The Grandmothers/Chapter 1

UNTIL Alwyn Tower grew to manhood he never forgot that everyone was older than he. People remembered things not in existence now, and many of them had been born in houses which had vanished long ago.

A cabin which had stood in the melon patch had been his father's birthplace; and as a child, jumping over the heavy, downy vines, he tried in vain to find a trace of its foundations.

His uncle Jim, the minister, on the other hand, had not been born in the garden, but in a building which was now the woodshed. Alwyn asked himself how anyone could have slept in that poor shack, whose floor was the ground, trodden and scattered with chips, where the snow sifted in winter on the woodpiles. Of course when his grandmother had lain there with a baby in her arms, it must have been warm, safe, and pink, in the firelight. Now she was a strong old woman with sandy-gray hair; and only with difficulty, by calling to mind the family daguerreotypes, was he able to imagine a young mother in that vanished bed.

Alwyn's father and mother shared with his grand-parents the third house on the farm which his grand-father had bought from the government when Wisconsin was a wilderness. In that house his young aunt Flora had been born, in what was now his mother's parlor, exactly below the spare bedroom papered with forget-me-nots where Alwyn himself had slept when he was a baby. The house had been rearranged frequently, and augmented by new rooms, porches, doors, and windows, as the family grew. Now the old people and Fiora kept house by themselves in the south wing.

In their sitting room the sunlight burned brightly on stiff patterns of wallpaper, on the red garlands of the carpet, the ripples painted on the woodwork in imitation of quarter-sawed oak, and the false-Nottingham curtains looped up in the windows. A rack on the wall held a row of hand-painted plates, the work of his aunt and his great-aunt Nancy, decorated with birds, wild roses, and rosebuds.

Beneath the plate rack stood a couch, upholstered in rows of yellow tapestry biscuits, with a green button at each intersection of the crevices. It had the proportions of a lion's body—the legs carved in claws, the sloping back, the head uplifted under a mass of fringed pillows. In spite of its discomfort, Alwyn's grandfather took his nap there every afternoon, his spectacles in his hand, an open newspaper over his face.

In front of the couch in winter the woodstove crouched on a mat of zinc, with a rosy spot in the middle of each dead-black cheek. In summer it was kept in the woodshed, swathed in old carpets. A bow-legged table spread with a lace tidy marked the center of the room; and on a square shelf just above the floor the great family Bible, studded with gilt nails, lay diagonally.

The corner between the windows was occupied by a secretary a writing-desk which made, when it was let down, a noise like the winding of a large clock, and a pair of bookcases with glass doors, framed in jig-saw scrolls. The books on the shelves hid behind family photographs. A blue-and-white Wedgwood sugar bowl and a stuffed owl stood on one side; on the other a mandolin without strings, and three gray squirrels in a tree crotch; their eyes resembled beads, and in his tenth year Alwyn discovered that they were beads, in fact. Above the secretary hung a row of embossed portraits in one frame: Emerson, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Bryant, Lowell, and Whittier, equally complacent and almost equally muffled by untidy beards.

These great men, just beneath the ceiling, gazed across the room at a pair of enlarged pictures of Alwyn's grandparents in middle life: Rose Hamilton Tower's scarcely womanly head, the ash-blond hair combed back from her low forehead, her eyes unusually small, pale, and close together, her mouth drooping stoically; Henry Tower's face, stubborn and melancholy, his teeth set so firmly that the cheeks protruded a little over the jawbone, the chin lifted in a knot between the two tufts of his faded beard. Though the heads within the identical frames were of the same size, one saw at a glance that this man was smaller than his wife.

There was a shell on the sideboard, a conch shell in the shape of a horn, which, when held to the ear, repeated the surge and collapse of breakers, infinitely faint, as if heard across the great width of America. which separates Wisconsin from the sea. It seemed to the boy that in the same way every object in those rooms echoed the forces which had once been at play around it, very faintly, from a distance of years instead of miles. The pleated fabrics and sheets of old paper enfolded little, agitated ghosts; and the odor of unfamiliar clothes, beds, and pillows, residue of spirit-less perfumes and bouquets long since thrown away, suggested energies now exhausted and passions now forgotten: the energy which had chosen the farm in the wilderness, cut down the trees, uprooted the stumps, built and demolished the log cabins, and founded this home; the long series of passions which had in the end produced himself.

