Ancestors (33 page)

In my grandfather’s will all four of his children were named as executors. I don’t know what my uncle did that he shouldn’t have—probably he signed his sisters’ names on the back of certificates of one kind or another so that he could cash them. My mother and my aunts became alarmed and appealed to my father to step in and protect their interests, which he did. But by that time a good deal of money had simply vanished.

My mother’s share in my grandfather’s estate came to $8000. It was carefully husbanded by my father, and not washed away in the Depression. The interest paid half of the college education of my two brothers and me. The principal was then divided, thirty years after my grandfather’s
death, and my share became the down payment on a small house in the country. Though I did not buy it for nostalgic reasons, I took a certain pleasure in the fact that the exterior had been treated with a creosote stain like the cottage my father and mother built at the Chautauqua grounds when I was about three years old.

We moved out there soon after the Fourth of July and stayed until school started in September. Four big oak trees shaded the roof, keeping it cool. They were also an invitation to lightning, and my mother dreaded the August thunderstorms. Sitting on the porch in the evening, we burned punk to keep the mosquitoes and gnats away, and passed the citronella around. The katydids were deafening.

At the beginning of the Chautauqua season, tents sprang up and cottages were opened and aired, and we no longer had the place to ourselves, but my father and mother, foreseeing all this, had picked a lot on the extreme outer edge of the Chautauqua grounds, far away from the big cone-shaped open auditorium, and William Jennings Bryan, and the string quartets, and the Anvil Chorus; away from the cooking classes, and the wading pool, and the afternoon baseball game; away from the log-cabin museum crammed with objects very much like the things that were auctioned off when my Great-great-grandfather Turley died, except that the metal they were made of was now green and mysterious with age; away from the tent stakes that were so easy to trip over, and the invitations you could not say no to—away from
people
is what my father and mother had in mind, but Jimmy Hoblit and his wife came and settled down right beside them.

Twice a year, in the fall and again in the spring, the sewing woman paid a visit to the house on Ninth Street. It lasted a week, and all ordinary affairs were put aside until she left.
Her name was Effie Seyfer, and she was neither a servant nor a friend of the family, but something more intimate than either, and I wished that she would live with us forever. Any page of cutouts I found in her fashion magazines was mine for the asking, and sometimes out of an excess of gratitude I put down my scissors and went and hugged her. What she was like, to me, was the odor of cookies baking in the oven. But she was a woman of character. Her father was a drunkard, and she had him put on the black list, which meant that no saloon would let him have any liquor. While admitting that there was nothing else for her to do, people wondered that she could do such a thing to her own father.

One day, hearing a bustle in the upstairs hall, I went to see what was going on. Annette had pulled my mother’s dressmaking form out there and she and my mother and Effie Seyfer were dressing it up in a coat and a fur neckpiece and a big-brimmed hat pulled down so that you couldn’t see there was no face. The front door opened. I heard my father’s footsteps as he hung his hat and coat in the closet under the stairs and then took two or three more steps before he stopped. “Anybody home?” he called out, and they motioned that I was not to answer. Then without a sound the women retired behind the guest room door. At the turn of the stairs he saw the strange lady and, all his gallant feelings rising up in him, said “How do you do?” politely. Tittering behind the closed guest room door. To think that people were once so innocent.

When I was six years old, my father and mother went to Cincinnati to visit Youtsey cousins on both sides of the Ohio River. They were gone two weeks and I did not know what to do with myself or even how to get from one minute to the next. Each day was a hundred years long. Talking about this visit when he was an old man, my father said with
amusement, “Your mother wasn’t satisfied with looking up relatives who were close at hand. Nothing would do but we must go see one old aunt who lived out in the country far from anywhere, and when we finally found her she was sitting on the porch of her cabin, barefoot, and smoking a corncob pipe.” Though he liked my mother’s cousins individually, he had rather had his nose rubbed in that Kentucky family.

