We were both creatures of the period. I doubt if the heavy-businessman-father-and-the-oversensitive-artistic-son syndrome exists anymore. Fathers have become sympathetic and kiss their grown sons when they feel like it, and who knows what oversensitive is, considering all there is to be sensitive to.
When a sufficient number of months had been torn off the calendar so that my mother’s friends felt they could invite my father to their dinner parties, they did. And he got dressed up and went. They ware matchmaking, of course, and like all matchmakers had missed motives. I doubt if he needed their help. He was still only in his early forties, and he had always been handsome, and liked women, and it would have been strange if he hadn’t found somebody who was willing to love him. I had no comprehension whatever of the sexual and emotional needs of a man of his age. He was simply my father, and I assumed that for the rest of his life he would be—“faithful to my mother’s memory” is how I had heard grown people express it.
While he was having his social life, I was having mine. Our room at school decided to have a Halloween party and it was a question of where to have it. I offered our house and the offer was accepted. When I told my father he shook his head doubtfully and asked what I planned to do. I said was going to carve a pumpkin and put some cornstalks around in the living room. He didn’t think the party was at all a good idea, it would mean extra-work for the housekeeper, and next time I’d better ask before I did something like that. Since I had committed myself, I could go ahead with it, provided it was confined to an empty maid’s room and they used the back stairs. My mother wasn’t there to tell him that this was unthinkable and so that’s what happened. Deeply embarrassed, I led the teacher and my classmates through rooms that were brightly lit and had always been so hospitable, through the dining room to the pantry and up the narrow uninviting back stairs. Nobody seemed to find this in any way strange. I don’t think it was much of a Halloween party. What has stayed in my mind all these years is a scene that occurred by the laundry basket by the back hall. The teacher had chosen to be the “victim” and sat down on a chair and allowed herself to be blindfolded. At this point, ideas of propriety made me hesitate. I motioned to one of the girls, who took my place. When the teacher removed the blindfold she was smiling with pleasure because a young boy—because she thought a young boy had kissed her.
In telling me that he was going to be married my father was as gentle as he knew how to be. He didn’t expect me to offer any objection, and wouldn’t have been deflected from his purpose if I had.
A year or two before this, at the Country Club on a summer day, wandering idly near the caddy house I came upon a sight I didn’t understand. I thought at first it was some new kind of animal. Then I retreaded in horror. What I was looking at was a snake in the act of swallowing a frog that was too large and wouldn’t go down. Neither would the idea that another woman was not only going to sit in my mother’s place at the dinner table but also to take her place in my father’s heart.
Where a hardier boy would have run away from home or got in trouble with the police, I sat with my nose in a book so I wouldn’t have to think about things I didn’t like and couldn’t prevent happening. It wasn’t enough for me, or for my older brother and my younger brother and me, to slip through that door to the way things used to be, when the time came; my mother would expect us to bring my father with us. And if he was married to another woman, how could we?
We had moved from our fixed position and there was now no possibility of getting back to the way things were before she died. I could not tell whether the heavy feeling in my chest had to do with what might happen or with what had already happened and was irremediable.
The kindergarten run by Miss Lena Moose and Miss Lucy Sheffield was on the second floor of a building just off the courthouse square, and the young woman who became my stepmother used to go from house to house at nine o’clock in the morning, collecting the children. When we were all assembled, she walked us downtown. She must have been in her early twenties then. As a child she had lived on Ninth Street, though she didn’t anymore. At noon, on the day of my mother’s funeral, when we went into the dining room she was there. I sat down at the table but I could not eat. My throat was blocked from crying. She came and stood behind my chair and talked to me, and urged me to eat some of the baked potato on my plate. For her sake, because she was young and pretty and because I had always liked her, I managed to do it. The taste of that baked potato has remained with me all the rest of my life.
In fairy tales the coming of a stepmother is never regarded as anything but a misfortune. Presumably this is not because of the great number of second wives who were unkind to the children of their husband’s first marriage, though examples of this could be found, but because of the universal resentment on the children’s part of an outsider. So that for the father to remarry is an act of betrayal not only of the dead mother but of them, no matter what the stepmother is like.
What strange and unlikely things are washed up on the shore of time. I have in my possession a tattered photograph album full of snapshots of my stepmother as a young woman. Very pretty and sweet she was, with a fur muff and a picture hat and her skirts almost to the floor. There are pictures of her with friends, with her mother and sister, with one or another of her four brothers, with elderly relatives on the front stoop of a turn-of-the-century house in, I think, Boston. There are two group pictures taken by a local photographer, of a masquerade party—one with masks and one without, so that you can see who the pirate, the clown, the Columbine, etc., were. Half the people there I knew when I was growing up. And then more pictures of my stepmother: in Washington, D.C., during the First World War, with a thin-faced man in any uniform whom she was in love with at the time but did not marry; back in Lincoln, holding her sister’s baby, and so on. What beautiful clothes. What glorious automobiles. What good times.
