Ancestors (32 page)

How much of this comes from my Kentucky grandmother I cannot say, but the prevailing atmosphere of her house and of ours was, I think, Southern, though I have never been very far south of the Mason-Dixon Line and have to imagine what Southern family life is like. My grandfather, being a New Englander, must have inherited Puritan genes, and he had a New England upbringing, but Puritanism didn’t predominate and in fact wasn’t even apparent in his character. He was profoundly attached to his family and his friends, and his pleasure in having people around him was as much a part of him as his largeness of mind. He was not without a sense of the mystery that surrounds human life, but he took a skeptical view of the revealed truths and doctrines of formal religion, and put his faith in reason—a thing it is now, of course, no longer reasonable to do.

The lawyer who spoke at my grandfather’s funeral said that because my grandfather rarely went to any church and did not belong to any particular congregation, a good many people got the idea that he was an atheist, but that he was not; that he believed in “a conscious infinity, an intelligence that was the Creator of it all. That was Mr. Blinn’s God”; that he believed also that the laws regulating and governing the universe are finished—none ever were or can be added, from the moment of Creation—and that they are also immutable;
that our act or the reflex of our own act is what gives us happiness or misery; that we are punished not by God but by the emotional consequences of our wrongdoing—by our regret and shame; that human happiness is the highest good, and we can be happy only by being concerned for the happiness of others; that there is a destiny that makes us brothers, and so no one goes his way alone; that Heaven and Hell are not places but mental conditions.

How much of all this is what my grandfather actually believed and how much is the embellishment of Mr. Timothy T. Beach is the question. My grandfather had thought and read a great deal on the subject of religion, and I suspect that he approached the eternal verities with a more humble mind than this funeral eulogy would suggest.

In their unconscious assumptions and attitudes, my mother’s family was hardly Christian at all. But neither were they pagan. I don’t know what they were. I do know, really, but it is a question of what name to put to it. When Annette was forty, she had a son, now a grey-haired man, who bears a physical resemblance to my (and of course also his) Grandfather Blinn. But the resemblance is more than merely physical. What I am aware of in him, and found in my mother and Annette and my Aunt Edith and my older brother—the family trait they all have in common—is the pure feeling of the heart. I hesitate to say that it was their religion, but it is what they lived by.

When my mother was painting china, I stood beside her, watching. She painted odd-shaped Art Nouveau tea sets and dresser sets and vases decorated with pale pink or yellow roses and violets and daisies for her sisters and her friends, and nursery plates for their children. The smell of turpentine always brings it back to me. The cotton dabs covered with silk cloths were to soften the outlines, so that the flowers were more natural. As she squeezed the paint from the tube she said, “This is duck green … This is rose madder … This is alizarin crimson …” and I saw the color emerging and was in love with its name and smelled the turpentine and felt her presence beside me all as a single happiness. In the same calm matter-of-fact way that she taught me the names of colors, she also taught me to kneel beside my crib in the dark and say, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” and, when I was older, the Lord’s Prayer.

It was a rule of my Grandfather Blinn’s house that when he and Governor Oglesby were discussing religion, the children could stay up until they fell asleep. Annette says that her religious convictions came much more from being present on those occasions than from attending Sunday school, though she and my mother did that too. As grown women they believed in God but felt no guilt about not going to church; apparently He had excused them from it. The God my mother believed in (plainly modeled on my Grandfather Blinn with perhaps a touch of the grandeur of Governor Oglesby) was large-minded and just and affectionate
toward His family, who lived in the hollow of His hand—where else would they live? Heaven was an actual place. And the dead were not all shuffled up together but moved freely among their families and their friends. (When Dr. Donald died, Annette said, in a letter, she was glad that after so much suffering he could go on to the people of his time.)

Without at all understanding the consequences, my mother put an Old Testament fear in me by telling me that God did not love little boys who did something that, as it happens, all little boys do. Since she knew every thought that passed through my mind without my even having to tell her about it, there was good reason to suppose that He also knew what I was up to. But this also meant that He was in all insufficiently lighted places (the back stairs, the long hall upstairs between the bedrooms and the bathroom) shielding me from the unnamed terrors of the dark.

