Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  He was brought up on a farm outside Bloomington and had put himself through medical school, and his ideas about life were neither countrified nor platitudinous. He smelled faintly of disinfectant, and his hands were mottled with some brown discoloration which I took to be from his work—he ended up being the anesthetist for all the surgeons in Bloomington. The fact that he took his time about everything probably had something to do with this. He thought it excruciatingly funny that my father would get himself and everybody else at the station an hour before the train was due. He always arrived in time to pull himself up onto the steps of the last car just as the wheels were beginning to turn.

  You never could tell what was going to come out of his mouth. Once at the breakfast table he remarked cheerfully, “I used to take cream in my coffee and then your Aunt E got me to drink it black, and now I don’t like it either way.” And when the country was well into the Depression, he surprised me by saying, “You know, Little Bill, your Aunt E and I thought of sending you to Oxford and I’m very glad we had the idea while we could afford it.”

  I was in college when I discovered that my Aunt Edith had married someone else before she married Uncle Doc. She took me with her when she went calling on a friend, and at the last moment, when we were leaving her house, I had pulled a book out of the bookcase as a prop against possible boredom and had taken it with me. Noticing the name on the flyleaf, I interrupted the conversation to ask, “Aunt E, who is Edith Cosby?” and narrowly escaped being turned into stone. Small-town people manage to endure the inexorable proximity of their lives only by deceiving themselves into thinking that nobody knows what they couldn’t not know. I am in favor of this. But all in the world I know about my Aunt Edith’s first husband to this day is his last name, and that he worked in a bank in Lincoln, and they lived on Ninth Street for a while, and the temptation to help himself to the money that passed through his hands was too much for him, with the result that my aunt found herself a single woman again, living at home, and with something to live down.

  Annette and her husband were not willing, like most married people of that period, to take turns rocking the boat but went at it together. Then she would rush home to her mother, or to my mother, or to my Aunt Edith, with the newest developments. My Aunt Edith retained a kind of diplomatic frigidity with my uncle for half a century. She was never rude, but also never not disapproving. My mother and father stopped speaking to him. If my mother saw my uncle anywhere in public she came home in an excited state, and whoever was there had to hear about his extraordinary behavior. Annette’s father-in-law was drawn into it, and my uncle’s two sisters, and even a brother-in-law. When Annette’s name figured in those conversations I overheard lying in the next room, my mother would draw up a bill of indictment that included, among other things, nagging, being insanely jealous, and being ungenerous about money. My father would tell the story of the minnow bucket. The word “divorce,” the words “separate maintenance” floated around in my sleepy brain.

  I was fifty before I fitted the pieces of that marriage together, and saw that it was not what people said it was, or even what my aunt said it was. For she was young and excitable, and when she quarreled with her husband she couldn’t help drawing everybody in the family into it. The truth is that, in his own way, he loved her. My uncle was a romantic; the Brontës would have understood him better than the women of my mother’s and Annette’s bridge club did. When the building his office was located in burned down, the firemen could not restrain him from rushing up a flight of rickety wooden stairs, through the smoke and flames, to rescue the only existing print of a photograph of my aunt as she was when he married her. And she confessed to me once that it was only after he died, at the age of eighty, that she knew what it was to pull a comforter up over herself in the night; he always did it.

  My father and mother had become intimate friends with a somewhat older couple who lived next door to them on Eighth Street. Dr. Donald was a veterinary, and had a livery stable on the courthouse square. He also bought and sold purebred horses. He was born in Scotland, and all his life spoke with a strong burr. His wife was from a small town near Lincoln, and when I knew them had an endless list of complaints against him which she drew upon in conversation, always as if she were telling a joke on him, and it made everybody uncomfortable. She was the only person in town who didn’t admire him. Perhaps the trouble was that when it was his turn to rock the boat he wouldn’t do it. Or it may have been something quite different. Neither of them ever confided to anybody what it was that had come between them. Whatever it was, I think it happened after they moved to Ninth Street. When my father and mother first knew them she was not the bitter-tongued woman she later turned into. And as evening came on, my mother, waiting for my father to finish his traveling and come home to her, was aware of the lights in the house next door, and less lonely because she knew that the Donalds were also aware of the lights in her house.

  Aunty Donald never tired of telling me that when I was a baby she carried me on a pillow, and that I looked more like a baby bird than anything human. I weighed four and a half pounds when I was born, and somewhat less at six weeks. My mother’s milk did not agree with me nor did anything else, until the family doctor suggested goat’s milk. The minister of the African Methodist church kept a goat, and my father made an arrangement with him. When I was a little boy, I used to encounter the Reverend Mr. Fuqua occasionally on his bicycle and we would exchange polite salutations. I knew I had a great deal to thank him for, and so did he. By the time I was six or seven the friendship between my mother and Aunty Donald had cooled, though the two women continued to see each other. My mother’s fondness for Dr. Donald continued unchanged.

