Ancestors (26 page)

Well Mammy Dear this does not seem much like Xmas times. I am able to grasp the fact however after wading through a Xmas list of fifty but “Shaw Mamm” let’s try and get a little out of life while here as we are a long time dead.

You mustn’t get lonesome now and cry on Xmas as we will all think about you and have your presents waiting for you on your return.

Better try and get to St. Louis before the first of the year so that your passes will not expire on you. Happy is sending you a little remembrance and we all hope you will make this Xmas a happy one and not give way to lonesomeness.

Lovingly           
Will           

Fred Hubbard and Charlie Higley, the two men my father worked under, did not in the end leave the company; the storm blew over, and his life went on as before; but the letter is for me like coming upon a door to a closet I didn’t even know was there. I had no idea that my father was ever so unconfident or so vulnerable. Or that he was so deeply attached to my grandmother.

It is also true that children prefer not to inquire too closely into the natures of their parents. In a storeroom off the kitchen of the house I lived in as a child there was a grocery carton full of letters that my father wrote to my mother from the road. I had no curiosity whatever about them.

All my grandmother’s brothers were interesting to her, but the one who turned up the most frequently was Uncle Sanford, the drummer boy. He was the oldest, and she was next and I suspect followed him around when they were little. He lived in Kansas, and according to a note in my grandmother’s scrapbook, he combined farming and the
music business—that is, he sold sheet music and upright pianos and band instruments. But it is an unlikely combination and I can only think he must have had help. Her other brothers, Dave, James, Marshall, and Meade, all at one time or another farmed land that their father had given them. Uncle Meade’s full name was General Meade Turley, after the Union general who won the greatest battle of the Civil War, at Gettysburg, and then didn’t follow it up. My grandmother also had an uncle who was named Commodore Perry Turley. Uncle Marshall had a button factory.

Judging by another letter I found in the scrapbook, dated April 13, 1917, he was a joker.

 … 
By this time you have heard that I was in your part of the country and as it was fully my intention to come and see you regardless of the rain I finally located the telephone in the city of Williamsville and upon two attempts they failed to reach you and upon the assistance of your neighbors the information I got that you had gone to war But the recruiting officer had turned you down for the same reason that my wife was when she tried to enter in my absence, that they was only one place they could use you and that was the trenches and it would be too much to dig the ditch for your size but later if they decided to dig the trenches bigger they would send you word. Now I did not get to see you when I was over but we are coming over in June and we will make you tired then your brother Marsh.

The only one of my grandmother’s brothers who lived in Lincoln was my Great-uncle Dave. The paragraph about him in the county history is really about his wife—her maiden name (Elva L. Stolz); her parents (Solomon and Maria Stolz); her father’s death when she was four, and her mother’s second marriage and removal to California; her elder sister’s marriage in New York State to a Mr.
Lynde. From which I deduce that when the historian came to the door,
she
talked to him. At the time the history was published my great-uncle was farming. Later he moved to town and opened a shoe store, which failed. Two children died in infancy. It would seem that sadness followed him around like a dog.

One winter day my grandmother and I walked down Union Street to his house. For some reason I remember walking there through the snow with extraordinary clarity. And afterward, sitting on the floor of the parlor, with my head on a line with the isinglass windows of the potbellied parlor stove. I have been given a marvelous page of the Sunday paper to cut out: the cat fiddling (when put together with brads, the arms and legs are movable) and the cow jumping over the moon. The conversation of my grandmother and her sister-in-law, whom she didn’t much like, is carried on peacefully above my head. As I cut and fold on the dotted line, I learn (but without any emotion) that my grandmother’s brother, in an upstairs room, is dying of cancer.

Her sisters my grandmother simply accepted, the way she accepted the fact that the week has seven days. Sue married a doctor and lived out her life in or around Williamsville. Mandy’s husband had a grocery store, as I have said, and Ina married a plantation owner and lived in Mississippi.

