Ancestors (36 page)

I sort of remember those roses.

The housekeeper developed ear trouble which was diagnosed as erysipelas and the family doctor told my father that he must let her go because she shouldn’t be around the baby with it. After she left, she wrote poison pen letters, unsigned, about my father and Annette, to my Grandmother Maxwell, which upset her (she had had very little experience with malice as passionate as this and didn’t know what
was expected of her) but did no real harm, and to Annette’s husband. My uncle was jealous of Annette’s affection for my father, and even of her affection for my older brother and me. After the letters, he stopped Annette from coming to our house. Since she was the nearest approximation anywhere on earth to my mother, this was very hard on all of us, and also, of course, on her.

The third housekeeper was easy-going and slatternly and addicted to reading movie magazines, and she had a dog that looked like her. She also had a peroxide-blonde niece whom she hoped to marry off to my father. I don’t know whether he considered marrying her or not. His life was insupportable as it was, and he always tended to see women through rose-colored glasses, so perhaps he did toy with the idea. He took her—the niece—to see Annette, who was in the hospital at the time, and when my father lingered a moment to say good-by, Annette said from the pillow, “Bill, she won’t do.” My father said, “What do you mean?” and Annette said, “I mean she won’t do! ”

My Aunt Bert had begun to travel up and down the state with two big black suitcases full of samples, and on weekends she would be with us.

Though I have no trouble in conjuring up my mother’s hand, with the pen moving slantwise between the second and third finger, almost the only specimen of her handwriting that I possess is a letter to my Aunt Bert. It had been decided in the family that they would not exchange Christmas presents any longer, and my mother was writing to say that affection had impelled her to go against the agreement and send a small present.

Some of the things that made the house on Ninth Street so pleasant when I was a child—Oriental rugs that I knew the pattern of by heart, a carved Victorian walnut sofa, a mahogany
dresser and its mirror—belonged, I found out a long time later, not to us but to my Aunt Bert, who had left them with my mother.

I often heard Annette and my Aunt Bert described, by their contemporaries, as the two most beautiful young women in Lincoln. They were also friends. After my Aunt Bert came home with her baby and was divorced, Annette said, a man who had been in love with her before she was married and who was still in love with her applied to my father for permission to court her. He had the reputation of being a rounder, and my father turned him down. Afterwards he married, and was a very good husband. This cannot have been her only chance for happiness. I think she followed the dictates of her heart, as always, and that there was nobody she loved enough to marry.

At the time I am speaking of, my aunt was a handsome, strong woman with a kind of physical radiance. The gaiety she brought into the house made it habitable again. She teased my older brother and hugged me and dandled the baby on her knee, and perhaps saved my father’s sanity. The color came back into his face, and he was more like himself. He began to accept invitations and to go to the Country Club dances. The social life he returned to was changed beyond recognition from anything he and my mother had known, for the Twenties had arrived, and Prohibition. The clubhouse being closed in winter, the Country Club New Year’s dance was held in town, in Bates’s Academy, and gave rise to scandal. People—nice people—were drunk in public.

One day my father came up the back stairs to the empty maid’s room where I had built the city and palace of Montezuma and was re-enacting the conquest of Mexico and sat down in the only chair, and took me on his lap—a thing he hadn’t done in years—and told me that he was going to be married.

I was not faced with the prospect of living with a stranger,
or with someone who wouldn’t understand how I felt about my mother, for when I was four years old the pretty young woman who was going to be my stepmother used to gather up all the children on Ninth Street and walk them downtown to a kindergarten run by two elderly women, and until my father told me that he was going to marry her I had thought of her as someone who belonged to me.

My father sold the house on Ninth Street and most of the furniture with it. He very sensibly didn’t want to begin a new marriage in a place that had so many associations with his first one. For a year, while he was building a new house, we lived on an unpaved street in a rented house with nothing to recommend it except that it was a block away from Annette’s. At first it took a certain amount of courage for me to go there, for I didn’t know my uncle or even what to call him. I had never heard him referred to at home except by his full name or sometimes, scathingly, by his initials, “W.B.” So I called him “Mr. Bates,” politely, until my Cousin Peg asked her mother why I did this and Annette spoke to me about it. With a considerable grinding of gears I managed to say, “Yes, thank you, Uncle Bill,” when he asked me if I would have another piece of steak, and he accepted the change without a flicker of expression. Though he was a surveyor, he spent his whole life watching over the farms he had inherited from his father. He went every morning to the country, and when he came home and found me there, he would pass through the living room, nodding to me and making some remark to Annette that maintained the proper degree of tension between them, but never making an issue of my presence, though I always expected him to.

Sometimes I would find another displaced person there: my Uncle Ted. For varying periods of time and in a way that must have been totally without hope (for his face gave off no life and at family dinners when he smiled it had a dampening
effect on the occasion) he managed to earn a living. Between jobs, when he was hard-pressed he would turn to Annette for help. It had to be given surreptitiously, and sooner or later made trouble between Annette and her husband. My Uncle Ted was very fond of my Cousin Peg and of my older brother. I was uneasy with him, and aware always of the immovable arm ending in a grey kid glove.

So far as I know, Annette never quarreled with her husband about my being there. I rather think it wasn’t a serious issue between them. He loved his own children, and probably treated me as he hoped somebody would treat them in my circumstances.

