Foreword to the 1994 Edition

AS most children do, I suppose, I took it for granted that the things I saw around me every day had always been just as they appeared when I saw them. That was the way they were. At the same time, I learned quite early that they had come to be from a time before, when they had been different. The contradiction, after all, survives childhood and becomes part of what we continue to think of as the present. But when I tried to inquire where things and people had come from and what they had been like before, I knew then it was like trying to fly. No one else seemed to encourage the enterprise, and again and again silence closed over it. The urge to know, and the frustration that accompanied it, continued through my childhood, and when my parents died, my efforts to find out their own stories and origins had not come to much.

They had told me odds and ends, from time to time. There were little collections of old photographs that I had not seen in my parents’ lifetimes. Some were pictures of people I could not identify, and whom nobody by then would ever be able to identify. There were scraps of diaries, not journals, but simply records—visits, appointments, expenditures—most of them my mother’s, for she was a careful and orderly person. Indeed, she kept notes of many things as they occurred, including telephone conversations as she listened, but she did so in a shorthand that she herself had evolved, which she declared proudly was an absolute secret and would never be read by anyone else. Even so, she destroyed almost everything of the kind, including letters. Late in life, at my persistent urging, she wrote down some sparse notes about her immediate forebears, on a half-used yellow legal pad, but she stopped after a few pages.

I think I understand something about her reserve. She had been an orphan—her own plain word for the plain fact—since she had been a small child. Both parents died when she was still virtually in her infancy. Then the grandmother who brought her up in Pittsburgh for several years in respectable poverty died, too. Then her elder brother, her only brother, Morris, took care of her out of his first wages for a few years, and he also died, in his early twenties. By that time she had prepared herself to earn a living as a secretary—and she was proud of her superlative secretarial skills. They became part of her: exact and thorough and not given to divulgence. She made it clear that she preferred not to talk about her early life, and what she remembered of it I can only guess. Its faces were gone, and she did not return physically to its scenes. Once, driving in Ohio, perhaps before I was born (I remember it only because I was told about it), she had asked my father to make a side trip to see Cheshire, the town along the river which she had not seen since she had left as a small child. When my father was driving he did not like stopping at places he had not thought of himself. He took no interest in my mother’s family and as I remember the story they did not even drive through the town. She said that she had wanted to see the cemetery.

My father’s feelings about his own early years included a static and somewhat adorned attachment to his image of the small village on the Allegheny River where he had been born, and only a vague interest in events or characters of those years if he was asked about them. He returned at intervals to western Pennsylvania to visit his mother and two sisters, but what they shared, and what they remembered, and indeed the other living members of his family, remained to me scarcely more than distant shadows.

I have come to see that neither of my parents was really able to talk much about their pasts. How much of that inability was innate and how much had been formed by the self-protective habits they had fashioned for themselves I cannot tell. I see now something of how isolated and anxious my parents were, both of them, and at what pains they were to persuade themselves and everyone else that they were neither of those things. I think that both of them grew out of their many fears, my mother considerably before my father, but some of the habits had become their way of being, and about matters of intimate memory they never spoke freely. It is not an uncommon fate, after all. In my twenties it occurred to me that the middle class could almost be defined by its agreement to obliterate origins. But I have come to think that every social group probably encourages the alteration or ignoring of history in order to perpetuate a more acceptable image.

When I was living in Europe, in the years after I left college, the curiosity about my parents’ pasts and the places they had come from acquired a new and insistent urgency, and when I came back I tried to learn more about them. By then I saw that my parents’ familiar reticence about such things was not completely hostile to my wish to know, but that it was on the side of distance and forgetting, and that the picture had faded considerably from many of the pieces of the puzzle, even for them. And I realized then and later that every one of the few relatives whom I had known while I was growing up would have been startled to the point of incredulity by the very idea that I or anyone might consider them to be subjects to write about, and that they would have resisted anything so senseless. For most of them a project of that kind would have seemed plain shocking, as though they had been told that the walls of their houses had been transparent for most of their lives.

After my parents died and I had before me all the information that I was likely to have, I was struck again, of course, by its utter inadequacy. Nevertheless, there were pieces, small and few and faded though they were, and I began to look for connections among them, to see how much of the framework might still be visible. I wanted to find out, before I forgot any more myself, what I might know by then about whatever I had managed to learn.

—W. S. Merwin

January 1994

Unframed Originals

Tomatoes

WEATHERED picket fences not much higher than my knee stood around the vegetable beds, dusty but shining, and I admired them. I would have liked to have fences like that, by the house I imagined myself living in, as I would have liked to have a boat, and a horse. I thought I might be able to make fences like that, for a garden, if I were allowed to, and if I could find the right pieces of wood somewhere. I admired the bare straight walks around the outside of the fences. It would have been hard to judge the size of the garden because the paths led through the shadows of tall bushes, and beyond the bushes, and under the trees. One path at the end disappeared among the leaves and shadows. All of that was still the garden, and I could not tell how far it went. I had never seen a garden like that. I awoke to the realization that I had not known, until then, what gardens were really like. Everything that I had heard called by that name, including the narrow bits of yard outside our kitchen window at home, with its yellow irises and its hardy asters and its one rose, fell short of this, and retreated. They were all mementos of something or apologies for something, decorations or disguises. The one I was standing in was a real garden, not a corner or a border or a circle in a lawn, or a section of something else. Where it was it was the whole place. And real things to eat grew there. I had scarcely arrived there and I did not know how long I would stay, and there was nothing for me to do in that garden. The sun shone straight down into the middle of the vegetable beds and held the leaves still. It had been summer for longer than I had known.

To the left of the beds, on the other side of the path, was a low whitewashed building with one door and one window and a morning glory vine climbing a string trellis to the eaves. I admired the building too, and thought that I would like to live, alone, in a house like that. I wanted to stay in that one. As I looked at the vegetable beds in the sunlight, with the mens’ voices passing over my head, I did not know how old I was.

Yes, I knew I was nine, but that did not seem to mean what it had meant a few minutes before. Maybe I was nothing but a child who could not read or write yet, or tell time, or put on my own clothes. Or maybe I was grown up, and understood more than I had suspected, and could decide things for myself. The old man who was showing me the garden asked me how old I was and I said, “Nine,” but I was sorry to pass on such worthless conventional information. I expected that he would see through it and understand that it referred to nothing at all, but he seemed pleased and surprised. Rather than leave it at that, I said I was almost ten. “Good for you,” he said, and nodded, and turned to nod again, approvingly, at my father, who was standing with Uncle Port, on the path to the whitewashed house. My father did not reflect the same pleasure. He was waiting.

On his face was an expression that I had not seen before. He was displeased and impatient—that much was familiar. He appeared to have grown smaller since we had come into the garden, and to be drawing back although he was standing still and wanted the old man, and everything else there, except me, to move forward. When the old man spoke, my father’s stiff smile twitched politely, vaguely. The smile had nothing to do, directly, with what the old man said. I could see that my father was not going to answer. And Uncle Port, of course, did not say anything. I did not need to look, to know that he was standing there with his head on one side, and another sort of smile, gentle, pained and sad. His expression would be saying that he was sorry, and that there was nothing he could do. But he was not in a hurry.

We were all wearing white, and the whites were all different. My father’s clothes were starched, and gleamed. The sun shone through his white shirt with its heavier and lighter white stripes, and showed his white undershirt and his sloping pale shoulders. Port’s white clothes were dimmer, thicker, older. They looked big for him. The old man’s white clothes had had everything washed out of them again and again and then they had been ironed. The shadows sank into them and were at home. I was wearing creased white shorts that must not get mussed or dirty. And white buck shoes. The old man had on a straw hat.

I did not know how old I was because none of the others knew what to say to each other, or what to do next. The old man preferred to talk to me, and my father did not want him to. I could tell that he was blaming the conversation on me. He wanted the old man to go into the whitewashed building with him and Uncle Port, while I waited outside. The old man said that if I was to be kept waiting I had to be made at home. My father, cutting across what the old man said, told me to just wait right there and not touch anything and they would not be very long. But the old man persisted. “He won’t do no harm,” he said. And to me, with a sweep of his hand, “You help yourself to anything you please.” He pointed to some tall, lush bushes with intricate curling leaves, the sunlight glittering on tiny glass spines all over their fronds and long stems, their dark shadows hiding their feet, and he asked me if I knew what those were.

“Sure he does,” he insisted to my father, without waiting for me to answer. And to me he said, bending down to point, “Them’s tomatoes.” He pulled aside some of the leaves. “Some of them’s ripe,” he said. “You can eat them right now.”

“No,” my father said, shaking his head. “That’s alright now.” And to me he repeated, “You let them alone. Don’t touch anything.”

“They won’t bother you,” the old man told me. “One time people used to believe they would kill you. Deadly poison. You believe that? Thought you’d die if you ate one.” He laughed. “But we know better now. You just help yourself, if you see anything you want.”

He turned toward the door of the building and I saw that he was bent over as though he was too tall for the doorway, but he was not even as tall as my father. The shadows of the morning glory spilled along the wall. My father turned and said to me, behind the old man’s back, “Now remember what I said. You be a good boy.” That stiff, tight look was still on his face. The corners of his mouth were drawn back and pinched. The old man took his own hat off and motioned to the others to go in, but my father said no, and asked him to go first. So the old man put his hat back on and went in. My father motioned to Port to go next. He put his hand on Port’s shoulder and gave him a little push. And then he himself went in last.

Port knew what they had to talk about once they were in there. Even I knew. And I knew, in a general way, what the papers were that my father was carrying, besides the copies of his church bulletin—the bulletin several weeks old, and the church three hundred miles away. Very possibly the old man himself knew, and the matter had already been discussed with him. That seems likely. I doubt that my father had been asked to spring the subject on him for the first time. I am not even sure why he had been asked to talk to the old man about it at all, alone except for Port, at that decisive point. The garden in which the little house stood was not far from my Uncle Harry’s house. Harry was my father’s elder brother—twelve years his senior. The old man was their father. My grandfather.

He was then eighty-one. It was the first time that I had ever seen him, and it would be the only time. When I try to imagine his face I see nothing, and then the features of his children. I do not know that I ever saw a picture of him. And that was the whole of our conversation. By the time the talk inside the house was over, and they all came out again, my father’s voice was on the way to saying goodbye. If he had been calling on a member of his congregation, he would have been about to say, “Let us join in a moment of prayer.” And squeezing his eyes shut, he would have begun, “Our Heavenly Father …” He may even have done it on that occasion. If he did, it was brief. Both he and Port were anxious to be going, and my grandfather did not try to keep them. While they had been in there he had agreed to leave the low house that had been a shed, in the garden, and to spend the rest of his life in an old men’s home. He had signed the papers.

