When she married him she had not expected him to enter the ministry. He was then a schoolteacher and doing well at that vocation. He was a natural teacher, and soon after their marriage he was made head of a private girls’ school in East Tennessee and my grandmother taught music there. At one time she had as many as fifty pupils in violin and piano. Their combined incomes made them quite well off for those days.
Then all at once he told her that he had made up his mind to enter the Church, and from that time till the end of her days my grandmother never again knew what it was to live without personal privation. During that interval the reverend and charmingly selfish gentleman would conduct parties of Episcopalian ladies through Europe, deck himself out in the finest clerical vestments from New York and London, go summers to Chautauqua and takes courses at Sewanee, while my grandmother would lose teeth to save dental expenses, choose her eyeglasses from a counter at Woolworth’s, wear at the age of sixty dresses which were made over from relics of her bridal trousseau, disguise illness to avoid the expense of doctors. She took eighteen-hour trips sitting up in a day coach whenever summertime or another crisis in her daughter’s household called her to St. Louis, did all her own housework and laundry, sometimes kept two or three roomers, taught violin, taught piano, made dresses for my mother when my mother was a young lady, and afterwards for my sister, took an active part in all the women’s guilds and auxiliaries, listened patiently and silently through fifty-five years of Southern Episcopalian ladies’ guff and gossip, smiled beautifully but not widely in order not to show missing teeth, spoke softly, sometimes laughed like a shy girl although my grandfather often said that she wouldn’t know a joke if she bumped into one in the middle of the road, skimped all year long—doing all these things without the aid of a servant, so that once a year, in the summer, she could take the long daycoach trip to St. Louis to visit her only child, my mother, and her three grandchildren which included myself and my sister and our little brother. She always came with a remarkable sum of money sewed up in her corset. I don’t know just how much, but probably several hundred dollars—in spite of the fact that my grandfather’s salary as a minister never exceeded a hundred and fifty dollars a month.
We called her “Grand.” Her coming meant nickels for ice cream, quarters for movies, picnics in Forest Park. It meant soft and gay laughter like the laughter of girls between our mother and her mother, voices that ran up and down like finger exercises on the piano. It meant a return of grace from exile in the South and it meant the propitiation of my desperate father’s wrath at life and the world which he, unhappy man, could never help taking out upon his children—except when the presence, like music, of my grandmother in the furiously close little city apartment cast a curious unworldly spell of peace over all there confined.
And so it was through the years, almost without any change at all, as we grew older. “Grand” was all that we knew of God in our lives! Providence was money sewed in her corset!
My grandmother never really needed a corset and why she wore one I don’t quite know. She was never anything but straight and slender, and she bore herself with the erect, simple pride of a queen or a peasant. Her family were German—her maiden name was Rosina Maria Francesca Otte. Her parents had emigrated to America from Hamburg, I suppose sometime in the first half of the past century. They were Lutherans but my grandmother was educated in a Catholic convent and at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. I never saw my grandmother’s father but he looks in pictures like Bismarck. I barely remember her mother, in fact I only remember that she was a spry little old lady who referred to scissors as “shears.” About my greatgrandfather Otto I remember only that it was said of him that he declined to eat salads because he said that grass was only for cows, and that he had come to America in order to avoid military service. He made a large fortune as a merchant and then he lost it all. The last bit of it was exchanged for a farm in East Tennessee, and his farm had an almost legendary character in my grandmother’s life.
My grandmother Rose was one of four children who scattered like blown leaves when the family fortune was gone. One of the two brothers disappeared and was never heard of again, and the other, Clemence, still lives in Mobile, Alabama, and must be near ninety. My grandmother had a sister named Estelle who married twice, first to a Tennessee youth named Preston Faller who died young and then to an older man named Ralston, a judge who had the dubious distinction of presiding over the famous Scopes trial in East Tennessee, which was known as the “Monkey trial.” Once or twice, in the summer, “Grand” took us to South Pittsburgh, Tennessee, to visit “the Ralstons,” about which I remember honey kept in a barrel on the back porch, hot sun on pine needles, and the wildness and beauty of my grandmother’s nephew, young Preston Faller Jr., whistling as he dressed for a dance in a room that contains in my memory only a glittering brass bed and roses on the wallpaper and dusk turning violet at the open windows. But I was a child of seven and it is really only the honey in the barrel on the back porch that I remember very clearly, and the watermelons set to cool in the spring water and the well water that tasted of iron, and the mornings being such mornings! I do remember that Preston Faller Jr. would drive his stepfather’s car without permission to other towns and stay nights and I remember that once he took me to a minstrel show and that there was an accordion played in this show, and that the keys or buttons of the accordion are remembered as diamonds and emeralds and rubies set in mother-of-pearl. Preston Faller Jr. now lives in Seattle and is doing well there and has sent us pictures of his house and his Cadillac car. And to think that he was such a ne’er-do-well boy! But he was the son of the sister of my grandmother—how time flies!—he’s over fifty now…
