The Grandmothers/Chapter 2

YEARS after, when all his grandparents were dead, Alwyn sat in a watering place in the Austrian Alps, where there was a cluster of iron tables around a café, where nineteenth-century waltzes were played and the cakes were good.

A boy, on whose cheeks the round flush of illness darkened, was insisting wearily in French: "You Americans lack the sense of sin. You have discovered the fountain of youth; it has made you cruel. . . ."

A great psychoanalyst who looked like an old Protestant minister wavered along the path; and a middle-aged princess brought biscuits in a paper bag.

Lifting two heavy rings in the air with his blue-white hand, a hunchbacked critic could be heard saying, "The psychology of love undergoes a complete revolution every twenty-five years. In America, I am told, every fifteen years; but they have no fine arts, so their passions are lacking in interest."

The grave, well-modulated voices rose against the steady crying of a river, somewhere below. Far below, a plain lay, patched with cottages and tidy crops; far above, a number of soft mountains were brocaded. by ice; and over the valley walls seven cataracts fell, shivering on the stone in mourning—seven vines the color of pewter.

Alwyn was glad to be in Austria; but because of the odor and the bells of two or three cattle which were driven past, perhaps because of the poor fat princess who, it seemed, regretted civilization, he began to think of the early days of America, particularly the early days of Wisconsin and his family. And the river beat in the small valley as ardently and roughly as the heart of a Middle Western forest.

Wisconsin, his grandmother's wilderness. . . . He remembered one of its little hills; fancied that he sat, not in Gastein, but on one of its hills, dreaming of its history. Slain trees, and timber wolves slinking in search of young pigs, and weather-beaten children stationed in poor crops to scare off the deer. . . . He tried to picture to himself his ancestors: ignorant men with delicate bodies, hoping for wealth as a reward for virtue; boys with chapped mouths hunting by the light of lanterns; fearless girls becoming sickly mothers. A company of dead or distant relatives, on a continent without much elegance, without palaces, without rest. . . . There sprang up in his mind a great number of stories and fragments of stories, in which they were gesticulating and embracing and working.

Alwyn daydreaming in Austria, a little self-consciously a poet. . . . And for a moment the well- bred voices, the philosophies, the orchestras, were swept away. For a moment all Europe seemed less significant than the vicissitudes of pioneers, men who were anonymous unless they were somebody's relatives. He did not quite like their suffering, their illiterate mysticism, their air of failure; but he understood them, or fancied that he did. It did not matter whether he liked them or not—he was their son.

Among them, of their marriages and love affairs, there had also been born a composite character, the soul of the race that was not actually a race; something so vague that one recognized it only as an atmosphere, a special brightness, or a peculiar quality of the temperaments and customs and fortunes of Americans; as if it were the god of the place—half invisible, and so large that one could see at a given moment only the great arch of its foot, or the dim luxury of its flesh, or the electricity of its eyes, or the jewels on its giant hands and head. It had been born in the stables, the cabins, and the schoolhouses where music, religion, and the three R's had been taught in turn. Who could describe the mask that was its face, or estimate its strength, or define its character? Whatever it was, it was the hero of the stories that he knew, the tales of his grandmothers. By comparison with its dwelling-place, Europe seemed only the scene of a classic play continually repeated; for a moment only. . . . But there was that moment in every day of Alwyn's life.

On another night he was dining with friends at La Turbie. Around the hotel arid meadows ran down to the cliffs, meadows where sooner or later the moonlight would come, gently cropping the stone like a flock of sheep. They sat on a terrace, looking over the balustrade and the cactus upon Monte Carlo—the casino, the harbor, the large rock covered with palaces.

One friend said, "Madame R—is ill."

Another, "I hate myself for gossiping, but after all . . ."

And the first: "The less said about it the better. But I think as you do; the name of her illness is—hate. The young man . . ."

One asked, "So she hates him now?"

And another answered, "Having loved him long enough."

The little city below was anxious to please, sparkling on the seashore, the electric light writhed as if it were foliage on fire. As a child Alwyn had imagined that heaven would be like that; as an adolescent, the whole of Europe; and it woke other recollections of childhood.

