Children as they pass through one stage of growth after another are a kind of anthology of family faces. At the age of four I looked very much like one of my mother’s Kentucky cousins. Holding my chin in her hand, she used to call me by his name. Then for a while I looked like her. At the age of eleven or twelve I suddenly began to look like my Uncle Ted. When people remarked on this, I saw that it made my father uneasy. The idea that if I continued to look like him I would end up forging checks amused me, but faulty logic is not necessarily incompatible with the truth, which in this case was that when, because of Christmas or my birthday, I had ten or fifteen dollars, I could always think of something to spend it on. All my life I have tended to feel that money descends from heaven like raindrops. I also understood that it doesn’t rain a good deal of the time, and when I couldn’t afford to buy something I wanted I have been fairly content to do without it. My uncle was not willing, is what it amounted to.
When my mother died during the influenza epidemic of 1918–19, I turned to the person who was closest to her, for comfort and understanding. I am not sure whether this made things harder for my Aunt Annette or not. Her marriage was rocky, and more than once appeared to be on the point of breaking up but never did. When my Uncle Will came home he would pass through the living room, leaving behind him a sense of strain between my aunt and him, but as far as I could make out it had nothing to do with my being there. Sometimes I found my Uncle Ted there, too. I didn’t know, and didn’t ask, where he was living and what he was doing to support himself. I think it was probably the low point of his life. There was no color in his face. His eyes never lit up or looked inquiringly or with affection at any of the people seated around the dining-room table. If he spoke, it was to answer yes or no to a question from my aunt. That when he and Annette were alone he opened his heart to her as freely as I did I have no doubt.
Defeat is a good teacher, Hazlitt said. What it teaches some people is to stop trying.
EXCEPT for the very old, nothing, good or bad, remains the same very long. My father remarried, and was promoted, and we had to move to Chicago. I went to high school there, and my older brother went off to college, at the University of Illinois, in Champaign-Urbana. On the strength of his experience with the streetcar company, my uncle had managed to get a job in Champaign, working for a trolley line that meandered through various counties in central and southern Illinois. Nobody knew him there, or anything about him. He was simply Ed Blinn, the one-armed man at the ticket counter. He kept this job for many years, from which I think it can be inferred that he didn’t help himself to the petty cash or falsify the bookkeeping. During the five years that my brother was in college and law school they would occasionally have dinner together. He tried to borrow money from my brother, whose monthly allowance was adequate but not lavish, and my brother stopped seeing him. Once, when Ted came up to Chicago, he invited me to have dinner with him at the Palmer House. Probably he felt that it was something my mother would have wanted him to do, but this idea didn’t occur to me; adolescents seldom have any idea why older people are being nice to them. He was about forty and I was fifteen or sixteen, and priggishly aware that, in taking me to a restaurant that was so expensive, he was again doing things in a way he couldn’t afford. He had an easier time chatting with the headwaiter than he did in getting any conversation out of me. After we got up from the table he gave me a conducted tour of a long corridor in the hotel that was known as Peacock Alley. I could see that he was in his natural element. I would have enjoyed it more if there had been peacocks. When I followed my brother down to the university I didn’t look my uncle up, and he may not even have known I was there.
Some years later, from a thousand miles away, I learned that he had married again. He married a Lincoln woman, the letter from home said. Edna Skinner. He and his wife were running a rental library in Chicago, and she was expecting a baby. Then I heard that the baby died, and they had moved back to Lincoln, and she was working at the library, and somebody had found him a job running the elevator in the courthouse — where (as people observed with a due sense of the irony of it) his father had practiced law.
By that time my father had retired from business and he and my stepmother were living in Lincoln again. When I went back to Illinois on a visit, I saw my Aunt Annette. She was angry at Ted for marrying. Though she did not say so, what she felt, I am sure, was that there were now two children she couldn’t let out of her sight. And she disliked his new wife. She said, “Edna only married him because she was impressed with his family.” All this, however, didn’t prevent my aunt from doing what she could for them. The grocer was given to understand that they could charge things to her account. She did this knowing that my Uncle Will was bound to notice that the grocery bills were padded, and would be angry with her. As he was. She refused to tell the grocer that her brother and his wife were not to charge things anymore, and my Uncle Will, not being sure what the consequences would be if he put a stop to it, allowed it to continue. Also, living in a small town, there is always the question of what people will think. One would not want to have it said that, with the income off several farms and a substantial balance at the bank, one had let one’s brother-in-law and his wife go hungry.
