Growing Up (8 page)

My Uncle Tom worked as a blacksmith in the B&O yards near Harpers Ferry. That was a good job too. Though he walked the four-mile round trip to and from the shop daily in sooty railroader’s clothes, Uncle Tom was well off. His house contained a marvel I had never seen before: an indoor bathroom. This was enough to mark Uncle Tom a rich man, but in addition he had a car. And such a car. It was an Essex, with windows that rolled up and down with interior hand cranks, not like my father’s Model T with the isinglass windows in side curtains that had to be buttoned onto the frame in bad weather. Uncle Tom’s Essex even had cut-glass flower vases in sconces in the backseat. He was a man of substance. When he rolled up in his Essex for Ida Rebecca’s command appearances on Sunday afternoons in Morrisonville, wearing a white shirt and black suit, smoking his pipe, his pretty red-haired wife Goldie on the seat beside him, I felt pride in kinship to so much grandeur.

Lewis, Ida Rebecca’s youngest son, also thrived in Brunswick, at the barbering trade. Though scarcely twenty-five years old, he
had his own shop and called by appointment on the Brunswick ladies to cut their hair at home in the new boyish bobs and sometimes, according to people envious of Uncle Lewis’s reputation for gallantry, to render more knightly service. Uncle Lewis was my first vision of what male elegance could be. He had glistening black hair always parted so meticulously that you might have thought he needed surveyor’s instruments to comb a line so straight. Thin black sideburns extended down to his earlobes in the style cartoonists adopted as the distinguishing mark of high-toned cads. With a high gloss on his city shoes, in his crisp white barber’s smock, he wisecracked with the railroad men as he presided in front of a long wall of mirrors lined with pomades, tonics, and scents. I admired him as the ultimate in dandyism.

On those magic occasions when my father took me to Brunswick, the supreme delight was to have Uncle Lewis seat me on a board placed across the arms of his barber chair, crank me into the sky, and subject me to the pampered luxury of being clippered, snipped, and doused with heavy applications of Lucky Tiger or Jeris hair tonic, which left my hair plastered gorgeously to the sides of my head and sent me into the street reeking of aromatic delight.

After one such clipping I climbed a hill in Brunswick with my father to call at Uncle Tom’s house. Though Uncle Tom was fourteen years older, my father loved and respected him above all his brothers. Maybe it was because he saw in Tom the blacksmith some shadow of the blacksmith father who died when my father was only ten. Maybe it was because Tom, living in such splendor with his indoor bathroom and his Essex, had escaped Morrisonville and prospered. Maybe it was for Tom’s sweetness of character, which was unusual among Ida Rebecca’s boys.

Uncle Tom was at work that day, but Aunt Goldie gave us a warm welcome. She was a delicate woman, not much bigger than my mother, with hair of ginger red, blue eyes, and a way of looking at you and turning her head suddenly this way and that which reminded me of an alert bird. She was also a notoriously fussy housekeeper, constantly battling railroad grime to preserve her
house’s reputation for not containing “a speck of dust anywhere in it.” Before admitting us to her spotless kitchen, she had my father and me wipe our shoes on the doormat, then made a fuss about how sweet I smelled and how handsome I looked, then cut me a huge slab of pie.

My great joy in calling on Aunt Goldie was the opportunity afforded to visit the indoor bathroom, so naturally after polishing off the pie I pretended an urgent need to use the toilet. This was on the second floor and required a journey through the famously dust-free dining room and parlor, but Aunt Goldie understood. “Take your shoes off first so you don’t track up the floor,” she said. Which I did. “And don’t touch anything in the parlor.”

With this caution she admitted me to the sanctum of spotlessness. I trod across immaculate rugs and past dining room furniture, armchairs, side tables, a settee, like a soldier walking in a mine field. There would be no dust left behind if I could help it.