Ostensibly as a comment on Madame R's affairs, he began, "My grandmother Tower . . ." He talked of her soldier sweetheart as if it were someone they all knew; how when he came back from the Civil War, he did not want her; how she had married instead his elder brother who was a widower; how she had said, "I don't blame him."

His friends listened quietly because they were old friends, familiar with his passion for relatives who were dead, relatives who had been very poor, off there in the States. But one asked, "How do you know all this?"

Alwyn said, "She lived with us when I was a child. I watched them all closely then, much too closely. . . ."

As he remembered his childhood, it seemed that much of it had been spent in the center of a carpeted floor; and all about in a circle of rocking-chairs there had been women and men—-grandparents, and their friends, and old cousins, and great-aunts, and uncles; and behind each one a life had extended into the past like a corridor—poorly lighted, long corridors winding away in every direction, through reticence and forgetfulness, to their youth; and in the ring of rocking-chairs, the child for whose existence all the corridors had come together, had shivered in the gusts of emotion which blew vaguely down them, and tried to understand the strange syllables which echoed from one life to another.

Alwyn's friend looked at him sharply over the grapes and figs on the table. "A good woman. . . .But I don't understand how you found out her secrets. You know them as well as if you had been her lover. But it all took place before your father was born. She didn't tell you that story as you tell it, did she?"

"Not in so many words. . . ."

"Of course you knew them all—your grandfather and grandmother, your-great-uncle, wouldn't he be? But they were old then, very old, I should think; and old people don't tell that sort of thing. Don't be cross," he added. "You know that we prefer you even to your grandmother. But what do you know about her and what have you invented? Perhaps imperceptibly invented . . ."

Someone else went on, "Tell us, tell us, please, exactly which elements of that story you know to be unquestionably true?"

When Alwyn smiled and murmured, "But I don't know," they smiled and spoke of other things. But he was troubled by their questions. His knowledge of himself, of his native land, began with stories like that. After all, were they true? How true?

A child in a ring of rocking-chairs, shut in by secrets. . . . He had wanted to understand as other children want to be understood. A phrase of his grandmother's, certain glances exchanged over a letter, funeral sermons among greenhouse flowers, a caress which he had surprised, an antipathy still evident though worn out by the passage of time—each had had its peculiar spirit with an enigmatic face. They seemed to have bent over him even in the cradle, like amorous women, veiled, strangely bedecked, in old-fashioned dresses. Mysteries, some alive and some dead; and the dead had clung as close as the living. One had taken his wrist in its dry hand; one had slipped its arm without weight over his shoulder; and another had placed on his forehead its long fingers like a wreath.

He had been excited and frightened. No one else had seemed to notice them; his parents had looked away, toward things that were actually happening or going to happen. His grandmother, like an official representative of the past, had told stories without motivity, without a moral, and had replied to his timid questions literally, perhaps timidly.

But he had ignored nothing and forgotten nothing. In so far as he could he had learned the bare outline of everyone's life. Then his grandmother had said, for example, "Your great-aunt Mary Harris laughed like that woman," or, "Don't let a little dirt drive you mad, the way poor Nancy Tower did." He had noted every word of sentences he was not expected to understand, and added each detail, in his memory, to its proper nucleus. Little by little he had uncovered the life of his elders; little by little he had grown up. . ..

His mother, to explain her differences with his grandmother, his grandfather's harsh temper, his father's melancholy, had touched upon secrets which, deliberately, she would not have betrayed to a child. In New Mexico his uncle John Craig, who had lived away from the family since he was a boy, who had been more or less an outsider then, had told him things the others had forgotten or were ashamed of. Alwyn had given dead people the faces of daguerreotypes and tin-types, old people the young faces of fading photographs, or invented their appearance according to vague indications of traits peculiar to this or that branch of the family; and placed all their quarrels, infatuations, and disappointments, in a setting of childhood's exaggerated landscapes.

