Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  Until I was old enough to go to school, it was customary for me to spend Friday with my grandmother. In winter the front door was enclosed in a small wooden vestibule, removed when warm weather came. The front hall smelled of hot-air registers. Like most old people, my grandmother had very little heat in her body, and my aunt saw to it that the thermometer in the dining room registered an even eighty all winter long. If it was summertime and I continued straight on through the dining room, I would find my aunt in the kitchen at the stove, uncorseted, in a Mother Hubbard, with the sweat running down her face and neck, putting up tomatoes or sweet corn or string beans or pickled peaches.

  “Well, how is my Bill Bump?” she would exclaim, and give me a steamy kiss. I wasn’t her Bill Bump, I belonged lock, stock, and barrel to my mother, and my Aunt Maybel knew it.

  The exact number of the jars that were waiting for sealing wax and their metal screw-tops would be announced to me proudly, and then my aunt would say, “Your grandmother is expecting you. Mind the stairs. I say, your grandmother is expecting you.”

  The stairs were in the front hall, and treacherous, the treads being an inch or two narrower than usual and so thickly varnished they were like glass. At home I sometimes slipped and went flumpety-bump bump bump, but here the danger was so obvious I never did. My grandmother and I would start down together like voyageurs shooting the rapids of some uncharted river in the wilderness. Clinging to each other and the bannister, we would arrive at the oil painting of the Castle of Chillon on the landing, turn and start down again, and finally arrive at the cuckoo clock at the foot of the stairs. Once more we had made it.

  The woodwork all over the house was dark and highly varnished. The shades were drawn in the parlor all the way to the sill, to keep the blue Chinese rug from fading. In the other rooms, upstairs and down, they were always exactly at half-mast, and net curtains kept out much of the remaining light. If you have light, the first thing you know you have joy, for which there is some but not very much warrant in the Scriptures, and what there is can be interpreted figuratively. The light in my aunt’s house was that of a perpetual grey day.

  My aunt did not think that people who are sitting down should be still; they should rock gently back and forth in a rocking chair. In the parlor there were two of them. Gigantic they were, of Grand Rapids mahogany, with arms that hit you in the wrong place, and knife-like edges, and proportions that had no relation to the human body. There was also a matching divan that everybody always avoided because it was even more uncomfortable, and an upright piano that was never tuned or played on, and two large oil paintings, the work of my Great-aunt Mandy, who was my grandmother’s sister. The paintings were both of a winter sunset—I think she never painted anything else—with an orange sky, a brook with ice on it, and one or two antlered deer in the middle distance. Salt had been sprinkled liberally on the white paint to make it glisten.

  My great-aunt lived in Williamsville, and used to come and visit my grandmother sometimes. Nothing about her suggested that she had ever held a paintbrush in her hand, or that she’d been married. Her husband had a grocery store. She was a little dried-up old woman, who sat and rocked and kept an eye out for young girls whose skirts were too short.

  The parlor was never used except when my father came, and as my aunt went about raising the shades and finding an ashtray for him, I would be reminded of the fact that, even though she was older, she considered him the head of the family. She spoke of my grandfather as if he were larger than life-sized. If she had been as respectful toward her husband as she was toward her father and her brother, she would have been totally boxed in.

  The sitting room was directly beyond the parlor and could be shut off from it and from the dining room by sliding doors. High up over the open doorways two painted plaster heads looked down on the sitting room in such a way as to suggest that though the heads could not hear they could certainly see what went on. Nothing much did. One of the heads was black and the other white, and I wonder if they represented Europe and Africa. Above the desk there was a row of Max Fuller in his petticoat. The horsehair couch was, like all horsehair furniture, scratchy. The rest of the furniture was golden oak, and quite as uncomfortable as the furniture in the parlor, though not so massive. In glass-fronted bookcases all along one wall were kept my grandfather’s books, specimens of minerals, pieces of coral, several starfish, a seahorse, and a neat pile of parrot eggs, regarded with great affection by my aunt and my grandmother. The parrot that laid them was thought for nineteen years to be a male. One night they heard a frightful screeching and squawking, and when they came down in the morning—I would have had to get up and see what was going on, but people are either curious or they are not—they found these nineteen eggs and Polly dead on the floor of the cage.

