After his aunt Flora’s funeral, Alwyn went back to school in
Aaronsville. He lived with his mother’s parents, who had rented their
farm and bought a little property in the town: a house, a fine lawn
bounded by hedges, a vegetable garden, and a stable.
His grandmother Duff never lit the lamps until the shades were drawn,
remarking that it was “indecent to be seen by Tom, Dick and Harry,
as if you were an actor in plays.” Stiff and delicate, she would
stand in the bay window every evening as long as the dusk lasted. The
large flowers of the lace curtains (as if roses and lilies had been
burned and kept their shape in the ashes) stood out clearly against
the partial darkness--through which bicycles swung, leaving prostrate
columns of dust, and girls with strong arms interlaced loitered along
the walks, and workmen went home. It was the normal small-town twilight
which lay there, but the old woman stood before it momentously still,
as if she were watching an enemy from a stronghold; and often, as if to
pass the time of her vigilance, she sang, in an old, sweet voice:
_“Dark is the night
And cold the wind is--blow-ing!
Hide me, my Saviour, till the storm is o’er....”_
If her husband entered the room, she would shrug her round shoulders
and continue:
_“For the waves around me roll.
Hide me, hide me for my soul ...”_
Or she would sing other hymns, substituting for the verses she had
forgotten the mystifying notes of the Italian scale.
She had been lovely in her girlhood, and still moved with a peculiar
grace; her skirts and petticoats touching the floor, her small shoes
going and coming among them. If she had ever been happy she would have
been vain, and said, “My sisters were always in the fashion, whatever
it was.”
She betrayed a lifelong envy by wanting everyone to admire these
sisters. One had married, for love, a man who was too easy-going and
often drifted into financial straits, though they wanted for nothing.
The other lived in St. Paul in circumstances of wealth and prominence,
and rarely visited her poor sister. Both were haughty and beautiful
women.
It was they who had induced her to marry Ira Duff. He had then been
untidily handsome and a heavy drinker, keeping company with lazy,
profane men and the women of bars and shanties. The Raeburn girls had
been away to finishing school and were noted for style and vivacity,
and he had been impartially in love with them, in spite of his other
connections. But Anne and Arabella had had ambitious dreams and
discouraged the unpromising lover, saying that it was not right for
either of them to marry before their elder sister, and had accordingly
brought pressure to bear upon Ursula. “Pa can’t support three
well-brought-up daughters.” Their father had been losing his money in
various ways. “One of us must marry,” they had insisted.
So Ursula had accepted Ira Duff and set about to reform him. Her
loveliness, the novelty of marriage, her superior birth and education,
had undermined his former habits. He had signed the pledge against
liquor and tobacco; the low ties had been broken, one by one; he had
been converted and had begun to be influential in the church. It had
been as if she exerted, to the glory of God and the foundation of a
respectable life, all the influence she was ever to have over him. The
reform had been accomplished in four years.
As an old woman she took her grandson’s hand and pressed it against her
tight collar, through which he could feel a round lump in her throat.
“After four years of married life,” she said, “I was standing by the
garden gate, and I found that growth had begun. I knew that the cause
was crying too much every day. So I made up my mind then and there
never to cry again, whatever your grandpa did or said. And I haven’t.”
On another occasion she said, “Blessedly, there weren’t many deaths in
our family. My twins, Ferris and Forrest, died.”
With his mother, Alwyn had often put flowers on their graves, under a
mountain ash at Hope’s Corner. There were two headstones of soft Middle
Western marble, joined by a thin slab like the arm of one little boy
laid on the other’s shoulder: OUR TWINS ... BORN TO IRA DUFF AND HIS
WIFE URSULA NÉE RAEBURN ... DEPARTED THIS LIFE ... HEAVEN WAS THEIR
DESTINATION.
“As a young woman I had a magnificent head of hair. It was so heavy I
could scarcely hold up my head, proud as I was; and I could sit down
on it like a dress. Now when I gave birth to twins I looked at myself
in the looking-glass, and looked at the babies, and I cut it off with
a pair of shears. It was laughable to see your grandpa’s face when he
came in--he looked as if I had given away something that belonged to
him.