  When Judge Hoblit went bankrupt and the Hoblit house on Ninth Street came on the market, my father bought it. It was almost directly across the street from my Grandfather Blinn’s, and much larger and more comfortable than the house we were living in. By that time, my father had bought the farm he had his heart set on owning and put aside enough money so that he didn’t need to go into debt, but even so the house did not rest lightly on him. No old house would have; he liked things to be new and without a scratch. Soon after, Dr. Donald bought the Kings’ house, next door: Eighth Street was too far away. I was two years old when all this happened, my brother six or seven.

  The house on Ninth Street was steeped in family life. All the Hoblit children had grown up there, and somebody had lived in it before the Hoblits. At one time Mr. Hoblit was my Grandfather Blinn’s law partner. Judging by the only picture of him I have ever seen, the word handsome hardly does him justice. Annette says that Mrs. Hoblit believed anything her children told her, no matter how improbable. And as the house had ample occasion to observe, they lived beyond their means. I think they also must have been very happy. On top of a shed in the back yard there was a playhouse, long since gone when we lived there, that was the rendezvous of all the children in the neighborhood. My father as a young man used to stand plinking his mandolin under Claire Hoblit’s window. His intentions were not serious. They merely liked each other. She was a sultry-looking girl, and mischievous, and for idle amusement made trouble between couples who were courting, and the girls did not like her. In addition to her other failings she was witty. When a younger brother who was as diminutive as a wren married a girl who matched him perfectly, she remarked that they were a sample copy of a marriage. She fell in love with a singer—a Mexican whose skin was a darker shade than was acceptable in Lincoln—and her father said, “You can’t marry this man.” She said, “I will marry him,” and did, in the living room of the house I grew up in. After which nobody saw her for a long long time. She lived all over the world, and did not come home until her husband died. This time she was at some pains not to offend the women who were her contemporaries, and they let bygones be bygones. Because I was my father’s son, she was particularly nice to me. I remember her saying she’d had a lovely life. Annette says she didn’t. Lovely or not, she sat looki
ng as quietly pleased with herself as a cat with its tail curled around its forepaws, and I used to wonder what would happen if she were to ask me to run off with her.

  With the freedom children have to go where curiosity takes them, my mother must have been familiar with every nook and corner of the Hoblit house before she moved into it. She couldn’t bear dark varnished woodwork, and had it painted white upstairs and down. In the dining room the walls were dark green and the molding was black, requiring coat after coat after coat of white enamel. It was the only resistance the house put up. After that it was hers. The ceilings were high, the rooms good-sized, and the big windows let in light and air and sunshine, which big mirrors studiously duplicated. My mother was as hospitable as my Grandmother Blinn, and the house didn’t mind how many people she asked to stay and have hot biscuits and whatever she could find to make Sunday night supper out of. The more she filled the rooms with flowers and people, the more the living room and the dining room and the library and the kitchen seemed full of her. I didn’t distinguish between the house and her, any more than I would have distinguished between her and her clothes or the sound of her voice or the way she did her hair.

  The charm that old houses seem to accumulate around themselves effortlessly, this one also had. The big yard was enclosed by a low iron picket fence. The trees were full-grown but did not crowd each other or us. The wide comfortable porch went clear around to the side of the house, with a swing suspended by chains from the porch ceiling, and deep wicker chairs that, when you made the slightest move, added their creak to the late summer chorus of locusts and katydids. Under the bay window in the living room there was a bed of lilies of the valley. By the dining room window a huge white lilac bush. And farther still by the back steps, a trumpet vine and a grape arbor. Things you cannot go and buy. Time has to bring them about. During the years we lived there, there was a continuous anthropomorphic exchange of feeling and perception that was partly my responding to the house and partly the house’s responding to me. When I was separated from it permanently, the sense of deprivation was of the kind that exiles know. I rather think it was the same for my older brother.

  The house was a world in itself, set in the larger world of Ninth Street, which must have been about the same age. “Ninth Street” has for me a most beautiful sound. If you put it beside “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass …” or “Absent thee from felicity a while …” I would not perceive any incongruity. During the whole of my childhood I never thought it or said it or heard it without my heart responding, and fifty years later it still does—so much so that it is hard for me to realize that for other people what the name suggests is probably something quite ordinary. A quiet, tree-lined street in a small town shortly before the outbreak of the First World War is, in any event, what it was. And on hot summer evenings when my father hitched the horse up to the high English cart he was so proud of and we went out driving, I saw where we were in relation to everything else.

