Ancestors (23 page)

My Grandfather Blinn was a New Englander from Vermont. I have not been able to discover what faith he was brought up in—only that it was very rigid. The family were at church all day on Sunday, the congregation brought their food along and ate together, and my grandfather, being a shy boy, held back. Often when the faithful had satisfied their hunger there wasn’t anything left for him to eat. He knew, without my father’s having to tell him, what my father’s upbringing had been like and how he felt at being released from so confining a view of human life.

Also, pleasures that my father had looked longingly at from a distance were now suddenly open to him. In the will that caused such prolonged litigation, John P. Gillett left his widow a large farm with the story-book name of Gracelands,
and when she remarried and moved east she asked my Grandfather Blinn to manage it for her. He managed it as carefully and with as much satisfaction as if it had been his own. I was nearly grown before I discovered it wasn’t. On Saturday mornings my grandfather would invite my father to go there with him, on the electric line that connected Peoria, Lincoln, and Springfield. And on Sunday the rest of the family would join them for a picnic. The house was old and had been much added onto, and stood in a grove of trees, surrounded by cornfields. The barns were full of blooded stock, to be soberly considered, and there were beautiful walking horses. On horseback, as they walked through the fields, as they wound their fishing reels and with a precise flick of the wrist sent the fly sailing out over the quiet part of some bend in the creek, the two men revealed themselves to each other. My father intended to own a farm himself some day, and everything my grandfather said about the management of Gracelands was of interest to him. But he was also alert to the ideas that were offered for his consideration by my grandfather’s wideranging mind, and would not be so mentally alert again until he was an old man reliving his life in the clear cold light of how things had turned out.

My older brother was born in my grandfather’s house. With his arrival the time had come to spread out, and my father bought a modest two-story frame house on Eighth Street, a block from my Grandfather Blinn’s. Annette
^*
says that it had eight rooms, but that they were small. My father wasn’t going to make the mistake his father had of living in a house that was grander than he could afford. They knocked out a partition between two of the downstairs
rooms and put in a fireplace, and the house was very pleasant and homelike. It was painted a dirty shade of yellow when I was a little boy, and we no longer lived there, and compared to the house we were living in it didn’t look very permanent to me. Walking past it I used to worry that it would not be there when the time came to put up the plaque. I think I expected to be President of the United States.

Annette used to stay there sometimes when my father was away. “One night,” she said, “a young man came calling on me and stayed too late. Your mother was furious and said, ‘Annette, how can you do that, when Will isn’t home and people will see a man leaving my house at eleven o’clock!’ ” Remembering all the times she had stood watch for my mother when she was saying good night to my father, my aunt was deeply hurt.

My mother’s temper flared up as suddenly as a brush fire, but she didn’t nourish her anger and it was all over in a matter of seconds. I can only remember three times in my whole childhood when I encountered it head on.

Annette did not marry the lively, penniless young lawyer everyone expected her to marry but someone else. My Uncle Will Bates had graduated from Yale. This distinguished him from every other young man in town very much as having one brown eye and one blue eye would have. His father owned a great deal of land, and nothing I have ever heard about Erastus Bates was unprejudiced, but he appears not to have been very amiable. Annette and her husband went to Europe on their wedding journey, along about the year 1907, and brought back a collection of bibelots and a glass-and-gilded-wood cabinet to hold them, some colored prints of famous masterpieces by Raphael and Michelangelo, a photograph of the Bridge of Sighs, and an even larger view
of the Colosseum in Rome. These hung in my aunt’s front hall and living room for the next half century. In those days, when people drove a nail in the wall and put up a picture, it was for life.

My Grandfather Blinn took my father and Annette’s husband to Gracelands, intending some fishing, and my Uncle Will put soap in the minnow bucket. It was his idea of a joke.

On the outskirts of town there was a state hospital for feebleminded children, and while my Aunt Edith was working there she met a young doctor named William Young, whom she married. He left the hospital and started to practice in Bloomington. I don’t know when this happened. Sometime in the years just before I was born. He was over six feet and very broad in the shoulder, with a long head and dark skin and the beaked nose of a Indian. He was so secure in his own physical dignity that he could afford to speak of it with comic appreciation. I have a photograph of him sitting on a beautiful black horse, in a cap and plus fours, smiling as if at a joke with sixteen sides. One of them was should a man that big be sitting on a horse in the first place. As for learning to dance … With my Cousin Peg sitting on one of his size twelve shoes and me on the other he walked back and forth talking to my mother as if nothing whatever was going on down around his shins. Or sometimes he would act as though he had no choice, as if we made him walk around with us sitting on his shoes. And he was such a huge man that we were beside ourselves with our own power to do this to him. But then suddenly we couldn’t manage him. We were somewhere (I have no idea where it was) and Peg said, “That isn’t water down there, is it, Uncle Doc?” and I said, “That is too water down there, isn’t it, Uncle Doc?” and he drove us frantic by agreeing
with both of us, even when we explained to him that it couldn’t be water down there and not be water down there.

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 looking 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.