by Lauren Groff
I stepped out into the hallway, where my mother had constructed a sort of gallery of ancestors. It began downstairs, where, vivid and huge against the wall, was a copy of the Gilbert Stuart painting of Marmaduke, with his stern look, red hair, large chin. Opposite, above the middle steps of the stairwell, was his little wife, Elizabeth, a brittle, dried-up thing. At the top of the stairs the great novelist Jacob Franklin Temple beamed down beneficently. And then, all along the hallway that led to my room, there were dozens of drawings, etchings, photographs of later ancestors, until it ended with my section opposite my door. There were only two photographs of my mother: one of her as a little girl in a frilly dress, another with her as a long-haired semihippie.
Seeing her there, smiling in the faded oranges of pictures from the 1970s, I pressed my arms tight to my navel, and said to the Lump, “Just look at all your crazy ancestors.”
One step closer to the stairwell, and there were my grandparents on their wedding day. My grandfather, who was only eighteen at the time, looked skeletal in his suit. His wife, Phoebe Tipton, an old maid at twenty-eight, looked peckish with her enormous nose, absent chin, and round little body. They were, frankly, unattractive. And they looked so petrified, so stiff in their wedding clothing, that it was clear to me that neither could have been anything but a virgin. They must have danced the dirty dance once, to produce my mother, and then stopped with a sigh of relief. As neither person was, I was sure, the illegitimate source of my father, I took another step toward the stairwell to look at my great-grandparents.
My grandmother’s—Phoebe Tipton’s—parents were no more encouraging than she was. Claudia Starkweather and Chuck Tipton both clutched Bibles. Claudia was sallow, skinny, with Phoebe’s enormous nose and absent chin; Chuck Tipton was immense and very stupid-looking. Claudia was the descendant of Marmaduke, through Hetty, but she didn’t look capable of the imagination an affair requires.
“No,” I said to the Lump. “Forget it. It’s not her.”
I moved on to my grandfather’s parents, as Sarah Franklin Temple was a legitimate descendant of Marmaduke. There, I began to grin, because my grandfather’s parents, Sarah Franklin Temple and Asterisk “Sy” Upton, were both beautiful. Sarah was a gorgeous brunette, fair-skinned, clear-eyed; her husband, Sy, was sturdily handsome with a rakish grin. I found it easy to believe that Sarah could have screwed around, had a child in some convent or somewhere, then hidden the evidence, and come back to town only to marry the first man to ask her. Looking at her beautiful face, I thought I saw hidden depth, a secretiveness I wasn’t expecting.
So I took down the picture of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather in some windy locale, shaking the hands of Eleanor and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I kissed them both. Even though Sy had been the baseball commissioner for years and years, my mother had given most of his documents to the New York State Historical Association—NYSHA—instead of the baseball museum, which sparked, at the time, a great uproar. But at least it served to let me know where I would find out more. I doubted Sarah would have much documentation and was prepared to search through her husband’s life to find some kind of evidence about some kind of infidelity. An unexplained raw enmity toward some boorish young man in town. A mean-spirited anonymous letter sent to the unsuspecting husband. Something like that, some small nugget that would mean nothing to anyone else but would mean the world to me.
I was so excited, I forgot my resolution to rot at home until Primus called. I gathered a notebook and a pen and hurried down the hall, past the older ancestors, past Jacob and Elizabeth and Marmaduke, out the grand Dutch door and onto Lake Street again.
THE CANTED TRIANGLES of the hops poles at the Farmers’ Museum, the nineteenth-century village crouched in the middle, the waft of manure; the golf course’s long, hilly sward of green to my right and the country club with its tennis thwacks and a school of sailboats setting off into the lake. At last, there was the pillared stone mansion, Franklin House, which thirty-five years ago belonged to my family but was now a museum. For a moment, I imagined ghostly hacks and landaus clipping up the long driveway to the house, with garlands around the pillars and windows bright-lit for a ball. The library was a more modest stone building off to the side. I stood outside for a moment gathering my courage. And then, brazen, I went into the cool dim hall.