She was seventeen years younger than my grandmother, and came to Lincoln only once during my childhood. She brought her whole family—her husband (who was born on a farm near Williamsville but had long since acquired a full set of Mississippi vowels), her two nearly grown sons, her daughter and son-in-law and their little girl. Some of them stayed at our house, since my Aunt Maybel’s house wouldn’t begin to hold them all.

They were the first Southerners my brother and I had ever encountered, and we tried to manage so they were
never out of our sight. If one of the boys went down the hall to take a bath, I didn’t let the closed bathroom door deprive me of the pleasure of his conversation. Even when they sat and didn’t open their mouths, they were fascinating, the way animals are—beautiful animals who arch their back or lick their hind leg and you are in the presence of the Creation. But they were encouraged to talk, and felt a solemn obligation to be entertaining. Someone would make a commonplace remark and Aunt Ina, fanning herself with one of my grandmother’s palm-leaf fans, would smile appreciatively and turn to her husband and say, “Doesn’t that put you in the mind of Old Bess and her blind billy goat?” and they’d be off, creating characters and scenes out of the air. What seemed like effortless charm must have been a performance of considerable virtuosity, but I don’t think it was something they did particularly or exclusively for our benefit. If somebody had actively disliked them, I don’t know that they could have stood it—No, that isn’t true, people are never as vulnerable as they seem. But anyway, nobody in Lincoln disliked them. Or even came near to it. So I have no way of knowing how they would have reacted if someone had.

In spite of the date on her wall calendar, my Grandmother Maxwell’s life was deep inside the 19th century. The Civil War was no farther away in her memory than the beginning of the First World War now is in mine. And the historical names—Gettysburg, Missionary Ridge, Chattanooga and Chickamauga, Bull Run—often figured in her conversation.

At some point she and my grandfather spent a winter in Tennessee for the sake of his health. They lived in a cabin on the side of Lookout Mountain, and the Negroes who lived nearby used to come and visit them in the evening. “We got along very well,” she would remark complacently—the complacency of the Northerner over the Southerners, who
lost.

“If the Southerners had only been nice to the darkies, and
called them Mr. and Mrs., there wouldn’t have been any Civil War.”

My Grandfather Maxwell had been a Republican so my grandmother was too, in principle; and in the end, thanks to a Democratic president, she had the right to vote. No doubt she exercised it, but she wasn’t given to intellectual complexities. What interested her was not the broad political issues of the day but the rumor that the first Mrs. Woodrow Wilson died of a broken heart, because of her husband’s infidelities, and that when the second Mrs. Wilson accompanied him to the Peace Conference in Paris, her clothes closet was lined with satin. How indignant my grandmother was with that clothes closet!

I assumed that my mother loved my grandmother because I did, but they were cut out of very different cloth, and Annette says that my mother found my grandmother trying. She
would
give me horehound drops and other dubious things to eat that upset my stomach. And once when she stayed with my brother and me so that my father and mother could go on a trip together, she went through every drawer in the house, tidying and straightening and putting things away in new places, according to a system that, over the years, she had settled on. She must have known that my mother wouldn’t like it, because no woman would, but the temptation was too much for her. She even went into my mother’s dressing table. It was months before my mother found everything.

I also assumed that my grandmother loved my mother, and nobody has ever said that she didn’t. But she may have loved my mother and been glad that my father had a wife who made him happy, and at the same time been jealous of my mother, too. You cannot go to the cemetery and ask to be enlightened on matters of this kind, though it would ease my mind considerably if you could.

The cemetery in Lincoln is situated in a grove of oak trees on a bluff looking out over the rich farmland—a serene and timeless frame for lives concluded and beyond grieving over. My mother took me with her when she went there to tend the family graves. From the winding cinder drive I read the names on the tombstones. The cemetery was a replica in a few wooded acres of the town, for the names that constantly occurred in the conversation of my elders were all here: Gilchrist, Foley, Buehler, Crain, Ewing, Maltby, Randolph, Frorer, Cadwaller, Keys, Bates, Humphrey, Hill—the smaller, weathered headstones marking the individual resting places, and obelisks of marble and granite establishing the family territory. The graves were not neglected, and the dead were not forgotten but only a little removed from the heart of things.

