Ancestors (37 page)

“Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is,” Pascal said. “Let us consider the two possibilities. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Hesitate not, then, to wager that He is.” It is not very persuasive. I think I prefer my Grandmother Maxwell on the subject:
If the universe was a machine, it would have said so in the Bible. Come here and let me take a washrag to your ears. I declare, you could grow carrots in there.

She went to her rest in the Twenties. After the funeral they all went back to the house on Union Street and my Aunt Bert and my Aunt Maybel quarreled so bitterly that they were never on friendly terms again. Among other things, my Aunt Bert accused her sister of coming between Max and her. If my Aunt Maybel was indeed a child stealer, then the attic of the house on Union Street was full of toys for the same reason that the witch’s house in
Hansel and Gretel
was made of candy.

Someone remarked once to my father that it was a pity his sister never had any children, and he said, “I happen to know she could have had them.” There was no use asking what he meant by this statement; if he had felt it was proper to say more, he would have.

My Aunt Maybel died of a heart attack in 1939. She was sixty-five. She died away from home—not in her own bed, with her own things around her. Not even in a hospital, but among people she didn’t care for. I try to imagine what it was like, but I cannot get over my astonishment at her dying
in Augusta, Illinois. And they brought her body home, to a house without gas and electricity. How grand and mysterious life is!

Though my Uncle Paul was living at the time, she left everything she owned to my younger brother. The chair my uncle had drawn up to the dining room table for thirty-seven years, the knife and fork he ate with, the brass bed he slept on, were no longer his. My brother was in college, and from college he went into the army, and he did not claim his embarrassing inheritance. My Uncle Paul asked my Aunt Bert, who was still stuck in that coal-mining town in southern Illinois, to give up her job and come and keep house for him. She threw out the turbanned plaster heads of Europe and Africa, the parrot’s eggs, the bulldog, the peacock feathers, the starfish, and the seahorse, and a great many other things, and after that the house was nothing like so gloomy. But it also no longer had the look of immortality about it. My father kept his fingers crossed, knowing how quick-tempered and tactless my aunt could be, and for a time the arrangement seemed to be working, but it was only an accommodation, like that between the Campbellites and the Baptists, and the deep underlying differences finally declared themselves. One night my father was wakened from his first sleep by the ringing of the telephone. “Yes?” he said, preparing himself for bad news, before he knew from where. “Come and get your sister,” my uncle said. “All right,” my father said. “I’ll be over in the morning.” “You won’t come in the morning,” my uncle said. “You’ll come and get her right now!” So my father did. He never entered the house on Union Street again. Nor, since he asked me not to, have I.

My father set my Aunt Bert up in a small but quite comfortable apartment, where she lived out the rest of her life in the passionate enjoyment of doing as she pleased. At last she had her own furniture and rugs about her, and
all the family pictures, and my grandmother’s beautiful patchwork quilts, and there was no one to object if she read until three in the morning—no one but my father, who thought people shouldn’t stay up late reading.

She complained about the physical indignities of old age. And after Max died, his suffering haunted her. She had only one grandchild to squander her affection on, and to occupy her lonely imagination. But they did not see each other often, and her granddaughter was not on anything like the easy terms with her that my two brothers and I were. When I wrote her that I was getting married, she wrote back, “Happiness is our birthright, and now you have come into your own.” This statement strikes me as a triumph of love over experience.

Because he had taken care of his sister for so long, my father made her sign a paper stating that on her death everything she owned was to go to my stepmother (who was younger than my father and could be expected to outlive him). He did not put money above morality, but neither did he treat it purely as a medium of exchange. It was like a person in that it had rights which must be respected. With two farms and the securities in his safe-deposit box, he had enough so that if he should die, my stepmother would be amply provided for. And my aunt’s possessions were not very valuable. But apparently he felt that by helping her he had diminished the value of his estate in a way that must be compensated for. I knew my aunt was not happy about this arrangement, but I also knew that my father did not welcome opinions about his conduct that he hadn’t asked for. I needn’t have worried; the arrangement was never carried out—I assume because my stepmother talked my father out of it, but he was quite capable of seeing for himself that it was improper in that it did not leave his sister free to dispose of her own possessions, and that it was only natural she should want to do this.