It is possible that my father had been asked to intervene in that phase of the decision because the others had not been able to persuade my grandfather to sign and go. The old man was said to be stubborn, and perhaps he was. He may also have had misgivings about signing himself away, finally, to go somewhere wholly strange and institutional, at his age, even though he had been restless and on the move for much of his life. Harry no doubt shrank from urging his father to get out, particularly if the old man was reluctant to leave.

Harry had not been the only one, after all, who had brought Pap home, to Harry’s own house, to live, without any real warning to Harry’s kind, gentle wife Clara. When Harry and his sister Edna (to whom Port was married) and my father had got into my father’s car to go for a trip, Clara had thought they were just off to Pittsburgh to check on the old man. Their father, at that time, had been staying in an old rooming house somewhere in the city, but they were not even sure he was still there. Clara was taken completely by surprise when they turned up, late in the day, with the old man sandwiched in back, and brought him and his suitcase into the front room and dropped them off there, for good. That had been twelve years earlier, before I was born, and that was the way they had always been, all of them, as Clara would say: if they meant to do something they thought you might not agree to right away they wouldn’t tell you a thing about it, they’d just do it and surprise you. One bedroom of the house was rented out then, to help with expenses—it was the depression, and besides sometimes Harry didn’t make it home with his pay. Harry and Clara’s two elder daughters, who had been occupying another bedroom, were moved up into the attic, and their room was given to Pap.

The arrangement never worked very well. Clara felt that the old man had been, as she said, dumped on her to take care of, with no consideration at all for her. She took particular exception to a growing number of her father-in-law’s ways—such things as the everlastingly renewed stains of tobacco juice around the house on carpets and furniture. Finally Harry and Edna got the piece of land with the little house on it, and Harry fixed up the building and moved Pap in there. And there he had been ever since. Harry would walk over to see how his father was getting along, and take him things to eat, and tobacco, and maybe stop for a drink on the way over, or have a few there with the old man, or on the way back. And all those years my father had known, when I had asked him, where his father was, and he had never told me, even though we went to Harry and Clara’s house to visit, when we went back to Grandma’s.

Pap had grown up along the Allegheny River, near Templeton. He had been born there before the Civil War, and baptised John Denton Merwine, with an “e”. He was one of three sons of Jacob Ruffner Merwine and his wife Hannah, whose maiden name and birthplace I have never known. I am ignorant too of when and where the spelling “Merwine” came in. It had been in use for at least two generations by the time Jacob was born, in 1812. According to one set of records Jacob’s father was named Peter, and his mother Elizabeth Coult, and they lived and farmed in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, near Tunkhannock, where Peter’s own father, also named Peter, had a farm. The father or the son—perhaps both—made sails, besides, for markets in Philadelphia and New Jersey. The elder Peter, and his wife Mary Denton, had been among the first settlers in Tunkhannock Township. The same records declare that, two generations before the elder Peter, another Jacob had come to America from France, but I find that hard to believe. I cannot conceive of the name, in any form or spelling, ever having been French. Other records exist, in plenty, of Merwins (without the “e”) in New England in the eighteenth century and earlier. According to them, the name was brought there in 1635, by one Miles Merwin, from Wales.

My father’s family referred to John’s father as Old Jake—I do not know why, unless it was simply to distinguish him from his son, Jacob Jr., young Jake. Old Jake left the family homestead in his early twenties and went out to the Allegheny. That was in 1835. He was murdered there, at Montgomeryville, twenty-seven years later, when he was just fifty and my grandfather was six. I have heard several versions of the story.

Old Jake had been running a hotel at the time, at Templeton, and in one account he was out delivering his payroll, at night, with a horse and carriage, when he was shot and robbed. He was not the only hotel keeper in the family. His elder brother John, who had stayed at home and had become both postmaster and judge, and was known as one of the best educated men in Monroe County (“his education,” according to a local record, “being largely self-acquired, and of a practical nature”) turned the old homestead into a hotel that was famous in the region for more than fifty years. I have heard that my grandfather, too, ran a hotel in Templeton, but that may be nothing but the result of someone’s confusing his story with his father’s.

I knew none of this, even as rumors, when I was a child. I was almost thirty, and my grandfather had been dead for twelve years, before I learned that his father had been killed, and when. And I heard that from my father’s cousin, Mary. Once I knew it, and spoke of it openly to my father and his sisters, they said, “Oh yes,” and put it aside again. When I was growing up, my father never spoke of his own father at all, outside the immediate family, and even at home there were no casual references to him—there were virtually no references of any kind, ever. It was as though my grandfather did not exist and never had existed, or had vanished mysteriously, not only from the physical world, but from the minds of his offspring, long before I was born. His family’s lack of interest in the past, the closeness even of their gossip, its tiny scope, no doubt made it easier for them to drop him from consciousness, and it may be that it worked the other way around as well, and that their effacing him from their minds contributed to their indifference to what had happened to others in their past.

My father did not hear questions he did not want to hear. It was a trait that he and the rest of the family were said to have inherited from my grandmother, although they laughed about it and called it Merwin behavior. Ascribing its origin to her (and it was quite true that with her it was remarkably obvious and pervasive, and had become set with age and matriarchy and a deepening physical deafness) justified it and permitted them to take pride in its incorrigibility: it was a family trait. And my grandmother alone, for them, had come to signify the family. Even the name, in their use of it, no longer referred to their father.

I do not remember when it first occurred to me that there must have been such a person at one time, but once I conceived of my father having a father, once I knew of my grandfather’s existence, my wish to know about him persisted, along with other unanswered questions, and it stepped into the open after I started school. Many of the pupils were Irish or Italian, and most of the teachers, it seems to me now, were Irish. They tended to assume that everyone came from large, closely tangled families. A number of the other children’s grandparents, and even some of their great-grandparents, were living right there at home, features of their descendants’ daily comings and goings. I did not go so far as to envy those classmates—at least not often or consistently—but I was curious, puzzled. Their lives were as remote as the lives of children in books, who had fishing poles and straw hats, and went barefoot or wore patent leather shoes.

My mother’s parents had both died when she was a small child. She had no immediate relatives at all. It was a fact that she had to explain to people, periodically, but I had come to take it for granted that it was a perfectly natural way for things to be. I knew my father’s mother, indeed, but she lived far away where everything was different, and I seldom saw her. She was over seventy when I was born, and I never felt close to her. But at least I knew who she was, both through my own experience and my father’s and aunts’ reverential view of her. On the other hand, if I asked about my grandfather, my father did not hear. Or if I repeated the question until he heard, he would say, “Never mind,” or even, “Never mind, now.” The “now” was purely for emphasis and warning. It meant that the subject was to be considered closed—never having been opened—, and that any more questions would be considered disobedient behavior, and dealt with accordingly. So the matter was a secret, and there was no suggestion that it would ever be anything else. Both my parents, in their markedly different ways, were secretive. There was small likelihood of getting either of them to divulge anything they did not want known. I tried asking my mother about my father’s father. My mother told me that I should ask my father. But her tone lacked the vaguely ominous and long-suffering note of my father’s rare responses to the questions. Instead, it revealed a measure of scorn for the whole subject, a touch of mockery. Not information, but a different perspective. With regard to her own lack of relatives, her manner suggested that having a limited number of kinfolk was no disadvantage, and that in fact large families were unkempt and, if not actually disreputable, nothing to be proud of.

When I did, at last, meet my father’s father, and stood in the garden with him, in the sunlight, among the bright reflections of the leaves, everything was still, and it seemed clear to me that the old man had been living there for a long time. That he had, in fact, been living there all the time, and I had never known. I could tell that from standing there in the garden, and it was so. Then he was gone, and everyone seemed to accept that as though it too had always been so, and the only grandparent had always been Grandma.

During the years when my sister and I were small children we lived in a manse at the corner of New York Avenue and 4th Street, in Union City, New Jersey, on the Palisades above Hoboken, and from time to time, on occasions that followed no pattern I could discern but were simply announced and almost immediately happened, we would go on visits “home to Grandma,” as my father said. To me, Grandma was not the obvious focus or lure of those expeditions, but she was their official destination and their justification. My father told me that she loved me, and the statement conveyed an image of shapeless faded cotton print dresses, baggy gray cardigan sweaters, loose skin on wrists and fingers, and a worn Bible with scuffed gilt-edged pages. I accepted his assurance with a feeling scarcely more intimate or distinct than that with which I received the repeated assertion that Jesus loved me. He told my sister and me how happy Grandma would be to see us, and it may have been so. He told me that I loved her, and that too I accepted as a fact, a contribution to the meaning of the word. It did not seem necessary or important for that word to refer to an emotion, a feeling, and for the emotion to be my own, one that I could recognize. Instead, it alluded, apparently, to one of many workings of the grown-up world which I was too young to understand, but which would become intelligible, and indeed obvious to me, some day. In the meantime it was simply so and not to be questioned.

When I was small it seemed to me that the Union City manse had been the family home forever, but in fact my parents had moved there only a few months before I was born, when my mother’s pregnancy was well advanced. Up until that time, when they had been living in Pittsburgh, to begin with, and then during the first years of my father’s ministry at country churches in Armstrong County, near where he had grown up, it was a relatively easy matter for him to drop in on “Mumma” frequently—the young preacher, the son who had been to college and now drove a car. Eventually his own car. It was a myth, that car, by the time I was old enough to listen to what was said about it. The Ford. There may have been more than one of them, in that antediluvian time, but they blended into a single archetype in the telling. For my father, everything to do with driving and with his cars had acquired an aura which shone from all parts of the subject, and was his own mysterious possession. He had learned to drive in Kittanning, the town on the Allegheny to which his mother had moved the children—breaking definitively with my grandfather—when my father was eleven. My father’s driving teacher was an old friend, a plump, merry woman of his own age named Bernie—Bernice. His close, affectionate relation with her comfortably-off family (established in local business and politics, with a white frame house under old shade trees, on a brick-paved side street—and with cars) went back to his early adolescence. He described with unfailing delight Bernie and himself at the wheel, the car hers or her family’s. Again and again they launched themselves on the long hill outside Kittanning, which had been steeper in those days, of course, and prayed for the brakes to hold when they were going downhill, and for the motor not to stall when they were on the way up. Not many people had licenses, then. Bernie had had hers for a year or so. His own license, when he got it, enabled him to earn a salary as chauffeur for a Presbyterian minister, while enrolled as a divinity student at Western Seminary. No doubt he found occasion, before long, to call triumphantly at his mother’s house in Kittanning, driving Dr. Shelton’s big car.

