Annette says that the house was always reassuring, even when my mother wasn’t there. When you walked in from outdoors, there were traces everywhere of human occupation: the remains of a teaparty on the wicker teacart in the mossgreen and white living room, building blocks or lead soldiers in the middle of the library floor, a book lying face down on the window seat, an unfinished game of solitaire, a piece of cross-stitching with a threaded needle stuck in it, a paintbox and beside it a drinking glass full of cloudy water, flowers in cut-glass vases, fires in both fireplaces in the wintertime, lights left burning in empty rooms because somebody meant to come right back. Traces of being warm, being comfortable, being cozy together. Traces of us. No wonder people liked to come there.
The house was the outward reflection of a very happy marriage. Children are not always reliable witnesses in this area but I think I have it right. My parents were quite different in temperament, but they had many pleasures in common. I can’t remember my mother’s asking my father to do anything he didn’t want to do, or to be anything he wasn’t. And he betrayed his feeling for her every time he said her name. Her life had its share of sadness, some of it unbearable and still having to be borne. And if migraines have a psychological cause, what caused hers? I have no way of knowing, any more than, probably, she did. But across the felicity of her marriage to my father only one shadow stretched: She could not keep him always across the dinner table from her. Like a character in a fairy tale he was required to leave at set intervals. Every Tuesday morning he kissed her good-by and picked up the heavy grip that she hated so and went off to the railway station. He came home on the late Friday afternoon train, to be greeted on the front steps by her and my older brother and me and an old hound dog that nosed his way in between us until he got to the object of love.
If my father and mother quarreled, I never heard them at it. Or any tension in their voices when they spoke to each other. Her name was Blossom, and he called her Blos. After her death he did not like to talk about her. “That’s water over the dam,” he said once, when I asked him to tell me about his life with my mother. But in his old age, when five o’clock came, he liked to have a glass of Scotch at his elbow, and company, and conversation, and sometimes he would be reminded of something in the past. Once when I was home on a visit he said, “While your mother was carrying Happy we went to a wedding.” He paused, and I did not encourage him to go on, though I was interested. He either said the thing you were waiting to hear or he didn’t; there was never any dragging it out of him. He also, I’m sure, knew what sort of thing interested me and what didn’t. And perhaps being a fisherman he liked to let out a little line and then reel me in. “It was out of town,” he said finally. “The girl and I were very good friends. I’d even thought of marrying her … Your mother had morning sickness, and she would be sick the first thing, and then she’d get all dressed up and do whatever was expected of us. And in church I looked from one to the other of them. And I was so proud of your mother—of the way she looked and all that she was—and I broke out in a sweat at the thought of how close I’d come to marrying another woman.”
* Though it was not customary then for children to call adult relatives by their Christian name, my brother and I called Annette by hers; the alliterative “Aunt” was awkward to say, and leaving it off we indicated how close to her we felt.
12
To continue the tour of my Aunt Maybel’s funereal and really very ugly house on Union Street: At the threshold of my grandmother’s room, the strangeness and the oppressiveness suddenly ended. The striped wallpaper had cheerful pink roses on it, and the curtains were pinned back to make more light for sewing. The room was furnished with a heavy mahogany sleigh bed, an armoire, a dresser, and a small desk, also of mahogany, and a sewing table that could be folded up and put away but seldom was. There was a corner fireplace, but like the one downstairs in the sitting room all it amounted to was an ornamental brass shield, with no flue or hearth behind it. In this room the musty odor of the rest of the house gave way to a potpourri in which the smell of camphor and horehound drops was agreeably mixed with that of 4711 soap and lavender sachet.
