Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  I was not faced with the prospect of living with a stranger, or with someone who wouldn’t understand how I felt about my mother, for when I was four years old the pretty young woman who was going to be my stepmother used to gather up all the children on Ninth Street and walk them downtown to a kindergarten run by two elderly women, and until my father told me that he was going to marry her I had thought of her as someone who belonged to me.

  My father sold the house on Ninth Street and most of the furniture with it. He very sensibly didn’t want to begin a new marriage in a place that had so many associations with his first one. For a year, while he was building a new house, we lived on an unpaved street in a rented house with nothing to recommend it except that it was a block away from Annette’s. At first it took a certain amount of courage for me to go there, for I didn’t know my uncle or even what to call him. I had never heard him referred to at home except by his full name or sometimes, scathingly, by his initials, “W.B.” So I called him “Mr. Bates,” politely, until my Cousin Peg asked her mother why I did this and Annette spoke to me about it. With a considerable grinding of gears I managed to say, “Yes, thank you, Uncle Bill,” when he asked me if I would have another piece of steak, and he accepted the change without a flicker of expression. Though he was a surveyor, he spent his whole life watching over the farms he had inherited from his father. He went every morning to the country, and when he came home and found me there, he would pass through the living room, nodding to me and making some remark to Annette that maintained the proper degree of tension between them, but never making an issue of my presence, though I always expected him to.

  Sometimes I would find another displaced person there: my Uncle Ted. For varying periods of time and in a way that must have been totally without hope (for his face gave off no life and at family dinners when he smiled it had a dampening effect on the occasion) he managed to earn a living. Between jobs, when he was hard-pressed he would turn to Annette for help. It had to be given surreptitiously, and sooner or later made trouble between Annette and her husband. My Uncle Ted was very fond of my Cousin Peg and of my older brother. I was uneasy with him, and aware always of the immovable arm ending in a grey kid glove.

  So far as I know, Annette never quarreled with her husband about my being there. I rather think it wasn’t a serious issue between them. He loved his own children, and probably treated me as he hoped somebody would treat them in my circumstances.

  But the bitterness and unforgivingness of those small-town family feuds! I can hardly believe this now, and yet I know it is true because I saw it happen: On the morning of my mother’s funeral, he came to our house—a thing he had not done since I was old enough to remember—and my father shut the door in his face.

  In the hospital, with the terrible clairvoyance of the dying, my mother said to Annette, “I don’t want the Maxwells to have my baby.”

  I don’t know what Annette said to my father at the time, but many years later he said, in such a way to cast doubt on the story, “I was in the hospital too, and she never said anything to me about it.”

  Was it because they were both so ill? Or to spare his feelings? It would never have occurred to me that it needed saying, but possibly I knew (because it is the kind of thing children always know) how she felt about that household better than he did. It may have been the one thing she kept from him. Out of love.

  From the time he was about a year old, my little brother spent one day a week with my grandmother. And then gradually, since he had no mother and the housekeeper was glad to be relieved of the responsibility for him, the one day stretched out to three or four.

  Long before this, when my mother was alive, my father had a chance to give up the road and take a much better job in the Chicago office of the insurance company he worked for, and my mother said no, it was not a good place to bring up children. The offer was repeated when he was in his middle forties. This time, tired of lugging that heavy grip from one small town to another, he said yes. When we moved to Chicago he had every intention of taking my younger brother. But my grandmother threw herself on her knees before him (this scene I have no difficulty whatever in imagining) and cried, “Will, if you take that child I will die, it will kill me!” And since he loved her, he couldn’t do it. He thought the moment could be postponed. And of course it could. There is nothing that cannot be postponed. It is the only act of his life that I ever heard him express serious regret for. In the end, what it meant was that my younger brother was brought up by my Aunt Maybel and my Uncle Paul. They both idolized him. Until then, my Uncle Paul’s life had been made up of the Christian church, the New York Underwriters, and his family in Augusta. He became so fond of my little brother and he displayed this fondness so openly, by hugging and kissing, that my father’s sense of propriety was offended.

  I used to wonder if it was possible for my little brother to love someone who was so different from my mother as my aunt was. Until I heard that, coming home from school one winter day, he had slipped and fallen on the ice, and got a slight concussion. In telling about it, my aunt said, “I had been watching for him, and he came up the street calling my name.” Then I knew.

  The failure of Prohibition is, for me, the point at which the 20th century becomes distinct from the preceding ones. The essentially Puritanical Protestant churches have been losing steadily ever since the power to bring ordinary human life into relation with eternity.

  The Puritan believes that his own understanding of things is the only possible one, and therefore must not be departed from. But it was departed from, successfully, in Darwin’s Origin of Species and in all the scientific thinking that grew out of it. Man took his place in the animal kingdom, instead of being but little lower than God.

