A Family Trust

by Ward Just

  The man came into the office and was introduced to me. He made a fuss. “What a pretty girl, how are you young lady,” and all that. Then he looked inquiringly at Amos. I looked at him, too, expecting to be dismissed. But the old man said nothing, just motioned the man to the big visitor’s chair. I’d sit stone silent and listen, and for years I thought that somehow I would never be an adult; never understand what adults said to each other. I could not understand the conversations my grandfather “held.” What were they about? The words escaped me, the men talked without finishing sentences. There were names, first names, last names, nicknames, and episodes. Frequent laughter and expletives; the talk was often rough, and just listening to it I knew I was being ushered into a strange and wonderful society. Then, inexorably, the visitor would begin to move forward on his chair. His hands went out in front of him, palms up; he smiled with his mouth, but there would be no laughter. There would be a new smell in the air. My grandfather’s face would darken, and silence fall upon it. His gray eyes became opaque. As the visitor moved forward, my grandfather would move backward. They were like two saplings caught in the same wind, the one bending toward the other, the distance constant. Amos moved farther back in his chair, the chair tilting and hitting the desk (the desk was jammed up to the wall and Amos had his back to it when he talked to visitors). Then I understood. The visitor wanted something. He wanted something of Amos’s or something that belonged to someone else that Amos could get for him. (Once I asked him what it was that these men wanted, all of them seemed to want something, and the old man just laughed and laughed and replied at last, “My autograph.”) I did not understand the words but I understood the motion—the wind of desire that blew both men, the one forward and the other backward. At length the visitor would leave, and while he would appear confident and cheerful I understood in some strange way that nothing had been decided and that the visitor was ... dissatisfied. The visitor’s hat was in his hand and then it would be on his head; nod, smile, exit. And my grandfather, leaning forward now, watching the visitor disappear in a hurry down the stairs. Grandpa would wait for the first floor door to close (you could hear them just barely, the double doors into the street clicking and sighing), and then he would smile widely and bring me into his lap again. Come on, Dana! Let’s go have an ice-cream soda. We would leave the office, that huge old man and me, both of us grinning, as close as we would ever be. We’d stride on down to the drugstore and I’d have a chocolate soda and Grandpa would have a Green River. The owner would always ask after Grandmother. After a while he and the old man would fall to talking about “the situation”—whatever it happened to be at the time, an upcoming election, a matter before the city council, the weather, business downtown, a local scandal, whatever it was that was turning time in Dement.

  You see, he believed that the newspaper was the public memory It was narrative, chronicle, journal, biography, obituary, fable, parable and myth—all of those. But mostly memory, without which he believed no civilization could proceed. Much later I realized that he was truly a man of words, and that required a leap of the imagination because there was nothing “literary” about him. He was not an intellectual and had no use for intellectuals; his personal philosophy, such as it was, came from his own experience and a highly selective reading from his shelf of the Harvard Classics. Some of those old-time editors, they were well-educated men, reading Fowler for pleasure and corresponding with Mencken and acquiring fancy editions of the Lake Poets. Not Amos Rising. He read the Tribune and the Reader’s Digest and occasionally Time, though he hated Luce for what Luce did to Taft. No, he was a newspaper editor; just that. And I believe that somewhere in a region of his mind he hated “the news.” The news brought uncertainty and disorder to his life and to the life of the community; it threatened the sanity and tranquility of both. He loved the process, the reporting and layout and editing; the smell of the ink and the roar of the press. In that way he resembled a great general who hated war. Editing was one thing; the news was something else. It was not benign or indifferent; it did not exist to be published whole, in toto, but to be weighed and edited. The news was like gold, its value depended on the assay; sometimes it wasn’t gold at all but pyrite. Amos Rising, obsessed by his own memory, was the assay-master of Dement, the man who determined the value of the various lumps of metal placed before him. Unedited news was a calamity, for without editing a reader had no context by which to judge it, and no means of knowing its truth or falsehood or durability. An unedited newspaper was a delusion, a carnival sideshow of freaks and shell games, all of it chaotic and hysterical. It gave altogether the wrong impression of life, which to my grandfather was not a random affair. For all those reasons and more, at the end of his life the old man despised television—television, he believed, was the ultimate lie, a lie so devilish that one was at a loss to grapple with it. He sat in helpless rage, watching the defeat of Taft, the greatest Republican since Lincoln, the general and “goddamned Dewey” engineering a public humiliation. Television supplied no context. It did not disclose immorality, it displayed only the surfaces of things: a smoke-filled hall, weary delegates, confusing floor fights, and the appearance of triumph—the appearance concealing the reality. Television had no sense of history. The camera had no memory. My father said once that the old man did not believe his own eyes, but what he meant was that he did not believe his own eyes when they were seeing through another’s eyes.