There was an old woman at a desk who bore a remarkable resemblance to a goat, with her skinny jaw and tufts of white hair on her chin, but she was snoozing into her own chest. Before her was a sign that read: GENERAL PUBLIC: $5.00. NEW YORK STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY MEMBERS AND GRADUATE STUDENTS IN HISTORY: FREE. I thought of my prehistoric man on his crossing over the icy Bering Strait, my careful hours on my knees dislodging grains of tundra dirt. I signed in as a history graduate student and set to work, sending skittering through the stacks for me a skinny, mustached librarian who blushed furiously when I asked him a question.
Many hours later, I was still at the oaken tables in the library when the sun slipped below the hills and cast the lake in shadow. Around me were huge stacks of books, boxes of microfilm, master’s theses, my notebook filled with my scribbles. I had found out nothing, nothing, save that Sy Upton had come to Templeton in 1935 on a month-long scouting trip for the future baseball museum. But he fell in love with Sarah Franklin Temple and stayed. That’s all my grandfather, George Upton, wrote about his parents in the slim book that caused such a scandal and may or may not have led to his death.
Now the pert librarian was standing before me, fingering his bow tie and pushing a little leather-bound book with his finger. “Miss Upton,” he said. “I must go home very soon, I am very sorry to say.” And he did look sorry; he had been so helpful all day, charging through the library to find yet another source, flipping through microfilm for evidence, his pencil-thin mustache a-quivering. I had told him that I was starting a dissertation on “the migration of baseball to Templeton,” beginning in 1935, and was using Sy as a case study. It was such a stupid premise, but I couldn’t think of another, and the librarian seemed to swallow it whole. The little goat-woman at the front would open her eyes once in a while and shake her head at us, putter around, and then fall back asleep in the same position.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Let me put these things back,” but he waved me away.
“It’ll wait till tomorrow. There aren’t too many visitors here in the summer, you know,” he said. “And you may need them again. Doesn’t seem as if you got that much done.”
I stretched my arms above my head and yawned. “I didn’t,” I admitted. “I’ll be back tomorrow. And if I’m going to be seeing that much of you, I should know your name.”
He blushed and said, “Peter Lieder,” and held out his hand for me to shake.
But I was far too surprised to do so and just stood gazing at him until he dropped his hand in confusion. “Not,” I said, “Peter-Lieder-Pudding-and-Pie?”
“Well,” he said, “in fact, yes.”
“Holy shit,” I said. Peter Lieder was four years older than I was in high school, and quite porky at the time. Probably over three hundred pounds during his senior year, and the best musician we had in school: oboe, flute, saxophone, tuba, trumpet, drum, violin, Peter Lieder could play them all. The Peter Lieder I knew could have gobbled up this fey little man with his fries. “You’re Peter Lieder?” I said. “I’m so sorry I didn’t recognize you all day. I feel like a jerk.”
But the new Peter Lieder beamed at me. “Oh, Miss Upton, don’t worry about it. I’m not the same person, clearly. Nobody has called me Peter-Lieder-Pudding-and-Pie for years. A thyroid problem! Who’d have thought? And after the gastric stapling, too. Such a pity.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “Wow. But don’t call me Miss Upton. I’m Willie, Peter.”
“All right, Willie,” he said, flushed with pleasure. He cleared his throat and then said, “Now, I know you’re mainly interested in your great-grandfather Sy, but I found this all the way back in Special Collections. Looks
like it’s the journal of Sarah Franklin Temple, his wife, you know. Your, well, great-grandma. About the time that Sy came to town. I thought perhaps there was some information in there. Insight or two. Worth a try. Interesting stuff, from what I can tell. Smith girl, prolific writer. Nobody has ever really read them—they’re just sitting there awaiting the day that Sy gets a biographer.”
“Oh,” I said, my heart doing a joyful shimmy in my chest. “Thanks. Can I take this home tonight?”
His face pinched tiny with regret. “So sorry,” he said. “Special Collections stay here.”
“Please?” I said. “Just one night?”
“Miss Upton—” he began.
