Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  There are three of them in my grandmother’s scrapbook: My father with a black derby on the back of his head and a huge football-game chrysanthemum in his buttonhole. My father and three friends, in four-button suits, with their hats tipped back and their hands on each other’s shoulders and their teeth clamped on half-smoked cigars, which are tilted at a not quite convincing angle. My father with a girl. She is wearing a shirtwaist and a boater, and is posed selfconsciously, with one elbow on a property garden gate that has climbing daisies on it. There is, naturally, no garden. My father is on the other side of the gate and holds a furled umbrella rakishly over his right shoulder. I never saw him hold an umbrella in that way. It must have been the photographer’s idea. My father’s other hand is in the pocket of his white flannel trousers. His leather belt is three inches wide, and he is wearing a white bow tie. The girl is gazing at my father with a look of unfocused mistrust. And he, with his easy, off-balance stance, his strong arms and wrists, his good shoulders and thick hair, his mysterious half-smile, is a creature of physical perfection.

  He was not always like that. The earliest picture of him I know was taken when he was somewhere between seven and nine years old. I recognize the shape of the head and the large ears and the mouth, and am baffled by the clear blue eyes, which are full of light but have no expression whatever in them. Was it again the photographer? Or was it those frightful attacks of asthma in which he more than once thought he was going to suffocate?

  After a little experimental fingering he could play any instrument he got his hands on. I don’t know how old he was when he began to take violin lessons, but at the age of twelve or thirteen he performed in Gillett’s Opera House, which appears to have been a large hall over a clothing store on the courthouse square. Again I see them all—on the front row, and clutching their programs this time, and measuring their applause so that it will not seem exaggerated and foolish, even though they have a right to feel proud. He also played in the church orchestra. His violin teacher, who was a member of the Christian church, suffered from the unchristian emotion of jealousy—or so it was said in the family—and when my father composed a schottische for orchestra, he failed to tell him that the score for certain instruments had to be half a tone higher or lower for harmony. There was no rehearsal. The violins and clarinets were allowed to play what my father innocently put down on ruled music paper. His shame was so great that he never composed another piece of music. I don’t for one minute think that the world was thereby done out of a second Mozart, but still I wish it hadn’t happened.

  He helped pay his way through college by organizing a mandolin club and giving lessons to the members. A woman on the music faculty at Eureka College thought that he was talented and said that she would teach him to play the piano if he would give up ragtime in favor of Bach and Czerny. My father extricated himself from this kind offer and went right on reading the treble and faking the chords in the bass. His plans were made: When he finished college he was going to study medicine at the University of Illinois, and perhaps he would have if things had gone differently at home. That maddening electric bell didn’t do the trick. Before the year was out, my Aunt Bert had made a disastrous marriage and my Uncle Charlie was dead.

  My Aunt Bert announced that she was going to marry him after she had known him exactly two weeks. My grandfather got on the train and went to Waukesha, Wisconsin, the place where Louis Fuller was born and brought up, and asked the cashier of the bank about him, and was told that he came of a good family. Why the cashier did not feel free to tell my grandfather that he was the black sheep of that family I don’t know, any more than I know why my grandfather felt he could not address his questions to Louis Fuller’s family.

  Although it is a scene I find hard to imagine, I don’t think my father was speaking metaphorically when he said, “Father begged Bert on his knees not to marry Fuller. She wouldn’t listen to him.” My grandfather was up against the same streak of mulishness in his daughter that he had to deal with in his wife. Or she may have been so in love that she didn’t care what anybody said. My grandmother’s scrapbook contains an engraved announcement of my Aunt Maybel’s marriage to David Paul Coffman, but not of my Aunt Bert’s marriage to Louis E. Fuller. They didn’t run off, but were married in the parlor of the house on Kickapoo Street, by the minister of the Christian church, on April 2, 1898. On the back of the wedding license the groom’s occupation is given as “journalist.”