“They died of a sickness that they caught because their father took
them to a cattle market in a snow storm; they were as pretty as
pictures, and he wanted to show them off among the men--he was always
one to make a great display.” She made this accusation, and others like
it, in a tone of perfect composure. “Well, they did not grow up to take
sides with their pa against me as the others did. But after that, not
one of our family died, and I thank the Lord.”
She took no account of the recent death of one of her two other
sons. He had had lung trouble; his wife and daughters were Christian
Scientists, for whom it would have been dangerous and impious to
acknowledge his disease by taking him West; but for some reason their
transcendent faith had not availed. At the church funeral his mother
had sat in the family pew in her ruffled black silk and veils, holding
her grandson Alwyn’s hand, with a look of mystic satisfaction. When
the widow had cried out and flung herself on the coffin among the cut
flowers, the aged woman had looked on without dismay, as if it were a
natural occurrence; and when the mixed quartet had sung, “Beyond the
smiling and the weeping, I shall be soon,” the glance of her bright
eyes amid their wrinkles had seemed to leap gayly up to heaven. Perhaps
she had not realized that the dead man was her son; for her mind had
begun to fail.
At first her sense of time grew morbid; she would forget the events
of the previous day or the previous hour, and remember instead things
which had been forgotten for fifty or sixty years.
Then she began to hide things. Having little to do now but conserve the
souvenirs of what they had done in the past, both she and her husband
took pride in orderly drawers, boxes, cupboards, and cubbyholes. Ugly
ornaments and mementoes, which no longer reminded them of anything,
were spread out about the house like the weapons and garments of savage
tribes in a museum. Nothing was owned in common: her pin cushion stood
beside his box of letters from their sons, on her cabinet organ; and
each waited for the other to neglect or mislay one of these things.
Now the old woman began to permit herself to be put in the wrong;
her strategy of many years broke down. As wanton as a magpie in her
black bodice and white apron, she slipped his spectacle case into a
closed umbrella, carried a paper-covered song book out to the privy,
explaining that these were Unitarian hymns and she was a Presbyterian,
and put an almanac on the organ in its place, opening it at a page on
which the signs of the zodiac sat in a circle around a disemboweled
man. She hid a valuable ring of freshwater pearls so well that it was
never found; and her husband expressed his disgust in pompous phrases,
which she remembered.
Her modesty became a sort of madness. The human body exposed below the
chin offended her as cobwebs had done when she had been a housewife,
and like them aroused her industry. She made lacy curls with a pencil
all over a nude photograph of one of her grand-daughters, two years of
age. The man of the almanac wore a bathing suit of ink. There was a
history of the conquest of America with innumerable illustrations, in
which the savages offered their daughters to the discoverers in dresses
which she drew, and even the slain lay beneath shrouds as fanciful
as valentines--the work of many weeks. If Alwyn left his collar
unbuttoned, she would steal up behind him and wrap a handkerchief about
his neck, murmuring, “I can’t abide nakedness.”
Alwyn learned from his mother that she had always kept everything of
an improper nature out of sight. She had had no roosters in her flock
of hens, and bought eggs for hatching from her neighbors. She had
persuaded her husband to plant a great hedge of cedars far from the
house, behind which the cows and bulls together had been led. She had
never allowed her babies to be seen until they were a month old.
Perhaps she wore, thus ostentatiously, the scar of some amorous
violence done by her husband in her youth. Perhaps she was trying to
rid herself of memories of sweetness and abandon which made a discord
in the pure concert of their hatred of each other.
The little house was full of symbols of malice, indeed seemed to
have been equipped with the properties of some sort of malicious
magic. Chenille balls dangling from table covers. Jagged leaves of
variously colored kid forming a penwiper. A framed garland on an
easel--fat callas and asters of dyed cotton under glass. Vases in the
form of crucibles, one deeply crimped along the violet edge. A box
of butterflies on pins. Each taboret wore a mock wedding veil. The
cabinet organ stood by the window, a miniature temple, all niches
and balustrades and pillars; and on the stops were printed in Gothic
letters the row of enigmatic words: TREMOLO, DOLCE, VOX HUMANA....
