Ancestors Read Free

misery or cultivated what they referred to as their nerves. My aunt didn’t go in for either one. She was high-spirited and strong-willed and at close quarters unmanageable. She was also very pretty, and so fond of a good joke—or even a bad one—and she doubtless could have gone on marrying and divorcing, but instead she went to work in a corset factory in Chicago.
    Once I asked my father what Max’s father was like, and he said, in the indirect way grown people answer children’s questions, that Bert liked the wrong kind of men. I interpreted this to mean that my aunt liked men who wore loud checks and spent their time at the racetracks, and it may well have been true. Since I was very fond of her, I would have excused an even greater lapse from good judgment. Two of the men who wanted to marry her, my father said, were, later on, very successful in business. If she’d married either one of them—but she wouldn’t have them. And he considered this a further evidence of her perversity. His own character was straightforward and uncompromising and cautious, and he tended to view human behavior in rather simple, old-fashioned (even for his period) terms; that is, he thought everybody was at all times able to distinguish between right and wrong, and when they got into trouble it was largely their own doing. Though he considered that his sister had mismanaged her life, he stood by her faithfully, offering financial help when it was needed, and I used to suspect him of taking a melancholy pleasure in the thoroughness withwhich she pulled the house down on her head. She named her only child for him, and when my father was in trouble she came running.
    As a small child, Max Fuller was so beautiful that photographs of him, in a girl’s petticoat, with his bare legs crossed at the ankle and an expression of innocence on his exquisite androgynous face, were framed by the yard. There was a set in our upstairs hall, under the gas night-light, and my Aunt Maybel, my father’s older sister, had another. It was a period that admired sweetness above all other qualities in art.
    How Max felt about those pictures may be deduced from the fact that, as a grown man, he parted his hair in the middle and plastered it flat to his head. Even so, he’d have looked like the Arrow collar ads that were everywhere at the time, except that he lacked the proper physical complacency.
    From snapshots pasted in my Grandmother Maxwell’s scrapbook it appears that as a boy Max was properly clothed, that he had friends, male and female, that he was sent to a boys’ camp, that he played football, that he knew how to sit on a horse, that he was not afraid to dive from high places. Since there were no Socialists in the family, the corset factory in Chicago was not referred to as a sweat shop, but surely that’s what it was. Moving back one stage from the man who knew about putting sherry in turtle soup, I arrive at a nice-looking boy of seventeen, whose face was without any color and whose expression, especially about the eyes, reminded me of a nervous animal. Nothing that I ever heard about my Aunt Bert’s second husband would have led one to believe that he was a wicked man, but the ground on which my aunt obtained a divorce from him was “that the said defendant had been guilty of habitual drunkenness for the space of two successive years prior to the filing of this Bill of Complaint …” This cannot have been pleasant for my aunt, orfor Max. His stepfather had a daughter by a previous marriage, who lived with them, and she and Max did not get on well. My aunt’s second marriage lasted about ten years, after which it was too late for Max to start over again on a different and better childhood.
    The scrapbook contains a number of undated postcards and letters from him, including this:
    Dearest Grandmother:
    I received your nice letter and am trying to live to your desires and be a credit to the Maxwell family. I have plenty of confidence and