Ancestors (24 page)

With the freedom children have to go where curiosity takes them, my mother must have been familiar with every nook and corner of the Hoblit house before she moved into it. She couldn’t bear dark varnished woodwork, and had it painted white upstairs and down. In the dining room the walls were dark green and the molding was black, requiring coat after coat after coat of white enamel. It was the only resistance the house put up. After that it was hers. The ceilings were high, the rooms good-sized, and the big windows
let in light and air and sunshine, which big mirrors studiously duplicated. My mother was as hospitable as my Grandmother Blinn, and the house didn’t mind how many people she asked to stay and have hot biscuits and whatever she could find to make Sunday night supper out of. The more she filled the rooms with flowers and people, the more the living room and the dining room and the library and the kitchen seemed full of her. I didn’t distinguish between the house and her, any more than I would have distinguished between her and her clothes or the sound of her voice or the way she did her hair.

The charm that old houses seem to accumulate around themselves effortlessly, this one also had. The big yard was enclosed by a low iron picket fence. The trees were full-grown but did not crowd each other or us. The wide comfortable porch went clear around to the side of the house, with a swing suspended by chains from the porch ceiling, and deep wicker chairs that, when you made the slightest move, added their creak to the late summer chorus of locusts and katydids. Under the bay window in the living room there was a bed of lilies of the valley. By the dining room window a huge white lilac bush. And farther still by the back steps, a trumpet vine and a grape arbor. Things you cannot go and buy. Time has to bring them about. During the years we lived there, there was a continuous anthropomorphic exchange of feeling and perception that was partly my responding to the house and partly the house’s responding to me. When I was separated from it permanently, the sense of deprivation was of the kind that exiles know. I rather think it was the same for my older brother.

The house was a world in itself, set in the larger world of Ninth Street, which must have been about the same age. “Ninth Street” has for me a most beautiful sound. If you put it beside “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass …” or “Absent thee from felicity a while …” I
would not perceive any incongruity. During the whole of my childhood I never thought it or said it or heard it without my heart responding, and fifty years later it still does—so much so that it is hard for me to realize that for other people what the name suggests is probably something quite ordinary. A quiet, tree-lined street in a small town shortly before the outbreak of the First World War is, in any event, what it was. And on hot summer evenings when my father hitched the horse up to the high English cart he was so proud of and we went out driving, I saw where we were in relation to everything else.

The courthouse square and the business district that had grown up around it were on one side of the railroad tracks, and most of the residential section of Lincoln was on the other. The streets were paved and lighted, except on the outskirts of town. There was nothing that we would now consider a factory, but what with the usual banks and small business enterprises, two coal mines, and the asylum, it was generally possible to make a living. This is not to say that no woman ever had to take in some other woman’s washing, or that the shacks the Negro families lived in and the unpainted houses provided by the coal companies for the miners had a porte-cochère and half a block of lawn around them, but you could count on the fingers of one hand the houses that did. Lincoln was not a typical small town, because there is no such thing, any more than there is a typical human being. Every person was exceptional in some way. When I think of the Rimmerman girls, three middle-aged and unmarried sisters who never stopped talking, and of old Mrs. Hunter in her rusty black hat, and the plumber’s wife who stopped my brother on the street and said, “I dreamt about you last night, Edward, wasn’t that habitual?” and the Presbyterian minister’s son who had ears like a faun and induced a kind of sexual delirium in girls without even having to get off his bicycle, and the discontented dentist’s wife who was straight
out of Ibsen, I wonder that so small a place could hold so much character. In the same way, every street was exceptional. You could not possibly mistake Fifth Street for Eighth Street (even when I dream about them I know which street I am on) or Broadway for Pulaski Street, and no two houses were exactly alike, either. Some of them were so original that they always seemed to have something they wanted to say as you walked past: perhaps no more than this, that the people who lived in them did not wish they lived in Paris or Rome or even Peoria. What would be the point of living somewhere where you did not know everybody?