  I never succeeded in getting my hands on any of the objects in the bookcases, or even the books, except one. My grandfather’s copy of Dante’s Inferno, with the Doré illustrations, was presented to me by my Aunt Maybel when I graduated from college, with the stipulation that if I was ever obliged to put my things in storage, I was to return it to her for safekeeping. This was not really a feasible plan, because she died nine years later. The book is still safe, though it shows its age, and in some of the plates somebody (who could it have been? my older brother? Max? my Cousin Blane Maxwell?) has traced the sexual parts in pencil.

  Over the bookcase, in the darkest corner of the sitting room, there was a sepia photograph of my Grandfather Maxwell in his open coffin, surrounded by floral tributes from the various lodges he had belonged to.

  Breakfast and lunch were eaten in the kitchen, and the evening meal in the dining room. The telephone was attached to the dining room wall. Above the swinging door to the kitchen, or on the dado, or along the high shelf under the dining room windows, were still more interesting objects: ruby-red cups with “Souvenir of” this or that World’s Fair etched on the glass; a highly ornamental and of course never used Bavarian beer stein; a picture of an English bulldog looking out menacingly between the apertures of a real picket fence—that is to say, the fence was outside the glass; a dusty peacock feather. My aunt didn’t know, and I don’t suppose anybody else in Lincoln did either, that peacock feathers bring bad luck.

  At the head of the stairs was a watercolor rendering of the Maxwell coat of arms (did Miss Jessie Gillett bring this also from Scotland?) and two framed diplomas proving that my aunt and uncle had graduated from Eureka College. To the right, down the hall, were my grandmother’s bedroom and two much smaller rooms—the bathroom, which smelled of glycerin soap and had a Rube Goldberg contraption for heating bathwater on the spot, and my uncle’s office. This room was furnished with a desk and a typewriter, two chairs, and a narrow bed I sometimes slept in, watched over not only by my ancestors but also the special agents of the New York Underwriters Insurance Company.

  To the left, down the same hall, was the bedroom of my aunt and uncle, and then the spare room, as it was always called. Children have no sense of history. It has to be drummed into them. And until this process is completed, the past always takes place in the surroundings and circumstances of the present. I knew that my Uncle Charlie, in his delirium, as he lay dying, sang “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” and where could he have done this except in the big brass double bed in the spare room?

  It looked as if nothing had happened there since. Things did happen in that house, though—mostly scenes, of an appalling nature, which I heard about from my father when I was older. He remained on the outside, but was called in when things got out of hand. I myself was once called upon to adjudicate an argument between my Aunt Maybel and my Aunt Bert—about whether the Oberammergau Passion Play was in Switzerland or the Holy Land—and so I have an idea of what heat they brought to bear on matters of real emotional substance.

  * I remember his telling me that’s what he had done. My Aunt Annette says that my Grandfather Blinn advised him to take as his portion of the estate some shares in the Central Illinois Tele
phone and Telegraph Company, at that time worthless but, in my Grandfather Blinn’s opinion, likely to be worth a great deal someday. And my father did, and they were. This does not jibe, of course, with what my father told me, but I know he owned stock in the telephone company, and whoever said things had to jibe?

  11

  My father was walking to the train one morning, carrying his heavy grip, when two girls went by in a pony cart. He saw that the girl who was driving had black hair and large brown eyes, and that she was looking at him. In that instant both their lives were rearranged. Living in so small a place, they couldn’t possibly have failed to see each other before this, and in fact my Aunt Annette, who was four years younger than my mother, remembers watching with her a lawn party they were too young to be invited to. There was a dance platform under the trees, and Chinese lanterns—I see it as a Middle Western small-town version of Renoir’s Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette—and my mother was staring at one particular couple. “I would give anything in the world to be that girl,” she said, “and wearing that blue dress, and dancing with that man.” The young man in question was my father. As she, later on, had premonitions of her death, so this was a premonition of love. But if she hadn’t been driving a friend to the same train my father was taking, would they—It’s an idle question. They saw each other at the same moment and, as if they were exchanging favors at a cotillion, gave up their hearts.