After he had left home, when most of his older relatives were dead, certain things of which he had remained in ignorance had continued to trouble him. For the personages in rocking-chairs, the questionable spirits leaning over his cradle, had embodied not only the past, but the future—his own wishes and fears; and he was not to be content until an everyday light had unveiled all their faces. To bring an end to his childhood, to drive its ignorance out of his heart, to conduct or try to conduct his own life in its alarming motion, he had been obliged to lead in imagination many lives already at an end. Now and again the riddle of his own experience had resembled one of the past's riddles; his personal solutions had solved them as well. Spell after spell had been lifted. He had been possessed by a family of spirits—now at last they were exorcised; and in their place there was this family of stories which he could not have remembered, but seemed nevertheless to remember.

In his nineteenth year he had written a historical essay, based upon what he had found out about his relatives: a summary of all these unwritten biographies; as it were, a short biography of America. A professor had praised it; his mother had said that she could not understand it; he himself had been proud of his work. One night, in a hotel on the French Riviera, he found these pages and reread them:

At first there broke against European sea walls, the edge of a uniform world of water; somewhere upon it America lay, a phantom putting an end to its uniformity. Down to the seaports came disappointed men—no one who was happy would have set sail for a phantom. Some were hopelessly poor: they had dreamed of states in which all the poor would be rich, and their revolutions had been crushed. Some were sickly: they had invented moralities to curb the appetites of others, who in turn had abolished their laws. Some were bondsmen, sold for a time. Some were failures and the sons of men who had failed: success being impossible on this earth, perhaps it would be possible on a continent which a few years before had not been on the earth. Some were criminals or adventurers, whose regret wore masks of bravado. Some wanted to rule, whose fathers had not been kings. Some received in hallucinations a knowledge of pure ceremonies, by which they were not permitted to worship. All were disappointed—minorities going out to form a majority against the world.

In dangerous boats which tottered up and down the water, when they were not seasick, they sang. Some believed that America was like a goblet lying in the ocean, and when one drank from it one would become so happy that one would dare to remember one's grief. Some tried to believe that it was an earthly heaven or heavenly earth, where saintliness which other men would worship would be easy, where wealth would be apportioned according to saintliness. Those who died were never disillusioned; and the waves among which they were laid seemed to sing feebly with those who were left on the boats.

Not one ship sank; and they landed on a long coast of bushes and stone, of stagnant water and sand. The redskins were dangerous but pitiable, in their animal hiding places; and as the whites proceeded to exterminate them they could never bear to think what they were doing. Their own number was reduced by diseases; those who did not die were strengthened by the thought of the early Christians.

They shot red squirrels flickering in the trees, and turkeys (great, enameled birds); and planted the Indian corn. They gave thanks when there was enough to eat, and repented of their insignificant sins when there was not; in the beginning the crops were always meagre. The evidently poor land kept its wealth secret, like a young mother who thinks herself a virgin. It was the land which God had given them, and it was poor. So God was poverty, but He was poverty which would become wealth. He was a precept by which poverty would be changed into wealth; He was a law. There were songs and talk about sin, but few transgressions. Preachers of genius painted evil in such perfect colors that men vomited and women fainted in the churches; they made the agony of some seem sweeter than love. Dangerous witches appeared among them and were condemned; and on the chest of a man accused of commerce with spirits, heavy stones were laid one by one until he died.

They went further west. Over the Northwest Territory mouth organs quavered between embarrassed kisses, and cabinet organs quavered between prayers. From the half-ashamed love-making sprang a great population, and from the prayers muttered in new log cabins, the certainty that the God of poverty had blessed this people with His uplifted, enigmatic finger. They came to the Far West, and found valleys as large as kingdoms, without kings; red mountains and others the color of pearls; deserts below sea level in which no fire was visible, but the earth was ashes; and extremes of temperature as in hell, and heavenly climates. They wasted great forests and unearthed a plunder of oil, coal, and metals.