I did not meet Edna until I brought my own wife home to Lincoln for the first time. We had only been married three or four months. When we were making the round of family visits, it struck me as not quite decent not to take her to meet Ted and the aunt I had never seen. My father didn’t think that this was necessary. Though they all lived in the same small town, my father never had any reason to be in the courthouse or the library, and he hadn’t had anything to do with Ted since the days, thirty years before, when he had to step in and straighten out the handling of my grandfather’s estate. But I saw no reason I shouldn’t follow my own instincts, which were not to leave anybody out. I was thirty-six and so grateful to have escaped from the bachelor’s solitary existence that all my feelings were close to the surface. I couldn’t call Ted, because they had no telephone, but somebody told me where they were living and we went there on a Sunday morning and knocked on the screen door. As my uncle let us in, I saw that he was pleased we had come. The house looked out across the college grounds and was very small, hardly big enough for two people. Overhanging trees filtered out the sunlight. I found that I had things I wanted to say to him. It was as if we had been under a spell and now it was broken. There was a kind of easy understanding between us that I was not prepared for. I felt the stirring of affection, and I think he may have as well.
Edna I took to on sight. She had dark eyes and a gentle voice. She was simple and open with my wife, and acted as if meeting me was something she had been hoping would happen. Looking around, I could see that they didn’t have much money, but neither did we.
I wrote to them when we got home, and heard from her. After my uncle died, she continued to write, and she sent us a small painting that she had done.
Not long ago, by some slippage of the mind, I was presented with a few moments out of my early childhood. My grandfather’s house, so long lived in by strangers, is ours again. The dining-room table must have several leaves in it, for there are six or eight people sitting around it. My mother is not in the cemetery but right beside me. She is talking to Granny Blinn about … about … I don’t know what about. If I turn my head I will see my grandfather at the head of the table. The windows are there, and look out on the side yard. The goldfish are swimming through their castle at the bottom of the fishbowl. The door to the back parlor is there. Over the sideboard there is a painting of a watermelon and grapes. No one stops me when I get down from my chair and go out to the kitchen and ask the hired girl for a slice of raw potato. I like the greenish taste. When I come back into the dining room I go and stand beside my uncle. He finishes what he is saying and then notices that I am looking with curiosity at his glass of beer. He holds it out to me, and I take a sip and when I make a face he laughs. His left hand is resting on the white
damask tablecloth. He can move his fingers. The catastrophe hasn’t happened. I would have liked to linger there with them, but it was like trying to breathe underwater. I came up for air, and lost them.
THE view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters.
I wouldn’t know anything more about my uncle’s life except for a fluke. A boy I used to hang around with when I was a freshman in Lincoln High School — John Deal — had a slightly older sister named Margaret. Many years later I caught up with her again. My wife and I were on Nantucket, and wandered into a shop full of very plain old furniture and beautiful china, and there she was. She was married to a Russian émigré, a bearlike man with one blind eye and huge hands. He was given to patting her affectionately on the behind, and perfectly ready to be fond of anyone who turned up from her past. I learned afterward that he had been wounded in the First World War and had twice been decorated for bravery. Big though his hands were, he made ship’s models — the finest I have ever seen. That afternoon, as we were leaving, she invited us to their house for supper. The Russian had made a huge crock of vodka punch, which he warned us against, and as we sat around drinking it, what came out, in the course of catching up on the past, was that Margaret and Edna Blinn were friends.
Remembering this recently, I looked up Margaret’s telephone number in my address book. The last letter I had had from her was years ago, and I wasn’t sure who would answer. When she did, I said, “I want to know about my Uncle Ted Blinn and Edna. How did you happen to know her?”
“We were both teaching in the public schools,” the voice at the other end of the line said. “And we used to go painting together.”
“Who was she? I mean, where was she from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was she born in Lincoln?”
“I kind of think not,” the voice said. “I do know where they met. At your grandfather’s farm, Grassmere.”
“My grandfather didn’t have a farm.”
“Well, that’s where they met.”
“My grandfather had a client, one of the Gilletts, who owned a farm near Elkhart — I think it was near Elkhart. Anyway, she moved East and he managed the farm for her. It was called Gracelands. Could it have been there that they met?”
“No. Grassmere.”
Oral history is a tangle of the truth and alterations on it.
“They had a love affair,” Margaret said. “And Edna got pregnant and lost her job because of it.”
“Even though they got married?”
“Yes. It was more than the school board could countenance, and she was fired. He quit his job in Champaign and they went to Chicago and opened a rental library.”
“I know.… What did the baby die of?”
“It was born dead.”
Looking back on my uncle’s life, it seems to me to have been a mixture of having to lie in the bed he had made and the most terrible, undeserved, outrageous misfortune. The baby was born dead. He lost his arm in that automobile accident and no one else was even hurt. They put whatever money they had into that little rental library in Chicago just in time to have it go under in the Depression.
