Ancestors (25 page)

I understood that this was not unkindness but custodianship. Years hence, when Max came to her and said, “Where is my little white and gold piano with the angels painted on it?” she could say proudly, “In the attic, where you left it.” The same with the toys in my egg basket.

These toys—a swan sleigh that ran on concealed wooden spools contributed by my grandmother from her sewing basket, the furniture for Goldilocks and the three bears cut out of the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, and so on—were made by me, with my trusty scissors and flour-and-water paste. My grandmother’s occupation was sufficiently similar that I could follow what she was doing and appreciate her satisfaction in it. She designed and made appliquéd quilts. The pattern was usually taken from nature—the wild rose, the morning glory. What I cut I pasted. What she cut she pinned or sewed. We got on perfectly.

She had yellowish-white hair, which she wore in a flat pompadour. Her skin was soft, and her touch gentle. Her voice I cannot convey; words do not always do what you ask of them. It was related to hymn singing but not lugubrious. All sorts of mysterious sounds and hesitations went on in it, as they do in the ticking of an old clock. In her clothes she was partial to lilac and lavender shades. She seldom moved from her low rocking chair, and when she did it was to
search in a leisurely fashion for something she or I needed. I think it must be a common dislike of hurry that makes very young children and elderly people so congenial.

Over the big dresser in my grandmother’s bedroom there was a constellation of family heads in black oval frames—my two grandparents facing each other at the apex, and two young men and two young women forming the base. These pictures must have been taken about 1897. My Aunt Bert, with her hair done up on top of her head except for one long curl (see the pictures of Ethel Barrymore in
Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines
), had not made a single disastrous marriage; my father was still intending to practice medicine; my Aunt Maybel, though not a beauty, had not yet acquired the tight-lipped expression that the front of her house had and that it undoubtedly copied from her; my Uncle Charlie looked forward to a long and happy life; my grandfather, with a splendid iron-grey mustache and those remarkable blue eyes, had no inkling that the day was going to come when he could not put his feet to the floor; and my grandmother had her husband and her children where she could watch over them and keep them from harm. I was too young and too uninformed to draw ironic conclusions. All I saw was that the people in the photographs were safe behind a layer of glass and I was not. It didn’t take very much to make me feel threatened. One impatient remark could change the whole quality of the day. My grandmother’s bifocals usually reflected the window or the door or the chandelier or objects in the room or a gentle consideration of what I was telling her, and if by chance they did express disapproval, it was of the Methodists or the Baptists or Woodrow Wilson, never of me.

“Come here and let me nurse you,” she would say, meaning come sit on her lap and be rocked and held. When I put my arms around her I encountered a familiar obstruction, her corset, which was as rigid as her ideas about religion.

The old mahogany clock on the mantelpiece was never pressed for time, and I could feel it slowly drawing the light from the sky and the long afternoon to a peaceful close.

Sometimes I spent the night. Going to bed was a leisurely process that began with taking the pillows out of the hard round hollow bolster, and ended with the ceremony of putting my grandmother’s false teeth in a glass of water. After which she opened the window the merest crack—the night air was bad for people—and turned out the light and we knelt down in the dark beside the big double bed and said our prayers.

I assumed it was in this very room (but of course it was in her bedroom in the house on Kickapoo Street) that, being up with my grandfather in the night, she heard a sound outside, and discovered that a burglar had put a ladder against the side of the house and was about to send a little boy up it to her window. She loved to tell this Dickensian incident as we were undressing for bed, and it may have had something to do with my kicking so much in my sleep that we had to have a pillow between us.

It would have been better, of course, if my grandfather had held out against her a little longer, at least until their children were educated, before they built that big house the burglar was trying to get into.

