With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge
(For Eudora Welty)
WHEN I see ten-year-old boys, walking along the street in New York City or on the crosstown bus, I am struck by how tiny they are. But at the time I am speaking of, I wasn’t very big myself. So far as I was concerned, the town of Lincoln was the Earthly Paradise, the apple that Eve prevailed upon Adam to eat being as yet an abstraction, and therefore to all intents and purposes still on the tree. I had an aunt and uncle living in Bloomington, thirty miles away, and for a time I went to Peoria with my mother to have my teeth straightened. Those two towns, and Springfield, the state capital, constituted the outer limits of the known world. The unknown world, the infinitude of unconscious emotions and impulses, didn’t come up in ordinary conversation, though I daresay there were some people who were aware of it.
At twelve I was considered old enough to join the Presbyterian church, and did. In Sunday school and church I recited, along with the rest of the congregation, “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” That any part of this formal confession was not self-evident did not cross my mind, nor, I think, anyone else’s. We said it because it was true, and vice versa.
Twelve was also the age at which I could join the Boy Scouts and I did that, too. There was only one Scout troop in town, and the scoutmaster, Professor C. S. Oglevee, was a man in his early fifties, who taught biology at Lincoln College, and was the official weather observer. He was, as well, an unordained minister and an Elder in the Presbyterian church. The Scouts were all drawn from the Presbyterian Sunday school.
At Scout meeting I said, “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, courteous, kind,” and so on, with the same fervor that I recited the Apostles’ Creed, and downtown I went out of my way to help elderly people across the street who could have managed perfectly well on their own, for the traffic was negligible. A Model A or a Model T Ford proceeding at the speed of fifteen miles an hour or a farm wagon was what it generally amounted to.
In a short while I passed from second-class to first-class Scout, and kept the silver fleur-de-lys on my hat polished, and looked forward to becoming an Eagle Scout, beyond which there were no further pinnacles to climb. In my imagination the right sleeve of my uniform was covered with merit badges from the cuff to the shoulder, and I did accumulate quite a few.
One day, in quest of specialized information of some sort, I went to see Professor Oglevee at home. He lived in a beautiful old mansion out at the edge of town. It had been built by a pillar of the church, whose widow Professor Oglevee was in the position of a son to. The house was set well back from the street, and painted white, and had a porte cochere, and was shaded by full-grown elm trees. The architect who designed it must have had the antebellum mansions of Georgia and Mississippi in mind. There was no other house in town like it. The white columns along the front had formerly graced the façade of the Lincoln National Bank. In that house I heard the word “whom” for the first time. A woman answering the telephone while a church social was going on outside in the garden said, “To whom do you wish to speak?… To whom?” — stopping me in my tracks.
On one side of the lawn there was an apple orchard and on the other a pasture with a little stream running through it: Brainerd’s Branch. It says something about old Mrs. Brainerd that children could go there without a sense that they were trespassing. In the early spring I used to walk along the stream listening to the musical sound it made, and sometimes stopping to build a dam. Tucked away in a remote corner of the pasture was a one-room clubhouse with a fireplace, which my brother’s generation of Boy Scouts had built under Professor Oglevee’s direction. Scout meetings were held there, and after the formal business was out of the way we sat around on the floor roasting wienies over the coals and studying the Scout Manual.
Professor Oglevee’s room was on the ground level of the house, where the floor was paved with uncemented tiles that clanked as you walked over them. To get to his desk by the window we had to thread our way between piles of scientific and nature publications. Afterward he took me outside and explained the mysteries of his rain gauges. He was a walking encyclopedia. With a dozen boys at his heels, all clamoring for his undivided attention, he moved through the woods identifying trees and plants and mosses. He was immensely patient, good-natured, and kind. So clearly so that I felt there was not room in his nature for the unpredictable crankiness and unreasonable severity other grown-ups exhibited from time to time. If anybody said one word against him, even today, I would get excited. Which means, of course, that I didn’t allow for the fact that he was a fallible human being. The flaws that as a fallible human being he must have had nobody ever knew about, in any case. But on one occasion he shocked me. Somebody said “Professor?… Professor?… Professor, what kind of a tree is this the leaf of?” and he glanced at it and said, “A piss-elm.” Though he then apologized for his language, the fact remained that he had said it.
