Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  15

  Family photographs are as subject to mortality as people are. You think, I remember that picture—I wonder where it can be? And the answer is, nowhere. It got thrown out, by somebody who said, “After I’m gone, who will care about these things?” Or by somebody who didn’t even know who it was a picture of. The past is forever being swept away in the interest of neatness and order. It is unforgivable, or at least I don’t intend to forgive it.

  When I was a child there was a postcard sized photograph of my Uncle Ted sitting with his arm around a vivacious young creature, in the curve of the crescent moon. He was attractive to women, because of his looks and because he knew instinctively, and I suppose also by close observation, just how money should be spent. I had dinner with him once in the Pompeian Room of the old Palmer House in Chicago, and never have I seen anyone more secure in his dealings with a head waiter. At the time, my uncle was in his forties and working in the ticket office of the Illinois Traction System in Champaign.

  My father blamed my Grandmother Blinn for the way my uncle turned out. He said that all my grandfather’s efforts to discipline my uncle and make him realize that he was not a young Vanderbilt were frustrated by my grandmother’s habit of giving him money behind my grandfather’s back. What seems strange to me is that, caught in a familiar situation, people still go on behaving in the same predictable way, even though everybody knows that there is only one ending to it, and that unhappy.

  The problem that occupied my uncle’s mind when he was a young man was how to make money in other ways and in larger amounts than by, say, going to work as a teller in a bank or writing insurance. He leased a plane from the Wright brothers, with the understanding that if it went up he would receive a check for two thousand dollars from the town of Lincoln. Few people had ever seen an airplane, and certainly not up in the air. My father, with his strong interest in the future, wouldn’t have missed it for anything, and he took me with him. The plane was sitting in a field at the edge of town from which the wheat had just been harvested. I remember the stubble pricking my bare legs, and the heat, and the endless waiting. Forty years later, my father said that while we were waiting in that wheatfield all afternoon, my Grandfather Blinn was pacing the floor of his office. Whether the plane went up or not, my uncle had contracted to pay the Wright brothers a thousand dollars he did not have.

  Who brought the plane? Wilbur or Orville Wright? It couldn’t have come by truck or by train and it was too big for a wagon. It flew there. It must have come down out of the sky with its wings spread, like a big hawk, and settled on that field of stubble. And it must have flown away again, quietly, when everybody’s attention was on other matters. But what people remembered forever after was the day the airplane was supposed to go up and didn’t.

  Inevitably my uncle got into difficulties my Grandmother Blinn’s skirts were not wide enough to protect him from. He persuaded my grandfather to buy an automobile—a Rambler, with carriage lamps for headlights, the canvas top held in place by leather straps, and the gearshift (or was it the emergency brake?) on the outside, above the running board. To blow the horn you squeezed a rubber bulb. It was the first automobile on Ninth Street. Would it had been the last anywhere on earth. Because my uncle was so knowledgeable, he was invited to go to Chicago with friends who had bought a car there and were driving back to Lincoln in it. The car went out of control and turned over. My uncle lost an arm in the accident. Nobody else was even hurt. Annette says that he was not driving at the time, and that the car was going forty miles an hour, which I had trouble believing until I remembered what the unpaved country roads of that period were like. It was probably muddy and the car went into a skid. My uncle may have reached for the steering wheel. He was found under it.

  Overnight his life was changed. The jobs that are open to a man with one arm are not numerous, and he was suddenly the last thing in the world he had ever expected to be—an object of charity. Rising above this disaster, he became engaged to a charming red-headed girl from a good family in Lincoln. They were married after dark, in the Episcopal church, and I seem to remember looking out of the window of a hack, on my way to the wedding, and seeing snow on the ground. I was only four, and I may have superimposed this occasion on another, for I also remember being with my aunt and uncle when they were delivering Christmas presents.

  Instead of moving on to some other family, disaster settled in for a visit of some duration. My Grandmother Blinn suffered a massive stroke when she was in her early sixties and was an invalid from then on.

  Impatient with a grate fire that would not burn, Annette poured kerosene on it. In the explosion that followed, her hair and clothing caught on fire. She had the presence of mind to roll herself in a rug. I don’t know where or when this happened. I only remember my mother’s distress, and the scars on Annette’s hands, where she had beat at the flames.

  To keep down the rats at Gracelands my grandfather imported a ferret, and the ferret bit him on the ear while he was sleeping. This happened on the twentieth of October, 1912. On the fourth of November he appeared in public for the last time, at the funeral of a friend. The family doctor and various other medical men acted out a charade of treatment. There was no cure for blood poisoning in those days, and the center of infection was in the head.

  The Christmas festivities were held upstairs in my grandfather’s bedroom so he could be present, and when the door was thrown open I saw my grandfather sitting up in bed at the same instant I saw the lighted tree. My aunt says that he sat up in a chair briefly and then had to return to his bed. What the older generation remembered I don’t remember at all—how my Cousin Peg and I rushed into the room, and she exclaimed “Oh see my rocking horse!” and I exclaimed “Oh see my dolly!” The point being that we had claimed one another’s presents. I never thought this often-told story very amusing, because, for one thing, it impugned my masculinity, and for another, both the doll and the rocking horse, which was huge and covered with real horsehide, were, as it happened, hers.

