Ancestors

by William Maxwell

  The older boy announces that on the twenty-fifth of March he is going to be twelve, not eleven, as everybody thought. The woman grows tired of arguing with him about it, and when his birthday cake is brought into the dining room there are twelve lighted candles on it. He blows, and eleven go out.

  In the school yard he exchanges marbles and baseball pennants and contagious diseases with other boys. Red measles, German measles, mumps, whooping cough, chicken pox—he brings them all home and the little boy catches them from him. They sit up in bed working puzzles and keeping each other company and scratching. There is a quarantine sign on the front door. When it is removed and they are allowed to go back to school, formaldehyde candles will burn all day in the sealed-off, empty bedroom.

  In the house next door there was a little girl who was just the age of the little boy, and who caught spinal meningitis and died. Ethel Kiest. Mrs. Kiest’s lace curtains are more interesting (deer and landscapes) than the little boy’s mother’s, and whereas the furniture in his house is walnut or mahogany, the furniture in the Kiests’ house is golden oak. On the big round dining room table, Mrs. Kiest keeps all the china and silver that will be used for the next meal, under a white cloth with a lace edge, grouped around the highest object—the silver sugar bowl with a domed top. Anything that reminds the little boy of circuses—and the dining room table is very like a circus tent—he admires. He would like it if his mother followed this custom. On top of the roll-top desk in Mr. Kiest’s den there is a stuffed prairie dog, which the little boy stands and stares at. In the parlor there is a very large book of photographs of the Columbian Exposition. He is allowed to look at it. If it is the time of year when the windows are open, and Mrs. Kiest is baking bread or coffee cake, the air brings this interesting fact to the little boy’s attention and he stops playing with his lead soldiers and pays a call on the house next door. He is even more transparent than most children. “Would you like some coffee cake?” Mrs. Kiest asks, and he always remembers to say thank you as she hands him a sizable piece, still warm from the oven. Mrs. Kiest and the little boy have something that binds them together besides his love of eating and her pleasure in watching him do it. He and Ethel Kiest did not always play amicably, but when they quarreled he could get up and go home, safe in the knowledge that the next time he saw her it would be forgotten, and now he misses her. He remembers her very clearly, and so does Mrs. Kiest. She had blue eyes and very fair skin and blond hair and a slight limp, noticeable only when she ran.

  The redbird is singing in the rain. There is a rooster in the back yard of a house on Tenth Street, and a squirrel is scolding. Somebody is beating cake batter in the kitchen, and a rug just got shaken in the back yard of the house next door. Again: snap. The iceman’s pick is descending through a two-hundred-pound cake of ice, a horse and buggy is going by, and the older boy is playing “Goodby Maw, Goodby Paw, Goodby Mule with Your Old Hee-Haw” on the piano when he should be practicing scales. Wild geese fly over the house on their way south for the winter, and at the first sound of their honking he pushes his chair back from the dinner table and rushes outdoors. He is a throwback to William Higgins, whom he has never heard of, and all in the world he wants is to be a hunter or trapper. Sighting the geese along the barrel of an imaginary gun, he takes aim and fires.

  Awakened by a splash of gravel on the windowpane, the little boy watches him get up and dress and then he and Harold Irish go off together before daylight, in the searing cold, to see if there are any muskrats in the traps they have set along Brainerd’s Branch.

  Now the snow is gone and it is summertime. The woman is sitting on the plaid carriage robe, on the bank of Kickapoo Creek, dreaming about I wish I knew what. The yellow leaves drift down, they float downstream, past her cork. (So much of what I remember from this period of my life is touched with a bloom, a golden dust, but especially those all-day fishing expeditions, which I didn’t even particularly enjoy at the time. Now they are seen in the slanting light of something that has not yet happened, and so are a great many other things. As if it were continually late afternoon.) When the cork bobs sideways, she gives a jerk with her pole, and the little boy, sitting with his behind in the roots of a tree nearby and the end of his pole in the water, observes that she has caught another sunfish.

  Pioneer instincts have survived in both of the boys. The older boy throws the little boy’s hat up in a pine tree at the country club and it is one teasing too many. The little boy picks up a midiron and starts after him. Murder is what he is bent on, but he is prevented from it. Walter Kennett runs out of the caddy house and grabs him.

  Saturday nights he falls asleep listening to the music that floats across the ravine from the clubhouse.

  The summer is gone and the snow lies deep on the ground. It is morning. There are white tropical forests and Chinese pavilions and volcanic islands with palm trees on the windowpane. In the warmth of his bed and half asleep, the little boy waits for the woman to come in and close the window and turn on the radiator.

  In this house there are no folding doors to shut the Christmas preparations away from sight, and the little boy knows the tree is there, in the alcove of the living room. Each time he goes upstairs he has to turn his face away. Just before dark, it happens. He doesn’t mean to look but on the way upstairs he loses control of his eyes. The bicycle is there. And it’s blue! In a delirium of guilt and joy he goes on up to his room.