Sometimes he would ask his grandmother about one thing or another. Her eyes would grow vague with the intimate recollections which his question disturbed in her mind, so that he would expect a full and romantic account of them. But often she would merely say, "Oh, it is too long a story to begin now," or, "They are just old things which I've kept a good many years."

For the memory of another is like a ship which one sees coming down a bay—the hull and the sails separating from the distance and from the outlying islands and capes—charged with freight and cutting open the waves, addressing itself in increasingly clear outlines to the impatient eyes on the waterfront; which, before it reaches the shore, grows ghostly and sinks in the sea; and one has to wait for the tides to cast on the beach, fragment by fragment, the awaited cargo.

Alwyn's grandmother sat in the sitting room only when there were guests, or when, by the south window she held the Milwaukee Sentinel or the Christian Herald on a level with the ridge of her old-fashioned corset, discovering what went on in the world through her unsuitably small spectacles. Her life, like that of primitive women, revolved about the place where food was prepared. Her thought and even her recollections were accessory to whatever she was doing at the moment; they resembled her habit of whispering to herself, often with vehemence, while she worked. So it was in the kitchen, her broad lap full of pea pods or stockings to be darned, with one eye on a simmering kettle or the bread rising in pans, that she was most likely to satisfy her grandson's curiosity. Sometimes she replied to questions which he was too young to ask with obscure allusions or partial avowals, which, like the rays of a magic lantern, illuminated with disconnected pictures the darkness of many lives—in fact, the darkness of life itself.

Her large kitchen looked as cool and solid as a room built of stone. There were things in it which, though they had been made in the old days, were still useful: a copper kettle, dented and discolored here and there by verdigris, which served as a foot-bath; a great, green flour barrel into which a hen who had wandered through the open door fell one day, beating up the flour with her wings; a sugar barrel with a handle; and two hand-hewn chests, one of which had been brought by the Towers from York State, part of their baggage on stagecoach and canal boat.

In one corner a short pump brought up rain water into a sink from the cistern under the floor. When the pump was out of order a trapdoor was lifted, and a pail attached to a pole was lowered into the abyss. Alwyn shrank against the wall, not only because he might fall in—it represented all the abysses with which his elders dealt so carelessly and capably; and out of it there breathed a strange odor associated in his mind with the body of a rat, white and swollen, which in his sixth or seventh year had had to be removed from the water. There he observed his grandmother's meals in preparation—all the food characterized by his mother as unwholesome: potatoes in a black spider, frying in a quantity of bacon fat until they were brown; headcheese and the crackling of rendered lard; platters of leathery eggs; saturated pies; and baking-powder doughnuts so rich that they stained one's fingers. She would give him a doughnut, saying, brusquely, "Ask your ma before you eat it, or she'll fly up in the air!" Upon which he would remember his mother's remark, that all the men of that family were dyspeptic.

In the kitchen alone, of all the rooms in the house, Alwyn could imagine his grandmother as a girl, standing up very straight against that green plaster wall; her cheeks not quite rosy (for whoever had colored the familiar daguerreotype had mixed violet with the red); each gold earring swinging in the shadow of a curl; the black lace mitts and the watch fob; the bonnet of straw and ribbon, the great skirt wired and ruffled and hung with bows. Her sober eyes gave no sign of imagination and no sign of surprise at whatever they saw.

Over the itinerant photographer's head they must have seen miles of tough bushes and grass; strong men chopping down the forest in a high wind; pigeons dropping heavily from branch to branch; pasturing deer continually alarmed. . . . And like the wild morning of that world, the eyes in the daguerreotype were cold and clear, and were not anxious about the afternoon or the evening.

"Whew! the heat!" the grandmother would say to the dreamy boy, wiping her flushed face on her apron. "Your pa will want some cold water in the field. Take the pail and run down to the well and bring up a little to the house, and then you'd better take a fresh jug to the men."

