The Eighth Day

by Thornton Wilder

  Clotilde Kellerman had other passions, too, or tended other altars. She loved her family collectively, while being in a constant state of exasperation with each individual in it. They were hers. She would have walked into a wall of fire for any one of them. Housekeeping, for her—like the aspiration to a higher social rank—was invested with moral values. Her aim was perfection and it took its toll of those about her. Beata was to remember all her life the occasion when her mother gazed for a moment at the roast which her maid had placed before her at the Sunday dinner table, then had seized it in both hands and hurled it to the floor. Her gesture was forceful, her voice was contained: “Tell Käthe we shall have scrambled eggs.”

  The von Diehlens transmitted a third passion from generation to generation, though it reached Clotilde Kellerman in an attenuated form. To them music, nightly in the home and at least twice a week at concerts, was essential to existence. Neither Clotilde nor her daughter Beata was musical, but they did not know that. They thought they were. Many color-blind persons are unaware that the world they see differs from that seen by their neighbors. They wept at slow movements; they recognized well-defined themes and rejoiced at their recurrence. Beata’s father, however, had an ear. In Hoboken he was long the president of the best (of four) Sängervereine until he could no longer endure the banality of its programs. He grew tired of hearing forty obese men proclaim the joys of a hunter’s life and bid passing birds report their breaking hearts to their beloved. He took his family to the opera in New York and wept unashamedly through the works of Wagner. His wife was very pleased to be there, though she gave little attention to the performance. She was handsome and she knew it, and very well born; it was her duty to be present and it conferred a (five-hour) privilege on those who beheld her.

  Friederich Kellerman was deeply attached to his children and particularly to Beata, but his wife held strong views on parental relations. She was quick to intercept any demonstrations of tenderness. They rendered boys unmanly and girls vulgar. At mealtimes the children stood behind their chairs until their parents were seated; on going to bed they kissed their parents’ hands. At heart Clotilde Kellerman had a low opinion of girls. God sent them into the world for the perpetuation of the race, but the most one could do for them was to inculcate a spine of steel, a royal carriage, a thorough knowledge of cooking, bedding, and cleaning, and to find them a husband from an estimable family. It should not be forgotten, however, that Clotilde had also acquired the merits, real or imagined, of aristocrats: never, in the presence of her children, did she say a malicious word about her neighbors. (She had other ways of conveying disapprobation.) Though she could cast a platter to the floor, she never raised her voice nor permitted her children to do so. She let it be known that she was guided by her own opinion rather than by those of her neighbors. She did not permit any discussion of the relative wealth or poverty of their friends. If her husband had entered the house one day and told her that he was bankrupt, she would have uttered no word of complaint. She would have moved to a slum and improved the tone of the neighborhood.

  Beata was an exemplary student, though she was not interested in knowledge for its own sake (von Diehlen and Kellerman), an accomplished performer on the piano, a superb cook (von Diehlen). She gave all of herself to whatever task was set before her (Kellerman). She didn’t give a pin for her beauty, possibly because she thought her older sisters were more beautiful. Young men left her alone. There was no one to whom she could extend affection; her dog was run over, her cat kittened. She had approached on tiptoe the possibility that she might acknowledge her love for her father and receive any, any, recognition in return. She tried to send some kind of message to him—the waving of a scarf from a quicksand; but Friederich Kellerman was powerless. He suggested to his wife that Beata might be sent to one of those women’s colleges. “Nonsense! I don’t know where you get such ideas, Fritz! Do you know what those girls wear? They wear bloomers!” Beata became not sullen but stony.

  It would be rash to say that John Ashley came to her rescue just in time. She might have held out a year or two longer without turning to stone. Maybe he was a year or two late. We are not permitted to tease ourselves with these conditionals. The same starvation that warps one strengthens another.

  Why was Beata an unhappy misfit in her own family? Because she had been formed by her parents’ best principles and insights and her parents did not recognize them when they saw them. Parents grow old. What we have called their creativity (there is a home-building, child-rearing “creativity”) loses its keenness. They are “feather-plucked” in the commerce of life. Family life is like a hall endowed with the finest acoustical properties. Growing children hear not only their parents’ words (and in most cases gradually ignore them), they hear the intentions, the attitudes behind the words. Above all they learn what their parents really admire, really despise. John Ashley was quite right in wishing to be under forty when his children were passing through their teens. His parents were both forty when he was ten—that is to say they were beginning to be resigned to the knowledge that life was disappointing and basically meaningless; they were busily clutching at its secondary compensations: the esteem and (hopefully) the envy of the community in so far as they can be purchased by money and acquired by circumspect behavior, by an unremitting air of perfect contentment, and by that tone of moral superiority that bores themselves and others but which is as important as wearing clothes.

