Backwater (2 page)

So when most of the family rallied around her and said a video was just what everyone wanted, I wanted to crawl off somewhere and evaporate. The power of cable television is fierce.

Aunt Tib supported me. She always has. As a retired history teacher, Tib knows about perspective. She started researching the Breedlove family tree because she wanted to get the sense of who this family really was, find the values we all shared, the
ones we’d misplaced, the stories we had in common, and the ones we’d pushed aside. And when her eyes started going bad two years ago, she picked me to be her assistant, which was a great honor because at the time I was only fourteen. Down through the ages, there have been Breedloves who collected family information, but Tib and I are the first ones to put it all together. We drew a chart of the Breedloves through history, beginning with our early roots in England to our immigrant status in New York and New Hampshire, to what Tib called “the great Breedlove expansion across America that has made us what we are today—entrenched.”

Then, sadly, her eyes gave out and it was up to me to see the project through. Tib wouldn’t let anyone feel sorry for her, either. She got a cane and went to classes to learn how to get by.

“You finish what I started,” Tib told me. “That’s history’s way.”

Plenty of people didn’t like
that
, saying how an
adult
should be doing it.
Adult
is a magic word with some individuals who think that becoming one is like getting sprayed with instant insight. But I’ve never worked harder at anything in my life—gathering family stories, pouring through old diaries, letters, scrapbooks and family Bibles, crawling around dusty attics in search of heirlooms. I’ve read wills and insurance papers until I’m blue in the face, gone through hundreds of old photographs. There are a million things a family historian has to do.

Egan kicked snow in my direction and made a face. “She’s got scripts and make-up and she says she’s picked out music.”

He wiped sweat from his forehead. His life lay easily before him. Law school in a few years, clerking, partner in a Breedlove law firm. Cross-country runners had it made; they knew about looking ahead. When you’re a historian, you keep looking behind you; that’s death to a runner.

He cleared his throat. “I’m supposed to tell you dinner’s at six.”

“You told me.”

“Are you going to sit there in the snow?”

My butt was freezing. “Yes.”

I sat there.

He stood there.

“I just want to say, Ivy, that you won the history prize at school for the past two years, and that if it wasn’t for you helping me with my term paper on FDR and the New Deal, I would have never stayed on the Honor Roll. You understand how things connect more than anyone I know. You’ve always been that way.”

Egan took the cemetery stone wall in an easy hurdle, and ran off around the corner.

Wet snow soaked through the seat of my blue jeans.

I thought of my fourteen file folders of family research back home in the huge plastic container with the emerald green dust-free top, sitting there, undervalued.

I thought of the fifty-two pages of text I had already written and Aunt Tib’s and my years of genealogical labor being preempted by a quick-fix filmstrip.

I squeezed my eyes tight to keep in the tears.

My father can’t wait for me to finish this project. He’s concerned that I’m obsessing on it. I feel that’s extreme.

Compulsing
, maybe.

But what does a kid do when she has so many questions? Do you just swallow them like they don’t matter? I want to
know
things. I’ve always been that way, and at sixteen I’m sure not changing now.

What influenced my parents?

Who were my grandparents, and great-grandparents, and aunts and uncles and cousins down through the ages?

What part of them do I share?

Where did they come from? What did they care about? What were their victories? How did they fail? Did they make a difference in the world?

Can I?

I’ve tried to explain my feelings to Dad. He just looks at me blankly and asks if my homework is finished.

I tell him that homework is nothing compared to having the canals of history stretch before you and get no reply. I could fight dirty at this point, remind him that Mom was a great history lover. But Dad can’t talk about Mom. It’s too painful. So we talk about the letter.

Back in 1776 one of my relatives, Eliza Breedlove, dressed like a man and joined George Washington’s army when she was sixteen. She died at Valley Forge, but not before she’d marched clear across New Jersey, half starving with a bullet in her arm. The doctor sent a letter to her parents saying she was one of the finest soldiers he’d ever known. The first time I
read it, I felt a shock wave through my body. Lots of kids study a historic period, shrug and think,
okay, it happened, but what’s it got to do with me?
You’re connected, I tell them, you just don’t know it.

