Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  Though my aunt was brought down in her first flight, she had been so brave. Defeat that comes about through timidity is final. The person who has acted bravely is sustained by the recollection of that moment when he could have acted with caution and chose instead to throw caution to the winds. Having lived through so much, and had such a good view of the seamy side of life, my aunt had earned the right to be rash if she felt like it.

  Max’s daughter still did not know where and when her grandfather died, whether he had ever remarried and had other children who would be her half-aunts and-uncles, or exactly what the trouble was that led her grandmother to guard her secret so long and so carefully. She thought of everything it could be, including bigamy, and suspected that it was nothing so dramatic as most of the possibilities that occurred to her. From the wording of her Great-grandfather Fuller’s will, her grandfather must have been, to say the least, irresponsible about money. Regardless of what he did, he was her grandfather and she wanted to know about him. And her knowing would certainly harm no one now.

  A further search among her father’s papers uncovered the name and address of a first cousin on the Fuller side, Louis Fuller’s sister’s son. She wrote to him and got a letter back, saying that he had known her Grandfather Fuller very well. He was the victim of a domineering father. As a boy he had dreams of becoming an inventor, but his father had other plans for him, and he had to hide his inventions under the floor of the barn or his father would find them and destroy them. As a grown man he drifted from one job to another. Before him at all times was the vision of untold wealth that would come to him as the reward of his inventions. Dreamers, as my father often pointed out to me, are inclined to get into financial difficulties. On several occasions Louis Fuller’s father bailed him out, and then he said, “No more.” Unable to get money any other way, Louis Fuller committed a forgery and served eighteen months in prison. I can see him saying to himself as he dipped the pen in the ink, They would never put me in jail for $118. He wouldn’t let them do it.

  He came home to Waukesha when his father died, learned that there was nothing coming to him from his father’s will, and returned to New York without waiting for the funeral. He married again. His second wife was a Roman Catholic, and she was a very good wife to him. During the latter part of the First World War, this same nephew was stationed nearby, and used to visit Louis Fuller and his wife every weekend, until he was mustered out of the army. He developed an affection for both of them.

  During the Twenties, Louis Fuller was trying to patent a dry stencil and wanted an affidavit from his nephew, which was supplied, though not promptly. He then wrote to thank his nephew for sending it. The letter begins: “Your letter and affidavit received. It is very satisfactory and will probably be of material assistance to me. I would like to have a supplemental affidavit setting forth in a few words the facts as to the delay which must be accounted for if possible. Something like this: That you first heard from me about an affidavit as to your knowledge of my possession of the invention about November 1924; that the import of it did not occur to you at the time, but that you intended to take up the matter later but through inadvertence did not do so at once, thinking that you would do it in your next regular letter to me; that having heard from me again on or about June 1925, asking for the information, you have made an affidavit showing your knowledge as to my possession of the invention. You might also state in this affidavit, that you saw me take a piece of gun cotton, place it on an ash tray and ignite it and that it burned at once with a flash and a large flame, that this was seen by three other persons present beside myself, and you (Ryan, Nichols, and Aunt Elizabeth). Do not mention the names.… ”

  On the second page of the letter this sentence occurs: “It seems to be my job in this world to lick rascals. But worms do not lie on their backs forever.” There is also a terribly touching postscript: “I am remembering about Samson. He did not pray God to thrust the pillars asunder, but that he, Samson, be given the strength to do it. And so it happened. Also, ‘He goeth forth clothed in the Armor of righteousness, and who can withstand him?’ But every day I see evil triumph and good dragged in the dust; the wicked prosperous and happy and the good poor and miserable. Solomon states that this was one of the greatest mysteries which he had ever contemplated. But if this Objective Reality is in fact a place of trial to train the Soul, and She profits by it, all is well. I have a deep conviction that the wicked, rich man has got something to learn. But if God’s infinite mercy saves him, what of His infinite justice? You cannot say one is greater than the other.”