  As I shall have occasion to say when we consider the early years of Eustacia Lansing: all young people secrete idealism as continuously as the Bombyx mori secretes silk. It is as necessary to them as food that life be filled with wonder—that they contemplate heroes. They must admire. They must admire. The boy in the reformatory (his third conviction for burglary with assault) secretes idealism as a Bombyx mori secretes silk. The girl of fifteen, brutalized into prostitution, secretes idealism—for a while—as a Bombyx mori secretes silk. Life to newcomers presents itself as a brightly lighted stage where they will be called upon to play roles exhibiting courage, fair dealing, magnanimity, wisdom, and helpfulness. Hoping and trembling a little, they feel that they are almost ready for these great demands upon them.

  In the fine acoustics of the family life Beata had imbibed from both parents a number of summonses to perfection—the responsibility and decorum of the aristocrat, and the probity and the quickness to resent oppression of the working classes. All virtues (even humility) invoke independence. Beata’s mother, growing old, was relapsing into the vices of the aristocratic view of life. Beata’s father, when young, had transmitted to his favorite daughter the virtues that had invested his family for generations; aging (at forty-four) he had become rudderless and obsequious. Beata’s refusal to be concerned with attempts to impress the neighbors exasperated her mother; her refusal to be coerced disappointed her father. She was isolated and wretched.

  John and Beata, then, were sitting on the bench watching the play of the sunlight on the waters of New York Harbor. A breeze sprang up. The ruffles on Beata’s bertha fluttered in the air.

  “Are you cold, Beata?”

  “No. No, John.”

  He looked at her. Smiling, she glanced into his eyes, then lowered her own. Slowly she raised them and looked steadily into his. We remember his grandmother’s warning against looking long into the eyes of a child or an animal. Hitherto these young persons had stolen quick glances at one another—blue eyes into the blue—of an almost painful sweetness and confusion. In daily life the reciprocal glance is brief; a little prolonged it is the confirmation of mature confidence or the mark of resolute antagonism. Boys play a game of outstaring one another; it soon breaks up in semihysterical laughter and a release of coltish energy. They tell us of actors experiencing a mounting panic when they are required to prolong the pose on the stage or before the camera. It is—as the photographers say—an “exposure.” In love it is the dissolution of pride and separateness; it is surrender.

  John and Beata gazed into
one another’s eyes. A force they had not foreseen took possession of them. It lifted their hands; it joined their lips; it drew them along the walk into the town.

  He had not planned it. She did not distrust it. Without words they found their way to his empty house. Two months later they left Hoboken together; thereafter, for nineteen years, they were seldom separated for longer than twenty-four hours—until he was taken to jail.

  On the evening following his graduation Beata left her home while her parents were entertaining friends in the front parlor. At first dark she had hidden a coat, a hat, and a small handbag under the kitchen steps.

  John and Beata were never married. There was no time for it then, and a suitable occasion never presented itself. John happened to have found a bride as independent of tribal forms as himself.

  Rites are instituted to aid and support the well-intentioned. Beata had long worn a thin gold band set with a garnet. John removed the stone and filed away the setting.

  “Shall we go and find someone and get married, Beata?”

  “I am married.”

  They arrived a few days later in Toledo, Ohio. They had stopped on the way to see the Niagara Falls. The firm that had engaged John had not been informed that he was married, but a cordial welcome was extended to the young couple and when Lily was born six months later she received many gifts in the shape of blankets, spoons, pushers, and silver mugs.

  During the epidemic in Hoboken those who were shut in acquired an intensified interest in whatever could be seen from their windows. Beata’s visits to the house where John lived were observed and reported. But for a long time no one dared mention them to the redoubtable Clotilde Kellerman. She was the last to learn of them. Thereafter she did not permit Beata’s name to be mentioned in her presence.

  It would be difficult to defend John’s treatment of his parents. On the morning following his graduation he accompanied them to New York and saw them off on the train. He would write. At Christmas he sent them a card without return address. He did not tell them that he was married and a father.

  John Ashley wanted all things new. He must be the first man who has earned his bread, to take a wife, to beget a child. Everything is filled with wonder—a bride, a first salary cheque, the infant in one’s arms. To announce these things to persons who think they are everyday occurrences is to endanger one’s own sense of their radiance.

  Besides, he had had enough of advice and warning, of being commended for what a dolt could do and being ridiculed for what was hard won, for being urged to admire what he despised—his father’s anxiety-ridden prudence—and being asked to deplore what he admired—his grandmother’s idiosyncratic independence. He had had enough of being a son. His first year of marriage was like the discovery of a new continent. His voice descended half an octave. He walked the mile to his place of work like Adam going forth to his daily task of naming the plants and animals. On the first half mile he was filled with a storm of tenderness for what he left behind; on the second, with the gravity of one who has founded the human race and must foster and defend it. It made him uncomfortable to think that perhaps his happiness rendered him conspicuous. He had the sensation that he “shone.” (“Good morning, Jack. How are you?” “Fine, Bill, how are you?”) His natural taciturnity increased. That fear abated. No one noticed.