My father’s driving—he spoke of it as though it were something he could point to—was a treasure he cherished all his life. From the start it was a proof, to him, of his own exceptional ability and what it could achieve, a sign that he had made good and not disappointed his Mumma’s hopes, or his own. My grandfather could not drive a car. He could drive a team, and was said to have had a river pilot’s license—but what did those matter in the world that my father had entered in college and the clergy? Very possibly his brothers did not drive at that time either, though they were older than he was. So it set him apart, and permitted a freedom of movement which, in his case, could be deployed in such a way as to suggest special responsibilities. Even after driving had become all that is most ordinary he remained proud of his own as something distinctive, and was prompt to refer to the number of years he had driven, how early he had obtained his license, and—until he was in his sixties—to the fact that he had never had even a minor accident. “Not a scratch,” he said, though it was not literally true. Yet he never learned to shift into second without grinding the gears, although he winced, clucked his tongue, shook his head, if he heard someone else do it. Sometimes his gear-crashing was blamed, by an elliptical process, on the Ford, or the car he had learned on, and the peculiarities of their gear systems. As far as I can remember from early allusions, his first car had been a hand-me-down, passed on because neither the car nor the former owner had much to lose by the transfer, and because the machine would be suitable for a novice to practice with. And then, I think, came The Ford, the first real car. In my mind it is green, with a rumble seat, but I never saw it, and it is possible that the car acquired that color in my mind from nothing except the fact that my father bought it from a doctor friend in Greenville, who warned him that it was no car for a preacher because it ran half on gas and half on cuss. It started reluctantly, by all accounts, in response to a handcrank in front. The fuel line worked by gravity, so the only way for it to climb a hill was in reverse. It stalled in the rain, or in long puddles, and had to be cranked again in cloudbursts until it shook itself. It served my father and mother, in this way, for a couple of years, on the rutted roads of western Pennsylvania.

Then and later, all through my childhood, whatever car they had or we had was indisputably my father’s. At some time in their first years together he had started to teach my mother to drive. It must have been early in their courtship, or their marriage—an exceptional, romantic gesture. And he must have felt some ambivalence about it even when it was suggested. My mother maintained (it was a word she used often) that he had shown no patience at all, and perhaps in an attempt to ease the situation by generalizing it, she came to express the opinion that no husband or wife should try to teach the other to drive. The lessons came to grief quickly. I do not know what car they were driving—a borrowed one, or the Ford soon after they got it. But my mother had failed to change gears correctly on a hill, and then had not used the brakes promptly enough, nor steered accurately enough, and the automobile, which fortunately was not going very fast, had bumped the entrance to a narrow iron bridge, and injured a front fender. The curriculum ended at that spot. My mother refused to drive further, and she stuck to the decision, to which she had been brought, she said, by my father’s behavior on that occasion: his annoyance at the accident and the harm done to the car. The issue became a fixation in their lives, one that they used to air the multiplying disappointments and resentments that arose between them. In the thirties my father made fun of women drivers, and my mother would remind him that he had been taught to drive by a woman—a round which neither pursued. My mother arrived at other refusals, and compared them to her refusal to drive. “It would be just like the car,” she said. “If anything happened, I would never hear the last of it.” She said it again when, twenty years after the accident, in Scranton, at the time when my father bought the new Olds (from a man named Burnie) he urged her to take driving lessons and get a license. And she did, finally. First Burnie himself came, a rotund man wearing his garage coveralls, and fetched her away for driving instruction—out of sight of the house. And after Burnie, a professional instructor, in a brown hat and a gabardine. And she took her test and got her license, and still would not drive the car. The license was allowed to expire. My father cited the story as proof of his own desire to remove the problem, and of her clinging, instead, to her grievance. She insisted that she would have no peace if she drove that car. Every little thing would be her fault. He went away on a trip and left her the keys and the tank of the car full of gas, in the garage, and she never took it out once while he was gone. She said he left her the keys only because he knew she would not use them, and that he never really wanted her to drive. No doubt they were both right. It was not until another whole decade had gone by, and they were in their fifties, and my mother had a job of her own in the Kittanning court house, that she renewed her license—and bought a car of her own, which she was very particular not to let him drive, citing his way of changing gears as one of her reasons. By then, if he ever spoke of women drivers, it was with a certain amusement at the joke itself, a touch of nostalgia at being reminded of a rather silly period piece. And she could give up—partly because she seldom rode in his car, with him driving—her sharp intakes of breath when he crashed his gears or braked too suddenly or turned without signalling. She could adopt an attitude of resignation, expressed with raised eyebrows, toward his driving as a whole, to which he no longer drew attention.

But back at the end of their twenties, in the months when my mother was pregnant with me, the First Presbyterian Church of Union City, New Jersey, extended the call—as it was phrased—to my father, and he was happy to accept. They moved. A new place, within sight of Manhattan. In a new state, where people pronounced their words differently. A new church, a city church, and in comparison with the former ones, a rather large one. A new house, new to them at any rate, considerably bigger than any they had lived in. A child on the way, as part of their new life. The pregnancy dated from the beginning of the year. In keeping with the turn of the moment, The Ford was replaced with a new car, The Buick. It represented distance already traversed. And a boast of arrival.

My father remained proud of The Buick for several years, its make, model, everything about it. It is true that I do not remember ever seeing another one just like it. Neither a sedan nor a coupe; a two-door, with a deep back seat, a large hump of luggage compartment on the rear, and the spare tire bolted on a rack behind that. The middle section stood up like a deck house or a top hat, and was covered with a textured black patent leather. A broad visor extending from the front of it shaded the windshield. The body of the car, from the windowsills down, was a lustrous blue, a twilit sky color. It looked as though you could see far into it, as into water, and my father, and a series of men from the church ritually, indeed reverently, washed and Simonized it. My father pronounced the word Simonize as though it were a spell. When new license plates arrived he called me into his study for the ceremony of removing them from their waxed paper and holding them up with a little “Hm” of pleasure. The rear plate was fastened behind the spare tire, under a small black oval box from which the glass corneas of three lights protruded, one white, one green, and one amber. Each glass was fluted on the inside, like the reverse of an orange squeezer, so that looking at them one saw what appeared to be the undersides of three flowers with precise narrow petals. Only the white light worked, by the time I was old enough to be interested, but I considered all three of them, and the red tail lights—particularly when seen in the dark, with the smoke of the exhaust swirling past them—to be objects of urgent but inexplicable beauty.

Besides, there were the wooden spoke wheels, the spokes enamelled the same lucent blue as the body, with fine black lines along their centers. And running boards on which I yearned to ride. I was never completely content with the plain, almost flat radiator cap with indentations around it for grasping it, once I had seen caps adorned with thermometers standing in metal rings. It made no difference to me that my father shook his head and pursed his lips at the thermometers, and said they worked only for a short time and then were no use. I was not interested in what they were supposed to do.

The Buick’s importance extended to its housing. It had to itself the whole ground floor of a real (small) barn that walled off half of the back yard: a two story structure with hay-loft doors upstairs above the main ones. The building must have been the same age as the manse. Both of them harked back to the 1870’s or ’80’s at least, the time of horses and carriages. It was obvious that the barn had had other lives that had been concealed but were there in it still. For a while, I learned—I no longer remember from whom—it had been used as a warehouse for hides, which had been hoisted from wagons in bales, by means of the pulley that was still there, up under the peak outside the hayloft doors. For us—for me, and later for my sister—the whole building was absolutely forbidden ground, and only once did I ever see what was on the upper floor. My father, one day, in an expansive mood, allowed me in beside the car, where the walls were hung with rakes and shovels and chains and there were shelves sagging with paint cans. On the far side a ladder went straight up to a hole in the ceiling. He held me up, with my head above the level of the upper floor, so that I could peer around in the cardboard light. There was nothing there but bulges. When he lifted me down he told me that I must never go up there, for any reason. In time that upper story was populated with wasps, and with assorted people and creatures of my invention, many of whom did not even suspect each other’s existence. When my father was about to take the car out, the barn was called the garage. He would open its doors, and then open the gates of the fence along New York Avenue and back the car out onto the white-pebbled driveway, and whoever was going with him would get in there.

For those trips “back home”—which was another of my father’s ways of referring to the periodic journeys across New Jersey and Pennsylvania to New Kensington, where my grandmother had moved after he left for college, and where he had never lived—he believed in getting an early start. By one route the distance, according to the Buick’s odometer, was 444 miles. He had made it more than once in a single day, which he and his listeners considered a wonderful achievement. It allowed him, at any rate, to declare that he could do it in a day, though it meant leaving early and arriving late at night. Most of the trips on which he managed to do it were ones that he took by himself; usually, when the family was along, we broke the journey somewhere on the way. But whatever the plan, or absence of plan, he—who ordinarily did not like early rising—wanted to be on the road, if possible, by four o’clock in the morning. You made your best time, he repeated, during the hours before daylight. So we got up in the hollow dark, my mother cooperating with the arrangements, but bustling and clucking her tongue at the proceedings as she went, because getting up so early violated the children’s sleep. Her pursed lips and her impatience with the last minute packings and closings expressed a deepening reluctance concerning those trips altogether, but I did not understand that, at the beginning. My father assumed full authority for the expeditions, and ignored, or pretended to ignore, her lack of enthusiasm. “The darkest hour,” he would say to me, eyebrows and finger raised, “is just before the dawn.” As we got ready, and floated out of room after room—bedrooms, bathroom, dining room (“the children have to have their breakfast if they’re going to be up that long”)—the light in the house looked sallow and unlikely, and the smell of wallpaper followed us and then abruptly was gone, replaced by the startling yet elusive scent of what my mother called the night air, which had its dangers. There were no cars at all, at that hour, and the silent darkness was freighted with that odor speaking of the earth. Our footsteps echoed on the gravel walk. The hinges of the back area-way door squeaked behind us. The street car wires hummed above the avenue. The garage doors grated open. The Buick started up, waking huge echoes, and the tail lights moved toward us with the smoke rising around them. My mother spoke to us, and we answered, in whispers, and we climbed in onto the stiff velvet upholstery with its own dusty night smell. In the light of the street lamp its inky blue looked black.

Now for years the trips have run together into a few scarcely distinguishable variations. As a child I could not see that they were steps in a progression, and that their quest for continuity betrayed change. I supposed that the decision leading to each of those early starts—never quite as early as my father had hoped they would be—arose from a clear and identically formed impulse, as definite and indisputable as a day on a calendar. Even my parents’ different, and diverging, attitudes toward those journeys and visits seemed to me to be expressions of a single course, two sightings of the same destination. But the returns to Pennsylvania may have revealed, more than anything else, distances. And added to them.

From the beginning of her acquaintance with my father’s family, my mother had felt that its women—my grandmother and my aunts who had remained her satellites—had been unwelcoming to her, had received her as an outsider, and preferred to keep things that way. She was probably right, and it would not have made much difference to her to consider that their behavior was only in a limited sense personal; no doubt they would have done as little to make anyone my father married feel at home. As I could see later, they were not remarkably open or flexible or thoughtful, and my mother’s tastes and admirations, and most of her interests, were alien to theirs. They were habitually suspicious of anything or anybody from outside. And for her part, coming into a closed family circle made her particularly conscious of having no parents, herself, and no close relatives except her brother Morris, who died soon after she was married. Her own lack of kin must have made their minute ingrown sanctum, with my grandmother at its center, seem particularly exclusive. If she was withdrawn they found her snooty. And in their eyes, of course, my father remained their possession—and they too were right. He was the youngest son, and his achievements and distinctions, real or imagined, were adjuncts to their own carefully hedged self-esteem. Their adulation, dependable and uncritical, helped to nourish and restore a view of himself which my father clung to. Before he and my mother had moved east to Union City, and so before I was born, it was possible for him to drop in on them, surprising them; but once he and my mother lived in New Jersey, a visit was an occasion. He came alone less often, and if things were different, they knew why.