I spoke a while back of my grandmother’s inherited farm which her bankrupt parents had retired to in East Tennessee. Actually it was only about two hundred acres of rocky, hilly soil—well, maybe three or four hundred acres—but it was divided by inheritance among the two sisters, my grandmother and Estelle, and their only known living brother, Clemence. Estelle died early of asthma and an overdose of morphine administered by a confused country doctor, and so this legendary farm belonged to my grandmother and her brother and the children of her sister. It was administered by Judge Ralston, the widower of Estelle. I remember only two things about it, or three. One, that my great-aunt Estelle had to live on it prior to her first marriage and that she told my grandmother that she was so lonely that she used to shout hello on the front porch in order to hear an echo from an opposite mountain. Then I remember that some of the timber was sold for several hundred dollars and that the proceeds were passed out among all the inheritors like holy wafers at Communion. And then I remember, finally, that one time, probably after the death of Judge Ralston, my grandmother paid a valedictory visit to this farm, which she had always dreamed might someday prove to contain a valuable deposit of mineral or oil or something, and found that the old homestead had been reduced to a single room which contained an old female squatter. This ancient squatter could not satisfactorily explain how she came to be there on my grandmother’s property. “We came by and stayed” was about all she could say. My grandmother inquired what had become of the large porch and the stone chimney and the other rooms and the female squatter said that her husband and sons had had to burn the logs for fire in winter, and that was what had become of the porch and other rooms, that they had disposed financially of the stones in the chimney, too. My grandmother then inquired where they were, these male members of the squatter household, and the finger-thin old lady informed her that the husband had died and that the sons had gone in town a year ago with a big load of lumber and had never returned and she was still sitting there waiting for them to return or some word of them…
That was the end of the story of the farm, which had meant to my grandmother an assurance against a future in which she thought maybe all of us might have need of a bit of land to retire to…
The one thing that my grandmother dreaded most in the world
was the spectre of that dependence which overtakes so many aged people at the end of their days, of having to be supported and cared for by relatives. In my grandmother’s case there were no relatives who had ever stopped being at least emotionally dependent on her, but nevertheless this dread hung over her and that was why she continued to keep house in Memphis long after she was physically able to bear it and only gave up and came to St. Louis a few months before her death.
Some years earlier than that, when she and Grandfather were living in Memphis on his retirement pension of eighty-five dollars a month, I took refuge with them once more, after suffering a nervous collapse at my job in a St. Louis wholesale shoe company. As soon as I was able to travel, I took flight to their tiny cottage in Memphis and slept on the cot in the parlor. That summer I had a closer brush with lunacy than I had had any time since the shattering storms of my earliest adolescence, but gradually once again, as it had in those early crises, my grandmother’s mysteriously peace-giving presence drew me back to at least a passable proximation of sanity. And when fall came I set out upon that long upward haul as a professional writer, that desperate, stumbling climb which brought me at last, exhausted but still breathing, out upon the supposedly sunny plateau of “fame and fortune.” It began that Memphis summer of 1934. Also that summer, a turning point in my life, something of an opposite nature occurred to “Grand.” Through the years, through her miracles of providence, her kitchen drudgery, her privations and music pupils and so forth, she had managed to save out of their tiny income enough to purchase what finally amounted to $7500 in government bonds.
One morning that memorable summer a pair of nameless con men came to call upon my fantastically unworldly grandfather. They talked to him for a while on the porch in excited undertones. He was already getting deaf, although he was then a relatively spry youth of eighty, and I saw him leaning toward them cupping an ear and giving quick nods of mysterious excitement. After a while they disappeared from the porch and he was gone from the house nearly all of that fierce yellow day. He came home in the evening, looking white and shaken, and said to my grandmother, “Rose, come out on the porch, I have something to tell you.”
What he had to tell her was that for some unfathomable reason he had sold their bonds and transferred five thousand in cash to this pair of carrion birds who had called upon him that morning and addressed him as “Reverend” in voices of sinisterly purring witchery.
I see my grandmother now, looking off into dimming twilight space from a wicker chair on the porch in Memphis and saying only, “Why, Walter?”
She said, “Why, Walter,” again and again, till finally he said, “Rose, don’t question me any more because if you do, I will go away by myself and you’ll never hear of me again!”
At that point she moved from the wicker chair to the porch swing and for a while I heard nothing, from my discreet position in the parlor, but the rasping voice of metal chain-links rubbed together as my grandmother swung gently back and forth and evening closed about them in their spent silence, which was, I felt without quite understanding, something that all their lives had been approaching, even half knowingly, a slow and terrible facing of something between them.
“Why, Walter?”
The following morning my grandfather was very busy and my grandmother was totally silent.
He went into the tiny attic of the bungalow and took out of a metal filing case a great, great, great pile of cardboard folders containing all his old sermons. He went into the back yard of the bungalow with this load, taking several trips, heaping all of the folders into the ashpit, and then he started a fire and fifty-five years of hand-written sermons went up in smoke. The blaze was incontinent. It rose far above the rim of the concrete incinerator, but what I most remember, more than that blaze, was the silent white blaze of my grandmother’s face as she stood over the washtub, the stove, the kitchen table, performing the menial duties of the house and not once even glancing out of the window where the old gentleman, past eighty, was performing this auto-da-fe as an act of purification.