My mother picked off the dry blooms from the geraniums and threw away the withered flowers and rancid water in the tin vases that were sunk in the ground, and stood contemplating the headstones: “Edward Blinn, 1844–1913” and “Annette L. Blinn, 1848–1914.” She let me fill the vases with fresh water from the nearest faucet, and as she arranged the flowers she had brought from the garden at home she would talk to me in a voice pitched a little lower than ordinary, making me feel the presence of the people all around us in their graves. Sometimes she would find fresh flowers in the vases, indicating that someone had been here before us, someone not the family who continued to remember my grandparents with love after they were dead—and she would wonder aloud who it was. Then we would get in the carriage and follow the winding cinder drive until we came to my Grandfather Maxwell’s grave. Throughout the cemetery there were flags, some bright, some faded, in star-shaped metal standards, marking the graves of those who had fought in the Spanish-American or the Civil War. I loved all flags. Here and there among the graves were
family mausoleums, hardly bigger than a child’s playhouse but made of white marble and with no windows and an iron grating across the door. What if somebody wanted to get out? But this applied also to people buried in the ground, and I tried not to think about it. And did think about it, even so. What was to prevent people from opening their eyes and seeing what had happened to them?

“Do you remember your grandfather?”

The sadness I hear in my mother’s voice makes me search around in the back of my mind for something that turns out not to be there. I feel that she will be distressed if I say I don’t remember him, and so I manage to conjure up a shadowy figure (as in six or seven years’ time I would be calling on recollection for what she looked like). “I remember him coming up the street,” I say. I am aware that the image is perhaps invented, and I expect she was too.

When I study his picture—the fine forehead, the line of the jaw, the mouth half concealed under a drooping mustache, and the eyes, particularly the eyes, which I know so well because I have known them all my life, they are just like Annette’s and they have looked past me so often with just that expression, as of someone staring at life itself—I regret deeply that I cannot remember him. It is the picture of a man of intelligence and feeling, with a vein of sadness running through his nature, and a commitment to various abstractions, including honor.

My grandfather was born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. His last name was originally spelled Blynn, and his father, writing in the family Bible, changed the
y
to an
i.
Annette says that the family is descended from one of two brothers who came over on the
Mayflower.
I looked up the passenger list and was relieved to find no Blynns, and no brothers who fit the description my aunt has given of them. My Great-grandfather Blinn and his brother were both cattle farmers, one in Vermont, the other in Canada. My Grandfather Blinn’s
mother, Leefee Harrington, was descended from Jonathan Harrington, the first man killed in the American Revolution. His house still stands on Lexington Common. He was wounded in that historic volley of Pitcairn’s redcoats, and crawled across the green and died in his wife’s arms, on the morning of April 19, 1775. Shortly after this, his son James took all his worldly possessions and tied them up in a bandanna and with the bundle slung from a cane resting on his shoulder, walked to Vermont. The cane came down through the family and only in the last fifteen years disappeared, accidentally, during a housecleaning. That is to say, it was left on the lawn, along with the rest of the contents of the front hall closet at my Aunt Annette’s, when she was in Florida, and somebody walking past stole it. Leefee Harrington was James Harrington’s granddaughter. Her sister Candace married my great-grandfather, Charles Blinn, had two children by him, and died. Leefee Harrington was engaged to a man named Edward Dunallen, whom she deeply loved, but my great-grandfather persuaded her that it was her duty to marry him instead, and look after her sister’s children. She named her first-born child, my grandfather, after the man she loved, and, though she later had a daughter, gave him the whole of her heart.