At the beginning and end of the album, pasted in what must have been blank places, since they run counter to the sequence, are a dozen pictures of my father. Except for the one where he is standing with a string of fish spread out on a rock beside him, he is always in a group of people. He has a golf stick in his hand. Or he is smoking a pipe. Or he is wearing a bathing suit and has one arm around my stepmother’s waist and the other around a woman I didn’t recognize. And looking at these faded snapshots I see, the child that survives in me sees with a pang that—I am old enough to be that man’s father, and he has been dead for nearly twenty years, and yet it troubles me that he was happy. Why? In some way his happiness was at that time (and forever after, it would seem) a threat to me. It was not the kind of happiness that children are included in, but why should that trouble me now? I do not even begin to understand it.
If I had by some supernatural sleight of hand managed to pull off that trick and brought my mother back from the cemetery and if we had continued to live the way we did before, we would have found ourselves on an island in a river of change, for it was the year 1921, and women had begun to cut off their hair and wear their skirts above their knees and drink gin out of silver flasks in public. Now and then one of them drank too much and had to be taken home. The gossips had a great deal to shake their heads over. In the light of what followed, the twenties seem on the whole a charming, carefree period. So far as good manners are concerned, it was the beginning of the end. When my mother went riding with my father on Sunday morning she rode sidesaddle (think of it!) and came out of the house and down the steps of the front porch in a divided skirt that swept the cement walk. I try to imagine her with bobbed hair and her skirts above her knees and I fail utterly.
It was still possible to think, as my father did, that the present was in every way an improvement over the past, and that the future was bound to be even more satisfactory. He also believed in keeping up with the times. When Prohibition came in, he announced that he was ready to obey the Law and give up drinking—by which he meant a glass of beer or a shot of bourbon, in masculine company. W
hen it turned out that other people were not going to do this, he made his own gin and bought rotgut whiskey from a bootlegger named Goonhound Johnny, like his friends.
On one occasion he even overshot the mark. Friday afternoons I went to dancing school and pushed girls around in the one-step, the fox trot, and the waltz. They held themselves at arm’s length, their backs as stiff as a ramrod, their manner remote. The dancing teacher was young and animated and something under five feet tall, which meant that she was my height even though she wore very high heels. There was also a class for adults on Thursday evenings, to which my father and stepmother went before they were married. One night they put their cheeks together and did a new dance that they had been practicing in private It was called the Toddle, and everybody stopped to look at them, and the dancing teacher, very red in the face, asked them to leave the floor.
It is characteristic of my father that though he was angry at her and never went back, he did not remove me from the children’s class. On Friday afternoon the dancing teacher kept me after the other boys and girls had gone. She was in trouble, though she didn’t quite manage to say what it was. Did she sense that I was half on her side and nobody else much was? She had done the right thing, without stopping to think that the two people involved were of good family and she was a grass widow with two small children to support and from out of town. She may not, in fact, even have known who was and who wasn’t of good family. I felt sorry for her, as I would have for anybody in tears. And disloyal to my father as I stood there listening to the things she said about him. And embarrassed that he was the object of scandal.
One of the things my mother loved about my father was that he was a natural musician. Hoping that this talent might have been inherited, she arranged for my older brother to take piano lessons from a nun who taught music in the Catholic school. When I was six I accompanied him to the house where the nuns lived, for my first music lesson. Sister Mary Anise showed me where to put my hands on the keyboard and I looked up at her teeth, which were frightfully crooked, and burst into tears. She told my brother to bring me back when I was seven—by which time she was wearing false teeth that were not crooked and I could look at her with equanimity. I was not musical and I didn’t like to practice. What I did like was the lives of the composers, doled out to me one at a time in the form of unbound sheets of printed matter that had to be folded and sewed together at the spine, and a perforated sheet of illustrations to be pasted in at the appropriate places. In the first of these books I read how Johann Sebastian Bach’s wicked elder brother was jealous of his talent and wouldn’t let him have access to the music he wanted, so he got up in the night and copied it by moonlight, ruining his eyesight. I found an attachment to the young put-upon Johann Sebastian Bach, and after him to Handel and his Water Music, and Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert and Schumann and Mendelssohn and Wagner’s operas and classical music in general. It didn’t improve my playing. “Flat,” my mother would call out from the next room, when I was practicing at home. “E-flat, not E-natural.” And I would get up from the piano stool and go look at the clock in the front hall.