  When my father came back from that business trip he telephoned my mother and asked if he could see her. From that time, Annette says, my mother never went out with anybody else. One of my mother’s beaux managed to get the assembly changed from Friday to the middle of the week, when my father would be out of town, and my mother refused to go to it.

  The rules about courting were strict in my Grandfather Blinn’s house: If there was a party, the guests left at midnight; at other times, the young men said good night at ten o’clock and left or my grandfather asked them to leave. That was the rule, but he didn’t always know when they lingered. My mother was afraid that if my grandfather asked my father to leave he would never come back, and so she got her younger sister to keep watch for her, through minute after minute of sweet foolishness. My mother was even so indiscreet as to have dinner with my father in a hotel. There would have been hell to pay if my grandfather had found out.

  My mother was married at home, in the parlor, in June, 1903. My father was twenty-four, she was three years younger. Annette was the matron of honor. The bridal book, with the signatures of the minister and the wedding guests, has ended up in my possession, so I know that the service was performed by the Reverend W. H. Cannon, minister of the Christian church in Lincoln, and that my Grandfather Maxwell was well enough to be present. Max Fuller signed his own name. He was only four, and it doesn’t look as if somebody guided the pen. There were more than a hundred wedding guests. How they got into that house (let alone how they sat down to a full wedding supper, which my Aunt Annette says they did) I cannot begin to imagine. Somebody sneaked into the summer kitchen and made off with a drum of ice cream and the coat of one of the waiters. The waiter remarked in my Grandfather Blinn’s hearing that he was not going to profit very much from this day’s work, and my grandfather gave him the money to buy a new coat. The ice cream was in molds.

  When I asked Annette where my father and mother went on their honeymoon, she couldn’t at first remember.

  “Mackinac Island?”

  “No.”

  “French Lick?”

  “Yes. That’s where they went.” A huge frame hotel with long verandahs lined with rocking chairs. “I can see your mother’s face when they came home. How her eyes shone. It wasn’t a very long stay, but your father had done it handsomely.”

  During the first year of their married life, my mother and father lived at my Grandfather Blinn’s. My grandfather did not think my mother ought to be alone when my father was on the road. My father greatly admired his father-in-law, and from the beginning he was more comfortable with my mother’s family than with his own. The warm soft wind from Kentucky. They took him in, and made over him—made him feel that it was his true self that was wanted—and nearly everything was an innovation. Probably the greatest innovation of all was that religion was not viewed from a fixed position.

  My Grandfather Blinn was a New Englander from Vermont. I have not been able to discover what faith he was brought up in—only that it was very rigid. The family were at church all day on Sunday, the congregation brought their food along and ate together, and my grandfather, being a shy boy, held back. Often when the faithful had satisfied their hunger there wasn’t anything left for him to eat. He knew, without my father’s having to tell him, what my father’s upbringing had been like and how he felt at being released from so confining a view of human life.

  Also, pleasures that my father had looked longingly at from a distance were now suddenly open to him. In the will that caused such prolonged litigation, John P. Gillett left his widow a large farm with the story-book name of Gracelands, and when she remarried and moved east she asked my Grandfather Blinn to manage it for her. He managed it as carefully and with as much satisfaction as if it had been his own. I was nearly grown before I discovered it wasn’t. On Saturday mornings my grandfather would invite my father to go there with him, on the electric line that connected Peoria, Lincoln, and Springfield. And on Sunday the rest of the family would join them for a picnic. The house was old and had been much added onto, and stood in a grove of trees, surrounded by cornfields. The barns were full of blooded stock, to be soberly considered, and there were beautiful walking horses. On horseback, as they walked through the fields, as they wound their fishing reels and with a precise flick of the wrist sent the fly sailing out over the quiet part of some bend in the creek, the two men revealed themselves to each other. My father intended to own a farm himself some day, and everything my grandfather said about the management of Gracelands was of interest to him. But he was also alert to the ideas that were offered for his consideration by my grandfather’s wideranging mind, and would not be so mentally alert again until he was an old man reliving his life in the clear cold light of how things had turned out.