The reason my brother and I didn’t go to the Christian church Sunday school was that my mother was afraid to have us cross the railroad tracks. My first exposure to the New Testament ideas came when I was presented with the Beatitudes, printed as a little book, with bright-colored illuminations. It was given to me by an old woman who came to the door at tactful intervals with Boston brown bread and pot-holders, and it enlarged my expectations of life, for if people who hardly knew me gave me presents when it wasn’t even Christmas or my birthday, at any time I might have an agreeable surprise. It also made me think. My brother was four and a half years older than I was, and as an object for teasing I was irresistible to him. When he had nothing better to do he played with me the way a cat plays with a chipmunk or a mole, hoping to produce signs of life, which usually came in the form of temper and tears. That the meek would inherit the earth and the pure in heart see God was just what I had been hoping to hear.

When my Grandfather Blinn died, the house across the street was sold to a retired farmer. There were three boys in the family, and my brother and I were drawn to them like nails to a magnet. They went to the Presbyterian Sunday school, and so we asked my mother if we could go with them. Though, historically speaking, the Presbyterian Church belongs among the more rigid and orthodox forms of Protestantism and its adherents have been notable for their excitability and rancor, neither the minister nor the congregation of this church appeared to be in the least concerned with proving that what Jesus had in mind was the Presbyterian Church and no other. Those adults I remember individually were cheerful, complacent, and full of kindly feelings. There was never any talk of hellfire and infant damnation, or any mention of the fact that everybody wasn’t subject to redeeming grace. No one was outside the pale except the heathen Chinese and Japanese, who were fast being converted and brought into our midst by missionaries. We recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed, and we sang fervently, Sunday after Sunday, the same few rousing hymns—“Ring the Bells of Heaven” and “
Bles
s-ed sur-
rend
er so
hap
-py and free …” and “Jesus wants me for a
sun
 … 
beam,
a
sun
 … 
beam,
a
sun
 … 
beam
 …” as if the only thing in the world that mattered was our enthusiasm. I went to Sunday school with Bennie Irish, and learned about Abraham and Isaac, and Joseph’s coat of many colors, and how God made the world in six days and on the seventh rested, and how the Red Sea parted, and the Disciples couldn’t stay awake in the Garden of Gethsemane, and Nebuchadnezzar ate grass. The man who led the singing had a V-shaped notch in one ear that was sufficiently interesting to draw my wandering attention back from the old lady whose knees wouldn’t stay still. Every so often, some child with a birthday would be invited to come up in front of the Sunday school and deposit in a
glass fishbowl seven pennies if he was seven years old. Or a missionary would tell us about the work of converting the heathen, and show us beautiful embroidered kimonos and tiny shoes that, hard as it was to believe, Chinese women wore on their feet. And when Jesus said
Suffer little children, and forbid them not,
he was talking about me.

Like all old people, my Grandmother Maxwell sighed without knowing that she was doing it, and our going to the Presbyterian Sunday school was undoubtedly the cause of some of those sighs.

She never reproached us—at least not directly. But she would announce, as if it were the continuation of an argument she and I had been having, that Jesus wasn’t sprinkled. “You won’t find a word about sprinkling in the New Testament,” she would say, looking at me severely. “I don’t care what the Presbyterians say, He went down
under
the water and He came up
out
of the water!”

I had not been either sprinkled or immersed, but I knew that my grandmother loved me, and I could not believe that so obedient and gentle a child as I was would be consigned to the flames. On the other hand, I do not think that my grandmother said that merely for the pleasure of hearing out loud something she believed in in the innermost recesses of her being. She must have hoped that the words would sink in, and that, when I was older, I would be moved to act upon them.