“Willie,” I said.
“Willie,” he said, “I’m so sorry, no.”
“Pretty please?” I tried again.
He looked troubled, then peered around in the gloomy shadows. “All right,” he whispered, peering around for the goat-woman, who was in the back with a cart and a few books. “Seeing as it’s you. And your family. I shouldn’t do this, but all right.” Then he looked at me with large eyes and gave a curious giggle as I stood and slid the book into my bag.
“I’ll bring it back tomorrow,” I said. “Thanks so much, Peter Lieder,” and then, fast, I was out the door before he changed his mind. Outside in the uprush of rose smell from the bushes by the door, I imagined the little librarian in the door behind me, in growing distress, frowning and rubbing his hands together like a chipmunk.
I DIDN’T SEE it until I entered the house that night and went up to my room. But there it was, framed in the twilight in a window, surreal and vivid: the monster in midair, suspended by the crane. Its neck was thrust backward so that its head tilted toward the east mountains, its arms and legs were drooping toward the ground, the great, delicate tail one long comma, looking tattered and unlovely out of the water. Like this, the buttery belly was exposed to the sky, and the monster, though huge, looked vulnerable. Water poured from the body back into the lake like long silvery strings in the dusk.
And then with a great mechanical groan, the crane pivoted the body until it was over the double-rigger flatbed truck that was to transport it, and began lowering it down. On the wind up from the lake there swept a new smell, both fishy and vegetative, a darkly rotting stink. When I looked away from the window, I felt the ghost there, an ethereal midnight blue, clenching. Angry, I could tell. I remembered the cold touch of the monster; I remembered its great sadness, which was apparent even in its corpse, and I understood the ghost’s fury.
With the monster now out of the lake, something had ended, I knew. Sadness fell over me like a velvety curtain and I pressed the Lump, feeling a pulse there.
When I was small and easily wounded, books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book, they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight; the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.
So, as I heard my mother move downstairs making dinner that night, I sat on the bed with my angry ghost and picked up Sarah Franklin Temple’s journal and began to read. She was a fresh college graduate when the volume began and her words were so strange that I became lost in them. Vi had to call me three times to come downstairs. At last she came up herself to take the book out of my hands.
I looked up, eager, thrilled. “Your grandmother,” I said, “was a total nut job.”
“Willie,” she said, suppressing a smile. “I’m so glad you’re pouring yourself into your quest. But even great scholars need food.”
“Vi?” I said. “Weren’t you ever curious about them? Sy and Sarah? The glamour of your grandparents? Never?”
She blinked at me, seeming trapped for a second before she dropped her eyes to the little book in her hands. “A little,” she said. “They were so…removed. Like c elebrities. I asked my great-grandmother about them, but she was bats then, and who knows whether the things she said were real. And I could never ask my father. He always seemed so stern when it came to her. I don’t know. I’m still maybe that obedient little girl at heart, I guess.” Then she gave a rallying sigh and said in her economical way, “Doesn’t matter. I’ll hear it all from you, I’m sure. But now our casserole is getting cold and it’s late and I have my prayer group tomorrow that I still have to bake cookies for.”
“Ugh. Baptist cookies. Locusts and wild honey, I’m guessing,” I said, reaching a little, because my mother seemed so sad.
“Nope,” she said, giving me a little weary smile. “But they must be dunked to find salivation.”
“Hardee-har. You sound like Clarissa,” I said, but I actually did giggle a little.
Vi held my hand all the way down the stairs, and turned to me at the bottom. “Despite everything,” she said, her jowls gently wobbling, “Sunshine, I’m so glad you’re home.”
Sarah Franklin Temple Upton
Her graduation photograph from the Emma Willard School, taken in 1927
Sy and Sarah in a canoe on Glimmerglass Lake, with Hannah holding an orphan in her lap. CIRCA 1932.