  The courthouse square and the business district that had grown up around it were on one side of the railroad tracks, and most of the residential section of Lincoln was on the other. The streets were paved and lighted, except on the outskirts of town. There was nothing that we would now consider a factory, but what with the usual banks and small business enterprises, two coal mines, and the asylum, it was generally possible to make a living. This is not to say that no woman ever had to take in some other woman’s washing, or that the shacks the Negro families lived in and the unpainted houses provided by the coal companies for the miners had a porte-cochère and half a block of lawn around them, but you could count on the fingers of one hand the houses that did. Lincoln was not a typical small town, because there is no such thing, any more than there is a typical human being. Every person was exceptional in some way. When I think of the Rimmerman girls, three middle-aged and unmarried sisters who never stopped talking, and of old Mrs. Hunter in her rusty black hat, and the plumber’s wife who stopped my brother on the street and said, “I dreamt about you last night, Edward, wasn’t that habitual?” and the Presbyterian minister’s son who had ears like a faun and induced a kind of sexual delirium in girls without even having to get off his bicycle, and the discontented dentist’s wife who was straight out of Ibsen, I wonder that so small a place could hold so much character. In the same way, every street was exceptional. You could not possibly mistake Fifth Street for Eighth Street (even when I dream about them I know which street I am on) or Broadway for Pulaski Street, and no two houses were exactly alike, either. Some of them were so original that they always seemed to have something they wanted to say as you walked past: perhaps no more than this, that the people who lived in them did not wish they lived in Paris or Rome or even Peoria. What would be the point of living somewhere where you did not know everybody?

  If you wanted to walk downtown you could. If you were beyond walking distance you were outside of town, in the cornfields. But there was the streetcar if you didn’t feel like walking. And in the summer they were open, and you arrived home refreshed and cool from the ride.

  When the streetcars left the business district they kept to their course down Broadway, rocking and teetering and giving off overhead sparks. Across the tracks of the Chicago and Alton Railroad, and then past the Opera House, past the high school. At the corner where the grade school was, the two streetcar lines diverged. One went off, at a slight angle, down Eighth Street, depositing passengers in front of their houses, or at the asylum, or the cemeteries, or, in July and August, the Chautauqua grounds. The other line turned right and went down Union Street, past the beginning of Ninth Street, and Tremont Street, past my Aunt Maybel’s house, and on out to Woodlawn, which was newer than the rest of town, and so far out that people tended to forget it existed.

  The population of Lincoln stayed between ten and eleven thousand, and with very few exceptions they were all in bed by ten o’clock.

  The people I knew as a child had the quality of seeming slightly larger than life size. This was, of course, partly because I was a child; but it is also true that the person with plenty of air and space around him takes on an individuality that is felt as stature.

  You could be eccentric and still not be socially ostracized. You could even be dishonest. But you could not be openly immoral. The mistakes people made were not forgotten, but if you were in trouble somebody very soon found out about it and was there answering the telephone and feeding the children. Men and women alike appeared to accept with equanimity the circumstances (on the whole, commonplace and unchanging) of their lives in a way that no one seems able to do now anywhere. This is how I remember it. I am aware that Sherwood Anderson writing about a similar though smaller place saw it quite differently. I believe in Winesburg, Ohio, but I also believe in what I remember.

  The glory of the town—its high-arching elms—is gone now. The elm blight did away with them in one short heartbreaking season, and Lincoln is once more exposed to the summer sun the way it was when my Grandfather Maxwell was a young man. It may yet go one step further and revert to prairie. In my childhood Lincoln was entirely canopied with elm, silver maple, box elder, linden, and cottonwood trees. Their branches frequently met over the brick pavement, and here and there, above this green roof, steeples and bell towers protruded: the Methodist, the Baptist, the Cumberland Presbyterian, the German Catholic and the Evangelical Lutheran, the Christian, the Irish Catholic, the Presbyterian, the Congregational, the African Methodist, the Universalist, the Episcopalian. On Sunday morning the air was full of the pleasant sound of church bells.

  In later years, when my father spoke of the house on Ninth Street, what he remembered was the size of the coal bill, for it was not well insulated and his annual salary as state agent for the Hanover Fire Insurance Company was $3,000. So he stood on the window seat in the library and stuffed little wads of toilet paper in the cracks where the windows did not fit snugly. I don’t mean to suggest that he had no feeling for the house. He loved it, but in spite of h
imself, the way you love someone you don’t approve of.

  Since I didn’t have to worry about the coal bill, what I remember is the violets; and sitting on the back steps making orange gloves for my fingers out of the blossoms of the trumpet vine; and the place, between two trees, where you could climb up onto the roof of the summer kitchen and from there get to any part of the roof you wanted; and the barn; and the flower garden; and the cities I built in my sandpile; and the shaded rustic table and chairs where we ate lunch in the hot weather; and the fact that, indoors, the rooms rested as lightly on me as a thought.