The atmosphere of those visits apparently improved for a while soon after I was born. There was a baby for them all to attend to, and my mother was in charge. She was meticulous and protective, and very sure of what was needed; but they, for their part, were zealously strict in their notions of what was proper, and they respected her suddenly revealed unhesitating authority. Besides, my grandmother was doubtless beyond caring much about the details of child care. She was old, and had reared seven children of her own. The process appeared to have used up most of her interest in the subject. Unless children made noise or otherwise violated her strait views of what was good conduct she appeared to take only a remote and vague interest in them. Her relation with them—with us—was largely indirect: she spoke to someone else about them. The role of the matriarch had grown up, had been built up, around her, gradually replacing some earlier insulation, and she accepted it absolutely. My two aunts, Alma and Edna, had no children of their own. I was a toy. During my first two years, before my sister was born, we stayed longer, on some of those visits to New Kensington, than I remember us ever doing later—a matter of weeks, sometimes. I was taken along, swathed in baby things, to the houses of my parents’ old friends in that region. Occasionally my mother consented to entrust me to Aunt Edna’s care for a few minutes at a time. When I was almost two my father’s health was not good; my mother was pregnant again; there were other demands upon my parents that called them away. By then I could be left with Eddie and her husband, Port, for slightly longer periods, and when I was alone with them they tended to spoil me. I have an impression—formed mostly of details long forgotten or subsumed in others—of the intervals with Eddie and Port as a halcyon age, and my fondness for the smells and sounds of that drab, smoky, grating town comes from those days.

My grandmother lived at 1154 Stanton Avenue, New Kensington, in what I now realize was a small house, the ground floor yellow brick, the upper story white-painted frame. Her daughter, my Aunt Eddie, and Uncle Port, lived next door at 1152, in a house that was virtually its twin, except that Eddie’s front porch was enclosed in windows, and my Grandma’s was open, with a big dark green porch swing at the end. The swing was not to be sat on, unless a grown-up came first and dusted it off; otherwise the soot got on one’s clothes and hands and legs. My Grandma’s house, inside, was the darker of the two, and it felt quieter. A black marble and ormulu clock ticked before a mirror, on the mantelpiece. Both houses faced west onto tiny patches of grass set between clipped privet hedges. At the end the grass fell away abruptly on a steep bank. Each house had a cement walk out in front, and a flight of cement steps down to the sidewalk. Beyond that there was another small bank, and at intervals a few more cement steps led down to the street—a detail that pleased me, invited me: it conveyed a remote suggestion of living in castles, with ramps and battlements. The street was not paved in those years, as I recall, but was oiled and strewn with small pebbles, and there were deep cracks and holes. It was just wide enough for two cars, but there were seldom two at once moving along it. They appeared rarely, picking their way slowly along, and they almost never parked on the street. On the far side the bank fell away again, a real drop, half as high as the house, to the railroad tracks. There was a whole broad current of them, running past the front doors of the houses, glinting and ringing. It seemed to me that the sound of them was present all the time, at those two houses. The roar and shriek of trains rose out of it and faded back into it again, echoing, as did the puffing and chugging, clanging, thumping, bell ringing and hissing of the short engines from the switching yard that fanned out, a half block to the north. When the wheels had gone the sound was still there, a clear impersonal note travelling from the springs and concerns of the outermost world, neither menacing nor addressing nor pausing, completely free of the injunctions and opinions of the family, and always there. Other sounds spoke of the actual houses. The cement walks between them echoed like slapped inner tubes, when someone’s footsteps passed through. The nails of the rat terriers kept in both cellars clicked and rattled like rice on the wood and linoleum of the cellar stairs and on the cement around the furnaces. But the sound of the tracks and the thunder of trains were the ones that stamped the place and claimed it continuously, and in coming to know them close at hand I was hearing a note that led back through my grandparents’ lives to the beginning, and before.

My grandmother came from farther north, along those tracks. As long as she was alive I never knew where she had been born and brought up, nor anything about her parents. I did not at any point feel intimate enough with her to ask her anything about herself and—at least by the time I knew her—she tended, as a matter of habit, to turn aside questions that were put to her, and to suspect the motives of anyone who questioned her. Whether that trait was inborn and inherent, or a commonplace of her background, I can only guess—and I imagine it was both. Some of it she, and the life they shared, passed on to her children. When I asked my father about her parents and where she had grown up, he seemed not to know, or to have forgotten; his manner offered little hope that he would remember. My grandmother’s maiden name was Anderson, “from up around Clarion there.” The Andersons had family reunions every so often, my father told me once as we passed such a gathering—men in white shirts, women in summer dresses, standing around trestle tables under big trees, outside an unpainted farmhouse—and he had been invited but had gone only once or so, and had not found much of interest there.

He did tell me that his mother’s father, whom they had called Grandpap Anderson, had had a donkey he used when he worked on the roads, hauling and setting out crushed stone and gravel, to pay his taxes, and keeping track of the hours worked in a tattered notebook. My father showed me the notebook, held it up rather as a magician holds up a pack of cards. In time the notebook itself passed into my hands and a closer inspection evoked a different image, less bucolic but more likely, perhaps representing a later stage in Grandpap Anderson’s—and the region’s—life. The man with his donkey, tapping stones into the loosened surface of the road, has become, by 1897, the date on the cover, “E. Anderson, Sup.,”—I suppose the “Sup.” is short for “Superintendent.” S. Anderson by then must have been around seventy. On the cover darkened like wallpaper in an old house it says, “Always Bring This Book.” Inside, in fine copper-plate penmanship, are accounts for the householders of an unnamed community which must be Templeton, totalling, for that year (“Less a/c for J. D. Paul”) $206.99. The tax was 6 Mills. Registration was in May. Among the accounts on page ten are two in the name of Zellafrow—one N.R.’s to the amount of $4.25, and beneath, that of John, for the amount of $.45. Thirty five years after the murder, and the birth of the rumors. On the last page of the book, in another hand, unsteady, uneducated, in pencil:

Someone else was keeping the records by then. Under the last entry there is a child’s drawing of a man in a hat, and a house with a smoking chimney. Three years later, in mid-summer, Samuel Anderson died. He had been born in Templeton. If my own father ever knew him—which he almost certainly did, since at the time of his grandfather’s death he was eight years old and living only a few miles away—he seemed to retain, and certainly he conveyed, no clear image of the man. And as for his mother’s remoter forebears and where they came from, I know nothing at all.

My father told me one legend of my grandmother’s. Some antecedent of hers supposedly had been eaten by wolves, in a hunting lodge in the woods, in a blizzard, somewhere out in Ohio (pronounced “Ahýa”.) The details were vague or missing—who it was, when it happened, just where. But years ago it was thought to be a good story and was repeated occasionally. I have not believed it for a long time. To me it seems interesting only as an isolated index of the fantasies and self-justifications of the unknown minds that produced it, accepted it, and passed it on.

It was only after my father himself was dead that I found my grandmother’s dilapidated thistle-blue autograph book from the time of her youth in the 1870’s and ’80’s. “My love for you shall never fail As long as pussy has a tail By Maggie E. Bechtel,” in purple crayon. Inspirational poems, “I know God’s in His heaven,” “Thoughtlessness,” “The Marines’ Hymn,” sent by my Uncle Sam during the first World War. In pencil, in a margin, “Sam gave me this long a goe.” A dried pansy between the pages. And obituary notices, in no discernible order—some of the crumbling bits of newspaper pasted on top of the pencilled dates, eclipsing them. “There was a band of angels that wasn’t quite complete, so God took Mother Gifford, to fill the vacant seat.” Many of those born in the river settlements had moved into Kittanning and Ford City, and died in town. And from the book I learned a few of the dessicated facts that make their way into such places. My grandmother’s mother had been born in Templeton, date unspecified. Apparently her name before her marriage had been Elizabeth Bechtel. One of the pencilled notices in the autograph book reads:

“Arvill

In the days of Solm reflections

in the Hours of Social glee

Keep me in thy Recollections

for I often think of thee

—Your Aunt

(illegible) M. E. Bechtel”

I suppose the name was originally German.

There is no obituary notice for Samuel Anderson, and there are several for his wife Elizabeth, whatever that may indicate. She died on July 22, 1904, ten months to the day after her husband’s death. They had baptised my grandmother, born at Maple Furnace, Pa., August 8, 1854, Arvilla. When she was alive I was never certain whether she had brothers or sisters, though my father referred absently to relatives with unfamiliar surnames. In fact, Arvilla had been one of five children, all the rest of whom, at different times, had moved out to California.

Templeton is a hamlet strung out along the railroad tracks on the east bank of the Allegheny River, some sixty miles northeast of Pittsburgh. It may have been larger in the 1850’s, when my grandparents were born, and around the time of the Civil War, when they were children, than it is now. Most of the settlements on that winding stretch of the Allegheny—Wattersonville, Redbank Furnace, Cosmus, Rimer, Hooks, Gray’s Eddy, Mahoning, Mosgrove, Gosford—have probably shrunk in the past hundred years and more. The river, in the middle of the 19th century, was the main artery of transportation and the central earthly presence in the minds of those who lived near it. I imagine that those river hamlets, up until the first World War, still bore a general resemblance to Mark Twain’s Hannibal. The broad river dominated the mental geography of the region’s inhabitants even after the advent of the Ford. Among many of those who had been born there in the 19th century and had not moved away nor learned to drive, it continued to do so after the Army Engineers had thrown their dams across its current, and the days of river traffic were effectively over. Not only my grandmother, but my Aunt Mary in the following generation assumed that one envisaged any place in the region in relation to the river.