  At about the same time, light thrown on the New Testament by Biblical scholarship made it questionable that when (in the words of Thomas Campbell) the Bible spoke, anybody had, in some instances, understood what it said. In my childhood, the barrier between one Protestant church and another seemed permanent and necessary, though I never asked myself what purpose it served. The congregation of the Presbyterian church acted as though they didn’t even know about the Cumberland Presbyterian church, just across the street from them. But the strong sense that all Protestant denominations had of their separate identities is now steadily giving way. The Unitarians have merged with their next of kin, the Universalists, the Congregationalists with the Christian Church, and this organization in turn with the Evangelical and the Reformed Churches, and so on. In the spring of 1970, ninety delegates from nine Protestant churches voted in favor of a proposal that would merge their membership of twenty-five million members in an organization called the Church of Christ Uniting. After which they rose and sang the doxology. And elected as their first chairman a representative from the Disciples of Christ. It doesn’t look to me like the forward surge Thomas Campbell imagined but, rather, the response to a threat which they are not strong enough to stand up to individually—that, in the words of Barton Stone, the power of religion has disappeared and even the form of it is fast waning away.

  I joined the Presbyterian church in Lincoln as soon as I was old enough, and when we moved to Chicago I started going to another Presbyterian church there, until one day I brought home from the school library a copy of Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger. I was a very priggish adolescent and I wanted to test the strength of my religious convictions. They were not, it turned out, very strong. But I was not content with saying that I did not and could not know whether there was a divine order in the universe, which was my father’s position for most of his adult life; I didn’t stop short of atheism. Perhaps not atheism. My father’s is a rational position, mine simply an unbelief. A negative. If you could only develop a print from it you would have saving faith.

  I would like to believe in God but not all that much is, I sometimes think, the simple truth of the matter. When I am thoroughly frightened, I do more than half believe in Him. Other people’s inabilit
y to believe troubles me just as much, because it has altered the world I live in.

  Reading The History of the Disciples of Christ in Illinois, I came upon a paragraph about a man named John F. M. Parker, and in it were these two sentences: “Within eleven months he lost a son, a daughter, his farm and his wife. But then he said: ‘I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him against that day.’ ”

  It makes me hang my head in shame.

  Where the understanding of other men differs from ours there is just as good a chance that we are in the presence of truth as of opinion. Therefore a new kind of enlightenment ought to have resulted from the respectful and unemotional consideration of one man’s understanding against another’s. Instead it seems to have produced a new kind of darkness, with little choice, actually, but to wait for what time brings. The providing place that my Grandfather Blinn had a glimpse of prematurely is not in the firmament, as people once thought.

  “Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is,” Pascal said. “Let us consider the two possibilities. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Hesitate not, then, to wager that He is.” It is not very persuasive. I think I prefer my Grandmother Maxwell on the subject: If the universe was a machine, it would have said so in the Bible. Come here and let me take a washrag to your ears. I declare, you could grow carrots in there.

  She went to her rest in the Twenties. After the funeral they all went back to the house on Union Street and my Aunt Bert and my Aunt Maybel quarreled so bitterly that they were never on friendly terms again. Among other things, my Aunt Bert accused her sister of coming between Max and her. If my Aunt Maybel was indeed a child stealer, then the attic of the house on Union Street was full of toys for the same reason that the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel was made of candy.

  Someone remarked once to my father that it was a pity his sister never had any children, and he said, “I happen to know she could have had them.” There was no use asking what he meant by this statement; if he had felt it was proper to say more, he would have.

  My Aunt Maybel died of a heart attack in 1939. She was sixty-five. She died away from home—not in her own bed, with her own things around her. Not even in a hospital, but among people she didn’t care for. I try to imagine what it was like, but I cannot get over my astonishment at her dying in Augusta, Illinois. And they brought her body home, to a house without gas and electricity. How grand and mysterious life is!

  Though my Uncle Paul was living at the time, she left everything she owned to my younger brother. The chair my uncle had drawn up to the dining room table for thirty-seven years, the knife and fork he ate with, the brass bed he slept on, were no longer his. My brother was in college, and from college he went into the army, and he did not claim his embarrassing inheritance. My Uncle Paul asked my Aunt Bert, who was still stuck in that coal-mining town in southern Illinois, to give up her job and come and keep house for him. She threw out the turbanned plaster heads of Europe and Africa, the parrot’s eggs, the bulldog, the peacock feathers, the starfish, and the seahorse, and a great many other things, and after that the house was nothing like so gloomy. But it also no longer had the look of immortality about it. My father kept his fingers crossed, knowing how quick-tempered and tactless my aunt could be, and for a time the arrangement seemed to be working, but it was only an accommodation, like that between the Campbellites and the Baptists, and the deep underlying differences finally declared themselves. One night my father was wakened from his first sleep by the ringing of the telephone. “Yes?” he said, preparing himself for bad news, before he knew from where. “Come and get your sister,” my uncle said. “All right,” my father said. “I’ll be over in the morning.” “You won’t come in the morning,” my uncle said. “You’ll come and get her right now!” So my father did. He never entered the house on Union Street again. Nor, since he asked me not to, have I.