  (“This house is like an empty shell,” Walter Kennett said after my mother died, and he never came to see us again. Neither did Mrs. Kennedy. What I don’t understand is how we could have taken that happiness for granted and not sensed that there was a time limit to it and that each day was bringing us closer to the folding chairs and the grey casket in the dining room and the reek of too many white flowers and the ministerial voice intoning, “I am the resurrection and the life …” Apparently she did sense it, or why did she say to Annette, “I made Happy promise that if anything happened to me he’d break all my cut glass. I don’t want some other woman to have it.” She told the wrong child; cut glass was not real to him the way muskrats and rabbits and quail and pheasants were real, and he forgot, and now some other woman has it, but not the woman she had in mind. She would not have objected to a daughter-in-law’s using it. So great was her longing for a little girl of her own, she would even, I think, rejoice in the idea. But with what confidence one speaks for the dead—that they would have liked this and they would not have liked that—when the living are so unmanageable, when it is so hard to marshal or maneuver them even toward something that is obviously for their own good that one never dares promise anything in their name. She also said, “When I am gone nobody will know how to do my hair.”)

  Nobody thought to tell the little boy that it is better to learn to ride a bicycle on level ground. He has almost mastered the wobble, but not the principle of the coaster brake. The bicycle is gathering speed and he doesn’t know how to stop it. He and it are about to end up in a heap at the foot of Ninth Street hill.

  Equilibrium is not his strong point. Far too often he takes refuge in tears. Even trivial things set him off, and this exasperates the man. Their relationship is neither simple nor always the same. It includes both love and dislike. The man is not interested in hearing explanations for failure—not even legitimate ones. “No alibis!” he says and turns away.

  The little boy knows when his father is angry with him, and that the anger is controlled. What he doesn’t know is what would happen to him if his father’s anger weren’t controlled. Would he be annihilated? (Actually, it was my own anger that was of the annihilating kind.)

  The little boy has a kind of druidical love for the white lilac bush that grows by the dining room window. During a thunderstorm in May, when it is covered with white blossoms, a big branch snaps. The weight of the wet blossoms was too much for it. The little boy rushes out into the wind and the rain and, weeping, tries to put it back. At the same time he is aware of the faces at the dining room w
indow, sober with concern—not for the lilac bush but for him, for what will happen to him when he grows up and has to face the things that sooner or later happen to everyone.

  The dog is getting old. White hairs on his muzzle, and on winter mornings he is so stiff that the woman has to lift him from the piece of carpet where he sleeps and carry him out onto the back porch. One day when the little boy comes home from school, the dog is not there. The woman explains that it did not hurt when the veterinary put him to sleep, and Old John was not frightened of him: He walked over to him and greeted him. The little boy believes her but he is confused and distressed, even so, to think that he will never again feel that cold nose against him, and the house seems queer without the dog. The older boy takes his tears off where nobody can see them.

  The man is standing in water up to his thighs, and his hand is under the little boy’s stomach. The little boy feels as slippery as a fish. He is afraid he will get water in his mouth. Also of he doesn’t know what. He is shivering with the cold, and his lips are blue. His father is explaining what to do with his arms and that he must kick hard. “I won’t take my hand away,” he says, and the little boy knows that what the man says he won’t do he won’t do. The little boy moves his arms, kicks, gets water in his mouth, and keeps on moving his arms and kicking. Supported by the hand he thinks is there, he is swimming, but he doesn’t know it, until he looks around wildly and sees that his father is twenty feet away, smiling at him.

  18

  My Aunt Edith took my little brother home from the hospital after my mother died, and wanted to keep him, but my father said that he intended to bring up his own children and keep his home.

  We had a series of housekeepers. I don’t know how my father stood it; it was hard enough to be a child and sit across the dinner table from them. Where there had been only us there was now this stranger, whose remarks were prepared for by a silence and brought on another, during which I was aware of the scrape of knives and forks on plates.

  The light bulbs did not give off enough light, the food had no taste. My father walked the floor with his hand on my shoulder, and spoke hopefully about the future, but his face was the color of ashes and his soul was not in his body. My brother and I did not attempt to comfort each other, though we slept in the same room and could have said things in the dark. And I made endless trouble for my father by repeating something I shouldn’t have. Though I was only ten years old at the time and I have had fifty years in which to forgive myself, at the recollection of it I am once more deeply ashamed. The evening of the day my mother died, I was lying on the horsehair couch in the sitting room, under the picture of Caerlaverock Castle, when old Mrs. Stokes came over from next door to pay a visit of condolence to my grandmother. They sat talking in the parlor. I was exhausted from weeping, and unable to think, because an event of the utmost importance had taken place without my consent, so when I thought at all it was to try and make it not have happened, and periodically even that impulse gave way. My eyes were closed and I could not lift my hands from my side. To all appearances I was asleep. I was asleep but not asleep. I heard everything that was being said in the next room. After the two women had praised my mother, my grandmother settled down to the subject of my mother’s family, about whom she had a great many things to say that were news to me, and I did not always even understand what they meant. For example: “… so Mr. Blinn went to Dr. Young and told him he had to marry Edith.”