Dad said the letter corrupted my mind.

“It freed me, Dad.”

“Freedom, Ivy, is the state of being released or liberated. You are totally enslaved by this
obsession!
”

“I could be on drugs, Dad. I could be smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. I could be—”

“
Getting ready to study the law!
”

I could almost mouth the words.

“When
I
was sixteen, Ivy, I had already read every piece of literature there was to read concerning America’s great law institutions where fine men and women learned to love the law, learned to defend it to the death, learned to not take no for an answer.”

“Learned to bill by the hour,” I added, and Dad said that as God was his witness, a law education was the cornerstone of a successful, fulfilled life.

“You know, Dad, there are important people in this family other than lawyers.”

He coughed.

“What about Mercy Breedlove who lived in the time of the Woman’s Suffrage Movement and believed so strongly that women should have the right to vote that at seventeen she embroidered the front and back of a dress with Susan B. Anthony’s words of freedom:
Men, their rights and nothing more.
Women, their rights and nothing less.
And she wore that dress day in and day out with everyone pointing at her and her father screaming at her to stop. That was long before anti-perspirant, too.”

“Embroidery,” Dad sputtered, “is not a proper Breedlove career.”

“What about Iza and Baldwin Breedlove, Dad, the fifteen-year-old twins who lived during the Depression and quit school and got a total of eleven part-time jobs per week to support their family. And when some of those jobs dried up, they taught their dog tricks and performed in the street for food.”

“You will not perform in the street for food.
Ever.
”

“And let’s not forget Vesta Breedlove, Dad, who came over on the Mayflower with her birds, Florence and Luther. Everyone told her she was crazy, the birds wouldn’t survive, but they did better than her husband, who got buried at sea. But she kept going, Dad—built herself a log cabin at the edge of the colony just big enough for her and the birds, and said although she mourned her dead husband, she’d always preferred the company of Florence and Luther, so no one had to worry about her.”

Dad’s face turned bright fuchsia. He slammed his fist on the kitchen counter, rattling the stoneware. “You have
nothing
in common with a person like that! Breedloves do not emulate disturbed people!”

It was the second angriest I’d ever seen him. The first was when I backed into the rhododendron bushes, terminally scratching the Lexus.

I’m told my mother, a social worker, was more reasonable about things. Social workers usually are. She worked for New York’s Department of Social Services helping poor women fight bad landlords and battered women get to safety. She was always railing at a system that kept poor women down. One of her clients named a baby after her.

I’ve done my best to piece Mom’s life together from the snippets I’ve gotten from other people. She didn’t have a diary or stacks of old letters, but she had boxes of history books. In one history book about women Mom wrote, “This is my family tree.” I’ve thought hard about why she wrote that. I think it’s because Mom was adopted; she never knew who her biological parents were. I think she found in the history of all women’s struggles a deep connection to family. Whenever I read about women in history, I feel my mother’s spirit pushing through the pages.

I did a rubbing of her gravestone a few years ago. It took me longer than usual because I kept crying.

Hers says simply:
She embodied grace.

Dad wrote it.

The man has his moments. I try to remember this when he gets impossible. He helps me with my homework whenever I need it. He comes to career day at my school and talks about the joys of lawyering. He works harder than anyone I know. He’s always studying something—he doesn’t just read the newspaper, he scrutinizes it. He pours over his legal briefs, takes reams of notes. He stays up late reading, too. Dad says he doesn’t need much sleep, but his eyes have always looked tired to me. He has long lists of what he has to do and follows
to the letter. He makes long lists of what I have to do, which I keep losing. On lists with more than ten action items he pens,
I’m doing this for your own good—Love, Dad
, to shield the blow. Dad says that without lists we never accomplish all the tasks set before us. I suppose this is true.