At the top of the stairs lay the miracle of plumbing. Shutting the door to be absolutely alone with it, I ran my fingers along the smooth enamel of the bathtub and glistening faucet handles of the sink. The white majesty of the toilet bowl, through which gallons of water could be sent rushing by the slightest touch of a silvery lever, filled me with envy. A roll of delicate paper was placed beside it. Here was luxury almost too rich to be borne by anyone whose idea of fancy toiletry was Uncle Irvey’s two-hole privy and a Montgomery Ward catalog.

After gazing upon it as long as I dared without risking interruption by a search party, I pushed the lever and savored the supreme moment when thundering waters emptied into the bowl and vanished with a mighty gurgle. It was the perfect conclusion to a trip to Brunswick.

W
HEN
my father came home from work that evening he ate hurriedly, bathed in the tin basin, and changed into his blue serge suit, white shirt, necktie, and low shoes. It was a Wednesday in November. We were all going on a trip.

Doris, Audrey, my mother, and I were already dressed in our best clothes and the suitcase was packed when my father arrived. It was the first time the family had ever made a trip together. I had been itching to get away all afternoon, annoying my mother with the same question repeated a hundred times—“Is it almost time to go? Is it almost time to go?”—and she had gone about the preparations singing happily to herself.

When the supper dishes were cleared it was dark and chilly. My father buttoned up the isinglass windows of the Model T and hoisted Doris and me onto the high backseat. My mother climbed into the front with Audrey in her arms, my father spun the crank, the motor caught, he jumped in behind the wheel, and we rolled merrily out of Morrisonville.

We were headed for Taylorstown, five miles away, to spend the night with Uncle Miller. It was the hog-butchering season, a
time of communal festivals which ended the long harvest season. Uncle Miller, Ida Rebecca’s fifth son, had invited my father to bring us all for the festivities at his house. These would start with the predawn slaughter of Miller’s hogs and turn into a sixteen-hour bout of boiling, scraping, grinding, chopping, slicing, stuffing, feasting, gossip, and high-spirited jocularity.

For my mother there were risks in a visit with Miller, for he was fond of drink. A tall cadaverous man with a nose like a hatchet blade, he was, of all Ida Rebecca’s boys, the closest to being a blithe spirit. His passions were antique furniture and shrewd bargaining. When his eyes sparkled with the stimulus of a few drinks, his furniture standards fell and he began bargaining for anything for the sheer love of bargaining. In this mood he even tried to draw my father into barter deals for our mail-order furniture. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Ben. I’m going to make you a proposition. …” Uncle Miller was constantly making propositions, and to develop a mood more congenial to bargaining he passed the whiskey freely.

Since we would all be together at Uncle Miller’s house, though, the risks were not high. Aunt Edmonia would be there to keep things in hand. Aunt Edmonia, Miller’s wife, fit my mother’s idea of a good woman. She exercised woman’s power for decency. Uncle Miller minded his ways when Aunt Edmonia was in the house.

The car trip through the cold and darkness felt like an immense journey to me. I had exhausted myself with the excitement of anticipating it and drowsed off in fatigue, and then woke, and it seemed we had been driving for hours, and then dozed again, and then woke, and dozed again. …

For my mother, a trip outside Ida Rebecca’s territory was worth a little risk. I had just turned five, and my mother was more and more unhappy about Ida Rebecca’s growing influence on me. The latest tension involved ghosts.

My grandmother believed firmly in the existence of ghosts and the importance of heeding omens. I was with her one day
when a bird flew into her house. When we had shooed it out she told me, “Somebody’s going to die.”

I didn’t understand.

“A bird coming into the house is an omen,” she said. “It means somebody in that house is going to die.”

Since I was in that house when the bird came in, I went to my mother in alarm and told her the awful news.

“Don’t pay any attention to stuff like that. It’s just ignorant superstition.”

Ida Rebecca had evidence, though. She had told me of a woman not far from Morrisonville who died after a bird got into her house. I told this too to my mother.