Many words were uttered in that house whose meaning was equally
obscure. For Alwyn’s grandfather, who was known as “the greatest
talker in the country,” used words which no one else understood, words
which he did not understand, and words which do not exist, to swell
a passionate theme, to confound his neighbors in an argument, and
for their own sake. He would say, for example, “My farm was the very
apocalypse of fertility, but the renter has rested on his oars till
it is good for nothing,” or “Manifest the bounty to pass the salt
shaker in my direction.” Something of the Bible, something of an Irish
inheritance, something of a liar’s anxiety, made of his most ordinary
remark a strange and wearisome oratory.
For he was a liar. Diligently he turned the poor past into a golden age
in which he had stridden, triumphed, above all persuaded; and still in
his old age he labored to persuade man, woman, and child. On summer
evenings Alwyn would see him in the pale-green garden like a stage
setting, urging upon a neighbor his version of his life, and acting
out its rôles. Between the beds of beets and onions he would stagger
a little with the bearlike motion of a large man when he is old, and
speak louder and gesticulate weirdly as the gathering dusk hid him from
his audience.
His wife, standing with her grandson by the window, would say very
softly, very sharply, “Your grandpa tells that riffraff he’s so fond of
up there in the garden a lot of lies.”
And through the shadows closing down as if to shut him up and answer
his arguments, he would catch a glimpse of the little woman who, in his
youth, had made him a respectable man (a man whom she alone refused to
respect); and a genuine sigh would make more impressive his complaints
and his anecdotes.
Her honesty, even without a word, wounded and dishonored him.
Therefore, perhaps, he hated the plain truth and looked down upon it,
and strode away from it as quickly as possible into the remote past of
his preposterous stories and ridiculous pretensions, where he could
not be contradicted. But no--she had known him for sixty years and
could always contradict him. When he was alone, melancholy actually
distorted his old, loose face, as he brooded on what he had last said
and wondered if in fact his arguments had been unanswerable.
There had been disgraces in his life which he was determined to change
into heroisms. In particular, he had refused to fight in the Civil War,
out of worldly interest, pride, and timidity, buying exemption from the
draft three times and mortgaging his farm to do so. The family hoped
the story would be forgotten. But he continued to lead casual guests
into corners and, with his haggard body bent over like a question
mark, amaze them with an account of what he called his “relations with
government.”
“Then by the great horned spoon who did I see?” one would hear. “None
other but Ezra Winterbotham, the meanest man that ever walked up and
down God’s green earth, though well circumstanced, displayed in the
height of fashion of an officer’s uniform. Now he represented the
authorities at Washington, the might of the law, the--” With his long
thumb the old man drew in the air a word more impressive than any he
could think of.
“Well, this here Winterbotham thundered and cursed God and swore that
I’d be arrested simultaneously if I didn’t go south with Company B. I
saw it was fate coming at me and so I bowed my head.”
He shook a twisted forefinger, now on one side of his listener, now on
the other, to block the way of escape. “But no! No, said I to myself.
So I rose in my wrath and denounced him. Gosh all firelocks! man, said
I, you were intended by God to go to war, having made you so as you
wasn’t good for anything else. The good Lord meant such men as me, your
humble servant, to sing his praises in other ways by becoming prominent
citizens in times of peace.”
Sitting by the window, his wife grew more and more stiff and courtly,
as if all the world were looking at her.
“I’ll buy a man, by cracky! said I. I’m not so poor in this world’s
goods that I’ve got to be ordered about by every cracker-box public
speaker that gets delegated by hook or crook to Washington. I’ll buy a
man to do my fighting for me. There’s aplenty as are waiting for such
chances and that hain’t any other future and wouldn’t be man enough for
it if they had. Men o’ your ilk, Winterbotham!”