I don’t suppose she would have wanted my brother and me to be brought up without any knowledge of religion, but by not going to the Christian church we broke the chain that went back through five generations and a hundred years—through my father to her, and through her to, on one side, Charles Turley and his father, Charles Turley the pioneer, and on the other to her mother, Louisa England, and her grandfather, David England, who swung his scythe three days for three bushels of wheat, and her great-grandfather,
Stephen England, who chose this land of milk and honey for his descendants to live in, and formed the first Christian church in central Illinois, and preached the gospel sitting down when he could no longer stand.

On Sunday morning I would stand in front of my father, waiting for him to put down the paper and fish around in his trousers pocket for a dime for me to put in the collection plate. At that moment Mr. Irish was struggling with a stiff collar and putting on his best blue serge suit so he could walk to church beside Mrs. Irish, but my father placidly returned to the Chicago
Sunday Tribune.
Without his ever having to resort to explanations, I knew that he was finished forever with going to church, but that he didn’t mind my going to the Presbyterian Sunday school, if that was what I wanted to do.

I don’t know what made him stop, except that what he did not believe in he would have nothing to do with. He was perfectly tolerant about every religion except the one he was brought up in. He almost never spoke of “the Christian Church”; he said “the Campbellites”—clearly with a derogatory intent. They were intolerant, narrow-minded, hide-bound, backward-looking, and impervious to reason. Barton Stone’s name must often have been mentioned in sermons my father had to sit through, but I wonder if he knew anything whatever about Stone’s life and saintlike nature. In any case, my father was not speaking entirely from prejudice; the atmosphere of the Christian church in Lincoln
was
self-righteous and censorious.

Until I came upon it in print, in a yellowed newspaper clipping in my grandmother’s scrapbook, I did not know that my mother had ever been a member of the Christian Church. Annette says she did it to please my Grandmother Maxwell. I don’t know when she stopped going, or why. But surely my mother wouldn’t have gone off to the Christian church on Sunday morning without my father, so he must
have continued to go to church after he was a grown man, and after he was married, and probably as long as my Grandfather Maxwell was alive.

But my mother took the Bible quite as literally as my grandmother did—sometimes even more literally. There was a very bad cyclone in Mattoon, Illinois, and when my mother heard about it, just as we were about to sit down to supper, she took all the food off the table and wrapped it in a tablecloth, and had my father take it down to the interurban station, where there was a freight car waiting, and we went to bed hungry.

For a time, during the First World War, my mother went to the Presbyterian church with us, until one Sunday when the minister made some patriotic statement that was greeted with applause by the congregation. She never went back. Her objection was to handclapping in the house of the Lord, not to the assumption that He took sides, for which there is ample warrant in the Scriptures. She used to say fervently that it was not the English who defeated Napoleon Bonaparte, nor the Austrians, nor the Russians, but God Almighty. She was quoting Victor Hugo. She loved sentimental ideas just as she loved sentimental music, and so did everybody else.

In a way that is as mysterious and fascinating as the imitative disguises of moths and butterflies, children manage to resemble now one and now another member of the family they spring from. There was a period during my adolescence when I looked quite a lot like my Uncle Ted, making my father uneasy. With reason. He did his best to teach me that money is something you hang on to, but I couldn’t help noticing the confident way my mother spent it. She was extravagant with her own money, but not with my father’s. And if it hadn’t been for my father she wouldn’t,
I think, have had any money to be extravagant with.

When my Grandfather Blinn died it was assumed that his estate would be considerable, but he did not leave anything like the amount of money people expected. His obituary says that he was a public-spirited man, and the large fees he received in important cases were invested in local improvements such as the Lincoln Street Railway and the Central Illinois Telephone and Telegraph Company—both shaky enterprises that required fresh capital again and again before they were finally on a secure footing. Young men who went to him for financial help usually got it, and his indifference to money seems to have extended to large sums as well as small ones. In the midst of a busy life, he often didn’t bother to put in writing the loans he made. When his partner remonstrated with him, saying, “Why do you loan money like that when you know you’ll never see it again?” my grandfather said simply, “I knew their fathers.” Lame dogs do not always find it convenient to remember just how they were helped over the stile, and the same goes for men who are no longer young and halfway up the ladder.