Ancestors (34 page)

One morning the telephone rang quite early, before my aunt brought my breakfast to me, and I heard enough to know that she was talking to my father in Bloomington, and that there was something he wanted her to do for him. A little later she called my brother and me into my grandmother’s room. It was the first time I had seen him since we were taken sick, and we hardly looked at each other. We were in alien country. My aunt sat down in a low rocking chair and took me on her lap, and I knew when her eyes filled with tears what she was going to say, but it had to be put into words and she did that too. What had to be done she could be counted on to do.

What I can remember of my childhood (which came to an end at that moment) all lies in the framework of seven or eight years, during which I was much more aware of the seasons than I was of the calendar, though I made several of them in school and brought them home to my mother to use. Sometimes it seems as if everything happened in a single long day that can be unwound inch by inch like a Chinese scroll. And I do not so much remember things as see them happening. In much the same way that my Aunt Bert saw Mary Edie setting out with a baby in her arms to find her husband, I see a man and a woman—both young, in their early thirties—and a little boy, fishing on the Illinois River. The river is very wide at this point, and the man does not like the look of the sky. He puts his fishing pole away and begins to row. The oarlocks creak in a slow steady rhythm. The rowboat sits low in the water. The resort where they are staying is a long way, around a bend in the river. The wind is blowing now, and the sky is getting blacker and blacker.
Creak. Creak. Creak.
The air is green. The sky is split open by forked lightning and this is followed by a massive clap of thunder. There are whitecaps on the water. When the man tells the little boy to get down in the bottom of the boat, the little boy hears in his voice that his father is afraid. He turns and looks at his mother, in the stern of the boat. She, too. The little boy now knows something he didn’t know before: It isn’t true that nothing bad can happen to them. The knowledge is remote as, lying
in bed at home, he smells the snow that has fallen in the night. But it is nevertheless permanent.

Kneeling beside his crib in the dark he says, “If I should die before I wake …” The rest of the words say themselves while he considers the possibility of what he has just said. Words are real to him; all promises binding. And in the night, with everybody in the house asleep and the gas nightlight in the upstairs hall at the head of the stairs to show the way, anything can happen. Anything at all. Fatalistically he accepts the woman’s goodnight kiss, and a few seconds later, when she has left the room, he bravely lets go, knowing that children have died in the night on this very street, even on the very same side of the street.

The woman and the little boy have the same large brown eyes. (So does my younger daughter.) When he touches velvet he thinks of the sound of her voice. He puts his head in the hollow of her neck and finds there unfailing comfort and the immediate renewal of self-confidence. Which is his self and which is her? When she withdraws for any reason, he has no choice but to go looking for her.

The man’s eyes are a clear blue. The cheek the little boy kisses at bedtime is scratchy. The man smells of cigar smoke and his own agreeable self. He wears stiff collars, and combs his hair with water.

They are in a sleigh—a cutter—and they have a plaid carriage robe over their knees, and the silvery sound is the horse’s bells shaking. It is very cold. Bundled up in woolen scarves, with his stocking cap pulled down to his nose, the little boy is in an ecstasy at being out after dark on a starry night, between his father and mother.

In the early spring the palms are brought from the greenhouse and placed one on either side of the front walk. The sidewalk is thrust up in places by tree roots, and the curb is higher than is usual nowadays so that people can descend without awkwardness from the metal step of a carriage.
The little boy gets down on his hands and knees, searching in the grass for spring beauties. He comes on the discarded shell of a locust and wonders if he shouldn’t preserve it. The trouble is, everything is worth preserving. The brick driveway is littered with tree flowers and seeds with wings attached to them. On the Kuhls’ front lawn there are buckeyes lying about which the Kuhls don’t seem to want. Behind the Kennedys’ house there is a mulberry tree. And behind the Harts’s house more violets than it is possible to pick, but he always asks first, and old Mrs. Harts says, “Go right ahead.” She has a bad back and wouldn’t dream of bending down to pick violets.