The strident voice mounted until everyone in the room was obliged to
listen. One after another, his wife fixed their relatives or guests
with a glance which made them uneasy, even frightened some, the very
timid or young.
“And will you believe it, sir, that fellow, that authority, went off
with his tail between his legs, uniform and all, and let me alone!”
His wife said serenely to a woman beside her, “It is a blessing Ira
didn’t go to the war. He’d have taken to drinking again, or worse. He
wasn’t so pious when we married as he is nowadays.”
Or a new minister would make a pastoral call, and the old man would
begin his history at once. The preacher, knowing that this was one of
his most important parishioners, noted for severe sanctity, would try
anxiously to understand. The old lady would look out of the window, and
caress her full skirts, and pick dead leaves from the potted plants.
But at last she would say, “Yes, it would be a very good story, if--it
were true,” and rise and go out of the room, leaving her husband to
face the astonished clergyman.
He took his revenge. When they left the farm, for example, he insisted
upon doing the cooking, and would not permit her to go into the kitchen
except to wash dishes. He represented this as a great burden, though
he liked keeping small, crowded places in order, and was vain of the
indigestible meals he prepared. Everyone smiled at his recipe for
pancakes, because it was a recipe for his stories as well: “One half
of wheat flour, one third of rye, one third of buckwheat, and copious
milk....” Everyone smiled, but everyone pitied him--an old farmer with
an able-bodied, sharp-tongued wife, so patiently doing the housework....
His malice was exercised only under cover of pity and affection. Long
before her mind began to fail, he would draw a relative or a neighbor
into a corner and confide in a stage whisper, “Don’t you forget it--my
poor wife is doting in the decline of her powers.” He appealed even to
strangers to sympathize with her failings, describing them incidentally
in full detail; and referred with marked unction to the trials which it
was his lot to bear in a Christian spirit.
When they were alone together, he would say with insulting simplicity,
“I call it vicious, the way you behave,” or, “You’re a blamed fool,
Ursula.” Perhaps the fact that he did not trouble to scold her
personally with his usual abundance of rhetoric hurt her more than his
blame itself, to which, in sixty years, she may have grown accustomed.
Their grandson wondered if it had been his deliberate policy, from the
beginning, to discredit her. Could he, in ignorance of his own heart,
have done his work so well? Relatives and friends, one by one, coming
to have a horror of her sharp tongue, her bitter disposition becoming a
by-word.... The old man complacently watching loneliness widen around
her, watching the manias of her old age increase, accumulating in his
mind the pity of others for himself as a miser stores away secret
treasure, sighing and pitying himself.... Alwyn decided at last that
he sincerely thought himself a good man, a patient husband, a martyr.
Especially after he began to suffer from a disease of the intestines,
it was obvious that he lived in constant fear of incredulity, even as
those do who are too naïvely honest to be understood. This manifest
fear had an air of innocence; whoever might not have believed his
stories, he himself in his old age seemed to believe every one.
But, though it was she who wore the look of victory, almost everyone
did believe him. Despair is less expressive than mere melancholy; she
would have been ashamed of seeming to deserve pity. His malice was like
an instrument in his hands, silent or sounding loudly as it suited his
purpose best. But when she said intolerable things, in her distant,
melodious voice, it was not merely against her will; she had at those
moments no will, and as if she had been hypnotized, felt neither fear
nor sadness nor pleasure.
All the relatives and neighbors had watched the restlessness of her
anger increase, quietly, rhythmically, like that of a whip; and heard
what she had to say when she could endure it no longer. Everyone, on
the other hand, had seen his tears. Only her daughter and her grandson
loved her; only the Towers admired her. Even those who had experienced
his perfidy held her responsible, and praised God that they did not
have such a wife or mother.
