Ancestors (28 page)

When my grandmother came to Lincoln as a bride, someone gave a tea for her. The guests left, by twos and threes, and were raked over the coals. As the teaparty broke up, my grandmother said, “I stayed to the end so you couldn’t talk about me.”

She was homesick, and every summer, while court was in session and my grandfather was very busy, she went to Kentucky. When he could, he came and joined her there and they stayed on a while longer. One year, Annette said, he was much longer than usual in coming and she missed
him so she was never homesick for Kentucky again—only for him.

While she was in Kentucky, my grandfather had a chance to buy, very reasonably, a house on Ninth Street that had never been lived in by anybody. The contractor had built it for himself, and changed his mind about living there. My grandfather sold the house they were living in, and he threw in the bedroom furniture with it, not knowing that my grandmother kept her engagement ring in a little bag tied to the back of one of the bedposts.

For a long, long time—for twelve or thirteen years, my grandparents had no children. One of my grandmother’s brothers married a Catholic, creating a scandal, and they had six daughters, and at one point my grandmother wrote to her sister-in-law, whom she had become very fond of, asking if she would let one of the girls come and live with her in Lincoln because she was so lonely. The answer was, “I haven’t one daughter too many.”

My Grandfather Blinn’s half-brother died, leaving a wife and three small children, and my grandparents took the youngest. They wanted to adopt her from the beginning, but her mother was of two minds about this. She spoke of taking the child back and didn’t. Then she said they could have little Edith and a few days later wrote that they couldn’t. In the end, by insisting that she take the child before they got any fonder of her, my grandparents were allowed to keep her. Shortly after that, they began to have children of their own. My mother was the oldest. Between Annette and my Uncle Ted, my grandmother lost a child, and it made her morbidly apprehensive. She held Annette responsible for my uncle’s safety when they were playing together, and this heavy burden became a part of the fabric of Annette’s dreams. Whether it was true or not, she thought that her mother didn’t love her as much as she loved my uncle and my mother. But there was one person whose affection for her
she was not in any uncertainty about. When my grandmother kissed my grandfather good-by at the front door, there, exasperatingly, was little Annette, sitting on the porch steps, waiting to give him the last kiss. In the evening, Annette went down to the end of the street in order to be the first one to meet him coming home. Once, she dressed up in her mother’s clothes and stood waiting on the front porch to greet him. My grandfather tipped his hat to her, and it was too much. She ran into the house, crying, “Mother! He
doesn’t
know who I am!”

My grandfather loved to bring people home with him for a meal, and extra leaves were always being slipped into the dining room table. The larder was like a store, with bins of potatoes, barrels of flour and sugar, and the shelves crammed with canned fruit and vegetables.

Ninth Street then was very much the way it was when I lived there, except that where two or three houses I knew stood there was an orchard, and every house had a barn behind it. The street wasn’t paved, and so the children had the blackest imaginable mud to play in. When I was a child the sidewalks were of cement, but before that they were brick, and before that, wooden boards. When the wooden sidewalks were taken up so that the brick sidewalk could be laid, Annette said, the children followed the workmen in a body, finding all sorts of treasures that had fallen through the cracks between the boards.

In the texture of the Blinn family life in Lincoln there were both light and dark threads, with, as time went on, the darker ones becoming preponderant. When my mother was about nine years old, the barn behind my grandfather’s house burned down, with my mother’s Indian pony in it.

I grew up thinking that a man my grandfather had sentenced for some crime or misdemeanor had set fire to the
barn, out of revenge, but my grandfather never sat on the bench of a criminal court, and what actually happened was that, for a prank, a boy poured kerosene over the hay in a manger and held a lighted match to it.

“We were out driving,” Annette said, “and your mother was at home alone. Father saw the flames as he turned into Ninth Street, and said, ‘I think that’s our barn!’ He tied the reins to the nearest hitching post and ran, but it was already too late.” A neighbor had gone into the stall with my mother and thrown a coat over the pony’s head. It was too frightened and totally unmanageable. My grandfather found out how the fire was started, but he did nothing, nor would he tell the children who had set the fire. All he said was that the boy’s mother was a widow and having a hard time.