When my grandmother had greeted me, she took me by the hand and led me to the attic stairs, behind what looked like a closet door in the room my uncle did not die in. Though I came to see her once a week, my toys were kept in the attic, in an egg basket. Along with its other attributes, the house on Union Street was very neat. So was the attic. They were both ready at a moment’s notice for whatever would be required of them at the Last Judgment. My Cousin Blane Maxwell, my Uncle Charlie’s only child, was by this time almost old enough to vote, but as my grandmother and I went down the aisle of boxes and discarded furniture, we had to pass an orderly collection of his toys, and another of Max Fuller’s, and still another that belonged to my older brother, which seemed almost to give me a legal right to play with them. I never did.
My grandmother let me have anything I needed or wanted, with one exception; I could not use her best sewing scissors to cut paper with. It was my aunt who stood between me and these marvelous playthings. The one time I disobeyed her and touched a key of the little white and gold piano on my way past, a voice spoke through the floor: “That’s your Cousin Maxwell’s piano, Billie, and you are not to play with it.”
I understood that this was not unkindness but custodianship. Years hence, when Max came to her and said, “Where is my little white and gold piano with the angels painted on it?” she could say proudly, “In the attic, where you left it.” The same with the toys in my egg basket.
These toys—a swan sleigh that ran on concealed wooden spools contributed by my grandmother from her sewing basket, the furniture for Goldilocks and the three bears cut out of the Ladies’ Home Journal, and so on—were made by me, with my trusty scissors and flour-and-water paste. My grandmother’s occupation was sufficiently similar that I could follow what she was doing and appreciate her satisfaction in it. She designed and made appliquéd quilts. The pattern was usually taken from nature—the wild rose, the morning glory. What I cut I pasted. What she cut she pinned or sewed. We got on perfectly.
She had yellowish-white hair, which she wore in a flat pompadour. Her skin was soft, and her touch gentle. Her voice I cannot convey; words do not always do what you ask of them. It was related to hymn singing but not lugubrious. All sorts of mysterious sounds and hesitations went on in it, as they do in the ticking of an old clock. In her clothes she was partial to lilac and lavender shades. She seldom moved from her low rocking chair, and when she did it was to search in a leisurely fashion for something she or I needed. I think it must be a common dislike of hurry that makes very young children and elderly people so congenial.
Over the big dresser in my grandmother’s bedroom there was a constellation of family heads in black oval frames—my two grandparents facing each other at the apex, and two young men and two young women forming the base. These pictures must have been taken about 1897. My Aunt Bert, with her hair done up on top of her head except for one long curl (see the pictures of Ethel Barrymore in Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines), had not made a single disastrous marriage; my father was still intending to practice medicine; my Aunt Maybel, though not a beauty, had not yet acquired the tight-lipped expression that the front of her house had and that it undoubtedly copied from her; my Uncle Charlie looked forward to a long and happy life; my grandfather, with a splendid iron-grey mustache and those remarkable blue eyes, had no inkling that the day was going to come when he could not put his feet to the floor; and my grandmother had her husband and her children where she could watch over them and keep them from harm. I was too young and too uninformed to draw ironic conclusions. All I saw was that the people in the photographs were safe behind a layer of glass and I was not. It didn’t take very much to make me feel threatened. One impatient remark could change the whole quality of the day. My grandmother’s bifocals usually reflected the window or the door or the chandelier or objects in the room or
a gentle consideration of what I was telling her, and if by chance they did express disapproval, it was of the Methodists or the Baptists or Woodrow Wilson, never of me.
“Come here and let me nurse you,” she would say, meaning come sit on her lap and be rocked and held. When I put my arms around her I encountered a familiar obstruction, her corset, which was as rigid as her ideas about religion.
The old mahogany clock on the mantelpiece was never pressed for time, and I could feel it slowly drawing the light from the sky and the long afternoon to a peaceful close.
Sometimes I spent the night. Going to bed was a leisurely process that began with taking the pillows out of the hard round hollow bolster, and ended with the ceremony of putting my grandmother’s false teeth in a glass of water. After which she opened the window the merest crack—the night air was bad for people—and turned out the light and we knelt down in the dark beside the big double bed and said our prayers.