In a fishing camp on a lake, my mother had seen a set of Copeland willow china, of a rare shade of light cobalt blue. It was being broken at the rate of a cup and saucer a day, and when she got back to town she said, “Aunt Sally, how can you let that happen?” The answer was “If you want it, take it.” My mother supplied the fishing camp with a set of china from the ten cent store, and the Copeland willow was shipped to Lincoln.

When they came home from this visit they were in the grip of a mania: They had played golf. My father promptly joined the country club in Bloomington. In February, with the snow lying deep on the ground outside, he cut circles out of white typewriter paper and practiced putting on the moss-green carpet of our long living room. He also set to work and raised the money to buy the land for a nine-hole golf course, across a ravine from our cottage at the Chautauqua grounds, and to put up a clubhouse in the style of a Swiss chalet. With woods on either side of the fairways and a great many sand traps and some quite steep hills, the course was considered very sporty. My father got a set of clubs for my brother and another for me, and we all four took lessons from the coach, a young Scotsman named Walter Kennett. He was quoted in our house morning, noon, and night—what to do with the right shoulder, where to place the hands on the club, with the thumbs overlapping. And the proper stance. And the follow-through.

During the week we played with my mother, and on
the way home to our cottage would stop and eat raspberries from a big square patch that the mowing machine had left in the middle of the fairway on the fifth hole. Weekends I caddied for my father, for twenty-five cents a round, and prayed that he wouldn’t play eighteen holes. We were locked in an Oedipal conflict about where I should stand when he teed off. I could see where the ball landed only if I stood behind him, but he insisted that I stand on the fairway seventy-five or a hundred yards ahead of where he was. Time after time I saw the ball rise high into the white air and never come down. Then would follow a forlorn searching in the rough grass, and being scolded, and more often than not
he
found the ball, and squared off grimly for his next shot.

The game was new to everybody in Lincoln, and people had not yet learned to take reasonable precautions. Absorbed in keeping his right shoulder down and his left arm straight, my father followed through correctly and stretched the piano tuner out cold on the ground beside him.

Having done so much more than anybody else to bring the club into being, my father expected, not unreasonably, that he would be elected its first president, but when people are too entirely beholden to some one person for something exceptional they get tired of being grateful. I am afraid my father’s personality also had something to do with what happened in that election. What he thought about something was usually expressed in a firm clear voice and in language that did not always allow for a divergence of opinion. Also he would walk down the street lost in his own thoughts and not know that somebody was speaking to him, and fail to return the salutation. So they wouldn’t have him. Instead, they elected as president a man who was interested in preserving our native songbirds and who had had nothing whatever to do with creating the country club, and they elected my father
vice
-president.

My mother was heartsick. I can hear her voice saying to Annette, “How can they do that to my Bill?” They could and they did. Two of my father’s friends sat up all night drinking whiskey with him, and when daylight came he was a different man. They had succeeded in convincing him that—though I think this is open to question—he had brought it about himself. He set to work to change his habits and his personality. Tact did not come naturally to him but he learned to be tactful, even so. And since he was never insincere, people forgave him when the effort he put into being tactful was apparent. He learned not to walk down the street lost in thought, and to allow room for a diverging opinion. And he went out of his way to be affable with people he hardly knew. It worked, of course, but I liked better the way he was before.

The willow china appeared on state occasions, but the fishermen had broken so many plates that my mother could use only single pieces—a large platter or the soup tureen. So one Christmas my father gave her a barrel of English bone china, which (God knows how) he managed to unpack and hide all over the house without our knowing it. Where she was concerned, he was capable of flights of fancy that were not matched by anything in the rest of his life. We spent the whole of that Christmas day searching for china, and at twilight my mother emerged triumphantly from the coat closet under the stairs with the last missing piece in her hand.