  Now this will be hard for you to understand. Your milieu is a different milieu altogether. The dress of the I was essentially nineteenth century. There was a single photograph on page one, a concession, in the middle 1940s, to a circulation manager who diffidently suggested that the paper ought to become more modern; even the Tribune had a cartoon on One. The circulation manager theorized that readers would not be alarmed at photographs from the various theaters of war. The old man did not like it but he yielded, knowing that the strength of the newspaper was in its numbers. A newspaper had to be read to be influential. But he wanted nothing to detract from the words, the twelve-pica columns of gray type. He wanted people to read, and to put as much effort into the reading as he put into the editing. It was through the printed word that the people would find their silhouette, the profile of their dreams and nightmares. And this was not chaos! There were occasions when the people had to be protected and on those occasions bizarre and unpalatable (literally inedible) facts were withheld. These facts were not altered, they were concealed. A sex crime too gruesome to describe outside the confines of the fire-house or the Elks Club was suppressed altogether—out of respect for the girl and her family, and for younger readers, and for the town’s sense of itself. When the state’s attorney was discovered with a five-figure bank account he was asked to resign and when he refused the Intelligencer simply stopped printing his name. A protégé of my grandfather’s, he’d been told that his future was unlimited—that is to say, he could go as far as the U.S. Congress or the governor’s mansion. It was as if he’d ceased, to exist. When the primary election came, the I gave over its columns to the state’s attorney’s opponent. There were a few readers who thought the incumbent had died and they had somehow missed the obituary. Poor Carl, they said. Then the rumors began. There was a late-night auto accident, a fall in a tavern, a scuffle on the golf course, a separation from his wife with hints of sexual misconduct. It was assumed the I was protecting the state’s attorney out of a sense of political loyalty, and that was partly true. But that state’s attorney was finished and he knew it and when he tried to sue for peace the old man threw him out of the office, muttering about abuses of the public trust. But no hint of scandal appeared in the pages of the newspaper because it would have undermined confidence in the existing order—not least in the old man himself, mentor to the discredited state’s attorney. And how had this peccadillo been discovered? Harry Bohn, the banker, had told my father and my father told Amos. Grandpa at first refused to believe it and the banker was obliged to open his books late one night fo
r the editor’s personal inspection. At midnight the three of them stood in Harry Bohn’s office while Amos went over the deposit slips and the mounting totals. There were photostats of checks received, and they were all drawn on Chicago banks, which infuriated the old man and drained whatever reservoir of sympathy he had. The next day, without explanation, he told the managing editor: “Carl’s name is out. Until I say it’s in, which I never will until the son of a bitch is dead.” Thus did Carl Brady vanish from Dement.

  But understand me this. The I was not Pravada. Private scandal and public mischief received a hearing. My grandfather did not want his readers to be misled into thinking Dement was utopia. Dement was a tough little town, everyone knew that, and he had his own credibility to maintain. He held a mirror to the town and like any mirror it was imperfect, there were foggy spots and holes, and of course the mirror had a frame. Such scandal and mischief as were reported were reported in such a way as to appear isolated; isolated incidents that in no way blackened the reputation of the town or of the man who ran it, namely, Amos Rising. He was protecting what he believed was the town’s essential goodness, call it symmetry. It was a frequent accusation that the I protected the business community; no businessman was ever arrested for drunken driving, or sued for divorce, or brawled in taverns, or went bankrupt. Amos Rising, if he were asked (which he never was), would have agreed that it was true. He did protect the businessmen, lifeblood of any community, but he protected the others, too. No group deserved a bad name—not the Negroes, or the Eastern Europeans, or the Jews, or the businessmen. So there were occasional mentions, a cutting here, a wife-beating there, drunkenness somewhere else, along with honors, awards, and success. However, I am not certain that the NAACP or the ADL would give you the same version of Amos Rising’s journalism.