  In any event, we took our presents and spread out all over the house. Leaning over the bannister, I watched my brother and my new aunt playing with his racing cars in the long front hall. And my grandfather was left to his slow dying, which went on clear to the end of January. I don’t know what I was told at the time. Nothing, probably. He was sixty-three. The funeral was on a Sunday afternoon and, the house being filled to overflowing, people stood outside on the porch or on the sidewalk. The day was so warm it was almost springlike. The minister of the Cumberland Presbyterian church offered a prayer, and one of my grandfather’s lawyer friends eulogized him in a speech that was much admired at the time but that strikes me as windy and ambiguous (“Mr. Blinn was not understood at all by a great many people. He was not what you would call a mixer. He was not a man who desired an army of loose friendships. What he sought, and what he got was close, warm, personal friends … When his children were born, Mr. Blinn, his strong affections always on the alert, reached out and encircled them all, and he bestowed on his wife and family such a rich heritage of affection as I never have known before … So it is a mistake, a great mistake, for anyone to think that E. D. Blinn was a heartless man …”), as if some legal defeat still rankled.

  I was a middle-aged man before my father told me that my grandfather died a most horrible death, in agony, with his head swollen to twice its normal size.

  “Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities,” Ingersoll said. “We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud—and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word.”

  In the case of my Grandfather Blinn there was word, or so his family believed. They believed that he came back after he died, with a message for them. They thought he was gone, and he opened his eyes and said—There are two versions of what he said. My mother’s version was that he said, “Heaven is a providing place,” and died. I know I am not i
nventing or misremembering this. I hear the sound of her voice saying the words. Annette says that his dying words were “United … hereafter.” She is given to unconscious mimicry, and as she was telling me about my grandfather’s death she opened her mouth and made her hand move in front of it in a gesture so authentic my hair stiffened. After that, nothing could shake my mother’s or Annette’s belief that there is a life without end.

  My grandmother waited about a year and then joined him in the cemetery. During the last months of her life a Mrs. Eliot, who had come to Lincoln as a bride at the same time my grandmother did and later moved away, was persuaded to come back and live with her. The two elderly women, sitting on either side of the cannel coal fire in the back parlor, passed the days talking about people they had known, and pleasant times, and the way things used to be. And about their husbands, and their children, and Kentucky.

  My Grandmother Blinn was there, and then, abruptly, she was not there, and strangers were living in the house across the street.

  From observing my own two children and what they do or do not remember, I have come to the conclusion that until the age of five the camera shutter remains open, producing a single long time-exposure. Then, mysteriously, something happens—not to the negative, which is indestructible, but to the print, and all that is left is a few torn-up scraps that might have been found at the bottom of a wastebasket.

  My own earliest memories are all of details in the house of my maternal grandparents. Exhibit A: the street number, etched in frosted glass over the front door and read in reverse as I am sliding down the bannister; B: a peculiar chair that has no back but, instead, two arms at right angles to each other; C: the taste of a particular slice of raw potato tucked in my mouth when I wandered out to the kitchen. And the black marble Victorian fireplace in the back parlor where Granny Blinn sits, and where the family congregates around her. And Annette lying on the floor of this same room, with her eyes closed, giving off emanations of unhappiness. When I bend over and kiss her, there is no response.

  In these earliest memories, the figures are frozen in some act or attitude, and I am the only person that moves. But not long ago my brother made me a present of one of his memories—Christmas dinner at my Grandfather Blinn’s, with the same figures released from their immobility and conspirators in a practical joke. I am there too, even though I have no recollection of it, and am not one of the conspirators because I would certainly have given the joke away. They are all talking and telling familiar funny stories and passing their plates up to the head of the table for more turkey and cranberries and oyster stuffing. Except my mother, who is sitting quietly, saying nothing. My father gave Annette the same present he gave her, and she is trying not to show that her feelings are hurt. Now that people have all but stopped playing practical jokes on one another, it is hard to see why they were ever tolerated. To find them uproarious you have to ignore, or to take pleasure in, the fact that the one necessary ingredient is a touch of cruelty. On the other hand, people filled with more love than they know what to do with sometimes bungle things. In the middle of Christmas dinner, a groom appeared outside the dining room window with a riding horse, my father’s real present to my mother.

  Both my maternal grandparents were dead by the time I was six, and in that dense Tolstoian family life I don’t suppose I was ever much alone with either of them. The values and assumptions of that household I took in without knowing when or how it happened, and I have them to this day: The pleasure in sharing pleasure. The belief that it is only proper to help lame dogs to get over stiles and young men to put one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. An impatient disregard for small sums of money. The belief that it is a sin against Nature to put sugar in one’s tea. The preference for being home over being anywhere else. The belief that generous impulses should be acted on, whether you can afford to do this or not. The trust in premonitions and the knowledge of what is in wrapped packages. The willingness to go to any amount of trouble to make yourself comfortable. The tendency to take refuge in absolutes. The belief that you don’t have to apologize for tears; that consoling words should never be withheld; that what somebody wants very much they should, if possible, have.