Alwyn would pause on the doorstep. There lay the countryside which, sixty years before, had been her wilderness—changed no less than she. Many gravel roads running parallel through the distance, as white as marble; chickens dusting their feathers in them, frightened away by automobiles. Thousands of telephone poles making the sound of a tuning fork. Reapers, cultivators, sowers, hayrakes, tedders, and racks, creeping like mechanical spiders over the slopes. Cattle of all colors under the hickories. Sunshine flashing on the tines of pitchforks, on idle plowshares, shovel blades, and the sides of tin pails full of lunch. Sunshine streaming in the orchards over large apples which seemed to revolve in the leaves. Clouds which looked like pieces of pleated linen. Far away, harnessed horses in miniature, and men wearing blue shirts, their arms bare to the biceps; and over their heads the sky full of heat waves gliding and curling. . ..

Alwyn never thought of the wilderness as hot, and did not know the origin of his clear sense of what it had been: cool and solid, forest beyond forest; no mountains, but instead, at an incomparable altitude, thunderhead on thunderhead the color of granite. Exactly in the center of the high, gray light had balanced an eagle. Catamount, bear, badger, deer, foxes, passenger pigeons, and birds of prey, had been so scattered among the trees and ravines that one never could have seen two at a time. The world had seemed empty; the great hollows had echoed and re-echoed. . . . Then, into the Mississippi Valley the pioneers had crept, with chests and sickles, axes, flails, and oxen in docile pairs. They had hesitated; and their figures had been dwarfed by that space, and at first their voices in that silence could not even have been heard.

That wilderness of history and hearsay, that distorted landscape of a dream which had come true before it had been dreamed, was there where it had been—but buried, buried under the plowed land, the feet of modern men, and the ripening crops. Probably Alwyn would never see its like. The pioneers were dead or unrecognizably old. The doorstep on which he stood happened to be a marble gravestone—discarded when a finer monument had been erected in its place or when a body had been moved to another cemetery. The chiseled side was turned toward the ground, and it occurred to Alwyn that among the letters of a name, a date, and an inscription, silvery beetles lay side by side, and against the urn or the clasped hands or the weeping willow, the earth as well was cut by the worms with illegible curlicues.

A great bowlder by the hitching post looked like the Ark of the Covenant at the back of his grandmother's illustrated Bible—he would sit on it when he got back from the field and crack hickory nuts. Cherry and plum trees stood in perfect order along the garden fence, the leaves of the one glossy and stiff, the leaves of the other curled back on the stem. The lawn was cut in two by a path which ran down to the road, and on his grandmother's half of it her roses grew. They were all cinnamon roses, a thicket of stunted bushes, the stems covered with short thorns, the blossoms spicy and disheveled. She would say, "That was the kind we had when I was a girl." For her, like pressed flowers in a book, or a bit of wedding bouquet folded in paper and fastened with a pin, they were a keepsake, a pretext for reminiscences.

Her extravagant love of the past was a way of continuing to be a mother, now that she was only a grandmother. If the men and women she had brought into the world had still been dependent upon her as they had been in their childhood, or if she could have usurped her daughter-in-law's control over Alwyn and his little brother and sisters, she would not have been so tireless in her efforts to remember and communicate what she remembered. She did not trouble to tell Flora or her grown sons about the old days—she never had; they heard her stories at second hand from the children, or overheard what was not intended for them. But the adventures she could relate, the judgments she could make with authority upon matters of which her daughter-in-law knew nothing, gave her an opportunity to impress upon these children—whom she could not instruct, or punish, or reward—the moral lessons of a period which had come to an end almost everywhere except in herself.

To this end she treasured all the heirlooms, including in her custody certain souvenirs of her husband's young manhood: such as the certificate of his first marriage—a large sheet of paper on which, under a black and white nosegay, one could still read his name and the bride's name, Serena Cannon; and a curl from the head of their son Oliver who had lived only seven years.