  The one disappointment in his new life was the nature of his job. The machine tools he was set to design turned out to involve small changes on established patterns. He called his work “making cookie molds.” There was no opportunity to fashion a new thing or to explore his own skills. By a coincidence (but the lives of such men are replete with coincidences) he heard of the position to be filled at Coaltown. The pay was poor, but the description of what would be required of him was inviting. He was replacing a “maintenance engineer” who had just died at eighty-two. The letter was signed “Breckenridge Lansing.” So, after two years and two months in Ohio, the Ashleys journeyed to southern Illinois, to a life which turned out to be filled with wonder and delight and many coincidences. When they descended from the train at Coaltown’s depot in September, 1885, John Ashley was twenty-three, Lily almost two, and Roger nine months old.

  Each of the Ashley children was—because of the peculiar components in an Ashley—what Lily called “exhaustingly notorious”; but their separate fames were “exhaustingly” enhanced by the fact that they were brother and sisters. The admiration or antagonism they aroused was tripled; the curiosity, centupled. On one level the Sunday supplements of the newspapers published lurid stories (“Have the Ashleys a Secret?” “The Ashleys’ Plans for 1911”); humorists strained themselves. On another, there were popular biographies of them. On another, amateur and professional genealogists went to extraordinary pains to trace their ancestors. Articles and brochures appeared in several languages. Presentation copies were sent to the subjects of these works, who had firmly refused to furnish any information concerning themselves. At first, Constance threw them into wastepaper baskets unread; Lily and Roger directed their secretaries to thank the authors for their interest.

  John Barrington Ashley’s immediate ancestors were farmers and small merchants on the western banks of the Hudson River. As Ashley, Ashleigh, Coghill, Barrington, Barrow, and so on, they had left the Thames Valley in the 1660’s, fleeing from religious persecution, and had crossed the Atlantic. For every head of a family of their persuasion and condition who steeled himself to this resolve there were ten who wavered, longed, and shrank back. (“Brother Wilkins, will ye remove with us?”) Once arrived at the shores of New England they pushed westward, felling trees and building the meetinghouse and the school; then pushed further. (In the seventeenth century they were saying: “If you can see the smoke from your neighbor’s chimney, you’re too near.” In the eighteenth they accommodated themselves, not without some stiffness, to living in a community.) They were steeled on the Lord’s day by four-hour sermons that were largely occupied with sin. (“Oh my beloved brothers and sisters, consider what a terrible thing it is to fall into the hands of an angry God!”) Most of the households had known a dozen children, not including the early lost. (The patriarch sleeps on the hill with his several brides beside him.) Some of the Ashley clan married into the Scots and Dutch families across the river. The Dutch families came from Amsterdam. One genealogist found an Espinosa in the line and claimed a connection with the philosopher, but there were many Espinosa-Spinozas among the Sephardim who had escaped from religious persecution in Spain. The parents of Ashley’s father’s mother—Marie-Scolastique Anne Dubois—had arrived in Montreal from a village near Tours on the Loire. (“Dis, cousin Jacques! Est-ce que tu viens avec nous à Québec—oui ou non?”) Beata’s ancestors were farmers, artisans, and burghers from northern Germany. Her mother’s grandmother was of a Huguenot family, weavers who had fled from religious persecution in France at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They had found refuge in several of the proud and independent Hanseatic ports.

  Names, hundreds of names, names from records in the town halls, church registers, from last testaments, from gravestones.

  Lily sent one of these brochures to Roger: “I wish they’d hurry and find my Italian ancestors. I know I’m Italian. And I know I’m Irish.—But what’s the use of all this ink?” Roger replied: “I wish I could read the annals of your descendants, and Connie’s and mine.” Those annals contain Gaels and Wops aplenty. (The word “wop” is derived from the Neapolitan-Spanish guapo: handsome, dashing.)

  This varied documentation could be found in any large library and was at the disposal of anyone who applied for it. Soon a new kind of attention was brought to bear on the material:

  There was very little intellectual heritage uncovered for the Ashleys. There were some schoolmasters and clergymen in the Coghill, McPhaill, and Van Dyke–Huysum lines. A great-great-grandmother of John Ashley was the daughter of Loris Vanderloo, the Dutch seaman whose Voyages to China and Japan (1770) were widely read. There was no evidence of gentle birth
. Clotilde von Diehlen’s presumptions were not sustained. A diligent search was made for an inheritance of musical endowment. Friederich Kellerman’s presidency of the choral society in Hoboken was noted. There was a tradition in the von Diehlen family that an ancestor named Kautz had served as cellist in Frederick the Great’s orchestra at Potsdam. It was confirmed. The unhappy Kautz had suffered from melancholia and had taken his own life.

  It was discovered that the Ashleys drew upon a remarkable store of health in their forebears. There was a notable tendency to longevity, especially among the males. This was combined, however, with a high instance of infant mortality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but that was true in all families. Sober farmers everywhere, crossed with the superstable Hudson River Dutch—the Van Tuyls and Vanderloos (livery stables and inns)—to say nothing of the sobriety vested in the families of Hannover and Schleswig-Holstein.