On Easter Sunday the two boys leap from their beds and run down the stairs and outside, where they start searching for what the Easter Rabbit has left for them, in nests of green paper straw, in my father’s hats. (But when did she do this? We woke up terribly early. Also he was very particular about his clothes, and yet every hat he owned was out in the yard where it could have been rained on. Did she take them without asking, or was it that he trusted her with everything he had, including his hats?)

On the Fourth of July, American flags hang from all the front porches, ashen-colored snakes curl up out of the cement sidewalk, and the little boy takes firecrackers out of their red Chinese wrapping paper and lights them. The older boy doesn’t bother with this kind; he sets off cannon crackers, while unheeded adult voices cry
Be careful!
In the evening, sparklers leave their seraphic calligraphy on the eye of the mind.

Now they are in that cottage under the oak trees. By the back porch there are morning glories climbing on strings. It is the territory of the mourning dove and the bobwhite and the whip-poor-will. The ground is carpeted with the umbrella-shaped leaves of the May-apple, and there are trees that do not grow in town, red-haws and honey-locusts. The
cottage smells of kerosene lamps and the fireless cooker. The walls are thin, and the distinction between outdoors and indoors is felt mostly when it rains. Mice and squirrels ignore it. In the middle of the night, the two little boys sit up in bed, in the yellow lamplight, watching the woman chase a flying squirrel with a broom. From the rafter it swoops to the top of a curtain. She swings and when the broom lands, the flying squirrel is somewhere else.

The thumping of radiators all over the house in town means that summer is over. Old Dyer comes night and morning to tend the furnace, and the washing goes off to Mrs. Dyer in an express wagon pulled by one of her grandchildren and comes back clean and beautifully ironed and smelling sweet.

In the evening, after they have left the table, the man stands holding a double sheet of the Lincoln
Evening Courier
across the upper third of the brick fireplace in the library, which does not draw properly until it is warm. The woman is sewing. When the doorbell rings, he goes to the front door and they hear him say, “Why, good evening, Mrs. Kennedy. Come in.” Mrs. Kennedy is dignified and handsome, and has grey hair. She lives two houses up the street, and at a certain season of the year the little boy is often in the Kennedys’ backyard, eating mulberries off the ground. He doesn’t have to ask permission.

Taking his hand now, his mother leaves his father and Mrs. Kennedy in the library, and settles herself in the living room, on the big divan. It is understood that Mrs. Kennedy has come to talk to his father about her troubles—that is to say, about Mr. Kennedy. Mrs. Kennedy is a lady and Mr. Kennedy is not a gentleman, and it was a mistake for them to marry. Her difficulties are of a kind for which there is no remedy. Her voice is never free from sadness and the little boy has never seen her smile. Since she cannot bring herself to talk about the thing that is really weighing on her heart,
she talks about something else—about her life shut up in a silent house with a husband who is not courteous or well-mannered but angry with her, for reasons it would never do to go into in the year 1915. She says that Mr. Kennedy is angry at her because she cannot control her feelings. She says her life is at a standstill and she has to go on as if nothing had happened. She asks the little boy’s father if he believes in God. He does and he doesn’t believe. He has read Thomas Paine and Ingersoll, but he still doesn’t rule out the possibility of a divine order in the universe. He considers that Mrs. Kennedy is a highly intelligent woman, and talking with her is like talking with a man. The little boy strains to hear what is being said in the next room. Some time back—perhaps only a few years but at any rate before he was old enough to remember, though he seems to sense, just out of reach, a faint glimmer of something, so perhaps it was when he was very small—the Kennedys lost their only child, a daughter, a happy and radiant girl of seventeen. She had an orange and a glass of milk before she went to bed, and died in the night. It won’t stand as an explanation now but it did then. From this tragedy Mrs. Kennedy cannot extricate herself. There are circumstances in which such behavior might be criticized, but no one criticizes her. Except Mr. Kennedy, whom nobody likes. And if it is true that people are not entirely dead, until they are no longer remembered or spoken of, then the beautiful Linda Kennedy still has a place, a life, on Ninth Street, which at this period is thickly populated with children. In the living room, the woman bites off a thread and then, with her hands idle in her lap, stares past the head of the little boy, who has fallen asleep. Interesting though the conversation in the next room was, it is his bedtime and he had no choice. The woman is not jealous of Mrs. Kennedy’s friendship with his father. He will tell her afterward, as they are undressing for bed, what Mrs. Kennedy came to see him about.

