed—namely, that they should never put up at a hotel if there was anywhere else that would take them in. One evening a year or so after my father had withdrawn from college, Professor Hieronymous turned up, at dinner time. He was fed and stayed on, waiting to be asked to spend the night. My grandfather was upstairs in bed, ill. My grandmother and my Aunt Maybel could not invite the professor to stay because it was my father’s place, as acting head of the family, to do this. At nine o’clock they excused themselves and retired, while my father sat up with the guest. Professor Hieronymous talked on and on pleasantly, and my father listened. At eleven o’clock, thinking to force my father’s hand, he stood up and said, “I guess I’d better go to a hotel,” and my father said, “I think so too.” The satisfaction of this moment stayed with him, undiluted, for sixty years.

When my father came home from work he went straight up to my grandfather’s bedroom and had his supper there, while he poured out all that had happened to him during the day. And during one of the periods when my grandfather was not confined to his bed, he allowed my father to persuade him to enter a saloon and, with his foot on the brass rail, drink a glass of beer. It is hard to see how love could go any farther.

“Father never saw me until Charlie died,” my father remarked once, without bitterness, merely as a statement of fact. But I wonder if it was a fact. What seems more likely is that my grandfather saw him quite plainly, and didn’t approve of what he saw. He could not have failed to see that my father was never going to be a faithful tiller in the Lord’s Vineyard. What he actually was—an upright man—may not at that point have been quite so apparent.

My father was promised a good violin if he didn’t smoke until he was eighteen—I assume in the belief that he would then be old enough to see the folly of nicotine and abstain from all forms of tobacco. No sooner was the instrument put in his hands, on his eighteenth birthday, than he took up smoking. Cigars and cigarettes and a pipe. My grandmother never got over this disappointment, and felt—quite unfairly—that my father had not kept his end of the bargain. But in any case they had lost him. And must in all likelihood have refused to recognize this at first, until a sufficient number of family arguments made it clear that my father was going to go his own way, smoke, drink, play cards, and do whatever he pleased on Sunday. He delighted in the company of women. He was not a skirt chaser, any more than he was a gambler, but how was my grandfather to know that? He had not been able to prevent his favorite daughter from throwing her life away by a bad marriage. He may have been expecting my father to do something equally damaging to his future, and, as they all set out for Sunday morning worship, have viewed with a sinking heart the angle of that derby hat and the dandified cut of my father’s clothes.

What he should have noticed (and I dare say he did) was my father’s attitude toward money. My father used to tell me solemnly how my grandfather said to him, “If you’ll just put aside a little money whenever you can until you’ve saved up a thousand dollars, you’ll never be without money the rest of your life.” Then my father would add, “And I
did manage to save a thousand dollars, and I’ve never been without money since.”

At what point, I have often asked myself, did money—that is to say, money in the bank, money invested in stocks and bonds, for they never thought in terms of extravagant living—become so real to them all? And why? And was it true of other Middle Western families as well? Was it the period? Or was it the inevitable consequence of my grandparents’ moving to town? I think of John England, who fell asleep the minute people began to talk about money. To him it was an object of no value. You couldn’t plant it. The rain didn’t rain on it. You couldn’t harvest it or watch it ripen. It was a dead thing and what interested him was life. Eternal life. I find it a terribly strange—and terrible—fact that the only words of my grandfather which my father ever quoted to me—his testament, so to speak—were not about faith or honor or truthfulness or compassion for other human beings but about saving money.

“All the Maxwells die young,” my grandmother used to say. She could have said, with just as much reason, “All the Maxwells live to a great age.” They did one or the other.

My Grandfather Maxwell was taken ill in Galveston, Texas, where he had gone on business. He wired my father to come immediately. There was a train that night, but it was evening when the telegram was delivered, the banks and stores were closed, and in those days nobody kept a hundred dollars in the house. My father went downtown, to Tim Hardin’s saloon, and showed him the wire, and Tim Hardin, knowing what the Christian church and my Grandfather Maxwell thought of saloonkeepers, nevertheless gave my father the money he needed to get my grandfather home.

In this final stage of his illness, my grandfather suffered excruciating pain whenever he put his feet to the floor and tried to stand. I have been told that it is a classical symptom of a nervous breakdown. My Aunt Maybel was married and living in Omaha, but during the last three months of my grandfather’s life she was at home helping my grandmother care for him. He was fifty-four years old when he died, on the third of January, 1904.

The obituary notices of the period were both more emotional and more graphic than anything we are accustomed to, and grammar and syntax here and there gave way under the strain. My grandfather’s obituary tells exactly how he died. “Although Mr. Maxwell had been a constant sufferer
from a complication of troubles for more than one year past, and although up to a few weeks ago his condition was such as to alarm his family and friends, he showed a decided change for the better and had been in fairly good condition until the last few days, when he was seized with an attack of the grip. He had improved to such an extent recently that all arrangements were completed for he and Mrs. Maxwell to go south with the hope of a complete recovery. On last Sunday he was feeling badly the largest part of the day, and seemed to want his wife close to him. In the evening he was taken with a violent spell of coughing and called to his wife to lie down on the bed beside him. He arose with nausea in his stomach, and after vomiting he fell into his wife’s arms, who at first thought he had simply fainted, but the bursting of the blood vessel resulted in instant and painless death.”