9
Sarah Franklin Temple Upton, from Her Journal,
Abridged
MAY 15TH 1932 TO AUGUST 1ST 1932
Today I arrived, and the boxed-up soul of mine is at last set free. Manhattan, the mere word’s a song…a good idea of my father’s to send me here for the summer, although my brothers seem to believe I am to be married. “How in the world,” they must have been thinking, “did we allow our lovely sister to graduate from college unmarried?”…how little they know me! I will accept no bourgeois striver, no paycheck-whore, no infernal attorney, editor, bachelor they’re so intent on introducing me to, I will have an artist, I will be the wife of a genius, or I will be a fierce spinster, dedicated to intellect…
…Today Manhattan is no longer glitz and dazzle. There is dirt, men in business suits selling things nobody wants, newspapers flying, rats with their beady eyes, breadlines. I feel sick. I rifle through the papers and find a story of famine forming behind those few tense lines…women in the Ukraine on broomstick legs, their children with balloons for bellies, one gust of wind and they’ll all float away…and all the while, my brothers serve caviar on delicate ivory spoons. These nights, I dream of Templeton, Lake Glimmerglass, my lake like ice on the tongue…
…two weeks here, and already this place makes me sick; already I have seen my private people on the street-corners, holes where their eyes should be…I am afraid…words beating behind my tongue like flies at a window…inappropriate, curious words, sometimes they slip out, my brothers and their wives looking at me silkily, then at each other…Not the needles again! I cannot go back to the hospital…Smith cured me, I thought, only one episode, there, only two weeks insane in four years…all that hockey, all those teas, all that menstruation and thinking…I was safe there. I am not safe, here, at all.
…sick, my brothers are sending me home. This place infects me. Templeton my smooth little pill…such images I have. Such voices, that high voice, the little girl’s, so naughty, talking to me, all the time now. How I hate her…the train is empty, Albany a small, spangled fish…this train is all brown velvet…the train slows, I am in Templeton, oh. Templeton, Templeton, the train says, slowing down. The lake, the blue, is an embrace.
…Father picking me up in his wretched old car…“a rich man, darling, should never show his wealth in a time of such misery”…gesturing toward the shantytown beside the railroad…“There are poor people everywhere, Sarah, even here”…Father is so old! So worn! Seventy-three and tottery. Mother has grown snappish, busy with the Orphanage, feeding the people in the shantytown, rather skinny in her forties, though still quite fine…“Hello, my dear, you look beautiful as always, I’m afraid you will find our circumstances reduced. Your father is over-generous, you see, and we can only keep a gardener and a housegirl now. Little Sally, from the Orphanage”…I do not like this Little Sally, mute girl, knobby face, wild hair…Father, closing the door be
hind us in his study. Over the mantel, Marmaduke Temple, and on the mantel old Cartwright’s baseball. Ratty thing of twine, curious my father holds such stock in it. Everyone knows baseball is an ancient sport…the Mills Commission all balderdash, bought by the Spalding Corporation, baseball manufacturers, to grow an American myth…baseball wasn’t invented in Templeton or anywhere else, it developed, like plants develop, out of other things…
Father looking weary, rubbing his eyes…“Sarah, I am afraid I have bad news. We are not as rich as we once were. The Crash was not good for us. Also, I have seen how Templeton was about to spiral downwards, invested much of my money in the town…The Hospital I built for my good friend, Imogene Finch, the gymnasium on Main, the electric streetlights I have put in, the Civil War Memorial near the Knox School for Girls, the tennis courts…Now, that work-initiative I have, Kingfisher Tower…they are calling it ‘Temple’s Folly’…a great, stone castle on the lake with a red tile roof…the men, I am afraid, are taking advantage of me. I have seen red tile roofs on a number of outhouses in this town…Oh, Sarah, Sarah, what can I do? I am afraid, my girl, that Templeton is dying.”
Dying! He told me then of what I couldn’t have known: Prohibition killing the great Falconer hop-fields all over the county—what remained had caught blight in the early twenties and nowadays trickled to nothing—the piano factory burnt down, the Phinney Printers moved to Rochester, the mercantile factory in Hartwick abandoned, the glove factory dead in Fly Creek. There were the dairy farms now, and that was about it for Templeton. People were poor, and getting poorer, he said…