  I managed to keep all this gossip bottled up inside me for about three months, until one evening as Annette and my brother and I were coming up the driveway of our house, I found myself telling them. I knew immediately by Annette’s intense interest and the look on my brother’s face that I should have kept on keeping that conversation to myself, but by then it was too late. The two sides of the family stopped speaking to each other, and my father’s burdens were made heavier. They were already quite heavy enough. All he ever said was, “Did you have to do that?” and I suppose the answer (though I hung my head and didn’t say anything) was yes. My grandmother continued to treat me the way she always had, but I was no longer as comfortable with her.

  On July 26, 1919, my father sat down at his desk and wrote a letter to Annette, who was in Mackinac Island:

  Things have been happening fast and furious this week. Mrs. E—– taken sick last Tuesday, in the hospital ever since, some indication of Lung trouble. With the two boys at Ediths have had to leave Blinn with Mother and Maybel—lock up the house and just quit. Talked with the woman you mentioned—thinks she would like to come but knows nothing about children—especially babies—and for that reason afraid to take responsibility.

  Am going up to talk with Edith about it today and will probably see her then. If you were only here to talk it over with would be so glad—This being a mother and father both is over my head but trying to keep fighting on. Blinn fine and weighs over 18 pounds. One consideration at least as I sit and write to you. The atmosphere of my home is at last free from the strain and unpleasantness so long existent. And by the love of Mike, it is going to have a housekeeper of some kind interested enough in me to keep it that way.

  The next housekeeper brought her grandson with her, and my father hoped he would be company for me, but we quarreled childishly over nothing—over the top of a cracked crockery teapot that he found in my sandpile and that I recognized as a part of something that had belonged to my mother.

  Annette and her family were in the habit of spending the winter in Florida, but the first Christmas after my mother died she sent my Uncle Will and Peg off without her so that she could be with us. “When I walked in, on Christmas Eve,” she said, “there were red roses everywhere. In vases, in bowls, in anything that would hold red roses. I looked questioningly at your father and he said, ‘They’re my Christmas present to Blossom.’ ”

  I sort of remember those roses.

  The housekeeper developed ear trouble which was diagnosed as erysipelas and the family doctor told my father that he must let her go because she shouldn’t be around the baby with it. After she left, she wrote poison pen letters, unsigned, about my father and Annette, to my Grandmother Maxwell, which upset her (she had had very little experience with malice as passionate as this and didn’t know what was expected of her) but did no real harm, and to Annette’s husband. My uncle was jealous of Annette’s affection for my father, and even of her affection for my older brother and me. After the letters, he stopped Annette from coming to our house. Since she was the nearest approximation anywhere on earth to my mother, this was very hard on all of us, and also, of course, on her.

  The third housekeeper was easy-going and slatternly and addicted to reading movie magazines, and she had a dog that looked like her. She also had a peroxide-blonde niece whom she hoped to marry off to my father. I don’t know whether he considered marrying her or not. His life was insupportable as it was, and he always tended to see women through rose-colored glasses, so perhaps he did toy with the idea. He took her—the niece—to see Annette, who was in the hospital at the time, and when my father lingered a moment to say good-by, Annette said from the pillow, “Bill, she won’t do.” My father said, “What do you mean?” and Annette said, “I mean she won’t do! ”

  My Aunt Bert had begun to travel up and down the state with two big black suitcases full of samples, and on weekends she would be with us.

  Though I have no trouble in conjuring up my mother’s hand, with the pen moving slantwise between the second and third finger, almost the only specimen of her handwriting that I possess is a letter to my Aunt Bert. It had been decided in the family that they would not exchange Christmas presents any longer, and my mother was writing to say that affection had impelled her to go against the agreement and send a small present.

  Some of the things that made the house on Ninth Street so pleasant when I was a child—Oriental rugs that I knew the pattern of by heart, a carved Victorian walnut sofa, a mahogany dresser and its mirror—belonged, I found out a long time la
ter, not to us but to my Aunt Bert, who had left them with my mother.

  I often heard Annette and my Aunt Bert described, by their contemporaries, as the two most beautiful young women in Lincoln. They were also friends. After my Aunt Bert came home with her baby and was divorced, Annette said, a man who had been in love with her before she was married and who was still in love with her applied to my father for permission to court her. He had the reputation of being a rounder, and my father turned him down. Afterwards he married, and was a very good husband. This cannot have been her only chance for happiness. I think she followed the dictates of her heart, as always, and that there was nobody she loved enough to marry.

  At the time I am speaking of, my aunt was a handsome, strong woman with a kind of physical radiance. The gaiety she brought into the house made it habitable again. She teased my older brother and hugged me and dandled the baby on her knee, and perhaps saved my father’s sanity. The color came back into his face, and he was more like himself. He began to accept invitations and to go to the Country Club dances. The social life he returned to was changed beyond recognition from anything he and my mother had known, for the Twenties had arrived, and Prohibition. The clubhouse being closed in winter, the Country Club New Year’s dance was held in town, in Bates’s Academy, and gave rise to scandal. People—nice people—were drunk in public.

  One day my father came up the back stairs to the empty maid’s room where I had built the city and palace of Montezuma and was re-enacting the conquest of Mexico and sat down in the only chair, and took me on his lap—a thing he hadn’t done in years—and told me that he was going to be married.