Underneath the clipping, in my grandmother’s scrap-book, is pasted this five-line notice: “The public schools will be dismissed Wednesday afternoon that the teachers may attend the funeral of the late Hon. R. C. Maxwell, a worthy member of the Board of Education.”

Every human life is a story, and my grandfather’s story, as his wife and children understood it, was that he was taken ill just as he was about to make a killing. They didn’t use this vulgar modern expression, but nevertheless it was what they meant. He hadn’t been as successful as he deserved to be. And to the end of their lives, whenever they spoke of him, their voices were tinged with an unfading regret.

My grandfather’s will was brief and in only one or two instances interesting. The third item reads: “I direct that the share of my Grandson, Robert Blane Maxwell be charged with the sum of $500 heretofore advanced by me to his father Charles C. Maxwell”—which strikes me as rather
rigid and Scottish, considering that the heir in question was a minor and somebody was going to have to provide for his care and education. It was perhaps a way of not admitting that my Uncle Charlie was in any way different from my father and my aunts—that is, of not admitting that he was dead.

Item four reads: “If at the time of my decease my said daughter Bertha L. Fuller should then be the wife of Louis E. Fuller, I direct that her entire share of my said estate be paid to her in cash the amount thereof to be estimated by the County Court in which my estate is settled.” The will was dated March 31, 1902, and my Aunt Bert was granted a divorce six weeks later.

My father was the executor of my grandfather’s estate. The payments to my grandfather’s creditors are duly listed in the final report. He had also borrowed money from various people, including $700 from his brother-in-law, James Turley, and $333.83 from my Aunt Maybel, which suggests that his financial circumstances during the last years of his life were verging on the desperate. Nevertheless, having saved that magical thousand dollars, he was not without any money. At the time of his death he had $486.70 in cash.

The family residence at 503 North Kickapoo Street, built with the money that my Great-grandfather Turley gave my grandmother for a wedding present, is listed among my
grandfather’s
assets. So are the household goods, appraised at $144.72. The claims against the estate amounted to $6700. The net assets amounted to $18,858.52. My grandmother’s share (with the widow’s allowance of $800 and one-half of the money from the sale of 325 acres of land in Kansas and $1310 more than the other heirs of the sum derived from the disposal of personal property) came to $7190.64. My two aunts and my father each got $2791.97, and my Cousin Blane the same amount less that
$500 his father had borrowed from his grandfather.

My Grandmother Maxwell could not go on living all by herself in that big house on Kickapoo Street. My Uncle Paul Coffman was starting out in the fire insurance business like my father, but in Nebraska. My father found a better job for his brother-in-law, traveling in southern Illinois, and gave my Aunt Maybel his share of my grandfather’s estate, with the understanding that she would make a home for my grandmother for the rest of her life.
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My Aunt Maybel and my Grandmother Maxwell and my Uncle Paul ended up in a box-like white house on Union Street, which my Aunt Maybel built with the money from my grandfather’s estate.

A church quarterly for the year 1864 says, “Let every preacher resolve never to enter a meeting house of our brethren in which an organ stands. Let no one who takes a letter from one church ever unite with another using an organ.
Rather let him live out of a church than go into such a den.
Let all who oppose the organ withdraw from the church if one is brought in.”

In this series of statements I recognize the intellectual climate of my Aunt Maybel’s house on Union Street. It undoubtedly was brought there, along with the horsehair couch, and the picture of Caerlaverock Castle, and a great many other items of furniture, when my grandmother gave
up her own house and went to live with her older daughter. It was probably also the climate of the little house behind the jail, and perhaps even of the farmhouse near Williamsville where my grandfather stopped to ask for a drink of water.

The house on Union Street knew the Bible backwards and forwards, and could quote chapter and verse to prove that dancing was wrong, in itself and because of what it led to. So was playing cards for money. And swearing. And drinking anything stronger than grape juice or lemonade. And spending Sunday in any other way than going to church and coming home and eating a big dinner afterward.

Though my Aunt Maybel’s house was only three blocks away, it was as different from our house as Jerusalem in the time of Herod was different from ancient Athens. It sat on a high foundation, with a porch across the front, and very little yard and no flowers or shrubs. There was a fern basket hanging from the porch ceiling and I suppose that did them. The two upstairs front windows were so placed and of such a size and shape as to suggest a self-righteous expression. There was also a barn in back. To my astonishment, when I passed the house recently, the barn was still there, a half century after all the other barns in Lincoln were torn down and replaced by garages.

It is abundantly clear that the carpenter who built the house was quite positive he didn’t need any help from an architect. Pigheadedly proceeding, he solved his problems as he went, making the foundation too high, cutting off a corner here and skimping there, and scratching his head when he found that he hadn’t allowed enough room for the stairs. Not being old enough to understand the part money plays in human affairs, I assumed it was entirely from choice that my aunt and uncle lived where they did, and, actually, I never heard them express any discontent with their house, which was very like them. But probably if they had been
given a choice they would have preferred to go on living in the house on Kickapoo Street, if only because from the front windows you could see the Christian church. It stood back to back with the stores and office buildings on the courthouse square, and looked out on a little park with a bandstand in the center of it. All the churches in Lincoln were inclined to be ugly at that period, and the Christian church was no exception. On the platform, alongside the minister’s chair and lectern, there was a baptismal tank. There was also a mortgage. This word turned up quite often in the conversation of my elders. I understood both what it meant and that it was not a desirable thing to have. And I concluded that the congregation of the Christian church must be made up of poor people.