WHOSE idea it was to organize the Cub Scouts I don’t remember, if I ever knew. A great many things seemingly happened in the air over my head. Cub Scouts had to be between ten and twelve years old, and they did not all go to the Presbyterian Sunday school. It was left to the Boy Scouts to lead them. Among the six or eight little boys who turned up for the first meeting was Max Rabinowitz, whose father had a clothing store on a rather dingy side street facing the interurban tracks and the Chicago & Alton depot, and was a Russian Jew. This distinction would not have meant anything to me if it also had not represented a prejudice of some kind on the part of my elders. I suppose it is why I remember Maxie and not any of the others.
There were a dozen or more old families in town who were German Jewish. The most conspicuous were the Landauers and the Jacobses. Nate Landauer ran a ladies’ ready-to-wear shop on the north side of the courthouse square, and his brother-in-law, Julius Jacobs, a men’s clothing store on the west side of the square. Once a year my father or my mother took my brother and me downtown and we were fitted out by Mr. Jacobs with a new dark-blue suit to wear to church on Easter Sunday.
The school yard had various forms of unpleasantness, but anti-Semitism was not one of them. In the Presbyterian church, the doctrine of Original Sin was held over our heads, with no easy or certain way to get off the hook. It was hardly to be expected that the Crucifixion was something the Jews could live down. But on the other hand, it was a very long time ago, and the Landauers and the Jacobses were not present. Mrs. Landauer and Mrs. Jacobs both belonged to my mother’s bridge club.
At that age, if I thought about social acceptance at all it was as one of the facts of nature. Looking back, I can see that manners entered into it, but so did money. The people my parents considered to be of good families all had, or had had, land, income from property, something beside wages from a job.
The Russian-Jewish family was quite different. They were immigrants, spoke imperfect English, and had only recently passed through Ellis Island. So far as the Lincoln Evening Courier was concerned, news that was not local tended to be about a threatened coal strike or calling out the National Guard to quell some disturbance. Very seldom was there any mention of what went on in Europe. I was a grown man before I learned about the pogroms that drove the Rabinowitzes from their homeland. When I try to recall what the inside of Mr. Rabinowitz’s store was like, what emerges through the mists of time is an impression of thick-soled shoes, heavy denim, corduroy, and flannel — work clothes of the cheapest kind. The bank held a mortgage on the stock or I don’t know Arkansas. The chances are that he held out until the Depression and then went under, along with a great many other people whose financial underpinnings were more substantial.
What made Maxie want to be a Cub Scout? Had he been reading Ernest Thompson Seton and contracted a longing for the wilderness? Or did he, a newcomer, in his loneliness just want to belong to a group, any group, of boys his own age? We taught the
Cub Scouts how to tie a clove hitch and a running bowline and how (if you were lucky) to build a fire without any matches and other skills appropriate to the outdoor life. Somebody, after a few weeks, decided that there ought to be an initiation. Into what I don’t think we bothered to figure out.
On a Monday night we walked the little boys clear out of town in the moonlight and halted when we came to a bridge. Somebody suggested a footrace with blindfolds on. A handkerchief was included in the official Cub Scout uniform and they all had one. If they had been sent running up the road until we called to them to stop, they might have tripped or bumped into each other and fallen down, but probably nothing worse. I noticed that the bridge we were standing on had low sides that came up about to the little boys’ belly buttons. I cannot pretend that I didn’t know what was going to happen, but a part of me that I was not sufficiently acquainted with had taken over suddenly, and he/I lined the blindfolded boys up with their backs to one side of the bridge, facing the other, and said, “On your marks, get set, go!…” and they charged bravely across the bridge and into the opposite railing and knocked the wind out of themselves.
I believe in the forgiveness of sins. Some sins. I also believe that what is done is done and cannot be undone. The reason I didn’t throw myself on my knees in the dust and beg them (and God) to forgive me is that I knew He wouldn’t, and that even if He did, I wouldn’t forgive myself. Sick with shame at the pain I had inflicted, I tore Max Rabinowitz’s blindfold off and held him by the shoulders until his gasping subsided.