“Naturally she died,” my mother said. “People die every day. Birds don’t have anything to do with it. If there hadn’t been a bird for miles around she’d have died just the same.”

I wasn’t too reassured.

“Listen here, Buddy, when the Lord’s ready to take you away from here you’re going to go, and not before, and the Lord’s not going to send a bird to tell you to get ready. Don’t believe things like that. It’s heathenish.”

The night a ghost appeared in my grandmother’s parlor door made my mother even angrier. It was in the dark of the evening with kerosene lamps casting gigantic shadows on the stone walls of my grandmother’s sitting room, and I was there with her and three of my uncles when she started up to her bedroom. The trip took her into a narrow adjoining room and past the closed parlor door, through which I’d seen my first Christmas tree.

I heard her cry out, then she was back among us in a frightful state.

“Raymond’s in there,” she said.

Raymond, one of her twins, had died in 1917, eight years before I was born, at the age of twenty-three.

“He’s standing there in the doorway right at the foot of the stairs.”

As oldest son, Uncle Irvey sought to reassure her.

“He’s there. Standing in the doorway,” she insisted.

While I huddled on a chair in a fever of terror, Uncle Irvey took a lamp and led his brothers into the next room to search for dead Raymond. There was silence. Soon I heard doors being opened and closed, then heavy shoes stamping overhead.

Returning, Uncle Irvey said, “We’ve been over the whole house, Mother, and there’s nothing here.”

“I saw him just as plain as I see you now,” she said.

Naturally I reported Raymond’s appearance to my mother the instant I crossed the road. Normally my mother did not speak disrespectfully to me of Ida Rebecca, but this time impatience overcame restraint.

“That old woman’s going soft in the head.”

“But she saw him, Mama, just as plain as I see you.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts. People just make them up and think they see them.”

I still wasn’t persuaded. I had been there and seen the ghost’s dreadful effect on my grandmother.

“Listen here, Buddy, the dead don’t come back. You never have to worry about the dead hurting you. It’s the living you’ve got to worry about in this world.”

Supper was almost ready when we arrived that night at Uncle Miller’s. In the few minutes before we sat down Uncle Miller asked my father to come out to the pigpen for a look at the porkers to be slaughtered in the morning. I heard them outside talking and laughing and knew they were having a drink in the darkness. In Morrisonville you learned the symptoms young. There was a certain change in the level of the voice, a laughter slightly more enthusiastic than laughter usually sounded. But they were only outside a few minutes, not long enough to overdo it, and when they returned and we all sat at the table, they looked fine.

We started with fried oysters. Presently my father put his fork down, rose from the table, and went into the yard; we all sat there not saying a word, listening to him outside vomiting. Uncle Miller
and my mother went outside then, and after a while my mother returned and took Doris and me off to the bedroom where Audrey was already asleep.

The house was unnaturally quiet next morning. The butchering festival I’d expected was not in progress, and my father was not in the bedroom with us. My mother said he was in Uncle Miller’s bedroom because a doctor was coming to see him.

I wandered around the backyard until the sun burned off the frost. After a while my mother came out.

“The doctor’s here,” she said. “He’s going to take Daddy to the hospital in Frederick so he can get better. Come and kiss him good-bye.”

To my surprise my father was fully dressed and seated in the doctor’s small roadster at the front of the house. He was wearing his blue serge suit, white shirt, and necktie, and looked all right to me. I walked across the lawn to the car, and he leaned out the window on the passenger’s side and smiled, but he didn’t have much to say to me. Just, “Daddy’ll be home in a day or two. Be a good boy till I get back.”

My mother held me up, and he gave me a kiss.

“We’d better get going,” the doctor said.

My mother set me down and leaned into the car and kissed him. She and I watched the roadster together until it passed over the brow of the hill headed for the Maryland side of the Potomac.

By afternoon we were back in Morrisonville. Next day before sunup she rose to visit the hospital. Uncle Irvey would drive her.