THE oldest county history mentions an early pioneer, Thomas R. Skinner, who came to that part of Illinois in 1827, cleared some land near the town of Mt. Pulaski, and was the first county surveyor and the first county judge. Edna was probably a direct or a collateral descendant. She may also have been the daughter of W. T. Skinner, who was superintendent and principal of the Mt. Pulaski High School. Whatever her background may have been, she was better educated and more cultivated than any of the women in my family, and if she had had money would, I think, have been treated quite differently.
From that telephone call and the letter that followed I learned a good deal that: I hadn’t known before. Edna worshipped my uncle, Margaret said. She couldn’t get over how wonderful, how distinguished, he was. He was under no illusions whatever about himself but loved her. He called her “Baby.”
She never spoke about things they lacked, and never seemed to realize how poor they were. She lived in a world of art and music and great literature. He had a drinking problem.
They lived in many different houses — in whatever was vacant at the moment, and cheap. For a while they lived in what had been a one-room Lutheran schoolhouse. They even lived in the country, and Ted drove them into town to work in a beat-up Ford roadster. Whatever house they were living in was always clean and neat. Annette gave them some of my Grandmother Blinn’s English bone china, and Edna had some good furniture that had come down in her family — two Victorian chairs and a walnut sofa upholstered in mustard-colored velvet.
Annette and my Uncle Will Bates went to Florida for several months every winter, and while they were away Ted and Edna lived in their house. She loved my Aunt Annette, and was grateful to her for all she had done for them, and didn’t know that the affection was not returned.
Margaret found Ted interesting to talk to and kind, but aloof. She had no idea what he was paid for running the elevator in the courthouse. Edna’s salary at the library was seventy-five dollars a month. He made a little extra money by selling cigarettes out of the elevator cage, until some town official put a stop to it because he didn’t have a license.
My uncle always dressed well. (Clothes of the kind he would have thought fit to put on his back do not wear out, if treated carefully.) Edna had one decent dress, which she washed when she got home from the library, and ironed, and wore the next day. She loved clothes. When she wanted to give herself a treat she would buy a copy of Harper’s Bazaar and thumb through the pages with intense interest, as if she were dealing with the problem of her spring wardrobe.
She was a Christian Scientist and tended to look on the bright side even of things that didn’t have any bright side. She would be taken with sudden enthusiasms for people. When she started in on the remarkable qualities of someone who wasn’t in any way remarkable, Ted would poke fun at her. The grade-school and high-school students who came to the library looking for facts for their essays on compulsory arbitration or whales or whatever found her helpful. She encouraged them to develop the habit of reading, and to make something of their lives. Some of them came to think of her as a friend, and remained in touch with her after they left school. At the end of the day, Ted came to the library to pick her up and walk home with her. Margaret didn’t think that he had any men friends.
They had a dog, a mutt that had attached himself to them. Whatever Ted asked the dog to do he would try to do, even if it was, for a dog, impossible. Or when he had, in fact, no clear idea of what was wanted of him. He made my uncle laugh. Not much else did.
He must have been in his early sixties when he got pneumonia. He didn’t put up much of a fight against it. Edna believed that he willed himself to die.
“Sometimes she would invite me for lunch on Sunday,” Margaret said. “Your uncle ate by himself in the other room — probably because there weren’t enough knives and forks for three. Having fed him, Edna would get out the card table and spread a clean piece of canvas on it or an old painting, and set two places with the Blinn china. The forks were salad forks, so small that they tended to get lost on the plates. And odd knives and spoons, jelly glasses, and coffee cups from the ten-cent store. Then she would bring on, in an oval silver serving dish, an eggplant casserole, or something she had invented. She was a superb cook, and she did it all on a two-burner electric plate. After the lunch dishes were washed and put away we would go off painting together. There was nothing unusual about her watercolors but her oils were odd in an interesting way. She couldn’t afford proper canvas and used unsized canvas or cardboard, and instead of a tube of white lead she had a small can of house paint. She had studied at the Art Institute when they
lived in Chicago. I think now that she saw her life as being like that of Modigliani or some other bohemian starving in a garret on the Left Bank. Ted was ashamed of the way they lived.… Only once did she ask me for help. She had seen a coat that she longed for, and it was nine dollars. Or it may have been that she needed nine dollars to make up the difference, with what she had. At that time you could buy a Sears, Roebuck coat for that. Anyway, she asked if I would take two paintings in exchange for the money.… When I saw her after her heart attack she was lovely and slender — much as she must have looked when she and Ted first knew each other. She spent the last year or so of her life living in what had been a doctor’s office.… That nine-dollar coat continues to haunt me.”
SHE was buried beside Ted, in the Blinn family plot. My grandfather’s headstone is no higher than the sod it is embedded in, and therefore casts no shadow over the grave of his son.
All the Days and Nights Page 32