Dad never, ever relaxes. Sometimes I watch him reading in his chair in his study and he’ll squeeze his eyes shut and shake his head hard and hit his fist on the desk like he’s got something bottled up inside that he wants to keep down there. After that, he starts reading again. A lawyer’s inner life is a true mystery.

It was almost six. Long shadows crept across the cemetery. Genghis, my toy poodle, scurried toward me wagging his little brown tail.

“Come on, boy.”

Genghis jumped on my pants leg, scooted back on his teeny hind legs. I scooped him up and arranged him in my pocket with his head and front paws sticking out.

Dad says Genghis isn’t a dog, he’s an accessory.

Easy for him to say. I was bit by a large dog when I was little. Any canine over ten pounds makes me nervous.

I wiped off my jeans and headed to the big house to have dinner with my family.

“All right now, if we work together, we can make this movie happen.”

A spotlight shone in the living room. Fiona was dressed to kill with all her television make-up on, holding a video camera. Her lips curled over her teeth, which is how Fiona smiles.

I looked at the oil painting of my great-grandparents that hung over the stone mantel. It was painted right after they were married. They paid the artist a little every week for two years during the Depression—it was the only way they could afford such a keepsake for generations to come.

Fiona studied the room. “We’ll start with a tight close-up on the painting … and then as Archie and Dan start reading from the script, the camera will pan the room to get the sense of history …”

My father held a script in his hand, looking uncomfortable. Fiona pointed to him. “This is the story of a family,” Dad read, “a very special family; a family that has known strength and weakness, joy and sorrow. This is the story of the Breedloves.”

She had to be kidding. You could say that about any family.

Dad bungled his next line: “Our ancestors are the bricks and mortar upon which our family has been built.”

He got it right on the third take.

“Now,” Fiona announced shrilly, “the camera will pan the dining room and the quilt on the wall, and then Archie, you say the part about how the old family home has been preserved by the generations and is still a gathering point for the family today.”

Egan tripped over a tangle of wires connecting the spotlights.

“
Cut!
”

I decided to use the moment. “Aunt Fiona, aren’t you going to talk about the story behind the painting? Or what about the quilt? Great-Great-Great-Aunt Cecilia embroidered the names and birth dates of twelve Breedlove children on it. She prayed for each baby when she was doing it. She was sick when she worked on the last three squares, but she held on until she finished. It took her twelve years. That quilt is narrative folk-art history!”

Fiona looked at the quilt and mumbled. “I could have saved that woman years of unnecessary labor.” Then she shook her head and glared at me. “We want sounds and images, Ivy. There’s no time for stories.”

She checked her script. “Now we’ll
quickly
move around the copper kettles—”

I stepped forward. My face was hot. “Comfort Breedlove carried the copper kettles from New Hampshire to New York and she engraved every part of the journey on the sides, from
the sicknesses, to the fears, to the weather conditions and the beauty of the landscape. You can’t quickly move around a thing like that!”

Fiona said Comfort would have arrived at her destination sooner if she hadn’t spent all that time engraving.

I said the worst thing a person could say in front of Aunt Fiona.

“
Sometimes saving time doesn’t matter!
”

“Doesn’t matter?” She threw back her head and laughed so coarsely that her silver earrings shook. “Isn’t that just like a
teenager.
” She said “teenager” the way some people say “serial killer.”

Tib rammed her white cane on the floor and said I was right.

Cousin James waved his arms like he did in court and said Fiona knew what she was doing.

Dad threw down his script and said he was hungry.

Archie asked Dad to
please
show respect for another professional who was trying to do her job. Dad responded by storming out of the room.

Fiona approached me like a brilliant director forced to work with peons.

“Take some advice from a professional, dear. When you’ve mastered time, you’ve mastered life.”

She always said that line at the end of her cable TV show and the audience would applaud and cheer until their mouths frothed with time-saving enthusiasm. She patted my cheek. “I think that we’ll do the interviews in the living room after dinner. You were going to change for supper, weren’t you, Ivy?”