She found some cretonne that matched the Indian Tree pattern of the china, and made doilies, which she used for the first time on a night when the Rimmerman girls were invited to dinner. As always, they all three talked at once, ignoring, or adding footnotes to, or correcting one another’s remarks, and my father had a one-track mind. It was too much, listening to them and having to carve. He neatly
deposited a slice of steak on the doily in front of him instead of on a plate. The three old maids were delighted. It was the proof of fallibility they needed to love him more.

My brother got an air rifle that same Christmas and two days later, just as my grandmother was saying, “It’s the empty gun that kills people,” it went off, just missing the toe of my Uncle Paul’s queer-looking shoe and making a hole in the living room carpet. It was the sort of thing he had been doing all his life, but even so my grandmother and my uncle were both upset. The one took it personally and the other didn’t like guns.

Another mania, of a less agreeable nature than golf and more widely shared, was already visible on the horizon. My mother spent certain days of the week rolling gauze bandages, in a white uniform, her black hair covered by a white scarf with a red cross on it. My father drilled with a group of local businessmen. Our class at school saved prune seeds, out of which gas masks were to be made, by a process not explained to us. And I was taken to see a movie called
The Beast of Berlin.
The title must have referred to the Kaiser, but what made an impression on me was the fate of the captain of the U-boat that sank the
Lusitania.
He went mad from remorse, and his distorted face—the eyes round with remembered horror and all his teeth showing—appeared at the window of a cottage where a simple peasant family was saying grace with folded hands before their evening meal. When I grew up I discovered that with a certain amount of hard work I could learn Latin, French, Italian, and Greek, but every German word remained unrecognizable to me no matter how many times I looked it up in the dictionary.

My older brother says that by joining that drill group my father had made himself eligible for the draft, and was on
the point of being called up when the war ended. My mother drove the car in the night parade on Armistice Day and my father sat astride the bonnet, smiling and waving to everybody. I thought he was just very happy that the war was over and I was pleased to see him that way, because he was usually rather serious. I’m sure he wasn’t the only drunk in that parade, but anyway, in his relief at not having to leave us and go fight in the trenches, he had tied one on. My brother says that he had to be put to bed.

I was aware that I had lived through an important moment of history. I know now but I didn’t know then that the less people have to do with history the better. Our whole family came down with Spanish influenza during the epidemic of 1918—my mother and father in a hospital in Bloomington, where my mother had gone to have my younger brother, and where she died three days after he was born. My father told me, toward the end of his life, that it had been arranged that Annette was to stay with my older brother and me, and at the last minute she announced that she had to go to Chicago. I think probably what happened—I have never quite been able to bring myself to discuss it with her—was that she had received an urgent communication of some sort from her husband. She was separated from him at the time, and everybody would know if she went to see him in Lincoln, or he came to see her, so he had asked her to meet him in Chicago. There was nothing to do, my father said, but hurry us off to my Aunt Maybel’s.

It was not a place either of us would have chosen to be sick in, but I learned from this visit that my Aunt Maybel’s sense of custodianship extended to more than toys. On Christmas Day my brother and I both came down with the disease that was raging everywhere around us. In her cotton nightgown, with her hair in a braid down her back, she appeared beside my bed every three hours during the night. Without speaking but with, nevertheless, a look of
concern on her face for which I was grateful, she held out a glass of water and the pills the family doctor had left for me. A rock doesn’t have to be congenial if it is the only one there is to cling to. Sometimes it was my uncle who came, instead. And they were also, of course, taking care of my brother, who was in the big brass bed in the spare room. Time passed by in jerks. I woke to a grey winter light, in that little room with my uncle’s desk and typewriter and all the grim-faced ancestors looking down on the progress of my fever, and remembered things I had overheard my aunt saying on the telephone downstairs in the dining room, and was frightened, and closed my eyelids for a second to shut out thoughts I couldn’t deal with, and when I opened them again it was black outside the windows. If only people would say to children when something unbearable happens,
Now you are growing up … This is how it comes about,
it might help, I think. It might have the same alleviating effect that being able to recognize the fact that you are dreaming does, when you are in the grip of a nightmare.