  How much of this comes from my Kentucky grandmother I cannot say, but the prevailing atmosphere of her house and of ours was, I think, Southern, though I have never been very far south of the Mason-Dixon Line and have to imagine what Southern family life is like. My grandfather, being a New Englander, must have inherited Puritan genes, and he had a New England upbringing, but Puritanism didn’t predominate and in fact wasn’t even apparent in his character. He was profoundly attached to his family and his friends, and his pleasure in having people around him was as much a part of him as his largeness of mind. He was not without a sense of the mystery that surrounds human life, but he took a skeptical view of the revealed truths and doctrines of formal religion, and put his faith in reason—a thing it is now, of course, no longer reasonable to do.

  The lawyer who spoke at my grandfather’s funeral said that because my grandfather rarely went to any church and did not belong to any particular congregation, a good many people got the idea that he was an atheist, but that he was not; that he believed in “a conscious infinity, an intelligence that was the Creator of it all. That was Mr. Blinn’s God”; that he believed also that the laws regulating and governing the universe are finished—none ever were or can be added, from the moment of Creation—and that they are also immutable; that our act or the reflex of our own act is what gives us happiness or misery; that we are punished not by God but by the emotional consequences of our wrongdoing—by our regret and shame; that human happiness is the highest good, and we can be happy only by being concerned for the happiness of others; that there is a destiny that makes us brothers, and so no one goes his way alone; that Heaven and Hell are not places but mental conditions.

  How much of all this is what my grandfather actually believed and how much is the embellishment of Mr. Timothy T. Beach is the question. My grandfather had thought and read a great deal on the subject of religion, and I suspect that he approached the eternal verities with a more humble mind than this funeral eulogy would suggest.

  In their unconscious assumptions and attitudes, my mother’s family was hardly Christian at all. But neither were they pagan. I don’t know what they were. I do know, really, but it is a question of what name to put to it. When Annette was forty, she had a son, now a grey-haired man, who bears a physical resemblance to my (and of course also his) Grandfather Blinn. But the resemblance is more than merely physical. What I am aware of in him, and found in my mother and Annette and my Aunt Edith and my older brother—the family trait they all have in common—is the pure feeling of the heart. I hesitate to say that it was their religion, but it is what they lived by.

  16

  When my mother was painting china, I stood beside her, watching. She painted odd-shaped Art Nouveau tea sets and dresser sets and vases decorated with pale pink or yellow roses and violets and daisies for her sisters and her friends, and nursery plates for their children. The smell of turpentine always brings it back to me. The cotton dabs covered with silk cloths were to soften the outlines, so that the flowers were more natural. As she squeezed the paint from the tube she said, “This is duck green … This is rose madder … This is alizarin crimson …” and I saw the color emerging and was in love with its name and smelled the turpentine and felt her presence beside me all as a single happiness. In the same calm matter-of-fact way that she taught me the names of colors, she also taught me to kneel beside my crib in the dark and say, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” and, when I was older, the Lord’s Prayer.

  It was a rule of my Grandfather Blinn’s house that when he and Governor Oglesby were discussing religion, the children could stay up until they fell asleep. Annette says that her religious convictions came much more from being present on those occasions than from attending Sunday school, though she and my mother did that too. As grown women they b
elieved in God but felt no guilt about not going to church; apparently He had excused them from it. The God my mother believed in (plainly modeled on my Grandfather Blinn with perhaps a touch of the grandeur of Governor Oglesby) was large-minded and just and affectionate toward His family, who lived in the hollow of His hand—where else would they live? Heaven was an actual place. And the dead were not all shuffled up together but moved freely among their families and their friends. (When Dr. Donald died, Annette said, in a letter, she was glad that after so much suffering he could go on to the people of his time.)

  Without at all understanding the consequences, my mother put an Old Testament fear in me by telling me that God did not love little boys who did something that, as it happens, all little boys do. Since she knew every thought that passed through my mind without my even having to tell her about it, there was good reason to suppose that He also knew what I was up to. But this also meant that He was in all insufficiently lighted places (the back stairs, the long hall upstairs between the bedrooms and the bathroom) shielding me from the unnamed terrors of the dark.

  The reason my brother and I didn’t go to the Christian church Sunday school was that my mother was afraid to have us cross the railroad tracks. My first exposure to the New Testament ideas came when I was presented with the Beatitudes, printed as a little book, with bright-colored illuminations. It was given to me by an old woman who came to the door at tactful intervals with Boston brown bread and pot-holders, and it enlarged my expectations of life, for if people who hardly knew me gave me presents when it wasn’t even Christmas or my birthday, at any time I might have an agreeable surprise. It also made me think. My brother was four and a half years older than I was, and as an object for teasing I was irresistible to him. When he had nothing better to do he played with me the way a cat plays with a chipmunk or a mole, hoping to produce signs of life, which usually came in the form of temper and tears. That the meek would inherit the earth and the pure in heart see God was just what I had been hoping to hear.