  When my father and mother went out for the evening they took me with them and put me on a sofa in the next room, or sometimes the same room, and I woke up in the morning in my own bed without knowing how I got there. Falling asleep I heard a good many things that were not intended for my ears or that it was assumed I would not understand. In time I discovered that if I kept my eyes closed and didn’t move and was careful to breathe regularly, the conversation often became more interesting. Ordinarily it was mostly about crops and recipes; now and then it widened to include disappointment and heartache. I soon had a very good idea not only of what husbands were inconsiderate of their wives’ feelings but also of what they said or did that was so intolerable and that would have provided adequate grounds for divorce if only the wife could bring herself to take action. My Aunt Bert’s difficulties with her second husband were sometimes referred to, but her first marriage and divorce were never mentioned—I now think because the only persons who knew the facts did not choose to discuss them. I decided that whatever the trouble was, it was so far in the past as to be of no interest to anybody any longer. This was not true.

  My aunt appeared in court, in Lincoln, on May 19, 1902, with my grandfather acting as her attorney, and was granted a divorce and the custody of her child. The details remained safely buried in the County Clerk’s office for more than half a century. They are (the deletions being in every case simple legal longwindedness) as follows:

  “Oratrix … represents that the said Louis E. Fuller … on or about the 9th day of January A.D. 1900 … absented himself … without any reasonable cause, for the space of two years and upwards, and has persisted in such desertion.

  “… that the said Louis E. Fuller … had been guilty of extreme and repeated cruelty toward your Oratrix, that he is a man of great austerity of temper, and frequently, during the time your Oratrix lived … with him, he indulged in violent sallies of passion and used toward your Oratrix very obscene and abusive language without any provocation whatever …”

  (“Bertha’s tongue,” my father used to say, and shake his head. But no doubt she thought there had been no provocation.)

  “… when your Oratrix was confined in childbirth at Springfield, Ill., the said Louis E. Fuller cruelly and heartlessly absented himself from their Boarding House … and your Oratrix had to solicit the aid of strangers for care and assistance of herself and newborn child until help could reach her from her parents …

  “… that on or about the third day of January A.D. 1900, the said Louis E. Fuller, at their home in Dubuque, Iowa, struck your Oratrix a violent blow in the face …

  “… that the said Louis E. Fuller, in contracting marriage with your Oratrix, was guilty of defrauding your Oratrix in that he claimed to be an honorable man, and that he had at no time committed any crime against the laws of any state in which he had lived whereas … in fact the said Louis E. Fuller … was confined … in the States prison at Stillwater, Minnesota, from the 23rd day of January A.D. 1894, to the seventh day of May, 1895 …

  “… that the said Oratrix was dragged from place to place, through the states of Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa, in numerous places, by the said defendant, leaving unpaid Board-bills, and being harassed for the payment of same, until in the said month of January A.D. 1900, she was compelled to accept the charity of strangers and return in shame and beggary to her father’s home.

  “… that the said defendant threatens by force to take from the custody … of your Oratrix their child and place him in the custody of entire strangers …”

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nbsp; Poor giddy, frightened creature! And what a coming of age. But it is still true that education and the formation of moral character are identical expressions. My aunt was twenty-six when she returned in shame and beggary to her father’s house, and it is too much to hope that nobody said I told you so.

  My father’s older brother had a beautiful tenor voice and my Grandmother Maxwell’s guileless blue eyes. The description in the Logan County History of Charles Turley, who led his descendants safely into the ark of the Christian Church—“He was a genial, generous-hearted man whom everybody loved”—instantly made me think of my Uncle Charlie. Perhaps he was a throwback. He was born, as I have said, on that farm three miles from Lincoln that my grandmother was so determined to sell, and he was five years old when they moved to town.