But the bitterness and unforgivingness of those small-town family feuds! I can hardly believe this now, and yet I know it is true because I saw it happen: On the morning of my mother’s funeral, he came to our house—a thing he had not done since I was old enough to remember—and my father shut the door in his face.

In the hospital, with the terrible clairvoyance of the dying, my mother said to Annette, “I don’t want the Maxwells to have my baby.”

I don’t know what Annette said to my father at the time, but many years later he said, in such a way to cast doubt on the story, “I was in the hospital too, and she never said anything to me about it.”

Was it because they were both so ill? Or to spare his feelings? It would never have occurred to me that it needed saying, but possibly I knew (because it is the kind of thing children always know) how she felt about that household better than he did. It may have been the one thing she kept from him. Out of love.

From the time he was about a year old, my little brother
spent one day a week with my grandmother. And then gradually, since he had no mother and the housekeeper was glad to be relieved of the responsibility for him, the one day stretched out to three or four.

Long before this, when my mother was alive, my father had a chance to give up the road and take a much better job in the Chicago office of the insurance company he worked for, and my mother said no, it was not a good place to bring up children. The offer was repeated when he was in his middle forties. This time, tired of lugging that heavy grip from one small town to another, he said yes. When we moved to Chicago he had every intention of taking my younger brother. But my grandmother threw herself on her knees before him (this scene I have no difficulty whatever in imagining) and cried, “Will, if you take that child I will die, it will kill me!” And since he loved her, he couldn’t do it. He thought the moment could be postponed. And of course it could. There is nothing that cannot be postponed. It is the only act of his life that I ever heard him express serious regret for. In the end, what it meant was that my younger brother was brought up by my Aunt Maybel and my Uncle Paul. They both idolized him. Until then, my Uncle Paul’s life had been made up of the Christian church, the New York Underwriters, and his family in Augusta. He became so fond of my little brother and he displayed this fondness so openly, by hugging and kissing, that my father’s sense of propriety was offended.

I used to wonder if it was possible for my little brother to love someone who was so different from my mother as my aunt was. Until I heard that, coming home from school one winter day, he had slipped and fallen on the ice, and got a slight concussion. In telling about it, my aunt said, “I had been watching for him, and he came up the street calling my name.” Then I knew.

The failure of Prohibition is, for me, the point at which the 20th century becomes distinct from the preceding ones. The essentially Puritanical Protestant churches have been losing steadily ever since the power to bring ordinary human life into relation with eternity.

The Puritan believes that his own understanding of things is the only possible one, and therefore must not be departed from. But it was departed from, successfully, in Darwin’s
Origin of Species
and in all the scientific thinking that grew out of it. Man took his place in the animal kingdom, instead of being but little lower than God.

At about the same time, light thrown on the New Testament by Biblical scholarship made it questionable that when (in the words of Thomas Campbell) the Bible spoke, anybody had, in some instances, understood what it said. In my childhood, the barrier between one Protestant church and another seemed permanent and necessary, though I never asked myself what purpose it served. The congregation of the Presbyterian church acted as though they didn’t even know about the Cumberland Presbyterian church, just across the street from them. But the strong sense that all Protestant denominations had of their separate identities is now steadily giving way. The Unitarians have merged with their next of kin, the Universalists, the Congregationalists with the Christian Church, and this organization in turn with the Evangelical and the Reformed Churches, and so on. In the spring of 1970, ninety delegates from nine Protestant churches voted in favor of a proposal that would merge their membership of twenty-five million members in an organization called the Church of Christ Uniting. After which they rose and sang the doxology. And elected as their first chairman a representative from the Disciples of Christ. It doesn’t look to me like the forward surge Thomas Campbell imagined but, rather, the response to a threat which they are not strong enough to stand up to individually—that, in the words of Barton Stone,
the power of religion has disappeared and even the form of it is fast waning away.

I joined the Presbyterian church in Lincoln as soon as I was old enough, and when we moved to Chicago I started going to another Presbyterian church there, until one day I brought home from the school library a copy of Mark Twain’s
The Mysterious Stranger.
I was a very priggish adolescent and I wanted to test the strength of my religious convictions. They were not, it turned out, very strong. But I was not content with saying that I did not and could not know whether there was a divine order in the universe, which was my father’s position for most of his adult life; I didn’t stop short of atheism. Perhaps not atheism. My father’s is a rational position, mine simply an unbelief. A negative. If you could only develop a print from it you would have saving faith.

I would like to believe in God but not all that much is, I sometimes think, the simple truth of the matter. When I am thoroughly frightened, I do more than half believe in Him. Other people’s inability to believe troubles me just as much, because it has altered the world I live in.

Reading
The History of the Disciples of Christ in Illinois
, I came upon a paragraph about a man named John F. M. Parker, and in it were these two sentences: “Within eleven months he lost a son, a daughter, his farm and his wife. But then he said: ‘I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him against that day.’ ”

It makes me hang my head in shame.

Where the understanding of other men differs from ours there is just as good a chance that we are in the presence of truth as of opinion. Therefore a new kind of enlightenment ought to have resulted from the respectful and unemotional consideration of one man’s understanding against another’s.
Instead it seems to have produced a new kind of darkness, with little choice, actually, but to wait for what time brings. The providing place that my Grandfather Blinn had a glimpse of prematurely is not in the firmament, as people once thought.