  My father set my Aunt Bert up in a small but quite comfortable apartment, where she lived out the rest of her life in the passionate enjoyment of doing as she pleased. At last she had her own furniture and rugs about her, and all the family pictures, and my grandmother’s beautiful patchwork quilts, and there was no one to object if she read until three in the morning—no one but my father, who thought people shouldn’t stay up late reading.

  She complained about the physical indignities of old age. And after Max died, his suffering haunted her. She had only one grandchild to squander her affection on, and to occupy her lonely imagination. But they did not see each other often, and her granddaughter was not on anything like the easy terms with her that my two brothers and I were. When I wrote her that I was getting married, she wrote back, “Happiness is our birthright, and now you have come into your own.” This statement strikes me as a triumph of love over experience.

  Because he had taken care of his sister for so long, my father made her sign a paper stating that on her death everything she owned was to go to my stepmother (who was younger than my father and could be expected to outlive him). He did not put money above morality, but neither did he treat it purely as a medium of exchange. It was like a person in that it had rights which must be respected. With two farms and the securities in his safe-deposit box, he had enough so that if he should die, my stepmother would be amply provided for. And my aunt’s possessions were not very valuable. But apparently he felt that by helping her he had diminished the value of his estate in a way that must be compensated for. I knew my aunt was not happy about this arrangement, but I also knew that my father did not welcome opinions about his conduct that he hadn’t asked for. I needn’t have worried; the arrangement was never carried out—I assume because my stepmother talked my father out of it, but he was quite capable of seeing for himself that it was improper in that it did not leave his sister free to dispose of her own possessions, and that it was only natural she should want to do this.

  When my aunt died, in 1957, my father told Max’s daughter to take whatever she wanted, and derived considerable satisfaction afterwards from the thought he had done this. A small quantity of old furniture that had had good care and been much loved was in this way saved from ending up at the Salvation Army. But one thing my father did hold back on that occasion.

  I have no idea how much people in Lincoln knew about my Aunt Bert’s first marriage. I tend to think that in small towns people know everything. My Aunt Bert didn’t tell Max the truth about his father. Instead, undoubtedly because it was believed to be for his own good, they—she and my Aunt Maybel and my grandmother and my father—all lied to him. He grew up believing that his father died shortly before he was born. And this is what he told his daughter thus perpetuating the lie that was passed off on him. Not until after his death did she begin to suspect, from certain remarks my Aunt Bert made, that she had not been told the whole story. Indirect intimations, mostly. The cat struggling to get out of the bag. My aunt never said anything specific; it was rather her absolute refusal to talk about Max’s father that finally aroused her granddaughter’s curiosity.

  At the time of her death, my Aunt Bert left a sealed envelope, with written instructions that it was to be burned unopened. My father was her executor, and he carried out these instructions before Max’s daughter arrived in Lincoln for the funeral. Characteristically, he told her what he had done.

  When he introduced her to old friends as Max’s daughter she sensed that he was proud of her. (He would never have introduced any woman slightingly, in any case.) He was the only member of her father’s family who was acceptable to her mother. She told him that Max had admired him very much and my father looked surprised and said, “I didn’t know.”

  He might have guessed. I remember the respectful way that Max looked at my father, and spoke to him. When Max was dying and my father took my Aunt Bert to Cincinnati, he asked my father to play the piano for him.

  Max’s daughter questioned my father about her Grandfather Fuller, but all my fat
her would say was that he “was not a very honest man.” It seemed as if all sources of information were permanently closed to her.

  Later, when she began going through Max’s records, she learned that her grandparents were married on April 2, 1898; that the marriage license stated that he was “of Chicago”; that Max was born on January 5, 1899, at which time Louis E. Fuller was described as a newspaper man; and that he died on February 4, 1900, in Springfield, Illinois.

  She wrote to the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Springfield, hoping to learn the cause of her grandfather’s death from the death certificate, and was informed that there was no such certificate. Letters to twenty other counties near Springfield also failed to turn up a record of his death.

  Finally, she wrote for photostats of the probate papers of her great-grandfather, Galusha E. Fuller, who lived, as I have said, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and from these she discovered that her great-grandfather’s will, written on June 6, 1901—a year and some months after Louis Fuller was supposed to have died—mentioned him as a beneficiary: “To my son, Louis E. Fuller, I give and bequeath the sum of One Dollar ($1.00), having heretofore advanced to him what I consider to be his just share of my estate.” Furthermore, she found that a settlement of her great-grandfather’s estate on May, 1905, listed among other heirs, Louis E. Fuller of New York City.

  The clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County produced a copy of my Aunt Bert’s divorce papers in which it was stated that she and her second husband were married on June 25, 1905—little more than a month after the settlement in which Louis E. Fuller was said to be alive and residing in New York City. Unless my Aunt Bert’s marriage to Max’s father was in some way illegal to begin with, the only reasonable conclusion anybody could come to was that she had divorced Max’s father as well.

  My cousin applied to the clerk of Logan County for the papers concerning her grandmother’s divorce from Louis E. Fuller. From them she learned the facts I have already given in chapter nine.