When my aunt died, in 1957, my father told Max’s daughter to take whatever she wanted, and derived considerable satisfaction afterwards from the thought he had done this. A small quantity of old furniture that had had good care and been much loved was in this way saved from ending up at the Salvation Army. But one thing my father did hold back on that occasion.

I have no idea how much people in Lincoln knew about my Aunt Bert’s first marriage. I tend to think that in small towns people know everything. My Aunt Bert didn’t tell Max the truth about his father. Instead, undoubtedly because it was believed to be for his own good, they—she and my Aunt Maybel and my grandmother and my father—all lied to him. He grew up believing that his father died shortly before he was born. And this is what he told his daughter thus perpetuating the lie that was passed off on him. Not until after his death did she begin to suspect, from certain remarks my Aunt Bert made, that she had not been told the whole story. Indirect intimations, mostly. The cat struggling to get out of the bag. My aunt never said anything specific; it was rather her absolute refusal to talk about Max’s father that finally aroused her granddaughter’s curiosity.

At the time of her death, my Aunt Bert left a sealed envelope, with written instructions that it was to be burned unopened. My father was her executor, and he carried out these instructions before Max’s daughter arrived in Lincoln for the funeral. Characteristically, he told her what he had done.

When he introduced her to old friends as Max’s daughter she sensed that he was proud of her. (He would never have introduced any woman slightingly, in any case.) He was the only member of her father’s family who was acceptable to her mother. She told him that Max had admired
him very much and my father looked surprised and said, “I didn’t know.”

He might have guessed. I remember the respectful way that Max looked at my father, and spoke to him. When Max was dying and my father took my Aunt Bert to Cincinnati, he asked my father to play the piano for him.

Max’s daughter questioned my father about her Grandfather Fuller, but all my father would say was that he “was not a very honest man.” It seemed as if all sources of information were permanently closed to her.

Later, when she began going through Max’s records, she learned that her grandparents were married on April 2, 1898; that the marriage license stated that he was “of Chicago”; that Max was born on January 5, 1899, at which time Louis E. Fuller was described as a newspaper man; and that he died on February 4, 1900, in Springfield, Illinois.

She wrote to the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Springfield, hoping to learn the cause of her grandfather’s death from the death certificate, and was informed that there was no such certificate. Letters to twenty other counties near Springfield also failed to turn up a record of his death.

Finally, she wrote for photostats of the probate papers of her great-grandfather, Galusha E. Fuller, who lived, as I have said, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and from these she discovered that her great-grandfather’s will, written on June 6, 1901—a year and some months after Louis Fuller was supposed to have died—mentioned him as a beneficiary: “To my son, Louis E. Fuller, I give and bequeath the sum of One Dollar ($1.00), having heretofore advanced to him what I consider to be his just share of my estate.” Furthermore, she found that a settlement of her great-grandfather’s estate on May, 1905, listed among other heirs, Louis E. Fuller of New York City.

The clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County produced a copy of my Aunt Bert’s divorce papers in which it was stated that she and her second husband were married on June 25, 1905—little more than a month after the settlement in which Louis E. Fuller was said to be alive and residing in New York City. Unless my Aunt Bert’s marriage to Max’s father was in some way illegal to begin with, the only reasonable conclusion anybody could come to was that she had divorced Max’s father as well.

My cousin applied to the clerk of Logan County for the papers concerning her grandmother’s divorce from Louis E. Fuller. From them she learned the facts I have already given in chapter nine.

Though my aunt was brought down in her first flight, she had been so brave. Defeat that comes about through timidity is final. The person who has acted bravely is sustained by the recollection of that moment when he could have acted with caution and chose instead to throw caution to the winds. Having lived through so much, and had such a good view of the seamy side of life, my aunt had earned the right to be rash if she felt like it.