I assumed it was in this very room (but of course it was in her bedroom in the house on Kickapoo Street) that, being up with my grandfather in the night, she heard a sound outside, and discovered that a burglar had put a ladder against the side of the house and was about to send a little boy up it to her window. She loved to tell this Dickensian incident as we were undressing for bed, and it may have had something to do with my kicking so much in my sleep that we had to have a pillow between us.
It would have been better, of course, if my grandfather had held out against her a little longer, at least until their children were educated, before they built that big house the burglar was trying to get into.
Annette once remarked, “Your Grandfather Maxwell said the kind of things to your grandmother that women like to hear, and that husbands do not always remember to say. Father and Mother were staying at Hot Springs at the same time that he was, and when they were leaving, Father asked if there was some message he could take back to Lincoln. ‘You can phone my wife,’ he said, ‘and tell her that I haven’t seen anybody as beautiful as she is since I’ve been gone.’ ”
Their deep affection for one another was not seriously affected by the annual fracas about how much money she needed to dress herself and her two daughters. But neither did they reach an understanding in the matter. He just stopped questioning her along about the first of February. Somehow he always found the money to pay Mr. Boyd, and my grandmother went on helplessly charging cotton thread and dress material and silk braid and ribbons and gloves, which sooner or later she knew she was going to be called to account for. How peaceful her last years must have seemed, in that upstairs room of the house on Union Street, with the clock that was never in a hurry, and me.
My Aunt Bert teased my grandmother affectionately, out of high spirits, as she teased everybody. My father teased my grandmother because he liked to get a rise out of her; not quite the same thing. “Your addiction to drinking warmed-over coffee is no different from my liking for whiskey,” he would say. And then he would smile indulgently at the fluster and indignation this statement produced. I could not understand why he did it. She was too innocent to defend herself, and had her feelings hurt.
Once I went with her to a meeting of the Eastern Star, the ladies’ auxiliary of the Masonic Lodge. My grandmother and an old man who lived next door to her were being honored—she was a charter member; what he was being honored for I don’t now remember. They were presented with a decorated cake to cut, on a little table in the center of a large hall, with everybody watching. Old Mr. Stokes and everybody else in the room, including me, soon perceived that there was something wrong with that cake, but my grandmother went on trying to cut it until the cardboard cake was taken away and a real cake substituted for it. She did not see the need of jokes, and they usually had to be explained to her.
If I sneezed three times running, my grandmother gave me butter and sugar mixed in a spoon. She had absolute faith in flannel waist bands, goose grease and onions, spring tonics, and camomile tea. She used to tell that when she was a little girl and ran a high fever, they put a fly poultice on her. “I saw the eyes,” she said—at which point, of course, so did I.
Some of the things that had happened to her struck me, even though I was a child, as archaic. She had been talked into having all her teeth pulled before she was forty. And she or perhaps some member of her family had been fleeced by somebody practicing the Spanish con game: She firmly believed that she was one of the rightful heirs to the land Trinity church now stands on, and that when the missing deed was located she would come into immense wealth. I knew she wouldn’t, but I never argued with her—not because I was afraid of her but because I knew that about most things she couldn’t change her opinion even if she had wanted to, which she mostly didn’t. And her opinions had nothing to do with why I loved her.
She read the Bible, and the Lincoln Evening Star, and a quilting magazine that had published several of her designs. Whatever made an impression on her innocent mind she cut out and pasted in the scrapbook I have so often referred to. The greater part of the printed matter consists of yellowed clippings about the First World War. Also pages and pages of stale accounts of the life of Abraham Lincoln, and contemporary newspaper clippings about the assassinations and funerals of Garfield and McKinley. Garfield was the only preacher and the only member of the Christian Church to become President of the United States, and my grandmother thought highly of him.