When the little boy has the earache he goes to his father and says, “Will you blow smoke in my ear?” and the man obligingly draws on his cigar and then puts his lips to the little boy’s ear and the earache goes away.

In a white corduroy suit that Effie Seyfer made for him, white stockings, and white shoes, he walks down the aisle of the Episcopal church, totally unconscious of the bride in his wake. And he doesn’t drop the ring. Later, sitting on a gold chair where his mother put him, he watches the footmen come and go with trays of champagne. He is forgotten by everybody. Just when he is about to give up all hope, his Aunt Edith appears with a plate of ice cream for him, and he feels the way people do who have survived a shipwreck.

His aunt and uncle come down from Bloomington for the night and early in the morning he rushes into the guest room and gets in bed between them. Something in the quality of their laughter tells him how welcome he is. But what about their own children? No children.

On summer evenings, to escape the heat or for a diversion, the man hitches the horse up to the high English cart and they go driving. Often they take the Donalds with them. The dog goes too, uninvited, but on the other hand, nobody turns and shouts “Go home!” When they overtake some ordinary buggy or farm wagon they congratulate themselves on being above the dust. (The cart was made for a Chicago millionaire, who decided that he didn’t want it after all, and through the maneuvering of Dr. Donald my father got it very reasonably.) The landscape through which they are moving is as flat as a chessboard. The squares are marked off by high hedges of Osage orange. If it is July, the grain is cut and stacked in the fields. If it is August, they may see the yellow chaff pouring out of the snout of a threshing machine. The horse’s tail goes up and the little boy is in a good position to observe what happens next, and it is all so interesting, and nobody takes any notice. The courthouse
clock, floating in the sky, shows them the way home. It doesn’t necessarily follow that the cart will stop in front of the ice cream parlor as they pass through town but sometimes this happens, and when it does the little boy is terribly happy.

In the middle of the week, when the man is away, they cannot go driving to cool off and at night the woman and the two boys wander from room to room downstairs. When they find a doorway with a slight stirring of air, they put their comforters down and fall asleep there. The man sits in some bleak, airless hotel room, wiping the trickle of sweat from his neck and wondering what they are doing at home. Two or three of his traveling acquaintances knock on the door and ask if he wants to go with them to a house they know about, and he puts on his tie and coat and straw hat and goes with them. But when the others go upstairs with the girls, he remains behind, nursing his beer. (I have his word for this.)

On Sunday morning he waits at the curb until the front door opens and the woman comes out of the house and down the steps, wearing a long riding habit with a divided skirt. She rides sidesaddle. If people have ever seen a woman riding astride they do not talk about it. The little boy tells everyone that when he is six he is going to have a pony. On the afternoon of his sixth birthday he stands at the front door collecting tribute—a baseball glove, dominoes, a box kite, and so forth. Later the children play games. They run around the yard keeping huge colored tissue-paper butterflies in the air with fans. They play London Bridge Is Falling Down. It falls on the little boy and he is caught fast in the arms of an enchanting young woman with red hair. (I have been told that she was not absolutely sure she wanted to marry my uncle, but then he lost his arm in that accident and how could she decently back out of it? Within five years they were divorced, and I never saw her again.)

The patients sit fidgeting in the waiting room of Dr. Young’s office in Bloomington while the little boy watches the circus parade—as it leaves the circus grounds and then, after the calliope has passed, the Model T shoots across town and they see the whole thing over again. The little boy is quite sure that in his uncle’s eyes he has no faults, and that his uncle will never disapprove of him or be offended by anything he does. (I was mistaken: He never forgave me for growing up.)

And there is no Shetland pony in the barn of the house on Ninth Street because there is no barn. When the carriage horse ran away for the third time, leaving the woman and the little boy stranded at the Chautauqua grounds, the man sold it. Also the English cart—though how he managed to bring himself to do this I do not understand; it was his pride. The barn was torn down and in its place there is now a garage and they go on much longer drives, in a seven-passenger Chalmers, and have flat tires, and get stuck in mud up to the axles.