My Aunt Annette had mysterious fainting spells which they thought were caused by her heart. At that time the high school was on the third floor of a building that also housed the elementary school, and rather than have her climb the stairs she was tutored at home, which added to her sense of isolation. My mother went to a finishing school in Monticello, Illinois. My grandparents didn’t hear from her at the usual time, and when a day or two passed and there was still no letter they began to worry. Then they had a letter from her roommate saying that my mother hadn’t written because she hurt her wrist playing basketball. They went down and found her with a broken wrist untended to, and took her out of school. After that she was tutored at home with Annette.

Neither one ever had a friend who was as close to her as the three sisters were to each other, but Annette believed that when she went anywhere with my mother, people always spoke to my mother, never to her. They cannot have been unaware of Annette, because she was the beauty of the family, but my mother had a natural charm of manner, and people felt that she was aware of them, of what was
going on in their lives and in their hearts—as in fact she was—and they responded to this concern for them, with the result that Annette felt trapped and rendered invisible by my mother’s personality.

There are no antiquarians in my mother’s family and Annette is vague, and sometimes even mistaken, about details of family history. But not about the family life of the Blinns at 301 Ninth Street.

“I had a kimona with red polka dots on it,” she said. “I was just wild about it. And one day Mother sent your mother and me to see a woman who used to work for us. They were very poor—her husband delivered coal. And she was sick in bed and didn’t even have a wrapper to put on. Her two children were playing on the floor beside the bed, and the sheets were dirty, and there were bags of coal in the bedroom, and coal dust over everything. In those days our dresses touched the floor and had trains, and when I saw how dirty the place was, I gathered up my skirts. I couldn’t help it. But your mother walked right over and sat down on the edge of the bed and took Nell’s hand and began to talk to her. That was the way she was.”

The first time I heard this story it ended there. The next time, years later, it had a different ending: “When we got home Blossom burst out, ‘Mother, I am
ashamed
of Annette. She gathered up her skirts so they wouldn’t touch anything!’ And Mother filled a basket with food and wine and clean sheets, and said, ‘Annette, since you behaved that way,
you
can take this to Nell. And you can take her that kimona you’re so fond of.’ ”

This severity was never meted out to my uncle. It is, of course, easier to perceive that a child is being spoiled than to prevent it, but my grandfather tried. Where my Maxwell grandparents quarreled over the bills that came on the second day of January, my Grandfather and Grandmother Blinn had words over Teddy. At some point, all unknowing,
my uncle had stepped into quicksand: he had discovered how much he could get away with.

My Aunt Edith (who was really my cousin once removed) was, on the other hand, not allowed to get away with anything. She was the oldest and that in itself would make for a stricter upbringing, but anyway, from things she said over the years, I have the impression that she nourished a number of grievances, and felt that my grandparents had distinguished between her and their own children. Annette says they didn’t. If she had not loved my Grandmother Blinn dearly, or if my Grandmother Blinn had not loved her, would my Aunt Edith have taken such pride in setting before us my Grandmother Blinn’s Thanksgiving dinner, from beginning to end?

She was like my mother and my aunt and not like them. Where they would open their arms to you, she would give you a peck on the cheek, and if you gave her a hug the response was only a fleeting smile. But such an eye for what made my brother and me happy! The magic lantern, the Peg-Lock blocks, and the Hollow Tree books that so occupied my mind and imagination all came from her. Never once did she forget to have our favorite dishes when we went to visit her, and she always managed to find out what we wanted to do and were afraid to ask for, and we got to do it. We allowed for what we thought was the difference and loved her as much as we loved my Aunt Annette but differently. It wasn’t until I was grown that I discovered the power of feeling behind the peck, and the understanding and good judgment that illuminated her affection for us. She might have led a very different life and been rather a different person if my grandfather had believed in education for women. One of her teachers who was leaving Lincoln to take a job at Smith College wanted to take my Aunt Edith with her. My grandfather did not believe in higher education for women, and that was that.