  And what about Max? When his cousin called on him in his office in Cincinnati, in the year 1935, and he learned about his father at last, did he go home and tell his wife what he had learned? The answer is he did not. Then or ever. His daughter was only nine years old at the time, and only seventeen when he died, and until the day before he died he was expecting to recover. In his place I think I too would have decided to wait until my daughter was a little older. “What saddens me now,” Max’s daughter says, “is that I was so often in New York when my Grandfather Fuller was alive, and could so easily have looked him up, and may even, who knows, have passed him on the street.” There is reason to think that Max did look his father up, on one of his trips to New York—perhaps the very one when he had dinner with me in the Village.

  Before Max died, he completed the line of descent of the Fullers, going back to a Robert Fuller who came from Southampton and landed in Salem in 1638, in the ship Bevis. In writing to his cousin about genealogical matters, he says, “I suppose you think this is a lot of useless nonsense, but once worked out, it may be valuable to someone someday.”

  One of the mysterious innuendoes that my Aunt Bert made in speaking to her granddaughter was that before Max’s father died she had gone home to her family, and one night he tried to kidnap Max, then a baby. From this Max’s daughter deduced that for a time at least her grandfather must have cared a great deal for his son—though I think, considering how little he had seen of that baby, it is also possible to regard it as the act of a heated imagination. I have even wondered if this could be the true story of the Dickensian burglar who was trying to get into the house on Kickapoo Street. My grandmother would certainly not have felt like going into my Aunt Bert’s marital difficulties with a child of four, and with that unbroken run of bad luck Louis Fuller would be bound to place the ladder under the wrong window.

  19

  Searching through books and papers for information that is usually not there, I often ask myself why I was so incurious about my forebears. Most of the things I would like to know, my father could have told me. If this kind of curiosity is one of the aspects of oncoming age, then my lack of it earlier was natural. But there is another possible explanation. My father had a number of stories that he liked to tell of an evening before dinner—the adventure of the copper-toed shoes, the adventure of the bellboy in the lobby of the hotel in Ohio, how he borrowed the money from Tim Hardin, how Professor Hieronymous met with his comeuppance, how my grandfather said to my father, “If you’ll just put aside a thousand dollars,” and so on. He did not like to be interrupted in the middle of his narrative, and by the time he got to the end I would have forgotten what it was I wanted to ask him. So I didn’t ask the questions I might have asked, and now there is no one to ask them of. Here and there, digging, I bring up some small piece of archaeological information.

  The History of Logan County says that my great-great-grandfather’s brother, John England, who was bored by the whole idea of money, was fatally injured at Cornland in November, 1884, but not what happened. Apparently everybody knew, and so there was no need to record it.

  Facing the Christian church in Lincoln, across that little park with a bandstand in the center of it, was the white clapboard mansion of the Honorable Robert B. Latham. I remember it as a very beautiful old house with slender posts supporting the upstairs porches, shutters at all the windows, wooden balustrades here and there, an
d a cupola. Having laid out the town of Lincoln, he devoted the rest of his life to making it amount to something. The Logan County History does not even attempt to list the enterprises and institutions that were brought into being by his energy and influence, but lumps them all together in a formal expression of gratitude.

  Speaking at a meeting of the Old Settlers’ Association, in 1876, he said that there was scarcely a forty-acre lot in Elkhart woods but what he had chased a wolf over. His father, James Latham, was the first white settler in Logan County, and the first Probate Court, in 1821, was presided over by him. From his photograph Robert Latham could be a religious prophet or, equally well, a gun-runner in a novel by Joseph Conrad.

