Chapter I: Part 1

THE
GRANDMOTHERS

_A Family Portrait_

BY
GLENWAY WESCOTT

_You do not see me as I once was.
Children, get out the photographs._
--My Grandmother

_Publishers_
Harper & Brothers
NEW YORK _and_ LONDON
1927

THE GRANDMOTHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY
HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

_FIRST EDITION_

To
My Mother

_CONTENTS_

I. Introduction: Alwyn Tower as a Small Boy. The House. His
Grandmother Tower’s Keepsakes 1

II. Alwyn’s Knowledge of America and His Family 17

III. His Grandfather Tower’s Character. A Fragment of
Autobiography. The Rest of His Life 34

IV. His Grandmother Tower’s Girlhood. Her Soldier Sweetheart.
Her Marriage 56

V. His Great-Aunt Mary Harris. Her Life and Travels 70

VI. His Great-Aunt Nancy Tower’s Unhappiness 94

VII. His Great-Uncle Leander Tower’s Return. The Adoption of
Timothy Davis 112

VIII. The Dead. His Grandmother’s Final Grief. The Photograph
Albums 140

IX. His Uncle Jim, the Minister, as a Young Man 164

X. His Mother’s Girlhood and Marriage 180

XI. His Father. His Uncle Jim’s Later Life. The Religious
Faith of the Family 215

XII. His Uncle Evan, the Deserter 258

XIII. His Aunt Flora 309

XIV. His Maternal Grandparents, Ira and Ursula Duff 326

XV. Conclusion: Another Moving. His Grandmother Tower’s
Deathbed 345

A Memorandum _for the guidance of_ The Reader

Henry Tower had four brothers and one sister: Harrison, John, Leander, Hilary, and Nancy.

Harrison Tower married Mary Harris, who had previously been married to a certain Dr. Brandon and to a man named Cleaver.

Leander Tower was a bachelor; and Hilary disappeared during the Civil War at the age of sixteen.

Nancy Tower married Jesse Davis, to whom she bore one son, Timothy, adopted after their death by her brother Leander.

Henry Tower married Serena Cannon; their only son, Oliver, died in infancy. After her death he married his brother Leander’s former sweetheart, Rose Hamilton. They had six children: Polly and Ada, who did not live to maturity, James, Ralph, Evan, and Flora.

James married Caroline Fielding and had no children.

Evan, who changed his name to John Craig, married Susanne Orfeo, a woman of French and Italian parentage, by whom he had one son, Leander Orfeo Craig.

Flora was unmarried, and died at the age of twenty-nine.

Ralph married Marianne, the only daughter of Ira and Ursula Duff. Their eldest son was named Alwyn.

_THE GRANDMOTHERS_

1. Introduction: Alwyn Tower as a Small Boy. The House. His Grandmother Tower’s Keepsakes

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 grandparents the third house on the farm which his grandfather 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 Flora 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 jigsaw 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, the residue of spiritless perfumes and bouquets long since thrown away, suggested energies now exhausted and passions now forgotten: the energy which had chosen this 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 tintypes: 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.”

2. Alwyn’s Knowledge of America and His Family

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 tintypes, 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.