Serena Cannon had made the hair album which was the show piece of the collection, a copy book bound in vermilion paper with two or three tiny garlands of hair on each foxed but substantial page. In all there were fifty-six names, badly faded, in a script full of old-fashioned flourishes, and fifty-six garlands, having a great variety of designs: braided hoops, medallions. like bits of Spanish lace, and spider webs, combinations of loops and zigzags and coils and shadowy scallops, executed in every quality and shade of hair—gray of tin and gray of iron, sandy and chestnut and dead black, one maroon and one almost orange; fine, coarse, wiry, or subtle; long threads spread out in spirals, and threads not long enough to encircle a space as big as the end of one's thumb, and stiff locks in which the form of a curl still pulled at the knots which held them. Most of the names were unknown to Alwyn: Letitia, Judith, Clara-Belle, and Sophonisba; Enoch, Luther, Cyrus, and Phineas; Cannons and Standishes. and Crosbys and Valentines—families which had died out or gone West. But he found, under a blond oval, the name of his mother's father, Mr. Ira Duff; under some dark plaited threads, My husband Henry O. Tower; and a lifeless wisp, marked in a woman's handwriting, My little son Oliver, and beneath it, in another script, in ink of another color, Deceased Dec. 4th, 1867. Alwyn was bewildered when his grandmother explained that this book took the place, in those days, of a photograph album. He was unable to deduce a face or a life from a lock of hair; but an incongruous refinement rose like a ghost or a perfume from between its pages, and was added to his conception of the early days—a refinement which was the fancywork of a woman with an unimaginable face, a woman without history, whose only son was dead.

Serena Cannon was famous for her hair work and had left to her husband's family another masterpiece, a wreath as large as a funeral wreath: more than one head of hair wound and tied on a skeleton of wire; padded flowers in the form of Turk's-cap lilies, frayed leaves and swollen buds all bristling with the ends of individual hairs; and the wreath as a whole—when the old hat box was opened and the tissue paper lifted—quivering like a venomous spider.

Alwyn saw in his mind's eye a pallid woman, the veins on her hands very blue, the hands themselves moving in a mass of hair piled on her lap. Once, when he was ten years old, his grandfather muttered to his grandmother, "You'll let that child spoil Serena's things! She was a saint. . . ." Alwyn ran out of the house and climbed into the maple tree, wondering what made her a saint and why he was afraid.

There was a box of arrowheads which had been picked up on the farm over a period of seventy years: triangles of delicately chipped flint, some like alabaster, some flesh-pink, some black—and these looked more cruel than the others; so many that the boy imagined them falling like a hailstorm over the whole land before his grandparents came. There were two strings of wampum traded by the Indians for some hens and a worn-out hoe.

There was a watch chain of braided leather, and his great-grandfather John Tower's silver watch, wound with a key, three-quarters of an inch thick, the lid over the face decorated with birds and cat-tails. There was a picture frame, not Serena Cannon's work, but his great-aunt Nancy's: leather daisies and bunches of grapes and tendrils, varnished and tacked on strips of wood.

There was a glass basket, of oblong panes bound together by tape; it stood on the highest shelf of the kitchen cupboard, and inside it one could see a litter of old papers-letters, newspaper clippings, announcements of births, and obituaries.

There were the patchwork bedspreads, the thinnest and oldest also made by his grandfather's first wife: the pattern, a basket of cubic fruit as high and as wide as the spread, of uniform blocks of muslin yellow with age and Turkey-red cloth now scarcely pink; upon, which was imposed the almost invisible pattern of the quilting itself—meticulous stitches in even, overlapping circles.

There were the crazy quilts: scraps of every sort of dress goods, bordered by zigzag or log-fence stitching: watered black silk, flowered foulard, plaids, changeable taffeta, red and yellow poplin, green challie and cashmere in Paisley patterns, blister crêpe and pongee—cut in diamonds and horseshoes and fans and meaningless shapes, embroidered here and there with bees, hearts, and leaves.