  While my grandfather was walking the floor with the bill from the dry goods store in his hand, my uncle was out earning money by whatever jobs were open to schoolboys—among other things, he was a newspaper carrier, and he posted and circulated bills. He must have gone at this with a good deal of energy for he was elected treasurer of the Illinois Bill Posters’ Association. A year after he graduated from college, and while he was reading for the bar examination, he married the daughter of a judge in Petersburg, Illinois. He and his wife lived with my grandparents in the house on Kickapoo Street. In 1895, all in the space of a few months, he had a son and was admitted to the bar, and the name on the frosted glass door of my grandfather’s law office was changed to Maxwell & Maxwell.

  My uncle was everything that people in those days admired in a young man, and for the most part still do. He was hard-working, intelligent, and ambitious, and his ambitions were of a kind that could easily be understood: to provide for his family, to do well in business, to be well thought of. If he met with a setback, he cheerfully doubled his efforts and usually overcame it. He was of an open, honorable nature, and at the same time he was a natural diplomat. He was everybody’s friend and darling. But when it came to seeking out legal advice they consulted, as always, older and wiser heads. Instead of sitting despondently in his office, he began to write life and fire insurance on the side, and did so well that one of the fire insurance companies sent him on the road as a part-time special agent. He traveled around the state inspecting risks and settling claims and cultivating the friendship of local agents, and was so successful that if he had lived it is quite possible his career would have been in that field and not in law.

  Like my father, he was musical. He composed military marches, several of which were published, and he was the leader and director of the Methodist church choir. I assume that he was merely earning money. If he had gone over to the Methodists, he would not have been living at home; it would have been too uncomfortable for him. He was the assistant manager of Gillett’s Hall, and he conducted a series of theatrical entertainments in the Broadway Theater. There appears to have been no limit to his capacity for driving himself. In one photograph, taken when he was about twenty, his eyes are abnormally large and he has a full mouth and a seraphic expression. In a later photograph, the angel has departed, leaving a young man in a dress suit who has already begun to be encased in fat.

  He was twenty-six when he drank contaminated well water in some small town in southern Illinois, and contracted typhoid fever. The first symptom was a severe chill, on the evening of the 4th of July. The next day, a Monday, he went on a business trip, and he came home on Wednesday evening not feeling any better. He went to see the family doctor, who gave him something to take but must not have diagnosed the disease properly, for that evening my uncle was still on his feet being installed as chancellor commander of Glendower Lodge Number 45 of the Knights of Pythias. He made one more business trip, to Petersburg, and came home on Saturday morning with a raging fever and took to his bed.

  The obituary notice that appeared in the paper two weeks later begins: “ ‘Charlie Maxwell is dead.’ Such was the word passed from lip to lip Saturday morning …” Knowing the place, I see it happen.

  They did not at first believe that he was in mortal danger. The family doctor laid great stress on the fact that my uncle was young and strong. But as his temperature continued to rise and he grew weaker and weaker, they went on being hopeful because hope was all there was to cling to. He didn’t always recognize the people standing around his bed. His speech was disordered and at times he had to be forcibly restrained. The family spoke with lowered voices in parts of the house that were remote from his bedroom, when they could have shouted in his ear and he wouldn’t have heard them. My grandfather and my father followed the doctors around, waiting for the tactful moment to ask questions the doctors could not answer. Any remark the nurses made was considered to be of the utmost significance. Aften ten days the fever went down suddenly, and he left his bed for a short time. Then it shot up again. At noon on Friday, he had a brief period of lucidity and recognized his father-in-law. Toward the end, in his delirium, he directed the Methodist church choir and sang with them. My Aunt Bert and her husband arrived from Springfield a few hours before he died. Three ministers spoke at his funeral.

  The obituary notice in the other evening paper says: “The death of Charles C. Maxwell removes from Lincoln one of its most promising young men, one widely admired by all who knew him. Full of energy, pluck, and stick-to-it-iveness, he had begun a foundation that was, even in early life, a marvel in itself. He experienced the rough sides of practical life, but, undiscouraged, worked diligently, ever striving to attain some practical end. He was just beginning to realize that man is the chief architect of his own success, that through the channel of personal effort will flow the tide that brings happiness.”