At the time when my grandparents were born, the railroads were new-fangled. It was a number of years before the rails came down the river valleys, around the time of the Civil War. The various lines through the region—the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh Railroad along Little Buffalo Run, Patterson Creek, and Long Run; the few miles of the Winfield Railroad, from West Winfield to the Allegheny, along Rough Run and Buffalo Creek; the Low Grade Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, along Redbank Creek; and the main line, the Buffalo and Allegheny Valley Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, along the east bank of the river—all followed the river and its tributaries. The river settlements through that section are on the east side of the water, which may have had to do, in the first place, with currents and boat landings. The talk of the coming of the trains, the requisitioning of land for them, the cutting of the woods, the grading of the slopes and building of the roadbeds, the laying of the tracks, were a long progression in the valley, impetus and form of irreversible changes, but it was still the river valley, enduring the general eager theft and defacement that characterized the building of the American railroads. The conflict between the older water transport and the new rail companies had begun with the inception of the railroads themselves, and it figured in the daily talk of the era. It must have been a matter of common knowledge when the railroads bought up, one by one, the dams that maintained the levels of the doomed canal system, and let them fall into ruin. On one page of my grandmother’s commonplace book is the date of the Johnstown Flood, caused by the collapse of one of those dams. It was one of the spectacular catastrophes of her lifetime, a date that she was unlikely to forget as long as it meant anything to her, and she may have written the bare cipher on that page less as a simple reminder than as a somewhat incredulous mark of her own presence, like initials on the bark of a tree. The flood happened when my grandmother was thirty-five, a mother of three children. Rumors reached her of people seeing bodies floating in the river far below Johnstown. Some said they had seen them passing under the bridges at Pittsburgh, and down the Ohio. There were people who went to Pittsburgh just to look. As an old woman my Grandma spoke of the bodies as though she had seen them herself, floating down the Allegheny past Rimerton.

The right-of-way there and in Templeton runs close to the river, and many of the houses, which must have been built at about the time when the rails were laid, are set between the edge of the bank that drops steeply to the water, and the tracks. They face the railroad line: long, low front porches, a few board steps up from the ground. I do not know what Samuel Anderson did for a living in Templeton; he may have been a tax overseer for years before the notebook that ends with a child’s drawing, but the book itself does not look like the record of a full-time public official. As for my grandfather’s father, Old Jacob’s hotel was probably no larger than most of the other frame houses lined up along the slope, with their chicken coops and vegetable gardens and outhouses in back of them. Everyone in the place knew everyone else pretty well. Arvilla was two years older than my grandfather, and had known him since he was a baby. She was eight when his father was murdered.

Some time not long after that, Old Jake’s widow, Hannah, decided that she could not manage to bring up the three boys herself, and she farmed out Jim, aged seven, with the Heinz family at Widnoon. John, my grandfather, went to the Rimer family, up at Rimer or Rimerton. One of the obituary notices pasted across its date in my grandmother’s commonplace book is that of Annie A. Rimer, who may have been John’s foster mother. Neither the hamlet of Rimer, as my Aunt Mary referred to it, or Rimerton, as my father, who was born there, called it, nor Widnoon up on the hill, where some of them went to school and are buried, was more than five or six miles from Templeton. It was all in the neighborhood. And when Mr. Heinz began delivering his wife’s locally celebrated chili sauce from door to door in his wheelbarrow—as the legend goes, at any rate—it was only a year or two before he had to take a wagon and go farther afield, or get somebody else to go for him. All the way to Templeton, before long. Jim left the Heinzes in 1871, when he was sixteen, to go to work in a furnace, perhaps at Mahoning, for a dollar a day. In his early thirties he moved, with the beginning of the exodus from the river settlements to the industrial towns. He went down-river to Kittanning, where he ran a barber shop, and in later years worked as a night watchman. Young Jacob, whom Hannah, it appears, kept with her and brought up at home, later had something to do, my father told me, with the barge traffic on the river, and for a while was a policeman.

But of John, my grandfather, and the Rimers, at that time, I know nothing at all. I have heard from several members of the family that John had a river pilot’s license, but no details about when and how he acquired it or used it. He seems to have worked in various capacities, up and down the river, and to have known the waterway at least as far as Pittsburgh. My father’s family legend about the Heinzes has it that as they grew more successful in selling an increasing assortment of bottled vegetables, their sons set up an office in Pittsburgh and distributed the produce from there. Eventually they began to urge their parents to move the whole enterprise to the city. The elders were reluctant to leave, suspicious of the Babylon down-river, and they held out, preferring the world they knew. At some point they said they would go only if they could take their own house, the actual building up on the hill, six hundred and fifty feet above the river, along with them. They may have supposed that putting such a condition upon their moving would rule out the idea once and for all. But arrangements were made for uprooting the farmhouse from the site on which it had been reared, and the shade of its trees, and its garden, and edging it on rollers down the narrow, rutted, steep road, several miles to Gray’s Eddy, or more probably to Rimerton, and sliding it onto a barge. The operation would have been complicated by the final grade down to the river. By the time I first saw Rimerton, the boat landings had gone from that part of the shore, but my father told me of seeing a team of beautiful horses, when he was a child, come down the road to cross the water on a flatboat, and on the way down the brake of the wagon failed, and the wagon rushed ahead, out of control, pushing the horses ahead of it onto the landing and the wharf, and off the end into the river, where they drowned before they could be cut loose from the harness. He remembered them being dragged out by other teams, and how he cried, and he showed me the spot where they had been buried—at least he thought it was the place. It is one of the handful of clear images of that time that he conveyed to me, something that had continued to impress him. And they had brought a house down that road, on rollers? So the story goes, and my father said that his uncle, young Jake, had something to do with providing the barge, and with the loading, and that my grandfather piloted the house down to Pittsburgh, where I was told it still sat unassimilated among the red brick mill buildings of the latter-day Heinz plant. If it happened like that at all, I imagine it was in the 1880’s, in the decade after my grandparents’ marriage. I know nothing else of that period of their lives except the dates when their first children were born.

They lived in Rimerton, perhaps from the time they were married, and I assume they called it that, since their children did. They ran a store in the house, and my grandmother took in sewing and did millinery work. I have heard that my grandfather actually owned a house in the village at one time—whether bequeathed to him by the Rimers or bought with earnings, or indeed whether he owned one at all, I am not sure. Nor do I know anything of his habits, his appearance, how much of the time he was away working on the river. And of my grandmother there are no pictures from that far back. In the oldest one I have seen she is already a woman in her sixties, heavy set, heavy jawed, heavy lidded—the heavy eyelids she passed on to several of her children—with gray hair; but still, in that picture, she looks startlingly young to me, since I never saw her until some years later.

No doubt her religion, which was to become the principal concern and focus of her life, was important to her from early childhood in Maple Furnace and Templeton, during the years of the Civil War. It is not easy to see, through the features of a woman past seventy, the child far behind them, but I find it hard to imagine her except as a very serious little girl, and the form of her religion—what my father referred to as “her church,” “her Bible,” emphasizing the pronoun—must have set early and changed little over the decades except to grow more obdurate. But she was born into it, or into something very like it. An unquestioning and vehement fundamentalism, a literal insistence upon the letter of the Word of God—taking the King James version for the original. A fierce self-righteousness and a view of the world in the light of an imminent Last Judgment—they were all around her as she was growing up. They were thundered from the pulpit in voices emulating the already legendary travelling evangelists of the days of her parents’ youth. And they served her, as they served all of the faithful, in making a day-by-day sorting without appeal of the sheep from the goats, the saints from the dwellers in outer darkness in Templeton. But even among neighbors who had grown up to the beat of that same relentless piety and had accepted it as their own special salvation she was remarkable, and admired for the unbending force of her conviction and the rigor of its application to decisions and events and people. She was a Methodist, as it happened, no doubt following the affiliation of her parents, and the sect that was represented most pertinently—it may have boasted the only church—in Templeton. And the Methodists in particular, among the denominations in the river settlements, harked back directly to the itinerant Wesleyan preachers who had whipped up the Fear of the Lord there within the memory of the middle-aged. The fire of the earlier years had subsided—by comparison, at least—to a scripture-quoting pietism, a pursing of lips and a willing suspicion, a straight and narrow Grundyism. It had soured. In that faith she had brought up her children. Before my father could read, she taught him:

It is a sin

To steal a pin

And how much greater

To steal a tater.

She made “Be sure your sins will find you out” into a household motto—“sins” meaning, above all, lies or theft. During my father’s childhood the family was poor much of the time; sometimes the children had no shoes, and there was not enough to eat. One summer day when he was four or five my father picked a few ears of corn from a field along the lane, up the river, and brought them home in his wagon, and his mother asked where they came from and how he had come by them, and when he told her she scolded him severely and made him take them back and apologize to the owner, and pay for them. It may have been perfectly usual and normal behavior on her part. It had the effect she intended it to have: he remembered it, with mortification, for the rest of his life. By the time I knew her, her eyeglass case, her sewing, and her Bible were always in her lap or within reach of her rocker, and some of the psalms, as she quoted them, referred to a startling distance, but by then the world around her had grown dubious and evanescent. She was still contemptuous—as were her daughters—of those who maintained that we were descended from monkeys, and there were usually several tracts tucked into her Bible announcing, with apposite chapter and verse, what could be expected in the life to come. She was never altogether reconciled to my father’s slipping away into Presbyterianism, even though the Presbyterian Church led him to college and to his ordination as a minister. She hoped it would be alright—meaning that she hoped it would be overlooked.

Her politics were as inflexible as her religion. Indeed there was probably no clear division between them. Both were aspects of the same viewpoint and temperament, both had been formed by the same circumstances and at the same time. She would no more have voted for a Democrat than she would have stolen a wallet or gone to Mass. Somewhere in her heedless loyalty there remained an impression from her youth of the Republican party as the party of Lincoln. It was also, in the poverty of the river settlements, the party of respectability and therefore both of social aspiration and conservatism. Her scorn of “Dixie” (pronounced “Dixeh”) had its origin in her childhood not so many miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and the talk of the Civil War and of friends who had helped runaway slaves escape to Canada, but it was certainly emphasized in later years by the solidly Democratic allegiance of the South. But since her Republicanism was not hampered by reason, she did not hesitate to make stern comments on the Carnegies and Mellons, the rich who avoided paying the poor an honest wage; and she spoke, or my father did, of early meetings held by labor organizers—John L. Lewis among them—in her cellar. I am not sure whether that would have been the cellar in Rimerton, or the one later, in Kittanning, but I imagine it was the former; and I suspect, if only on grounds of likelihood, that my grandfather, whose politics may have been less impacted and more pragmatic than hers, may have had something to do with any such gatherings.

And the children—Harry is the first of them for whom we have a certain date. He was born in 1884. But there was one daughter, Bertha, about whom there was always some unresolved mystery. The other daughters spoke of her as being different, and called her a gypsy because she wore flashy jewelry and was said to have a good time. They never had much to do with her. She may have been born before Harry. In any event, from 1884 until the end of the century the babies continued to arrive every two or three years until there were seven all told. After Harry came Alma, then Vince, Edna, Samuel, William (my father) and Dewey. Dewey (pronounced “Dyeweh”), born the year of the Admiral’s “Damn The Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead” attack on Manila Bay, lived only a few years and died of some childhood disease such as scarlet fever, leaving behind him a tiny rocking chair that remained in the family for five decades and more. It was always referred to as Dewey’s chair, and any mention of it had the faculty—at least in my own experience—of making a whole room of the Rimerton house appear around its image: an upstairs back bedroom full of afternoon sunlight, with a plank floor, rag rugs, a bed covered with patchwork, a picture of Jesus, a few tan faded photographs in heavy frames, a smell of dry wood, a single window propped open looking out in late summer over the dusty vegetable patch going to seed, the parched outbuildings, and the glare of the river on which the green shadow grows from the far bank.