If you wanted to walk downtown you could. If you were beyond walking distance you were outside of town, in the cornfields. But there was the streetcar if you didn’t feel like walking. And in the summer they were open, and you arrived home refreshed and cool from the ride.

When the streetcars left the business district they kept to their course down Broadway, rocking and teetering and giving off overhead sparks. Across the tracks of the Chicago and Alton Railroad, and then past the Opera House, past the high school. At the corner where the grade school was, the two streetcar lines diverged. One went off, at a slight angle, down Eighth Street, depositing passengers in front of their houses, or at the asylum, or the cemeteries, or, in July and August, the Chautauqua grounds. The other line turned right and went down Union Street, past the beginning of Ninth Street, and Tremont Street, past my Aunt Maybel’s house, and on out to Woodlawn, which was newer than the rest of town, and so far out that people tended to forget it existed.

The population of Lincoln stayed between ten and eleven thousand, and with very few exceptions they were all in bed by ten o’clock.

The people I knew as a child had the quality of seeming slightly larger than life size. This was, of course, partly because
I was a child; but it is also true that the person with plenty of air and space around him takes on an individuality that is felt as stature.

You could be eccentric and still not be socially ostracized. You could even be dishonest. But you could not be openly immoral. The mistakes people made were not forgotten, but if you were in trouble somebody very soon found out about it and was there answering the telephone and feeding the children. Men and women alike appeared to accept with equanimity the circumstances (on the whole, commonplace and unchanging) of their lives in a way that no one seems able to do now anywhere. This is how I remember it. I am aware that Sherwood Anderson writing about a similar though smaller place saw it quite differently. I believe in Winesburg, Ohio, but I also believe in what I remember.

The glory of the town—its high-arching elms—is gone now. The elm blight did away with them in one short heartbreaking season, and Lincoln is once more exposed to the summer sun the way it was when my Grandfather Maxwell was a young man. It may yet go one step further and revert to prairie. In my childhood Lincoln was entirely canopied with elm, silver maple, box elder, linden, and cottonwood trees. Their branches frequently met over the brick pavement, and here and there, above this green roof, steeples and bell towers protruded: the Methodist, the Baptist, the Cumberland Presbyterian, the German Catholic and the Evangelical Lutheran, the Christian, the Irish Catholic, the Presbyterian, the Congregational, the African Methodist, the Universalist, the Episcopalian. On Sunday morning the air was full of the pleasant sound of church bells.

In later years, when my father spoke of the house on Ninth Street, what he remembered was the size of the coal bill, for it was not well insulated and his annual salary as state agent for the Hanover Fire Insurance Company was
$3,000. So he stood on the window seat in the library and stuffed little wads of toilet paper in the cracks where the windows did not fit snugly. I don’t mean to suggest that he had no feeling for the house. He loved it, but in spite of himself, the way you love someone you don’t approve of.

Since I didn’t have to worry about the coal bill, what I remember is the violets; and sitting on the back steps making orange gloves for my fingers out of the blossoms of the trumpet vine; and the place, between two trees, where you could climb up onto the roof of the summer kitchen and from there get to any part of the roof you wanted; and the barn; and the flower garden; and the cities I built in my sandpile; and the shaded rustic table and chairs where we ate lunch in the hot weather; and the fact that, indoors, the rooms rested as lightly on me as a thought.

Annette says that the house was always reassuring, even when my mother wasn’t there. When you walked in from outdoors, there were traces everywhere of human occupation: the remains of a teaparty on the wicker teacart in the mossgreen and white living room, building blocks or lead soldiers in the middle of the library floor, a book lying face down on the window seat, an unfinished game of solitaire, a piece of cross-stitching with a threaded needle stuck in it, a paintbox and beside it a drinking glass full of cloudy water, flowers in cut-glass vases, fires in both fireplaces in the wintertime, lights left burning in empty rooms because somebody meant to come right back. Traces of being warm, being comfortable, being cozy together. Traces of us. No wonder people liked to come there.