Her sons had not even pretended to pity her. Now the one who had
contracted malaria in the South when he had run away--as he thought,
from her--was dead. The other, Andrew, a building contractor in
Chicago, as melancholy and clever as his father, but with his mother’s
hardness, made life miserable for his wife and children, though he gave
them everything that money could buy. He had no particular principles
or faith, hating religion for its pretensions of peace on earth, its
lack of power over hearts like his mother’s--for that matter, like his
own. She said frankly that his dissipated habits were a shame to her.
Her husband blamed her less for driving their sons away from home than
for acknowledging their weaknesses; and improved Andrew’s character
even as he had improved his own--by talking about it, hypocritically.
In the little house in Aaronsville a red-edged Bible lay on a special
shelf over the kitchen table. Every morning of their old age (just as
when their wayward children had been at home) after the breakfast of
fried potatoes and sweet rolls, he drew himself up to his full height,
took down the book, and read a chapter. Then they knelt on the floor,
each in front of a chair, and he raised his harsh voice:
“Guard us, dear adorable father, and guide us into one of thy
mansions. Though roamers and strangers to thy charity, set us not
aside with those who defile the highways and the byways. For liars,
money changers, ungrateful relatives, and strange women triumph.
Wither up their fig trees and put the seal of thy abundance on our
undertakings. Bless my health, and keep our scattered children out
of the dens of mischief. And hold in the hollow of thy hand the dear
wife of my bosom. Without ceasing for half a century, we have labored
and sung thy praises and kept faithful to each other and to thy true
religion--though our steps totter, we are still the same. Forgive us
our transgressions of word and deed, and lead us not into trouble, but
bring our aged limbs into thy kingdom. Amen.”
There followed a moment of silent prayer. When Alwyn knelt between
them, more embarrassed by this posture of the love of God than the
two sad ancient enemies whose knees bent with difficulty, he wondered
if in that moment each prayed that the other might be punished, made
sleepless by repentance, and have his heart divinely softened--that
is, at their age, broken.... But when they rose, his grandfather’s
cunning face was transfigured and haughty. Wandering away to one of
the windows, his grandmother seemed to regret that prayer had come to
an end, her eyes, in spite of their cold color and weary eyelids, like
a child’s eyes blossoming with light. And when she glanced back at her
husband, Alwyn realized that he was not only her enemy, but her priest.
She rarely spoke of religion, and had no reminiscences of its coming
and going in men’s hearts. Evidently it had nothing to do with love,
of which she spoke with pride and regret, as Alwyn’s other grandmother
spoke of the old days--their glory, their poverty, their bravado. “My
son,” she would say, “there were broken hearts and romances. But young
women in my day covered their nakedness, every one was modest and
genteel. But the menfolks were inclined to be rough--they mingled with
animals all day, and had many hardships to undergo. Don’t ever be wild
as your grandpa was.”
Alwyn remembered their wedding picture: the young man’s lips large and
red, his eyes expressionless as eyes of crystal, his large hand closed
on her arm as if it had often had its way with women; and beside him
the little bride dressed in dark sacramental finery.
“Always behave like a gentleman,” she continued. “In all my life, I
knew only one gentleman. That was Leander Tower. He was accounted a
little crazy in those days by many who were his neighbors. My life
would have been different if I had married him. But I was already
married, so I didn’t love him. It was my duty to love your grandpa and
I did it, hard and dishonest man that he was. As for Leander Tower, he
loved nobody on earth but his relations.” Alwyn’s mother said that she
had never before referred to that secret.
Another day she said, to his amazement: “I don’t regret a day of my
life. Your grandpa is a virtuous man and God-fearing, though he was
pretty unruly in his youth. Don’t you forget that, just because he
tells awful lies and is mean. He never drank. He never swore. He never
ran after women. Not after we married. He never failed at churchgoing,
or giving testimony, or praying before the public--and there wasn’t a
man in the township who could make such a fine prayer. There are few of
whom I could say as much. Now I don’t regret that he was hard on me,
and maintains that my mind is failing. It has taught me to fear God and
value the kingdom of heaven. Don’t you ever think this world amounts to
much.”