  The second generation of his descendants went through their inheritance so fast that gossip could hardly keep up with them, and in the early 1920’s his house was sold to a real estate developer, a golfing companion of my father’s, who tore it down and put up a row of semi-identical bungalows. A real estate developer, with rather different ideas and dealing with a different situation, is just what Old Man Latham was, and I don’t suppose he fell asleep when the conversation got around to money. And if one wanted to grieve, one could also regret that quarter-section of unbroken prairie the town was originally—trees skirting the streams, a sea of grass and wild flowers reaching out in every direction to the horizon, at night the howling of wolves, in the early mornings of spring the thrumming of prairie chickens, a country of foxes, raccoons, wildcats, and great herds of deer.

  One can grieve over all the water that has ever flowed over the dam.

  The Latham house, which ought to have stood for generations, is gone. So is the Donalds’ house next door to where we lived on Ninth Street. It burned down in the night. But by that time they were both dead. During Dr. Donald’s last illness my father took my wife and me to call on him. We had only been married a few months, and had come home on a visit, and my wife was being introduced to all the old family friends. Dr. Donald was sitting up in bed, in what used to be his den and was now converted into a downstairs bedroom, and his first concern was for my wife—that she should be made comfortable and feel liked. As I look back, I realize that what he did was give our marriage his blessing. At the time I was only aware of the fact that he approved of the girl I had chosen to marry, and of me, and that there was something about his approval that had made us both suddenly very happy. Everything I said seemed to fit in with his conception of what I was likely to think or feel. It was as if, going about his business, he had kept an eye on me. Perhaps he had. It was the first time I had ever really talked to him. We moved away from Lincoln when I was fifteen, and during the latter part of his life he was in Chicago—carrying on his business affairs and I suppose keeping out of reach of Aunty’s tongue—much more than he was in Lincoln, so we didn’t often see him when we went there. I find it very strange indeed that, though we lived in Chicago too, he never once came to see us, and nobody expected him to. He must have passed through the Looking-Glass into some other world that at no point touched the one we were living in. Or perhaps some friendships are attached to the place they flourished in, and have no existence anywhere else. Anyway, I discovered, too late, that he was a marvelous storyteller and that I loved him. At one point he took my hand in his and held it, resting on the counterpane, and said, in that soft Scottish voice, “My boy, I remember so well the day you were born. It was a terribly hot day in August and …” All the rest went out of my mind instantly, as if I were in the presence of something it was dangerous for me to know.

  After my Grandfather Blinn died, my mother transferred her veneration to Dr. Donald, and so did Annette. But they weren’t the only ones. When people had something weighing on their heart, they went and talked to him. He told Annette once that my father had been to see him, and had talked about my mother.

  The Dyers’ house is still there, at the foot of Ninth Street hill: a frame shoebox covered with green roofing paper. How on earth did they keep warm? A scraping sound in the cellar of our house meant that Old Dyer was shoveling coal into the furnace and fiddling with the drafts and the damper. Sometimes in the dusk he and I met in our driveway. He was a big man, in clothes so old that they had no shape but fell in folds. His daughter had worked in our kitchen and he must have known a good deal about all of us. All I knew about him was what I perceived in the fading light—that the voice that said “Evening,” was at least an octave lower than any other human voice I knew, and that his steps were heavy and slow. On hearing a quotation from the Bible he knew instantly where it came from. He was the son of a freed slave who came to Springfield from Richmond, Virginia, and drove his horse and wagon at night, taking runaway slaves from one station of the underground railroad to the next. Mrs. Dyer was born in slavery, the property of the wife of (so mixed up are the elements of history at the time it is happening) a general of the Union Army. Her father and mother ran away but were caught and returned, and the general sold her father somewhere down South and he was never heard from again. William Dyer, Old Dyer’s son, put himself through medical school and was practicing in Kansas City. This everybody knew about and considered remarkable.

  For a decade and perhaps more, the lives of our two families were closely entwined in mutual dependence. After we moved away from Lincoln, my father never failed to call on Mrs. Dyer once or twice a year, for as long as she lived. Usually my brothers and I went with him. They made—Mrs. Dyer and my father made polite conversation. At the back of their minds they both must have been thinking of my mother, but her name wasn’t mentioned. It wouldn’t have been tactful, since he had another wife, for Mrs. Dyer to speak for my mother, and for my father to do this would have been to run the risk of embarrassing Mrs. Dyer by being too intimate. When he got up to go, he would take out his wallet and present her with a new ten-dollar bill.