  The tide can be interfered with.

  My father went back to college in the fall, and after a few weeks my grandfather wrote him that he would have to come home and take over Charlie’s insurance agency. Sitting at a desk in my grandfather’s law office, he began to write insurance. After he had persuaded somebody to take out a policy, he then had to take it to my grandfather to be signed, because he wasn’t of age and his signature wouldn’t have been legally binding. The insurance company tried him out in my uncle’s job. All he had to do, it seems, was give up wearing quite such interesting neckties. The rest came easily and quickly to him.

  My father always regretted the fact that he was not able to follow his first inclination, and he would, I think, have made an excellent doctor. But on the other hand he made an excellent businessman. He was sober and responsible—those jazzy photographs were just manifestations of a stage he was passing through—and would have done well at almost anything he set his hand to, so long as it was of a practical nature. Imaginative effort he had no gift for, which is perhaps why he was not very tactful. He wasn’t everybody’s friend; those friends he had were all admirable but rather complicated men, who were drawn to him by his bluntness and by the fact that they could see right to the bottom of his character.

  One of them, Dean Hill, became my friend during the last years of his life. A more enchanting man I have never known. He and my father and another friend used to go fishing together when they were in their seventies. Dean Hill had a bad heart and wasn’t allowed to row the boat, my father was more than half blind, and the third man was deaf as a post. They took a humorous pleasure in compensating for one another’s physical deficiencies. When my father had a bite but couldn’t see that his cork was bobbing wildly, the other two would cry, “Bill, you’ve got something on your line!” And when this crisis was passed, out would come the pint of whiskey. Sooner or later, the conversation always got around to a subject that both Dean Hill and my father loved to talk about—the Gillett family lawsuit. Dean Hill’s mother was an interested party, and my Grandfather Maxwell figured prominently in the trial, as counsel for Miss Jessie Gillett, who was Mrs. Hill’s sister. The facts could be depended on never quite to fit together, and that it all took place long ago in their youth probably added to their pleasure.

  In my Grandfather Maxwell�
�s day, the most common litigation was over the ownership of land, and what every lawyer waited for was a lawsuit that would go on and on and on, with the ownership of a great deal of land at stake, and the lawyers’ fees reflecting the amount of time and labor they had spent on the case and the value of the property under dispute. One morning my grandfather was informed that Miss Gillett was in the outer office. His chance had come, and it was all anybody could ask for. The background of the case is contained in a biographical sketch of John D. Gillett in the Logan County History: “When he first came to Illinois nearly one-half the land was in the market at government prices, and availing himself of the opportunity he entered at different times about 12,000 acres, selling lots or sections as he found purchasers. In 1852 he with R. B. Latham entered about 7,000 acres. He is one of the most extensive farmers of Illinois, his home farm containing 9,000 acres.* In addition to farming he has paid considerable attention to cattle dealing and real estate, and his vast accumulations are due to his good judgment, industry and strict attention to business. He raises the finest blooded stock cattle in the United States, as his exhibits at various stock shows demonstrate, he invariably receiving first premiums. He is now engaged extensively in shipping fine stock to European markets. In 1873 he was one of the incorporators of the First National Bank of Lincoln and has since been its president. In politics he is a Republican, but gives no attention to public affairs. May 31, 1842 he was married to Miss Lemira Parke, whom he met in 1840, while crossing the Sangamon River, now at Clingman’s Ferry, she being on her way to spend Christmas with friends at Springfield. Her father, Elisha Parke, settled in that part of Sangamon County now included in Logan County, in 1837, and built the first jail in Logan County. Mr. and Mrs. Gillett have eight children—Emma (wife of Hon. R. J. Oglesby, Governor of Illinois), Grace (wife of D. T. Littler, of Springfield), Nina, Amy, Kate (wife of James Hill, of Chester, Illinois), Jessie, John, and Charlotte. The family are members of the Episcopal church at Springfield.”