My grandfather went back to St. Johnsbury every year, and the family with him. They usually stayed with his sister, after his father and mother died, but Annette remembers that one year her grand-uncle drove down from Canada and took them back with him. As they were crossing the border, he said, “Now, children, the horses are in Canada, the wagon is in the United States.” His house had once been an inn, and there he and his sons and daughters and their families lived, each in a separate wing.

My grandmother continued to go home to Kentucky in the summer, only now the children went with her. When my mother and my two aunts spoke of their Kentucky cousins, their faces would light up. As a small child, I looked like my mother’s cousin Wright, and sometimes, smiling at me, she would call me by his name. I felt it was an honor to look like Wright Youtsey. The Kentucky cousins played in a pack—in the house, down by the river, in the big hayloft. My mother’s cousin Hugh Davis said that the attic was full of Civil War uniforms, which the boys used to try on, and there were also old guns, including a Kentucky long rifle and a beautiful twenty-eight gauge muzzle loader shotgun made in England. “Grandmother promised me one of those guns, but not being around when the house was broken up, I never saw it.”

Along about the year 1890, they were all in Kentucky for a golden wedding anniversary. What my Aunt Annette remembers of this occasion is that her grandfather, knowing she loved bananas, took her into a storeroom where there was a huge bunch of them hanging from a hook in the ceiling and said, “Granddaughter, whenever you want a banana, come in here and get it.” At some point they all came trooping out of the house and posed for the wet-plate photographer with his head under a black cloth. The grandparents are seated on a bench in the center of the picture. With his full and rather wild grey beard, my great-grandfather
a little resembles the pictures of John Brown of Harper’s Ferry, though he was not at all that kind of man. My great-grandmother has a long thin face and her hair, still black, is parted in the middle and brushed tight to her skull. She looks as if her life had turned out just the way she thought it would, and he appears to be in a state of mild shock at the realization of all they have lived through in the last fifty years. My grandmother’s brothers look enough like my Grandfather Blinn to be his brothers, instead. George Youtsey and Aunt Sally and two of their children are in an open window directly above the bench. Tom Youtsey and his wife are standing, and so are my Great-aunt Ev’s husband, Burch Davis, and my Great-aunt Sue’s husband, Douglas Brown, with little Donald. And seated in chairs or on the ground are Howard Youtsey and Bertha (the Catholic, with a delicate pointed face and large gentle eyes), my grandmother’s two sisters, Granny Blinn with my Uncle Ted on her lap, my Grandfather Blinn with Annette leaning against him (about this sort of thing the camera never lies), and a job lot of twenty-five beautiful children, my mother being among them. The young man who wrote that quietly self-possessed letter on the eve of the turning point of the Civil War is missing: He died young, of the hardships suffered on Sherman’s march to the sea.

My Grandfather Blinn couldn’t continue to worship in the religion he was raised in because there was no church of that denomination in Lincoln. He and my grandmother went to the Methodist church for many years, but they did not join it, because my grandfather felt that he could not subscribe to all of its tenets. Annette says that they stopped going to church because my grandfather was growing deaf. “One Sunday, walking home after the service, Mother asked
if he had enjoyed the sermon and he replied, ‘I didn’t hear one word of it,’ and she resolved not to put him through that any more.” His deafness increased to the point where he had to have a trial suspended while he went to Chicago and was fitted for a hearing aid, so he could hear the witnesses.

On Sunday evenings he gathered the family together in the parlor and talked to them about the Bible. He said that there was no legal question that was not covered by some passage in the Scriptures.

He was the friend of every minister in town, and used to seek them out to discuss religion with them—particularly the Catholic priest. He had a very high opinion of all these men, my aunt says. Unless I am mistaken he also had a high opinion of Robert G. Ingersoll. When the old house across the street was emptied, the twelve volumes of Ingersoll’s lectures and miscellaneous writings (
The Gods, Some Mistakes of Moses, Why I Am an Agnostic, Superstition
, and so forth) ended up in my father’s den. Though they were not much read, they were looked at with respect, as if behind the glass doors of the bookcase we were keeping a king cobra. Voltaire would have served my grandfather’s purposes better, but Voltaire was not accessible and Ingersoll was, is the simple truth of the matter.