Alwyn's grandmother could identify piece after piece: "My sister Abigail's best dress when she was a girl. The dress I had made when your grandpa and I visited the relations in Iowa. Your aunt Flora's first party dress. A sacque that a woman named Minerva Foote gave me to cut up into a jacket for one of my children. The goods your mother's aunt Melissa Duff went on a lumber wagon to Milwaukee to get a whole bolt of, so nobody should have anything like it—she was the meanest woman ever lived! My cousin Matie Share's basque. The dresses of my two little girls who died—their names were Polly and Ada. The dress your mother was married in." She intended to make a crazy quilt for each of her grandchildren. There were the daguerreotypes in leather cases, one in a case of tortoise shell on which there was an inlaid lily, brought back by his grandfather from the South. Unknown men and women in a north light that was eternal; good, bad, and indifferent people. . . . The adolescent boy, cross-questioning his grandmother as to their identity, wanted to ask them questions as well—with no hope of being answered, since they were dead; curious and proud, he wanted to be able to explain to himself their failures, to love and hate them as they had loved and hated one another.

In the afternoon he often went by himself to her south bedroom, at the opposite end of the house from his parents, brother, and sisters, where the noise of everyday life sounded very softly or not at all. There he climbed on a clothes barrel covered with wall paper, from the barrel to a chest of drawers, placing a newspaper under his feet in order not to scratch the surface, and then into a recess on top of a built-in wardrobe, warm from the kitchen stove on the other side of the wall, which was called the chimney cupboard. All around him, as he sat dangling his feet over the edge, lay the magazines which his cousins sent from Milwaukee, full of editorials, love stories, advertisements of steamships and hotels, portraits of diplomats and actresses—the materials of every imaginable future. Between the chimney cupboard and his future, there were to be so many transitions; causes and effects which one was not even expected to understand; alarms, changes of heart, and hesitations; everything to be endured, and nothing prepared for. . . . Nothing prepared for, since no one knew what had begotten what; sons did not understand their parents' lives; no one thought about tragedies which had come to an end. The past covered one's footsteps all too promptly; present moments were always in the act of vanishing; how then could the future be anything but a riddle? Years of misconstrued events, and unreasonable aversions, and useless ambitions, and nightmares.

The boy turned the pages of the magazines listlessly.

Side by side above the chest of drawers, on a level with his knees, hung a pair of portraits of his grandmother's two little girls who died, enlarged from tin-types: two sober faces like boys' faces, wearing round white collars; one looking straight ahead, good-natured and unabashed, the other resting her chin in the palm of her hand with a sick child's thoughtfulness.

Across the room, also on a level with his knees, there was a large religious chromo, "The Rock of Ages": a girl dressed in what looked like a muslin nightgown, a young girl with streaming hair tossed against a rock in the sea, and clinging to a cross. There was no sky line; there were neither birds nor ships. What did it mean? Useless to ask—he knew as much as he would be told: it was not a real sea or any particular person or an actual darkness, but the night of the soul. The catastrophe, the black sky around it like the wall of a great well, the leaden breakers, and the soapsuds foam—all stood for something else. The dull crests kept on tirelessly booming in the picture; the girl could not have heard a comforting voice if there had been one. Deprivation and disappointment; loneliness without a horizon, without birds. . ..

All the secrets of all the lives must be like that—they could not tell. All they could do was to hang such a picture on the wall, or merely in their hearts. Would anyone ever tell?

That day he and his little sister had been looking at the daguerreotypes, at one in particular—a handsome, bearded young man in a uniform with two rows of brass buttons. His grandmother had looked over their shoulders, and she had said, "Do you know who that is?"

They had been surprised, for she always expected them to recognize the members of their own family. Of course they knew; even his little sister knew.

Sitting in the chimney cupboard, Alwyn puzzled over her question and her answer. Perhaps she had felt an impulse to mystify them, or the tediousness of having too many secrets to keep. She had said, "That was my soldier sweetheart."

They had not been able to understand. It was not her husband, their grandfather, but his younger brother—their great-uncle Leander, who was dead. Alone in the chimney cupboard Alwyn determined, one day, sooner or later, to know that story, and as many others as he could. . ..

"Why didn't you marry him then, grandma?" his little sister had asked.

She had answered in a low tone which implied that there were things which could not be explained, even things which passed her understanding. "Well . . . He didn't want me. I don't blame him."