Annette once remarked, “Your Grandfather Maxwell said the kind of things to your grandmother that women like to hear, and that husbands do not always remember to say. Father and Mother were staying at Hot Springs at the same time that he was, and when they were leaving, Father asked if there was some message he could take back to Lincoln. ‘You can phone my wife,’ he said, ‘and tell her that I haven’t seen anybody as beautiful as she is since I’ve been gone.’ ”

Their deep affection for one another was not seriously affected by the annual fracas about how much money she needed to dress herself and her two daughters. But neither
did they reach an understanding in the matter. He just stopped questioning her along about the first of February. Somehow he always found the money to pay Mr. Boyd, and my grandmother went on helplessly charging cotton thread and dress material and silk braid and ribbons and gloves, which sooner or later she knew she was going to be called to account for. How peaceful her last years must have seemed, in that upstairs room of the house on Union Street, with the clock that was never in a hurry, and me.

My Aunt Bert teased my grandmother affectionately, out of high spirits, as she teased everybody. My father teased my grandmother because he liked to get a rise out of her; not quite the same thing. “Your addiction to drinking warmed-over coffee is no different from my liking for whiskey,” he would say. And then he would smile indulgently at the fluster and indignation this statement produced. I could not understand why he did it. She was too innocent to defend herself, and had her feelings hurt.

Once I went with her to a meeting of the Eastern Star, the ladies’ auxiliary of the Masonic Lodge. My grandmother and an old man who lived next door to her were being honored—she was a charter member; what he was being honored for I don’t now remember. They were presented with a decorated cake to cut, on a little table in the center of a large hall, with everybody watching. Old Mr. Stokes and everybody else in the room, including me, soon perceived that there was something wrong with that cake, but my grandmother went on trying to cut it until the cardboard cake was taken away and a real cake substituted for it. She did not see the need of jokes, and they usually had to be explained to her.

If I sneezed three times running, my grandmother gave me butter and sugar mixed in a spoon. She had absolute faith in flannel waist bands, goose grease and onions, spring tonics, and camomile tea. She used to tell that when she was
a little girl and ran a high fever, they put a fly poultice on her. “I saw the eyes,” she said—at which point, of course, so did I.

Some of the things that had happened to her struck me, even though I was a child, as archaic. She had been talked into having all her teeth pulled before she was forty. And she or perhaps some member of her family had been fleeced by somebody practicing the Spanish con game: She firmly believed that she was one of the rightful heirs to the land Trinity church now stands on, and that when the missing deed was located she would come into immense wealth. I knew she wouldn’t, but I never argued with her—not because I was afraid of her but because I knew that about most things she couldn’t change her opinion even if she had wanted to, which she mostly didn’t. And her opinions had nothing to do with why I loved her.

She read the Bible, and the Lincoln
Evening Star
, and a quilting magazine that had published several of her designs. Whatever made an impression on her innocent mind she cut out and pasted in the scrapbook I have so often referred to. The greater part of the printed matter consists of yellowed clippings about the First World War. Also pages and pages of stale accounts of the life of Abraham Lincoln, and contemporary newspaper clippings about the assassinations and funerals of Garfield and McKinley. Garfield was the only preacher and the only member of the Christian Church to become President of the United States, and my grandmother thought highly of him.

What a mishmash that scrapbook is! Theodore Roosevelt and his wife and children. Woodrow Wilson’s daughters. Lady Duff Gordon’s eyewitness account of the sinking of the
Titanic.
Dante and Beatrice. The Longfellow house. The birthplace of Benjamin Franklin’s father. Christmas and New Year’s cards, business cards, letters, family photographs that I have never seen anywhere else, wedding announcements,
George Washington and Buffalo Bill, Richard Mansfield, Useful Things to Send a Soldier, a mock wedding at the Christian Church, conundrums, recipes, instructions for making quilts, the greatest snow in fifty years, photographs of the Chautauqua grounds, receipts for the payment of membership dues for the Order of the Eastern Star, a cat holding a fiddle (which a note in her handwriting says I cut out and colored), a Mother’s Day telegram from my Cousin Blane Maxwell for his dead father, the Maxwell plaid, the program for the commencement exercises when Max graduated from the University of Cincinnati, Mark Twain standing in the doorway of his old home in Hannibal, Missouri, an automobile that went over an embankment, a twelve-year-old boy who fell into the line shaft of an electric generator and got a thorough spinning, the buildings of Eureka College, and so on. She also set certain pages aside for information that she felt worth preserving—facts about my Grandfather Maxwell’s family and her own, the directions for making the crocheted table mats that she distributed so liberally through the family at Christmas time, the occupations of her husband, her six brothers, and her three brothers-in-law, the marriages of her children, the date of the death of her husband and her son, the miracles of Jesus, and the following account of the Civil War:

1860
                        “C
IVIL
W
AR
”

Commencement of War between North and South
                                1860, 1,2,3,4,

During the campaign between Lincoln and Douglas, who were Bosomed friends at time and until death, I was a little girl but went to Lincolns political meetings sing for him on big floats. 25, or more Girls Sang his songs yelled untill we were hoarse, (I was leading singer). an honor so always had the high seat those were hot times, and full of excitement but we all did our duty. Indians and Cowboys or Scouts,
Ladies riding horseback, not astride he would have been shocked. O how I wanted to ride. only a little Girl. Was not to be thought of.

Lincoln became President and if he had lived everything would have planed out right, but fate was against such a wonderful man.

He called out his soldiers My father did not have to go, sent a substitute Later on my Brother Sanford Turley Ran away, about fifteen, a robust boy. went to St. Louis, Mo Enlisted, in 11th Mo. Regiment He stayed, over four years, never wounded in all hard Battles, heart-rendering, to hear him tell his hardships. Soldiers loose their health, we lived at Williamsville about twelve miles from Springfield I shook his big old hand.

His body was brought to Springfield. So his friends could view his remains. I went to Springfield Stopped at a Democrat house, and the man of house was so mad because they made him drape his house. He got on a terrible tare. A Rebel. every house stores and dwelling Houses were draped thirty days

Procession went by the house where I stayed. His old Horse old run down Boots across the Saddle bag and several other things Out to Oak Ridge Cemetery. His last resting place they put Douglas and Lincoln Suits they wore in campaign in Museum in Chicago. Suppose they are there yet.

Such education as my grandmother had was in a one-room country schoolhouse, and it enabled her to spend her life reading the Bible, so it was sufficient, until she came to writing. She used quotation marks when she began a new line, and didn’t distinguish between a comma and a period. Her spelling is sometimes by ear (“valubel” for “valuable”) and sometimes distracted (“bosomed friends”) and sometimes it is even correct. But she invariably left off the “e” at the end of her brother Meade’s name, and in listing her children in the scrapbook she—this I really don’t understand
—spelled my Aunt Bert’s middle name “Louweze.” I mean you’d think she would know how to spell the name of her own daughter; she must have been thinking about something else.

My father considered the scrapbook an object of genuine historical value and asked my grandmother to leave it to him in her will, but she had made it for Max Fuller, because he was interested in family history, and Max got it.

Turning the pages, I came on a letter to her from my father that casts a rather different light on his teasing. When he wrote it he was twenty-eight years old and had been married two and a half years.

Lincoln, Ill   12/18/1906

My Dear “Mammy”

I was greatly disappointed when I learned you would not be with me Christmas, as far as I can remember I cannot recall that we were ever separated before. I do not say this to cause you any regret as I fully believe you and Aunt Etta
^*
will enjoy Xmas day together. We have a fine tree planned for Edward and do wish so much that you could see him as usual. We have such a lovely present for you but it is impossible to send it to Parsons so will have to await your return.

Have been greatly upset since last week Mother as Higley and Hubbard have quit the Hanover and organized another Company and I cannot say as to the new management whether it will be congenial to me. If I had lost my own job I could not have been more crushed and stunned but I will not feel that another streak of bad luck has overtaken me
^†
and I will fight for my rights and win out in the end.