  The truth was, he believed that the people were violent—violent beyond anyone’s worst imaginings. He believed that at any moment violence might erupt. Any spark could ignite it and he was determined that that spark find no kindling in the pages of the Intelligencer. He and his friend Elliott Townsend, they were frightened to the soles of their shoes. The law was fragile and capricious, descended as it was from the frontier. They decided to present the world as it was, mostly. The world was hard and breaks were not evenly distributed. But the world was essentially fair even if life was essentially unfair; in any case, it was as it was. The key to controlling it was information. The darker impulses must not be allowed free rein for in that direction lay disorder and anarchy, conceivably a revolution of some kind. Elliott Townsend had a phrase for it: “A free field, and no favor.” My grandfather believed that Dement provided the structure for a peaceful life, so long as it was allowed to develop on its own. The principles were sound enough. The old man believed in his heart that his edited version of reality was the truth—a higher truth perhaps, but the truth nevertheless. It agreed with the aspirations of the people. This was something he knew in his bones. Unfortunately his boys, my father and my Uncle Mitch and my Uncle Tony, did not understand the situation as he did. They thought they could release the town’s energies in the name of growth. They thought that progress would come with growth. Progress essentially meant a better life; it meant more money in people’s pockets. The old man was not educated, in fact he had never finished high school, but he knew that growth could not be controlled. Growth was willy-nilly, that was its essence. Amos believed that it was natural for the town to stay as it was, a place in relative stasis. He believed he could stop the clocks. His sons proposed to speed them up. They did not know or care where the new energy would lead them and the town. Amos knew that when he was gone they would not know how to contain it—indeed, worse thought, they did not realize that it would have to be contained. That was the old man’s nightmare.

  And it was the reason he spent so much time with my brother. He wanted Frank to see it clearly and from the beginning, see it as he had seen it as a boy sitting around the coal stove in his father’s blacksmith shop, listening to his father and his father’s friends talk about the town—a hamlet then, lawless, a hard-drinking, brawling place, in no way benign. That was the history of Dement: The French threw the Indians out, then the Indians threw the French out, finally the Anglo-Saxons threw the Indians out for good—slaughtered them to a man. Until well after the Civil War a woman was not safe on the streets. The local doctor was a drunkard and a charlatan who permitted Amos’s mother to die alone and unattended. The place seemed to him a volcano of passion—mostly hatred. He had been strong enough to make his own way, but he had had to fight and kick to do it. He wanted his own understanding of the facts to seep into Frank’s consciousness. He believed that Frank was my father’s natural successor as my father was his. Hard to say how much of it Frank took in. The old man was appalled when my brother enlisted for Korea. He simply couldn’t understand it, a war half a world away. But Frank had listened to my Uncle Mitch and thought it was ... right that he go. And go he did, following some untypical strain of idealism, I think he was clinging to the same idealism when he died, was killed, but it was only with a fingernail. I think he would have come back from there hard as nails. I don’t think the old man fully understood that what interested Frank was technology: the process, not the product. At any event, with Frank no longer around the old man turned briefly to me. He would take me to lunch in the same way he took me to watch the trains when I was six or eight. But it could never work out. I could never tell him that I understood absolutely what he was fighting and why. He scared me to death most of the time. And of course I was the wrong sex. Thank God. I am very lucky in many ways, and possibly I am luckiest in that way ...

  You understand that most of this is inferred. He would never explain it as I have explained it. The life of the family conformed to the columns of the newspaper. Its range was narrow. One understood that out there somewhere was disorder and chaos, but it remained unspoken. Heat meant fire so the heat was unrecognized, and in some ways it was like growing up in a convent or monastery; turbulence was elsewhere. And it was another reason why he hated television and movies. My uncle told me this story: The last day of the 1952. convention, listening to Eisenhower’s acceptance speech, Amos shuddered at an awful thought. What if newspapers were blacksmith shops and television motorcars? What if by 1970 there were no newspapers, there were only millions of television sets, all of them broadcasting lies. What if every event in the country were filmed at the moment it was happening and displayed on the instant, without editing. An endless flow of disconnected incidents, now here, now there, episodes of every shape and color, a daily panorama of disorder without an assay of weight. No context. No memory. Of course he did not believe it would ever happen, or so he told my uncle. Television was a fad that would fade. The people would at last return to their newspapers, snug.

  I remember very well the day I told my father that I was not returning to Dement after graduation from Holyoke. It was Christmas vacation of my senior year. I told my mother in the morning and then went down to the office to tell him, trembling. For some reason I felt it was better to get it over with in the office. I gave all the reasons you might expect me to give, except the real one. The truth was, I was infatuated with the East; if I had gone to Stanford, it would have been the West. But it was the East, old Connecticut towns, New York, new friends. I thought I could slip into the city like a character out of “Manhattan Tower.” So I told him I had a good chance for a good job, which was not true, and that in any case it would only be temporary, and of course that wasn’t true either. No more than a year at most, I said, and then I would return to Dement. The reaction was predictable: he was dead set against it and called my mother right then on the telephone. She was very diplomatic and agreed with him that of course it was a screwball idea and that was the very reason he should let me do it, “to let her get it out of her system.” I knew then that I had won. At the end of the interview with my father my Uncle Mitch came in. I think it embarrassed my father, he did not want Mitch or anyone else
interfering in his family. But Mitch only listened, shaking his head. Then he turned to my father and said, “Dad would never approve of this. Never. He would turn over in his grave.” And my father, strangely, smiled. “I guess he would,” my father said.