Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  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 “Bless-ed sur-render 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.

  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 t
o 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.