“Why, Walter?”
Nobody knows!
Nobody but my grandfather who has kept the secret into this his ninety-sixth spring on earth, and those rusty-feathered birds of prey who have gone wherever they came from—which I hope to be hell, and believe so…
I think the keenest regret of my life is one that doesn’t concern myself, not even the failure of any work of mine nor the decline of creative energy that I am aware of lately. It is the fact that my grandmother died only a single year before the time when I could have given her some return for all she had given me, something material in partial recompense for that immeasurable gift of the spirit that she had so persistently and unsparingly of herself pressed into my hands when I came to her in need.
My grandfather likes to recall that she was born on All Souls’ Day and that she died on the Feast of Epiphany, which is the sixth day of January.
The death occurred under merciless circumstances. Her health had been failing for the last five years till finally the thing she had always dreaded came to pass. She had to abandon and sell the home in Memphis and accept the shelter of my father’s house in St. Louis because she was literally dying on her feet. Somehow she got through the process of pulling up stakes in Memphis, packing away possessions that had accumulated through sixty years of housekeeping and then that final eighteen-hour day-coach trip to St. Louis. But soon as she arrived there, with a temperature of 104, she collapsed and had to go, for the first time in her life, to a hospital. I was not anywhere near home at this time, the fall of 1943.1 was doing a stint for a film studio in California. I got a letter from my mother giving me this news, that my grandmother was fatally ill with a malignant condition of long standing which had now affected her liver and lungs and placed a very brief limit to her remnant of life.
“Your grandmother,” she wrote me, “has dropped down to eighty pounds but she won’t give up. It’s impossible to make her stay in bed. She insists on helping with the housework and this morning she did a week’s laundry!”
I came home. It was a week before Christmas and there was a holly wreath on the door and somebody’s next-door radio was singing “White Christmas” as I lugged my two suitcases up the front walk. I stopped halfway to the door. Through the frothy white curtains at the parlor windows I saw my grandmother moving alone through the lighted parlor like a stalking crane, so straight and tall for an old lady and so unbelievably thin!
It was a while before I could raise the brass knocker from which the Christmas wreath was suspended. I waited and prayed that some other member of the family, even my father, would become visible through those white gauze curtains, but no other figure but the slowly stalking figure of my grandmother, who seemed to be moving about quite aimlessly to a soundless and terribly slow march tune, a ghostly brass band that was playing a death march, came into view!
The family, I learned later, had gone out to that monthly business banquet of my father’s world called the Progress Club.
My grandfather was in bed. “Grand” was waiting up alone to receive me at whatever hour—I had not wired precisely when—I might appear at the family door for this last homecoming of mine that she would take part in.
As my grandmother drew the door open in response to my knock, I remember how she laughed like a shy girl, a girl caught sentimentalizing over something like a sweetheart’s photograph, and cried out, in her young voice, “Oh, Tom, oh, Tom!” And as I embraced her, I felt with terror almost nothing but the material of her dress and her own arms burning with fever through that cloth.
She died about two weeks later, after a spurious, totally self-willed period of seeming recuperation.
I left the house right after dinner that evening. She had washed the dishes, refusing my mother’s assistance or my grandfather’s or mine, and was at the piano playing Chopin when I went out the door.
When I returned only two or three hours later, the whole two-story house wh
ich we now occupied was filled with the sound of her last struggle for breath.
On the stairs was a stranger who had heard me knock before I discovered that I did have the key.
He said, with no expression, “Your mother wants you upstairs.”
I went upstairs. At the top of the steps, where my grandmother’s hemorrhage had begun, was a pool of still fresh blood. There was a trail of dark wet blood into the bathroom and the toilet bowl still unflushed was deep crimson and there were clotted bits of voided lung tissue in the bowl and on the tiles of the bathroom floor. Later I learned that this incontinent giving up of her lifeblood had occurred almost immediately after I had left the house, three hours ago, and still in her bedroom my grandmother was continuing, fiercely, wildly, unyieldingly, her battle with death, which had already won that battle halfway up the stairs…
I didn’t dare enter the room where the terrible struggle was going on. I stood across the hall in the dark room which had been my brother’s before he entered the army. I stood in the dark room, possibly praying, possibly only sobbing, possibly only listening, I don’t know which, and across the hall I heard my mother’s voice saying over and over again, “Mother, what is it. Mother, what is it, what are you trying to tell me?”
I only dared to look in. My mother was crouched over the figure of my grandmother on the bed, mercifully obscuring her from me. My grandfather was kneeling in prayer beside his armchair. The doctor was hovering helplessly over all three with a hypodermic needle and a bowl of steaming water and this or that bit of useless paraphernalia.
Then all at once the terrible noise was still.
I went into the room.
My mother was gently closing my grandmother’s jaws and eyes.
Some hours later neighbors began to arrive. My grandfather went downstairs to let them in, and standing at the top of the stairs, I heard him say to them, “My wife is very weak, she seems to be very weak now.”