  My Great-grandfather Youtsey’s house in Cold Spring, Kentucky, is also still standing. One of my mother’s cousins—that same Wright Youtsey that she used to say I looked like—drove me out from Cincinnati to see it, in the 1930’s, at which time it belonged to a farmer, who was off somewhere in the fields. It looked like any yellow brick farmhouse. While my Kentucky cousin talked to the farmer’s wife, I put my head in the door of two or three downstairs rooms, which seemed bare and unloved, and went outside again. I told myself that I was looking at my mother’s childhood, but there was nothing anywhere that supported this idea in any way. I said, “It must have been very different in my great-grandfather’s time,” and my mother’s cousin smiled and said, “Grandfather kept his wheat in the drawing room.”

  My Grandmother Blinn’s first cousin, Henry Youtsey, was charged with the murder of the governor of Kentucky.* Actually there were two governors. The Republican candidate, William S. Taylor, had a plurality of the votes cast in the election of 1899, and was inaugurated, on the twelfth of December, but the Democrats controlled the state legislature, and the legislative committee on elections decided in favor of the Democratic candidate, William E. Goebel. In short it was a steal. On the other hand, there had not been one honest state election in Kentucky since the Civil War. The campaign of 1899 was an effort on the part of the Democrats to wrest the state from the grip of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad.

  Behind this struggle was another, between the old families in the rural districts and the German immigrants who settled in the cities. With few roads or bridges connecting them, only the railroad, the various counties were politically independent of each other and of the state government through their isolation. This situation lasted well into the 20th century, until about 1930. Within the county boundaries, the men who controlled the county did as they pleased. It was no problem to buy a jury or get a man killed. And Goebel himself had been tried for murder. He is an interesting figure. The Dictionary of National Biography says that Goebel was four times in the Kentucky Senate, and that during this entire period of legislative service he encountered bitter opposition from within his own party. “This political animo
sity resulted, among other things, in his killing John Sandford, a prominent banker and politician in Covington, in April 1895. On his examining trial he pleaded self-defense and was released, the grand jury subsequently refusing to indict him. He identified himself with the reform element, and is generally credited with the passing of much of the reform legislation of the period, particularly that relating to taxation and the regulation of the railroads.… In 1899 he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, and secured the nomination … by a series of shrewd political maneuvers which greatly increased the number of his enemies and divided his party.… Goebel was not an orator but had a talent for vituperation and biting speech. He was taciturn and reserved, and had practically no friends outside his own family. He owed his success to unusual skill as a politician and to a courage that seemed to have no limit.”

  He was on his way to the Senate, at ten minutes past eleven on the morning of January 30, 1900, when he was shot by a man standing in the window of the third story of a brick building immediately east of the state capitol. Goebel was carried into the Capitol Hotel, and the brick building was surrounded. A man came rushing down the stairs—a farmer named Whittaker, from Taylor’s own county—and was found to have five revolvers on his person, two in each side pocket of his overcoat and one in a side pocket of his trousers. He was arrested and denied the charge. There were no empty chambers in any of the revolvers. The legislature was in session at the time, and someone rushed into the hall and shouted, “Goebel has been shot!”—producing confusion. The legislators poured out of the building, bareheaded, many of them with their hands on their revolver pockets. Hundreds of people rushed to the scene of the tragedy, carrying a revolver in each hand, and the state of Kentucky was on the verge of civil war. Goebel was sworn in on his deathbed, and died a few days later. Taylor fled the state to escape the charge of murder. He had his office in the building from which the shots came, and for a week before the assassination forty people had been sleeping in the upper part of the building. Nobody knew their names or where they came from.