Considering the multitude of things that happen in any one person’s life, it seems fairly unlikely that those little boys remembered the incident for very long. It was an introduction to what was to come. And cruelty could never again take them totally by surprise. But I have remembered it. I have remembered it because it was the moment I learned that I was not to be trusted.
My Father’s Friends
MY father died in 1958, a few months after his eightieth — and my fiftieth — birthday. The day after he was buried, my stepmother brought out two heavy winter overcoats for me to try on, and then she and my older brother and I went to the storeroom above the garage, and she showed me a brown leather suitcase of my father’s, a much more expensive piece of luggage than I had ever owned. None of this was my idea, but I nevertheless could feel on my face an expression of embarrassment, as if I had been caught out in something. My stepmother was not given to thinking ill of people but when my brother and I were children he had assumed the role of the prosecuting attorney. I glanced at his face now; nothing unkind there. The coats wouldn’t have fitted him, or my younger brother, and since I was named after my father, the initials on the suitcase were mine, and who would want a suitcase with somebody else’s initials on it? So why did I feel that I had appeared to be showing a too avid interest in the spoils?
Later on that afternoon I started out on foot to call on two of my father’s friends who were not well enough to come to the funeral. The first, Dean Hill, was a man my father went fishing with. He was also a cousin of my stepmother. He had inherited a great many acres of Illinois farmland, and he had a beautiful wife. Apart from a trip to Biloxi in the dead of winter, they lived very much as other Lincoln people of moderate means did. I had known him since I was a young boy, and never had a conversation with him. When I go home to Lincoln I tend to put aside whatever in my life I suspect would be of no interest to people there, and sometimes this results in my feeling that I am going around with my head in a brown paper bag. But on this occasion I felt I could be my true self. To my surprise I found that he read books. In Lincoln the women put their names down for best-sellers at the desk of the public library, and the men read the evening newspaper. “What the book is about is a matter of indifference to me,” Dean Hill said. “I am interested in the writer — in what he is carefully not saying, or saying and doesn’t know that he is. What his real position is, as distinct from the stated one. It keeps me amused. All forms of deception are entertaining to contemplate, don’t you find? Particularly self-deception, which is what life is largely made up of.”
I found myself telling him about my guilty feelings at accepting my father’s things, and he nodded and said, “Once when I was sitting in a jury box the judge said, ‘Will the defendant rise,’ and I caught myself just in time. If one isn’t guilty of one thing one is certainly guilty of another is perhaps the only explanation for this kind of irrational behavior.… I’m glad you have the coats and the suitcase, and I’m sure your father would be too. Enjoy them.” He then went on to speak affectionately of my father. “I have no other friend like him,” he said. “I am already beginning to feel the loss. Most people have a hidden side. Your father was exactly what he appeared to be. It is very rare.”
I left the house with a feeling of exhilaration. I couldn’t help feeling that my father’s part in this old friendship had somehow been handed on to me, like the overcoats and the suitcase. And in fact it had. When Dean Hill and his wife came to New York six months later, he invited me to lunch at the Plaza, and the conversation was easy and intimate. Everything that he had to say interested me because of its originality and wisdom. While living all his life in a very small Middle Western town and keeping his eye on his farms, he had managed to be aware of the world outside in a way that no one else there was. Or at least no one I knew. He was worried about my stepmother. It was a case of the oak and the ivy, he said, and he didn’t think she would manage very well without my father. (He was quite right. She was ten years younger than my father, and when he was alive she was perky and energetic and always talking about taking off for somewhere — except that they couldn’t, because of his emphysema. After he was gone, the tears she wiped away with her handkerchief were simply followed by more tears. She spent the remaining fifteen years of her life in nursing homes, unable to cope with her sadness.)
I wrote to Dean Hill, and he answered my letters. The last time I saw him, in Lincoln, twenty-eight years ago, I could talk to him but he couldn’t talk to me. He had had a stroke. His speech was garbled and unintelligible. He appeared to feel that it was his fault.
MY second call, the day after the funeral, was on Aaron Mclvor, who for ten years was a golfing companion of my father’s. They also occasionally did some business together. Mr. Mclvor dabbled in a number of things, including local politics, and he must have made a living out of all this or he would have gone to work for somebody else. Now and then my father would be asked to handle an insurance policy personally, and in doing so he used the name of Maxwell, Mclvor & Company as agent.