In large families there are bound to be marked differences in age among some of the children. Harry was at least twelve years older than Dewey. And after Dewey was born the household stayed on at Rimerton for another decade and more, while the marriage pulled apart and the family ties loosened—some of them.

Nobody has spoken of those years except by way of head-shaking and sighs and reprobation of my grandfather’s drinking. Perhaps none of the family could have described clearly much of the progress of that dissolution. My grandfather’s absences while he worked on the river, or for whatever reason, grew more frequent and longer until he was away much of the time, and often no one at home knew where he was. When he showed up, my father said, he was usually drunk, and frightened them. Sometimes he had no money and his clothes were a disgrace. Sometimes he brought what seemed like a lot of money, acquired heaven knew how, and the household stocked up on food despite Grandma’s misgivings, or he brought the staples himself: hams and flour and corn meal and dried beans. Sometimes he took to outlandish the story was beyond changing. On the other side, my grandmother’s militant respectability stiffened. She took in more millinery work to feed the family, and she read the psalms, with her thimble on her finger.

It was late in my childhood before I began to guess that although the canonization of my grandmother was a matter of general accord and was taken for granted—it represented, in itself, the family bond—subscription to her particular judgments varied considerably, in practice. The differences acquired a geography once the children were old enough to leave home. Vince finally settled in Canton, Ohio, and seldom came back. A niece remembered his good nature and his humor. Sam had had problems of his own with his mother’s determinations. He was three years older than my father, but for some reason my grandmother liked to dress them as twins when they went out, and usually in sailor suits; she continued to do so when they were both adolescents, living in Kittanning. The three years’ difference in age made the charade particularly galling for Sam. People in town stared openly at this duo out of a side show. In my father’s account, one woman who looked long and hard at them as they walked past, and then stopped and turned round (Sam turned too, to check) to look back, and stood still, mouth open, gazing at them, finally undid Sam, who drew himself up, walked back, and said, “Lady, if I’m wearing something that belongs to you, I’ll take it off right here and give it to you.” From then on he refused to dress in that fashion. He had scarcely reached enlistment age when he disappeared, and eventually word came that he had joined the Marines. He was sent to France soon after the United States entered the first World War, and was wounded—a bayonet from under the chin into the hard palate—and sent home. He too settled in Ohio, near Bowling Green, to farm.

And Bertha married and left. For a time she remained in the region, but they saw little of her. Eventually she and her son, whose health was poor, moved out to the southwest. The other daughters spoke of Birdie with a certain disdain, as though she were scarcely one of the family at all. They considered her gaudy and flighty—but others in the family remembered her as pleasant, affable, merry, and generous.

The elder daughters, Alma and Edna, married but continued to maintain the tight inner circle with their Mumma at the center and my father as their hero. The others may not have been quite so implacable in their attitude toward my grandfather, but apparently after growing up and moving away from Mumma nobody saw much of him—with the possible exception of Harry. In the family sanctum around my grandmother my father’s role was actually enhanced by the form of his leaving home: in spite of his scant schooling he managed, at sixteen, to obtain, through someone in a Presbyterian Church in Kittanning, a scholarship to Maryville College in Tennessee. In due course the college itself was also canonized, though I do not believe my father ever returned there after his student years, and he did not receive a degree. But he was the son who was away in College, and they were proud of him, and he wrote home telling of the difficulty of the studies, his phrases punctuated with Bible references giving book, chapter and verse—a style which marked his letters all his life. Both for him and for his mother and his elder sisters, his going to college represented a further separation, and a particularly significant one, from his father: a sign that he, and they, could do well, and better than John D. had ever done, without him. It was a proof—had any been needed—of their superiority to John D. and all that he represented to them. And of course the proof, and the separation, were further magnified when, after a spell in the Navy during the war, my father became a theological student, and Dr. Shelton’s dressy chauffeur, and a minister. Through all those years, where was my grandfather? My father said that once, perhaps when he himself was at Western Seminary in Pittsburgh, he had traced his father to lodgings in a rundown neighborhood in the city, and had found him living in a single room, kept very tidy and clean, with the few belongings neatly arranged, and my grandfather himself clean and dressed in freshly laundered summer clothes. The cleanness was what had particularly impressed my father. They had found little to say to each other.

So when we went home to see Grandma, from Union City, we went to visit the sanctum. Besides the two houses down on Stanton Avenue by the tracks, there was Alma’s. In those years she lived in a frame house a few blocks up the hill. Many years earlier, long before I was born, she had married Ralph Spence: thin, slow, aquiline, self-effacing, seldom out from under his hat. He worked at the Alcoa Aluminum plant, as a foreman in charge of keeping the premises painted. It may have been from Ralph that my father picked up his high regard for the protective virtues of aluminum paint, which led to his periodic campaigns to paint miscellaneous objects around the house, from tools to paperweights, aluminum. I was startled, after Alma died, past ninety, to see a photograph of her and Vince and Harry as small children, some time well before the turn of the century, which shows her face, though already sly, tilted, and watchful, yet with a softness, an openness, a prettiness in the features, all of which had long vanished by the time I knew her. Only a few years after that picture was taken, or perhaps even at the time, she was said to be able to go down into the cellar and grab a rat, with her bare hands, out of the cellar wall, and then the real sport was to plunge it into kerosene and set a match to it, and let it loose at the edge of a field. Did those things really happen, or did the children make them up afterwards out of remembered fantasies? Either way they indicated what her character was thought to be. She had been brought up in circumstances where a penny was important, and she had become tight-fisted for choice, and was convinced that the whole world was conspiring to steal what she possessed. My mother said Alma still had three cents out of the first nickel Spence ever earned. They called her Dutch, behind her back, though she knew it; it was, or it became, an adjective meaning stingy. When she went out she carried her black patent leather purse clamped under her arm, and she never set it down even when visiting another member of the family. All through my childhood I thought she looked an old pumpkin, days after Hallowe’en: the graying orange skin, the shrivelling mouth and cheeks.

She treated Spence more or less as a lazy hired man. Both she and her younger sister Edna behaved with the evident implication that they had married beneath them, and that their roles in their marriages involved a daily wordless charity—an attitude that exasperated my mother, who was sorry (as were many others) for Ralph, and felt real affection for Edna’s husband, Port. In later days it seemed remarkable to us that Alma had married anyone at all and when the subject arose we arrived again and again at the conclusion that she must have waylaid Ralph and dragged him to the altar. In Edna’s case it was hard to guess how she had come to marry Port in particular, considering the assortment of ethnic prejudices that were treasured in the family, by those sisters especially, and his Christian name, Alonzo, with its hint of Mediterranean antecedents. (But closer to hand there is a Porter, from Mahoning, among the obituary notices in my grandmother’s commonplace book, though with no date of death and no indication of what the relationship may have been.) His complexion, besides, was remarkably swarthy for that circle. Edna herself had been fair, and she went gray at an early age. There was something asymmetrical about her mouth, her face, her body, her walk—and whatever they did. With age her shoulders rounded and rose to one side in a hump, and she looked up as though from beneath it, a turtle gesture, revealing her high cheek-bones and her trembling, distracted smile. She had a slight lisp and a deep, rasping, but pleasant voice.

The three houses were referred to by the names of the women of the family: Grandma’s, Aunt Eddie’s, Aunt Alma’s. When we went on visits it was Aunt Eddie’s that we were, in fact, heading for. My father drove according to a private principle that evolved, emerged, set, over the years, until it became so obtrusive that my mother refused to travel with him any longer. On the road he was anxious to make time. Detours distressed him and he took them personally. They were proofs of corruption and deliberate malevolence. He said they disgusted him. He did not speed, though he drove faster than my mother said she would have preferred, especially when he was trying to catch up, after delays. He was reluctant to stop, unless the stops had been agreed upon in advance and so could count as minor destinations. There were several traditional places where we might break our western journeys. Ridgewood, New Jersey, where my mother’s cousin Betty lived with her husband Calvin Jones—a Firestone salesman and a pillar of the Dutch Reformed Church, which my father said was alright even though it was not Presbyterian—and their two sons who were several years older than I was. But if we were on a trip, even if we stopped we would not stay long, and my father would inaugurate the visit by saying so. Then there was the Cochran House at Newton, where we might stop for a meal if we got there at the right time. But as soon as my father stopped anywhere he was anxious to be on the way again. He loved to drop in on friends of former days, either unannounced or as the immediate sequel to a telephone call made a few miles from their door—to surprise them. The habit embarrassed my mother, who pointed out repeatedly how inconsiderate it was, but my father listened to her objections, if he listened at all, only to sigh and press on, perhaps a little faster. And once he had sat down in the friends’ chairs, if he allowed himself to be persuaded to stay for supper and the night he would insist that we must all get up at four, for an early start, which meant that the rest of the household must get up too. Oh no, please don’t. Oh yes of course, you have to have breakfast. The early departures were spoken of as one of the many mysterious necessities of the ministry.

My mother occasionally made stipulations in advance about stopping at specified points of interest. She took pictures, and notes in shorthand, at such places. But often she failed to get her wish. We would be too late to stop, or there would be someone else whom my father had discovered he should visit, and surprise, instead. We never turned aside at Caverns advertised with Indian Heads, or at other Natural Wonders; there wasn’t time, and they weren’t worth it. Both parents agreed on that. But once we visited a sauerkraut factory and peered over the edge of an enormous wooden vat to see a man in rubber boots down in there, walking rapidly in circles, counterclockwise, and flinging handfuls of rock salt before him in wide arcs as he went. We were informed that it was dangerous for him to be down there too long. The fumes from the sauerkraut might overpower him and he might lose consciousness and would die if there was not someone always keeping an eye on him. They gave us a free can of sauerkraut as we left, and it lasted on the shelf among the canned goods for some time, as a souvenir.