The whole continent came to resemble the childbed of a virgin; amid cries of axes and moaning sawmills and finally a groan of factories which rose overnight in fields of refuse (in smokelike folds of stained linen) wealth was born. There was rejoicing as extravagant as the singing of angels. In the celebration which took place skyscrapers were built, so tall that they swayed continually, so strong that they never fell. Pride wounded too many times turned into energy. Whoever faltered closed his eyes and summoned up a fierce idealism. Men, women, and children worked side by side, making of delicate nerves a machine. In the noon of their holidays guns were fired and great schemes invented.

They did forget grief in the efforts they made to annihilate it, and became the laughing race of the earth. Unhappiness was treason; no tragic arts flourished. The slaves which had been shipped from Africa and outcast Jews who took refuge among them brought tragic songs—to which the Americans danced.

Men grew rich in a day or overnight; they could always grow richer; the future was illimitably generous. Nevertheless, millions remained poor. Before their eyes lay the feast—they could not eat; and though there were millions of them, each felt alone in his poverty. They grieved, but stifled their grief, being ashamed of it; for if they worked harder, if they had led purer lives, if they still worked harder. . . . Those who did not give up hated life secretly; those who did, despised themselves.

The New World was troubled; even the rich were troubled; they did not have an excuse for rest. They knew that God was poverty; was He not then an endless struggle? He seemed to have vanished when the struggle was over, leaving some lonely. Like a beggar, homeless as they once had been, He haunted others, who did not know which to be ashamed of—their wealth or God. He was also the precept which turned poverty into wealth; the poor in their envy would not let the rich neglect Him when He had served His purpose; and the rich tried to force upon the poor virtue and the rewards of virtue, for they were lonely in the midst of rewards. There was also a puritanism which was genuine remorse for the sins of others. So a series of sad persecutions took place.

It became the land of extreme youth. Middle age was merely a struggle; old age was a time when failure could not be disguised, or a time of success which did not satisfy. Men envied young men, and put them at their sides in positions of great responsibility, so that from eyes which glittered with reflections of the future, their eyes might catch fire for a moment. The whole country had one symbol: a very young man, always at the beginning of a career, always beside his mother. For she taught him to revere success and taught him its maxims. He would never forget that when she had been at his side, the mirage had seemed real and not far away; he would never again be so happy as he had been, under her spell. So young wives imitated the mothers of the men they loved. America became a matriarchate.

Meanwhile the colonists had moved and moved again, from east to west, into every corner of the continent; and each migration repeated, with a little less religion and a little more weariness, the pilgrimage which had brought them there: disappointed men going further, hoping still. . . At last there was no corner where wealth and joy might be thought to dwell, no riverbed without a city, no empty valley, no more coasts. At last those pilgrims who had failed to discover their hearts' desire had to look for it in heaven, as it had been in Europe, as it has always been. Disillusioned but imaginative, these went through the motions of hope, still pioneers. They will be seen while America lasts, proud and poor (like pretenders to royal blood, the site of whose throne has long been forgotten) among mechanics, surgeons, singers with androgynous voices, reporters, professional players of games, orators, gamblers in food, hooded vigilants, gold diggers, salesmen of salves, film stars, architects, trance mediums.

It was too well, that is, too badly written, in the style (Alwyn thought) of a public speech. He regretted its impiety, was ashamed of its anxious, artificial elegance. But he had not changed his mind; it was all true, true of America—he was sure that he could prove every assertion by an account of somebody's life.

But underneath his balcony a crowd of American sailors from a warship in the harbor quarreled around a French girl who had fainted away. Their presence reminded him how ambitious, indeed pretentious, his essay was; how much its subject was a family affair. Once he had believed that all Americans, because they were Americans, had embarked upon the same adventure; now he realized, very humbly, that there were many adventures. That of the sailors, for example, who were snarling at one another and shaking hands. . . . Idly, he drew rows of hearts along the margins of the typewritten pages, and read them again, half aloud, because the careful sentences suited his voice. The noisy sailors were quite as American as he, but he could hardly understand a word they said. As for his essay, he felt a certain pleasure at having displayed his intelligence, as having been intelligent at all when young; beyond that, it did not satisfy him. An honest generalization of one family's intimate history, true, perhaps, of America as a whole. . . . And the sailors made it ridiculous. Suddenly he felt that he had no native land he had a family instead.