  My older brother was born in my grandfather’s house. With his arrival the time had come to spread out, and my father bought a modest two-story frame house on Eighth Street, a block from my Grandfather Blinn’s. Annette* says that it had eight rooms, but that they were small. My father wasn’t going to make the mistake his father had of living in a house that was grander than he could afford. They knocked out a partition between two of the downstairs rooms and put in a fireplace, and the house was very pleasant and homelike. It was painted a dirty shade of yellow when I was a little boy, and we no longer lived there, and compared to the house we were living in it didn’t look very permanent to me. Walking past it I used to worry that it would not be there when the time came to put up the plaque. I think I expected to be President of the United States.

  Annette used to stay there sometimes when my father was away. “One night,” she said, “a young man came calling on me and stayed too late. Your mother was furious and said, ‘Annette, how can you do that, when Will isn’t home and people will see a man leaving my house at eleven o’clock!’ ” Remembering all the times she had stood watch for my mother when she was saying good night to my father, my aunt was deeply hurt.

  My mother’s temper flared up as suddenly as a brush fire, but she didn’t nourish her anger and it was all over in a matter of seconds. I can only remember three times in my whole childhood when I encountered it head on.

  Annette did not marry the lively, penniless young lawyer everyone expected her to marry but someone else. My Uncle Will Bates had graduated from Yale. This distinguished him from every other young man in town very much as having one brown eye and one blue eye would have. His father owned a great deal of land, and nothing I have ever heard about Erastus Bates was unprejudiced, but he appears not to have been very amiable. Annette and her hus
band went to Europe on their wedding journey, along about the year 1907, and brought back a collection of bibelots and a glass-and-gilded-wood cabinet to hold them, some colored prints of famous masterpieces by Raphael and Michelangelo, a photograph of the Bridge of Sighs, and an even larger view of the Colosseum in Rome. These hung in my aunt’s front hall and living room for the next half century. In those days, when people drove a nail in the wall and put up a picture, it was for life.

  My Grandfather Blinn took my father and Annette’s husband to Gracelands, intending some fishing, and my Uncle Will put soap in the minnow bucket. It was his idea of a joke.

  On the outskirts of town there was a state hospital for feebleminded children, and while my Aunt Edith was working there she met a young doctor named William Young, whom she married. He left the hospital and started to practice in Bloomington. I don’t know when this happened. Sometime in the years just before I was born. He was over six feet and very broad in the shoulder, with a long head and dark skin and the beaked nose of a Indian. He was so secure in his own physical dignity that he could afford to speak of it with comic appreciation. I have a photograph of him sitting on a beautiful black horse, in a cap and plus fours, smiling as if at a joke with sixteen sides. One of them was should a man that big be sitting on a horse in the first place. As for learning to dance … With my Cousin Peg sitting on one of his size twelve shoes and me on the other he walked back and forth talking to my mother as if nothing whatever was going on down around his shins. Or sometimes he would act as though he had no choice, as if we made him walk around with us sitting on his shoes. And he was such a huge man that we were beside ourselves with our own power to do this to him. But then suddenly we couldn’t manage him. We were somewhere (I have no idea where it was) and Peg said, “That isn’t water down there, is it, Uncle Doc?” and I said, “That is too water down there, isn’t it, Uncle Doc?” and he drove us frantic by agreeing with both of us, even when we explained to him that it couldn’t be water down there and not be water down there.