In spite of the early starts and the precipitate nature of the visits, it was often late when we approached New Kensington, and usually we had to stop at least once, in dark towns, to telephone Aunt Eddie and tell her not to worry, we were alright, there had just been detours and delays, one thing after another. And by the time we reached the familiar turnings the streets would be silent, no cars but our own rolling under the faithful streetlights, no one in sight on the sidewalks, and the glinting windows of the houses reflecting the measureless night. We would trundle slowly along Stanton Avenue, which in that light appeared to be the back of somewhere, running along the edge of the space where the tracks gleamed and echoed. We skirted potholes and peered out to see whether there was a light still on at Aunt Eddie’s, and there would be one, under a pink hemisphere shade, downstairs in the living room, or out on the glassed front porch. A forty watt bulb. We would ease to a stop by the cement steps up to the sidewalk, and open the car doors as stealthily as possible. The night air smelled sweet to me—a different sweetness from the air of the small hours in Union City. Suddenly the scent of soft coal smoke and petunias, that lingered above the cement walks cool with the dew, came back to me rich with a knowledge that was rightly mine but that I could not grasp. I was happy to be there, and happy to think that I would soon be in bed asleep. I stood on the sidewalk and looked up, a little giddy from the hours of travelling, and breathed the night. The less lights there were the higher the black sky was, behind the stars. A hand drew back a curtain at the window onto the porch, and waved and was gone. A moment later the glass door between the hall and the porch opened, reflections of the pink lampshade glittering in the bevels of the panes. The flashes looked bright enough to wake the whole street. The knob receded only a few inches, and Aunt Eddie popped through, tiptoeing in bedroom slippers, her face sagging, her head swathed in nets and a wrapper which did not hide the flat metal clips clamping the curls of her permanent. She was in her bathrobe, because it was that hour, and as she came she held her finger to her lips, watching us with a smile that made us all conspirators. The outer lock, when it turned, made more noise than we had made in getting out of the car. Aunt Eddie opened the front door a little and greeted us in a whisper. Port appeared behind her in his dark bathrobe, and he and my father whispered and brought in from the car what was needed for going to bed. Once the street door and the inner door were closed and bolted behind us we could stop whispering and talk in low voices, as though we were telling secrets, while the children were put to bed. The stained glass window was still there at the turn of the varnished stairs, in a whitish gray standing sleep of its own, and on the sill in front of it, in a pot, a dark plant which never grew at all.

In the early years, when Grandma lived next door, we almost never saw her until some time the next morning. But after her house had been sold and she had moved in with Port and Eddie she might wake when we arrived, and call out as we came up the stairs, and we would be led in to the side of the big bed, to greet her. Once when I had come without my sister I was taken in and she had not remembered who was coming, or had not been told, and was lying asleep, and sat up and asked who I was. When they told her she said, “Well, Peg O’ My Heart!” And just then she seemed young and warm and affectionate. But whether we greeted her or not, a moment later I would be lying under a patchwork she had made, in the bedroom over the back porch roof, with the light still coming in from the hall, and the voices whispering again. The sheets felt rough. My mother told me they were made of linen. Once as I was falling asleep I found a darned spot in the upper one and lay there feeling sorry for Aunt Eddie and Uncle Port, who I imagined must be very poor.

What did we do there, my sister and I? Almost nothing, which was what was demanded of us. At home our lives were surrounded by injunctions. On visits there were more of them. The dogs must not be touched. But there was not much temptation to do that. They barked and snapped when they were let out of their cellars, and Port was the only one who ever played with them, teaching them to jump through the hoop he formed by clasping his hands. Out back in a section of the garage that had been walled off to make a coal bin, visible through a gray lattice, was a giant snapping turtle which I was told could bite a broomstick in two. We must not go close enough to touch the lattice. Besides, it was covered with coal dust. The houses had a sweetish plaster smell that varied from room to room and from object to object but still was recognizable in all of them. There were artificial flowers in vases—petals and leaves made of celluloid and a kind of beadwork, and some of the waxy variety that I knew from cemeteries.

And Grandma sat up in her room over the living room, in her rocker by the window facing west out over the tracks to the viaduct where it sloped down to street level on the far side, and the heads and shoulders of cars could be seen passing up and down, unheard. Beyond the viaduct, on a rooftop, a billboard held up a huge picture of the sun. Through the struts of the sign one could see the line of hills across the river. Down in the living room we could hear the rocker move, and someone might call out “Is everything alright, Grandma?” and then, since usually there was no answer, go up and see. Grandma was stitching at her quilts, crocheting, reading her Bible, gazing out of the window. She was not to be disturbed, and we did not intrude on her. She came down to meals in the dark dining room and sat under the apricot-pink Tiffany lampshade; the chain from the bulb ended in a thumb-sized owl with ruby eyes. Grandma sat at the oak table and drifted in and out of the talk, one elbow by her plate, a hand in the air that occasionally waved as she grew older. “What are you waving at, Mumma?” Eddie would ask her, and first Grandma would not hear the question, and then she would laugh and say, “Oh.”

We went out paying calls with our parents. We had to go up and see Aunt Alma—that was the way it was put, from the moment we arrived at Aunt Eddie’s. And sit in Aunt Alma’s kitchen or out on the porch glider, while the grownups talked of things and people we knew nothing about and never would. There were days when my father left with the car on ministerial affairs, and on visits of his own. My mother remarked of those three houses that there was not a book in any of them. And nobody came to call. Port had many friends at work and at the Lion’s Club, and at every corner downtown. Spence belonged to the Masons and perhaps to a lodge or two. But nobody came home with them or stopped by for them there. Except for a Mr. Huff, a brush salesman with whom Edna and Port had made friends, who they said had studied for the ministry but had not had enough money to continue, and so had become a brush salesman instead. When Mr. Huff came to see them he opened his suitcase of samples on the kitchen floor, as a display of his life since he had seen them last, and after the brushes and their merits had been discussed he would stay for a meal. When he had left they would talk about what a fine man he was and how they hoped his luck would improve.

Occasionally, even in the early years, I found myself left in Port’s care, and it was like being unexpectedly set free. He might take me downtown, as though he were gathering me up and wafting me to another country. Once out of sight of the house we would slip down the bank on a narrow path and walk rapidly along the tracks—something so unthinkable that it made me laugh with the sheer wildness of it. Iseley’s sold towering ice cream cones for a nickel. My mother ruled categorically against them: if they were that big, heaven knew what was in them. But Port would get me one, and tell me to hurry up with it and he’d get me another. We sat high up in the shoe shine stalls with our feet on irons that looked like horse heads, and had our shoes shined, and Port talked with friends—everyone seemed to know him. Back home, we sat on the front steps and he played with the dogs and I watched the trains.

They were a wonder to me, like a fire or a body of water. In the earliest visits to New Kensington I had been carefully herded back from the top of the bank and the steps down to the sidewalk. But Port, above all, told me even then that I was not afraid of the trains when they thundered and screamed and clattered past only a few feet away from the front bank, so that I could feel the ground shudder and see the panes shiver in the windows, and if I was in the kitchen I could hear the glasses and plates and utensils clink and sing. When I was a baby, Port would hold me up and lift my hand to wave to the engineer, who might be somebody Port knew, and in those days I laughed at the roar as at the touch of cold water, and he would put an engineer’s hat on my head, backwards, and call me the Toughest Guy in New Kensington. Later I was allowed to go by myself as far as the top step, and sit there to watch the trains and count the cars. I could hear the trains coming from far enough away for my heart to beat faster as I waited for them to rush and be there in front of me. A half block to the north the yellow cement viaduct crossed the tracks. When a locomotive streaked under the blackened center of the span the plume of white smoke was abruptly chopped across, and when it emerged on the near side the smoke shot straight up again, hiding the heads of the pedestrians, who never seemed to change their pace, and the car roofs gliding soundlessly across. As the trains passed, the whole street rattled and echoed; and then when they were gone, and the rear platform of the caboose, with its pair of red lamps, was clicking away along the narrowing tracks, a hush returned suddenly, a stillness in which every sound was small and moved slowly as though in water, especially the bells of the engines in the switching yard beyond the viaduct, and the puffing and hissing and chugging from there, and the clang of freight car bumpers striking as the cars were coupled together.

Sometimes Aunt Eddie told us that Harry and his family might be over to visit while we were there, and she would say again how much she liked Harry and Clara’s daughters, their “girls”, all of whom had boys’ names. I do not remember them ever coming to Stanton Avenue during our own visits there, but we would go and call on them. They lived not far away—not nearly as far as we did. They were right across the river at Natrona Heights. From downtown New Kensington you could take a street car. Harry was a plumber and contractor, and his relation to Grandma’s closed world was, from his sisters’ point of view, somewhat ambiguous. He had moved away, but not so definitively, nor so far, as Vince or Sam or Birdie. He and Clara and the girls did come and visit Grandma fairly regularly, particularly on holidays. On the other hand, Harry’s life was not tied to his mother’s. He made no pretense of being accountable to her, and he did not emulate her fundamentalist religious zeal. No doubt Grandma and his sisters still inquired about when he had last been to church, and no doubt he answered evasively if at all. It was no wonder to them that there were other indications that he had fallen away from his Redeemer. They shook their heads and clucked their tongues and dropped their voices to admit that Harry too had been known—the voices dropped still lower—to drink, and poor Clara had had her problems. His sisters claimed that they had smelled it on his breath, and there were times—more shaking of heads, by way of finishing the sentence. To some unmeasured degree he had let them down. He might even have been capable of voting for a Democrat. I was glad to go to their house; my mother and Clara liked each other. But there was always a stiffness, an estrangement infusing our being there, some unease emanating from the fact that we came from the sanctum and its well known disapprovals, and from my father’s reservations and all that had remained unspoken for years between him and his elder brother who had grown up to be one of the men on the block, while my father clambered toward the pulpit and then looked out from there.

From the tiny slow-moving vortex around Grandma, Harry and Clara and their family a streetcar ride away appeared as an outpost. Beyond them, even the rest of the family grew remote and receded toward the rest of the world. I had glimpses of how attenuated many of the relationships had become. One day when I was in the car with my father he pointed to a boy with curly red hair, on a street corner, and said, “I think that’s your cousin so-and-so.” But when I wanted to stop at once and meet the boy, my father said no, he wasn’t sure, we’d do it another time. I saw that the family had branches that I knew nothing about, and I recognized as lip service my father’s repetition that we must go and look them up one of these days.

Yet we did make one historic trek into the family distances. Once in particular my father took only me with him when he went to Grandma’s. It was after we had moved from Union City back to Pennsylvania, to Scranton. We had not been there long before the Buick, which had been giving my father more and more trouble, breaking down far from home and mechanics, at unforgiveably ill-chosen moments, was replaced suddenly by the Olds: new, egg-shell gray, with long streamlined front fenders that housed the headlights and flowed on to an elegant humped shape introduced that year. A bargain at $815.