What a mishmash that scrapbook is! Theodore Roosevelt and his wife and children. Woodrow Wilson’s daughters. Lady Duff Gordon’s eyewitness account of the sinking of the Titanic. Dante and Beatrice. The Longfellow house. The birthplace of Benjamin Franklin’s father. Christmas and New Year’s cards, business cards, letters, family photographs that I have never seen anywhere else, wedding announcements, George Washington and Buffalo Bill, Richard Mansfield, Useful Things to Send a Soldier, a mock wedding at the Christian Church, conundrums, recipes, instructions for making quilts, the greatest snow in fifty years, photographs of the Chautauqua grounds, receipts for the payment of membership dues for the Order of the Eastern Star, a cat holding a fiddle (which a note in her handwriting says I cut out and colored), a Mother’s Day telegram from my Cousin Blane Maxwell for his dead father, the Maxwell plaid, the program for the commencement exercises when Max graduated from the University of Cincinnati, Mark Twain standing in the doorway of his old home in Hannibal, Missouri, an automobile that went over an embankment, a twelve-year-old boy who fell into the line shaft of an electric generator and got a thorough spinning, the buildings of Eureka College, and so on. She also set certain pages aside for information that she felt worth preserving—facts about my Grandfather Maxwell’s family and her own, the directions for making the crocheted table mats that she distributed so liberally through the family at Christmas time, the occupations of her husband, her six brothers, and her three brothers-in-law, the marriages of her children, the date of the death of her husband and her son, the miracles of Jesus, and the following account of the Civil War:
1860 “CIVIL WAR”
Commencement of War between North and South
1860, 1,2,3,4,
During the campaign between Lincoln and Douglas, who were Bosomed friends at time and until death, I was a little girl but went to Lincolns political meetings sing for him on big floats. 25, or more Girls Sang his songs yelled untill we were hoarse, (I was leading singer). an honor so always had the high seat those were hot times, and full of excitement but we all did our duty. Indians and Cowboys or Scouts, Ladies riding horseback, not astride he would have been shocked. O how I wanted to ride. only a little Girl. Was not to be thought of.
Lincoln became President and if he had lived everything would have planed out right, but fate was against such a wonderful man.
He called out his soldiers My father did not have to go, sent a substitute Later on my Brother Sanford Turley Ran away, about fifteen, a robust boy. went to St. Louis, Mo Enlisted, in 11th Mo. Regiment He stayed, over four years, never wounded in all hard Battles,
heart-rendering, to hear him tell his hardships. Soldiers loose their health, we lived at Williamsville about twelve miles from Springfield I shook his big old hand.
His body was brought to Springfield. So his friends could view his remains. I went to Springfield Stopped at a Democrat house, and the man of house was so mad because they made him drape his house. He got on a terrible tare. A Rebel. every house stores and dwelling Houses were draped thirty days
Procession went by the house where I stayed. His old Horse old run down Boots across the Saddle bag and several other things Out to Oak Ridge Cemetery. His last resting place they put Douglas and Lincoln Suits they wore in campaign in Museum in Chicago. Suppose they are there yet.
Such education as my grandmother had was in a one-room country schoolhouse, and it enabled her to spend her life reading the Bible, so it was sufficient, until she came to writing. She used quotation marks when she began a new line, and didn’t distinguish between a comma and a period. Her spelling is sometimes by ear (“valubel” for “valuable”) and sometimes distracted (“bosomed friends”) and sometimes it is even correct. But she invariably left off the “e” at the end of her brother Meade’s name, and in listing her children in the scrapbook she—this I really don’t understand—spelled my Aunt Bert’s middle name “Louweze.” I mean you’d think she would know how to spell the name of her own daughter; she must have been thinking about something else.
My father considered the scrapbook an object of genuine historical value and asked my grandmother to leave it to him in her will, but she had made it for Max Fuller, because he was interested in family history, and Max got it.
Turning the pages, I came on a letter to her from my father that casts a rather different light on his teasing. When he wrote it he was twenty-eight years old and had been married two and a half years.