The house was the outward reflection of a very happy marriage. Children are not always reliable witnesses in this area but I think I have it right. My parents were quite different in temperament, but they had many pleasures in common. I can’t remember my mother’s asking my father to do anything he didn’t want to do, or to be anything he
wasn’t. And he betrayed his feeling for her every time he said her name. Her life had its share of sadness, some of it unbearable and still having to be borne. And if migraines have a psychological cause, what caused hers? I have no way of knowing, any more than, probably, she did. But across the felicity of her marriage to my father only one shadow stretched: She could not keep him always across the dinner table from her. Like a character in a fairy tale he was required to leave at set intervals. Every Tuesday morning he kissed her good-by and picked up the heavy grip that she hated so and went off to the railway station. He came home on the late Friday afternoon train, to be greeted on the front steps by her and my older brother and me and an old hound dog that nosed his way in between us until he got to the object of love.

If my father and mother quarreled, I never heard them at it. Or any tension in their voices when they spoke to each other. Her name was Blossom, and he called her Blos. After her death he did not like to talk about her. “That’s water over the dam,” he said once, when I asked him to tell me about his life with my mother. But in his old age, when five o’clock came, he liked to have a glass of Scotch at his elbow, and company, and conversation, and sometimes he would be reminded of something in the past. Once when I was home on a visit he said, “While your mother was carrying Happy we went to a wedding.” He paused, and I did not encourage him to go on, though I was interested. He either said the thing you were waiting to hear or he didn’t; there was never any dragging it out of him. He also, I’m sure, knew what sort of thing interested me and what didn’t. And perhaps being a fisherman he liked to let out a little line and then reel me in. “It was out of town,” he said finally. “The girl and I were very good friends. I’d even thought of marrying her … Your mother had morning sickness, and she would be sick the first thing, and then
she’d get all dressed up and do whatever was expected of us. And in church I looked from one to the other of them. And I was so proud of your mother—of the way she looked and all that she was—and I broke out in a sweat at the thought of how close I’d come to marrying another woman.”

To continue the tour of my Aunt Maybel’s funereal and really very ugly house on Union Street: At the threshold of my grandmother’s room, the strangeness and the oppressiveness suddenly ended. The striped wallpaper had cheerful pink roses on it, and the curtains were pinned back to make more light for sewing. The room was furnished with a heavy mahogany sleigh bed, an armoire, a dresser, and a small desk, also of mahogany, and a sewing table that could be folded up and put away but seldom was. There was a corner fireplace, but like the one downstairs in the sitting room all it amounted to was an ornamental brass shield, with no flue or hearth behind it. In this room the musty odor of the rest of the house gave way to a potpourri in which the smell of camphor and horehound drops was agreeably mixed with that of 4711 soap and lavender sachet.

When my grandmother had greeted me, she took me by the hand and led me to the attic stairs, behind what looked like a closet door in the room my uncle did not die in. Though I came to see her once a week, my toys were kept in the attic, in an egg basket. Along with its other attributes, the house on Union Street was very neat. So was the attic. They were both ready at a moment’s notice for whatever would be required of them at the Last Judgment. My Cousin Blane Maxwell, my Uncle Charlie’s only child, was by this time almost old enough to vote, but as my grandmother and I went down the aisle of boxes and discarded furniture, we had to pass an orderly collection of his toys,
and another of Max Fuller’s, and still another that belonged to my older brother, which seemed almost to give me a legal right to play with them. I never did.

My grandmother let me have anything I needed or wanted, with one exception; I could not use her best sewing scissors to cut paper with. It was my aunt who stood between me and these marvelous playthings. The one time I disobeyed her and touched a key of the little white and gold piano on my way past, a voice spoke through the floor: “That’s your Cousin Maxwell’s piano, Billie, and you are not to play with it.”