The move to Scranton had served to emphasize emerging disaffinities between my parents. The issue of cars and driving had revived. When my father left my mother and sister at a summer cottage by a lake, and took me with him on that trip, it was surely after a discussion in which my mother said she would rather stay behind anyway, and reminded him that she was used to being left without a car. And his taking me with him, away from the lake, was a move to repossess himself of me. He blamed her, rather than any behavior of his own, for turning the children against him. The fear that we were growing away from him had been gathering in him for years and was both effect and cause of some of his angry and capriciously punitive behavior toward us and toward me in particular. Another of his responses to it, for some time, had taken the form of calling me into his study at home, where I would stand in front of the desk, uncomfortable, hot, wondering what I had done wrong now, and he would tell me to shut the door behind me. Then he would fish in the lower recesses of his desk for a moment, shut a drawer and sigh, and tell me that we just were not spending enough time together, he and I, and that he was sorry it was happening but he could not help it right now because he was so busy and had so much on his mind. But these were precious years that would not come again. He would tell me then how hard things had been for him when he was a boy, and how fortunate we were, we children, and how much easier life was for us, with our yard to play in. And he said how important it was for me to study hard and do well at school. And how he wished we could move before long and have a big place in the country with room, where children could run, and with shade trees, and a dog, just an ordinary dog, and maybe even a horse. I reminded him, out of loyalty, that we did have a dog. And he said we would do more things together. Then he would start telling me about insurance, how I would come to realize its importance when I was older, and how we were going without some things now so that we children and our mother would be taken care of if anything were to happen to him—which meant if he were to die. I would feel like crying, and he would come and put an arm around me and tell me that I must be a good boy. And then he might show me something out of his desk, such as the pocket knife which he said was the one thing he had that had belonged to his father, the one thing that his father had given him. Talking as though his father were dead. Or he would tell me something which ordinarily would not have been mentioned, and caution me not to say anything about it, to anybody. It was on one such occasion that he told me most of the little I learned about my grandfather. And then he might give me something, such as a card printed with the Ten Commandments, the names of the Books of the Bible, the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, and pat me and say that he would try to find more time to be together, and we would be pals, and I would nod, and go, feeling grief inextricably tangled with my own unexpected and unconvincing goodness, and shutting the door behind me.

And when he decided to take me with him, alone, back to Grandma’s, in the new car, the trip was presented, to me, as one of the often-postponed things that he always wanted us to do together and usually did not have time for. He contributed to the announcement and the preparations an air, more than half serious, of a male conspiracy against the women of the family. We men together. “Women,” he repeated: “you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.” It was an attempt to conceal his own uneasiness at the decision, and at the prospect of being alone together, and at the necessity of putting a good resolution into action—the resolution having to do with the oft-projected camaraderie between us. Once we were actually on the road he became morose and preoccupied again, and as irritable as ever. Even as an old man he remembered and reproached himself for the severity of his wrath when I stepped out of the car, once, where he had parked it, into a mud puddle, in my new white buck shoes with elaborately perforated wing tips. The oppressiveness of his behavior to me was so obvious that in New Kensington Edna and even Alma were stirred to take my part and remonstrate with him. He was more affable when there were people present to whom he could show me off before proceeding to discuss matters of real moment which did not concern me; I was not to “butt in” on those parts of the conversation, which to him were the conversation itself. It seemed to him then, probably, that many things, even most things that he considered his, were slipping from him. And that must have had something to do with his idea of going, in the new car, to visit the rest of Grandma’s children, his brothers and his other sister, and of taking Grandma and Alma and Eddie and me along.

But in fact I do not know what was in his mind, nor how long he had been planning that further family trip. He may have been brooding on it for some time without saying anything about it. He may have had it all decided when he proposed to take me with him, alone, to New Kensington, and still not have spoken of it to my mother, who would only have sniffed at the mention of such an excursion. On the other hand, for all his insistence upon fixed destinations and making time, he abhorred being what he called tied down by having to be somewhere, and the whole journey, complete with his mother and sisters, and me, to see far-flung relatives, may have arisen from a moment’s impulse after we got to New Kensington: a response to a wistful phrase of Grandma’s, or to some new remark about the car.

Grandma was well into her eighties by then, but he planned an early start so that we could make good time, because there was a long way to go. The three ladies wore high shiny black straw hats with narrow brims, and long coats although it was summer, and held their black patent leather purses clamped under their arms, as we assembled in the dark air, hours before dawn, and shuffled, whispering, down the walk and the front steps, holding Grandma by the arms, and settled into the car, and were off. No one had been warned that we were coming.

We stopped first, early in the day, to see Birdie. I could not understand why they spoke of her, and everything about her, as though she were an unfortunate, and somewhat ridiculous. But I cannot be sure now how much of her I remember and how much I have dreamed. When I came to think back to her she seemed to have been quite happy, in a house that opened right off the asphalt of a back street, with no sidewalk, past the doorsill. The tiny front room was full of sunlight, and there was a canary singing in a cage. Birdie was a well covered, smiling, welcoming woman in a bright yellow wrapper, wearing big, dangling earrings. Her son Billy, a quiet, thin young man, had painted the pictures on the walls: copies of Christ Praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, of a head of Christ as a young man, of a scene in which a young girl was listening to a bird in a tree—pictures that I recognized because we too had reproductions of them at home, but these were real artist’s oil paintings, and I was impressed, and felt that I would like to learn to paint like that. We were told that her son was going to be, or perhaps already was, a commercial artist. Birdie wanted us to stay and eat, but my father and Alma and Edna agreed that we had to be on our way, and we started off again and drove to Canton, Ohio.

There my father inquired about the address until we reached an old red brick industrial building where Vince worked in an office. My father went in to look for him and brought him out to the car to talk to us, and Vince stood there in his shirt sleeves, with garters above the elbows. The rest of us waited in the car. Vince bent down and talked through the window. It was lunch time, and he suggested that we have lunch together, but we had to get on our way, because it was so far. I believe we stopped somewhere else for lunch, after all. Of Vince himself I remember almost nothing except a resemblance to Uncle Harry, and his white shirt fluttering in the breeze, outside the car window, on the street.

From Canton we headed for the farmland near Bowling Green to look for Sam. We had a rural address that sounded definite and authoritative at a distance of several hundred miles, but began to dissolve as we drew nearer to the region it referred to. There was no indication of how to approach the place, where it was near, a landmark or a road with a name that people might know. The afternoon was well advanced before we came near enough to be rolling along dirt lanes past cornfields, stopping to ask. The trail faded. Nobody seemed to know Sam Merwin and where he lived, and we were not sure where we were, and it kept getting late, and cloudy, and chilly, and Grandma was anxious and asked where we were, among the flat green fields. Someone finally remembered and directed us, and we arrived at the uncut grass and the house like a box, not old but worn, standing by itself, where no one was expecting us.

It was a small building, looking temporary and thin, with a covered space to one side that I learned was called a breezeway, which everyone agreed would be very cold in the winter. Sam was there, and he said yes it got very cold there, and his wife came to the door behind him, plump and smiling, and their children were inside as we filed in. They stood still, by the beds, and looked surprised. Sam’s mouth was puckered, without teeth. He said he never thought to see us, and his wife agreed, laughing. We sat down, as they said to do, on the few chairs and on the beds. They talked about what Sam had been doing. He said he was on relief some of the time, and that he had the whole place for two dollars a month. He said “dawlers”, like my aunts, and they nodded. It sounded to me as though the rent was a good arrangement, and Sam said he had been lucky to get the place, but he kept repeating that it was just for the time being. I thought they might be poor, and the thought depressed me, with us sitting there and asking questions. I felt that we were embarrassing them, looking at their poverty when they had not been expecting it. I knew that my mother was right, and that we should not have turned up without warning. I do not know how long it had been since Sam had seen his mother—he was then forty-five—or whether she had ever set eyes on his children. They remained silent, staring at the woman they had been told was their Grandma, and at their aunts and uncle and cousin, across the great gulf that had just been set in front of them. And their elders did the same, not knowing what to ask each other, and their questions not making things any better, though Sam and his wife kept saying they were glad to see us and what a surprise it was. They all talked this way and that, for a while, about some things that had happened to them, and who had had children and accidents and sicknesses, and had died, in all the years since anybody from New Kensington had last conversed with Sam or heard much from him. None of the subjects went on very long. Each came to an end as though nobody else was listening. And then my father stood up and said we must be going, and Sam spoke with admiration of the new car. Maybe my father suggested that we might all have a word of prayer, and stood there and squeezed his eyes shut and pronounced it, or maybe he let it go that time. I forget. We went out through the broken things lying in the high grass, and got into the car and left, and drove all the way back to New Kensington by the shortest route, but there were detours and we got lost, and everyone was very tired and no one talked much, and we got back very late, amazed at how far we had driven in one day.

I never saw Birdie or her son again, or Vince. And three years later Sam was killed by a car, on the road north of Bowling Green. He opened a taxi door and was pitched out onto the road and struck by the machine just behind, and died of a fractured skull.

Neither my father, nor his sisters, nor Grandma, said much afterwards about the trip to Ohio, except to repeat how many miles we had driven, in how many hours. It did not occur to me that Edna’s or Alma’s or Grandma’s moods varied at all, and I was accustomed to assessing my father’s emotional states practically—in terms of their probable effect on me. I could not have guessed how any of them felt about that round of visits, in the days that followed, and they may not have known, themselves. Nobody talked about where we had been, except to say that the people we had seen were alright. Birdie was alright, and Vince was alright. And Sam was alright.

And for the same reasons I can only guess what my father may have felt when, a few days after that trip, he and Uncle Port and I got into the new car to drive over to Uncle Harry’s so that my father could talk to his father about going into a home. It was not until after we were on our way that I was told where we were going, and that I was being taken along so that I would have a chance to meet my grandfather. As for the institution itself, my father said that he had been to see what it was like, and that he was sure his father would like it there: the old man would be able to make friends, and walk out of doors, on the grounds.

At the far side of the New Kensington bridge I looked, as always, at the black scoreboard with the white skull and crossbones on it, and the number that stood for how many people had been killed in car accidents at that intersection, so far. The number had not changed since we had left for Ohio, in the dark, and I had read it by the beam of the headlights. As we drove, the backs of the two heads in the front seat turned, and nodded, and my father and Uncle Port discussed the possibility of taking my grandfather some chewing tobacco, and spent some time deciding which brand he would prefer. Hearing them talk about buying chewing tobacco was like watching them try on costumes. They worked at recalling what kind they had ever seen him chew, what cans he had kept it in, what packages they had watched him take it out of, and the names sounded foreign as they repeated them. And yet I had seen advertisements for those different brands of chewing tobacco covering the sides of barns all the way across Pennsylvania, and when I had read them aloud the first time my father had shaken his head and I had not done it again. Mail Pouch. Chew Mail Pouch. Red Man. With a Red Man’s head, in red. Beech Nut. I hoped they would get him Red Man. As the names were discussed the barns reappeared, the wooden houses near them, the hayfields and hills, as they would do again and again, over many years. Turns in the road, fences, trees, signs by day or night, light on boards and grass and animals rose distinct and still. And the drive to Uncle Harry’s remains clear, and the store where we stopped and they went in for tobacco.

There was an ice cream sign in an iron frame out on the sidewalk, like the recruiting posters in front of the Post Office. They bought Beech Nut. I can see the glint of Uncle Harry’s front door. But the face we were going to see, my grandfather’s, does not appear. I look up in the sunlight to the straw hat and I see the shadow of the brim, but not what the shadow is falling on.

Years after my grandfather died, and after my parents too had died, I wrote and asked my sister whether she had any information about him or had ever seen a picture of him, and she sent me a post card with a sepia print of a carefully—even elegantly—dressed man, perhaps in his thirties, with a neat moustache—a picture taken, probably, in the 1880’s. In the letter that came with it she asked, “Could this be our grandfather? And if so, why on a post card?”