Max’s daughter still did not know where and when her grandfather died, whether he had ever remarried and had other children who would be her half-aunts and-uncles, or exactly what the trouble was that led her grandmother to guard her secret so long and so carefully. She thought of everything it could be, including bigamy, and suspected that it was nothing so dramatic as most of the possibilities that occurred to her. From the wording of her Great-grandfather Fuller’s will, her grandfather must have been, to say the least, irresponsible about money. Regardless of what he did, he was her grandfather and she wanted to know about him. And her knowing would certainly harm no one now.

A further search among her father’s papers uncovered
the name and address of a first cousin on the Fuller side, Louis Fuller’s sister’s son. She wrote to him and got a letter back, saying that he had known her Grandfather Fuller very well. He was the victim of a domineering father. As a boy he had dreams of becoming an inventor, but his father had other plans for him, and he had to hide his inventions under the floor of the barn or his father would find them and destroy them. As a grown man he drifted from one job to another. Before him at all times was the vision of untold wealth that would come to him as the reward of his inventions. Dreamers, as my father often pointed out to me, are inclined to get into financial difficulties. On several occasions Louis Fuller’s father bailed him out, and then he said, “No more.” Unable to get money any other way, Louis Fuller committed a forgery and served eighteen months in prison. I can see him saying to himself as he dipped the pen in the ink,
They would never put me in jail for $118. He wouldn’t let them do it.

He came home to Waukesha when his father died, learned that there was nothing coming to him from his father’s will, and returned to New York without waiting for the funeral. He married again. His second wife was a Roman Catholic, and she was a very good wife to him. During the latter part of the First World War, this same nephew was stationed nearby, and used to visit Louis Fuller and his wife every weekend, until he was mustered out of the army. He developed an affection for both of them.

During the Twenties, Louis Fuller was trying to patent a dry stencil and wanted an affidavit from his nephew, which was supplied, though not promptly. He then wrote to thank his nephew for sending it. The letter begins: “Your letter and affidavit received. It is very satisfactory and will probably be of material assistance to me. I would like to have a supplemental affidavit setting forth in a few words the facts as to the delay which must be accounted for if possible. Something like this: That you first heard from me
about an affidavit as to your knowledge of my possession of the invention about November 1924; that the import of it did not occur to you at the time, but that you intended to take up the matter later but through inadvertence did not do so at once, thinking that you would do it in your next regular letter to me; that having heard from me again on or about June 1925, asking for the information, you have made an affidavit showing your knowledge as to my possession of the invention. You might also state in this affidavit, that you saw me take a piece of gun cotton, place it on an ash tray and ignite it and that it burned at once with a flash and a large flame, that this was seen by three other persons present beside myself, and you (Ryan, Nichols, and Aunt Elizabeth). Do not mention the names.… ”

On the second page of the letter this sentence occurs: “It seems to be my job in this world to lick rascals. But worms do not lie on their backs forever.” There is also a terribly touching postscript: “I am remembering about Samson. He did not pray God to thrust the pillars asunder, but that he, Samson, be given the strength to do it. And so it happened. Also, ‘He goeth forth clothed in the Armor of righteousness, and who can withstand him?’ But every day I see evil triumph and good dragged in the dust; the wicked prosperous and happy and the good poor and miserable. Solomon states that this was one of the greatest mysteries which he had ever contemplated. But if this Objective Reality is in fact a place of trial to train the Soul, and She profits by it, all is well. I have a deep conviction that the wicked, rich man has got something to learn. But if God’s infinite mercy saves him, what of His infinite justice? You cannot say one is greater than the other.”

And what about Max? When his cousin called on him in his office in Cincinnati, in the year 1935, and he learned about his father at last, did he go home and tell his wife what he had learned? The answer is he did not. Then or
ever. His daughter was only nine years old at the time, and only seventeen when he died, and until the day before he died he was expecting to recover. In his place I think I too would have decided to wait until my daughter was a little older. “What saddens me now,” Max’s daughter says, “is that I was so often in New York when my Grandfather Fuller was alive, and could so easily have looked him up, and may even, who knows, have passed him on the street.” There is reason to think that Max did look his father up, on one of his trips to New York—perhaps the very one when he had dinner with me in the Village.