My father kept a small victrola on top of the upright piano in the living roon and after dinner, having played a new record through two or three times while he figured out the chords, he was off, he had it. He played ragtime and songs from the musicals of the period. He had a beautiful touch and people loved to hear him. One day he sat down at the piano with me and tried to teach me how to play by ear. I didn’t understand one word he was saying.
It gave him no pleasure to hear me stumble through “The Shepherd Boy’s Prayer,” and also he wanted me to like his kind of music, so, when I was twelve, without inquiring how I felt about it, he took me away from Sister Mary Anise and Bach and Handel and Haydn, and arranged for me to take lessons from a young married woman who played the organ in the Catholic Church and was my stepmother’s closest friend. The piece she gave me to learn, at my father’s suggestion, was “Alice Blue Gown.” I liked her but I came to have a deep dislike for the inane song as, week after week, I played it and nothing else. I also made no progress. I had found a small plot of ground on which I could oppose my father without being actively disobedient.
Because he was finishing out a period of mourning, which in those days had to be three years, roughly, or there was talk, he and my stepmother waited. She was in California for a while and when I went for my music lesson I would be given a fat envelope that had come in the mail inside another envelope addressed to my music teacher. Nobody explained that this was so the housekeeper couldn’t steam the envelope open and read what was inside; instead, they acted as though it was the most natural thing in the world for a twelve-year-old boy to be bringing a love letter home to his father.
The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice, but in this case I think convenience entered into it: I mean, my father could have rented a box at the post office. He may have been deterred by the fact that if he was seen entering and leaving the post office and taking mail out of a box, people would very soon have guessed why. So in short he had no choice either, about that or about selling the house, which was so full of associations with my mother. In a matter of two or three weeks after he put it on the market, it was bought by a man who had had enough of farming and wanted to live in town. One day while I was in school the moving men came and what furniture my father hadn’t managed to sell or give away ended up in a much smaller house that he had rented on an unpaved street out near the edge of town.
I went straight home from school to the new house. Though as a grown man I have often stood and looked at the old house, I have never been inside it since that day, when a great many objects that I remember and would like to be reunited with disappeared without a trace. Victorian walnut sofas and chairs that my fingers had absently traced every knob and scroll of, mahogany tables, worn Oriental rugs, gilt mirrors, pictures, big square books full of photographs that I knew by heart. If they hadn’t disappeared then, they would have on some other occasion, life being, as Ortega y Gasset somewhere remarks, in itself and forever shipwreck.
The rented house had no yard to speak of, the porch steps were ten feet from the front sidewalk, and our house and the house next door were identical. The bites that woke me in the night proved to be bedbugs, concealed under a loose corner of the wallpaper, and the exterminator took care of them. My father probably thought that since we were not going to stay there it didn’t matter too much what the house was like. Or there may not, at that moment, have been anything better. I used to stand and compare the two identical houses, detail by detail, the way you compare repeats in wallpaper, hoping to find some small difference. I did not so much miss the old house as blot it completely out of my mind. We had gone down in the world and there didn’t seem to be anything to do but make the most of it. Ninth Street had the air of having been there since the beginning of time. Generations of children had grown up there, leaving their bicycles where people could fall over them, making leaf houses, climbing trees, playing run-sheep-run on summer evenings. The unpaved street we were now living on had no past and no future but only a wan present in which it was hard to think of anything to do.
One evening in October my father and Grace McGrath came down the stairs in her sister’s house and were married on the landing, by the Catholic priest, who couldn’t marry them in a church because my father was a Protestant. I was the only person present under the age of thirty. My older brother was away at college, my younger brother asleep in his crib. Now was the moment to forget about that door I had walked through without thinking, and about the void that could sometimes be bridged in dreams, and about the way things used to be when my mother was alive. Instead, I clung to them more tightly than ever, even as I was being drawn willy-nilly into my father’s new life.
III
THE NEW HOUSE
The small towns in central Illinois nearly all owe their existence to the coming of the railroads
in the decade before the Civil War. I have always had the impression that Lincoln is in some way different from the others but perhaps that is only because I lived there. It is the county seat and has two coal mines, now worked out. It has never had any sizable factories, and owes its modest prosperity to the surrounding farmland. In the year 1921 the shade trees that everywhere lined the residential streets had had time to come full size and made the town seem older than it actually was. It was not easy to tell when the houses were built, because their age was so frequently disguised by subsequent additions, and so they seemed timeless and as inseparably a part of the people who lived in them as their voices or their names or the way they combed their hair.