Disillusioned but imaginative, going through the motions of hope. Pretenders to royal blood, the site of whose kingdom has long been forgotten. Perpetual pioneers—the Towers were men of that sort. "Well, he's a Tower," his grandmother had often said, as if in explanation of her husband's behavior or that of one of her sons. What had she meant? Alwyn decided to write a character sketch, enumerating the traits of his relatives. Turning over the pretentious essay, he took a fountain pen out of his pocket and wrote on the back of its pages:

A curl of dark or ash-blond hair on the forehead; a smile as strained as a frown; obstinate blue eyes which seemed to see visions, and mouths which doubted them. Proud men with fine bodies, frequently ill. Slight men who had a talent for music and an aptitude for every sort of culture, of which they were suspicious as forms of weakness; men who were slightly ashamed both of their gifts and their neglect of them. They did not love cities, but loved the country as those who take refuge in it from cities do. Thoughtful without shrewdness—not one had ever got on in the world. Ill-advised by their imagination, they never forgave themselves for the mistakes they made; and, in secret, employed that same imagination to perfect their melancholy, as a saint perfects his sanctity.

They were sober, religious, and conscious of not being appreciated. In the wars which were fought they never achieved the rank which was due them; their painstaking bravery went unrewarded. They believed in democracy, hoping that it would reinvest with power those who deserved it. They marched at the head of processions, but the processions always turned down a side street, leaving them alone.

Generation after generation of coarser men—their inferiors in probity, in talent, in dignity—took the good things of this world away from them. Immigrants who began life as their hired men, ended as landowners and holders of mortgages on their land. The Towers worked harder and harder, always beyond their strength; and the harder they worked, the more their resentment grew.

For somewhere in England, in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, they had lived on the land as gentlemen. Two younger sons had been obliged to come to America in search of fortune. They had failed to find it; their descendants were still seeking, seeking among fools and brutes. Superior men, cheated of their inheritance, disguised as inferiors and unable to reveal themselves. . . . They said little, but this conviction took possession of all their minds: they were not born to be beasts of burden; they should not have to work as these others worked; they were not menials, but deserved a sweeter fate; life was unjust. This conviction was inherited by every Tower, from father to son; and in that inheritance younger son shared equally with elder. A grievance was their birthright. . ..

Alwyn knew this grievance in himself in so far as he resembled his father, his little old grandfather, Leander and Hilary his great-uncles, his great-aunt Nancy. He was glad that he understood them; it might save him, in a measure, from the family pride and brooding, the family resentment and doubt.

Every five seconds the lighthouse in the harbor threw a flake of light over his head on the ceiling of his room. Most of the sailors had made peace and vanished into bars and improvised brothels along the quay. One of them, at least forty years old, unmanageably drunk, was being taken back to the ship by the guards; he lay down on the pavement and sobbed: "I want my mother! I want my mother!"

Resting his elbows on the iron railing of his balcony, Alwyn fluttered the pages of his work. Two records of his opinions, one about America as a whole, one about his family—that is, the paternal branch of his family: they were of little value. Staring into the dusky Mediterranean, he thought of the Tower stories, the lives of his mother's parents, Ira and Ursula Duff, of pitiful, red-headed Flora, his uncles, the minister and the deserter, his great-aunt Mary, the adventuress, and all the others.

There in his hands, uselessly, were two statements of their significance; but the best way to explain what they meant would be, quite simply, to tell the stories themselves. Less impossible but more difficult than what he had attempted. . . . Stories like a series of question marks; questions which did not require an answer, questions at peace. He was content with their ambiguities, so he knew that they were the end of understanding, or at any rate, the end of trying to understand.

Trying to understand, for his own sake, shadowy men, women, and children. . . . And as he thought of their lives, he was surprised by regret (their regret) which weakened and then strengthened his will: regret that the time for laughter and ease, even for him, seemed never to come, while work never came to an end.