But as they approached that kingdom of heaven their conflict did not
abate. Their old bodies grew weaker, their minds confused; but they
seemed to breathe a bracing air of eternity. Warned by the gnawing pain
in his bowels, his fear of not being believed rose to a pitiful fury;
but the days in which he might still bring about her wifely submission
were numbered; so at last his malice was not even restrained by
consideration of what people would say. Her sorrow took on the special
clarity and peace of madness when her second childhood began. During
the last years it was as if they lay on one deathbed--the dying hands
interlaced by habit, by hatred of each other and love of God, the dying
mouths murmuring truths without pity and complaining still.
(It was during this period that Alwyn lived with them--afraid of their
old age, often shedding tears before he fell asleep, trying to ignore
hate and understand love, and for the first time falling in love.)
The embrace of their two spirits was closer than love ever is. They had
lived together half a century; now they could not be parted. Marianne
Tower took her mother out to the farm, but could not induce her to
stay more than one night. She could not sleep in the country; hate had
become a physical habit, as passionate as the habits of the young. “I
must go back this afternoon. I must look after my house. I must see
what your father is up to.”
When she returned to the little house, her husband’s face lit up with
pleasure, but before that expression had had time to change he would
say, in her presence, “I know, daughter, you’re inclined to see things
your poor ma’s way, but she is a great problem to me. She steals my
medicine and spirits it away, and even carries it so far as to hide
her own things. And I swear before the Almighty, I believe she does it
a-purpose.”
One afternoon during a school holiday, Alwyn and his mother drove to
Aaronsville, intending to take her back with them. “No,” she said, “I
reckon I’d better not go. I have to see to my affairs. And your father
is not contented if I’m not here.”
Then she went upstairs, and came down presently, carrying in her hand
the antlers of two stags, interlocked and covered with dust. She put
them on the table. “I found these old things in the attic,” she said
mysteriously. “I don’t understand what they’re for, and I don’t know
where we got them. But I found them, anyway.”
The old man came out of the pantry. “Ursula,” he began, looking at his
daughter as if this were a proof of all his contentions, “I pray to God
that the day will come when you’ll let my things alone. Tarnation! I
don’t blame you, but it’s a crucifixion to me, the way you go rummaging
in my belongings.”
Marianne gazed beseechingly at her father. Her mother, ignoring him,
gazed at the curio: the sharp horns harmless at last, spike wedged
against spike, and a bit of the skull of each animal.
“I never saw that before,” Alwyn said. “What is it? Where did it come
from?”
The old man said: “I discovered this phenomenon at the foot of an old
stump I was rooting up in my thirty-fourth year. It bears witness to
the death struggle of two ferocious animals. Beside themselves, they
struck one blow too many and got their horns tangled and lay there by
that stump, as you might say snared, until they died. And here you have
their rage to get at each other immortalized, and I say it ought to be
in a museum.”
His wife had not taken her eyes from the table. “Ira, Ira,” she
murmured, “you’ve told that story too many times. It’s not yours,
anyway. It’s mine. You gave it to me.”
He sighed and returned to the kitchen. She hunted a little piece of
black crêpe and painstakingly, lovingly, dusted the antlers. There
was nothing to say. Alwyn’s mother sat down and began to weep softly.
The old woman took up the interlocked antlers and pressed them to her
bosom, and started upstairs again. “No, Marianne, don’t ever cry,” she
said, as if she were merely giving good advice.
Their son Andrew came from Chicago to see his father. Alwyn and his
grandmother stood before the window, and in the garden the feeble old
man gestured and talked to his son. “Who’s that man up there in the
garden talking to your father?” she asked. “You better go up and find
out if he means to stay to dinner.”
Her husband insisted that she recognized her son and pretended not to,
out of spite. She often called Alwyn Andrew, even during her son’s
visit. At other times she treated him with exquisite formality, as
if he were a man she loved, half a stranger. One day she gave him a
begonia leaf, saying, “You’re my sweetheart, you know.”
The following winter Alwyn went to live with his uncle Jim; and while
he was gone the old man passed away.