Though it would be accurate to say that Aaron Mclvor was not like anybody else in Lincoln, it would also, in a way, be meaningless, since small-town people of that period were so differentiated that the same tiling could have been said of nearly everybody. He had sad eyes and a sallow complexion and two deep furrows running down his cheeks. The tips of his fingers were stained with nicotine and the whites of his eyes were yellowish also, in a way more often found in dogs than in human beings. Nothing that he said was ever calculated to make people feel better about themselves, but he could be very funny.
As I zigzagged the five or six blocks between Dean Hill’s house and the Mclvors’ that afternoon, I was struck by how little the older residential part of Lincoln had changed. A house here or there where no house was before. A huge old mansion gone.
Aaron Mclvor’s daughter-in-law directed me up the stairs to his bedroom. The ashtray on a chair beside his bed was full of cigarette butts. He looked the same, only old. I didn’t stay long and I wished I hadn’t gone to see him, because he had things to say against my father that, the day after his funeral, I didn’t feel like listening to.
“Mclvor is eccentric,” my father would say, when his name came up in conversation. It was not something my father would have wanted anybody to say about him. But he did not expect people to be perfect, and Mr. Mclvor’s eccentricities in no way interfered with the friendship. Because he said so many un
flattering things, it was assumed that he was a truthful man. I don’t think this necessarily follows. But if you wanted him you had to take him as he was. The caustic remarks were brushed aside or forgiven. And people loved to tell how, when he was courting his wife, he never brought her candy or flowers but simply appeared, in the evening after supper, and stretched out in the porch swing with his head in her lap and went to sleep.
His wife, whom I called “Aunt” Beth, was my mother’s closest friend. When I shut my eyes now, I see her affectionate smile, and the way her brown eyes lighted up. People loved her because she was so radiant. It cannot have been true that she was never tired or that there was nothing in her life to make her unhappy or depressed or complaining, but that is how I remember her.
When I was a little boy of six I met her on a cinder path at the Chautauqua grounds one day and she opened her purse and took out a dime and gave it to me. “I don’t think my father would want me to take it,” I said. My father knew a spendthrift when he saw one, and, hoping to teach me the value of money, he had put me on an allowance of ten cents a week, with the understanding that when the ten cents was gone I was not to ask for more. Also, if possible, I was to save part of the ten cents. “It’s perfectly all right,” Aunt Beth said. “Don’t you worry. I’ll explain it to him.” I took off for the place where they sold Cracker Jack. And she stands forever, on the cinder path at the Chautauqua grounds, smiling at the happiness she has just set free. I long to compare her with something appropriate, and nothing is, quite, except the goodness of being alive.
The tiling about my mother and Aunt Beth was that they were always so lighthearted when they were together. Sometimes I understood what they were laughing about, sometimes it would be over my head. My father and mother were both mad about golf. I used to caddie for my father, and if he made a bad approach shot he was inconsolable. He would pick his ball out of the cup and walk toward the next tee still analyzing what he had done that made the ball end up in a bunker instead of on the green near the flag. You felt he felt that if he could only have lived that moment over again and kept his shoulder down and followed through properly, the whole rest of his life might have been different. And that Aaron Mclvor mournfully agreed with him. The two women were unfazed by such disasters. My mother would send a fountain of sand into the air and go right on describing a dress pattern or some china she had seen in a house in Kentucky. When she and Aunt Beth had talked their way around nine holes — usually my father and Mr. Mclvor played in a foursome of men — they would add up their scores and sit down on the balcony of the clubhouse until their husbands joined them. Then, more often than not, they would come back to our house for Sunday-night supper. When my mother went out to the kitchen, Mr. Mclvor would get up from his chair and follow her with the intent to ruffle her feathers. My mother had no use for the family her younger sister had married into. Perched on the kitchen stool, Mr. Mclvor said admiring things about them. How well educated they were. How good they were at hanging on to their money. How one of them found a mistake of twenty-seven cents in his monthly bank statement and raised such Cain about it that the president of the bank came to him finally in tears. How no tenant farmer of theirs ever drew a simple breath that they didn’t know about. And so on. My mother would emerge from the pantry with a plate of hot baking-powder biscuits in her hand and her face flushed with outrage, and we would sit down to scrambled eggs and bacon.