Ancestors Read Free Page A

know I will make good. Mother and I are happy now and wish you would come up and see us. I like my work fine and I still attend Sunday school. With lots of love to you,
    Maxwell
     
    Sixteen or seventeen, he must have been, for, clearly, there is no longer a man in the house. The happiness, like all happiness, was fragile. Later on, by her mournful way of speaking of him, and sometimes more explicitly, my Aunt Bert led people to think that Max did not love her. Or at least that he did not love her the way he should. At eleven years old I didn’t know enough about life to question it, though it was, of course, highly questionable and self-indulgent behavior. Who is to say how much Max loved his mother except Max? How much did she love him? He was not an unfeeling man, and it doesn’t make sense, any of it, except as an example of how a grave disappointment can be transferred from the real cause, about which one can do nothing, to some other, more sensitive area.
    Before this happened, there was a change in the circumstances of her life. She had a run of good luck. Her natural flair with ribbons and laces and artificial flowers was recognized by the people she worked for. They put her in thedesigning department and then offered her a job taking orders from merchants in small towns around the state. She used our house as her headquarters because it was convenient and because my father needed her at that point. And for a short while she was very successful. But then the family doctor told her that she had to have her appendix removed, and in performing the operation he cut something he shouldn’t have. Or so my father said. With the result that my aunt could no longer carry heavy sample cases and had to retire from the road. It was too sudden and complete a reversal. It had meant so much to her to be out in the world, doing well, and making a good salary. During her convalescence she put on weight. And she did not feel at all well. For the first time in her life her body was a burden to her. But she had to do something. Through a business connection she got a job as a substitute teacher in a coal-mining town in southern Illinois. It was a stopgap. She did not want to live down there, and she wasn’t sure how long she would be physically able to go on dealing with unruly seventh-graders. One day a big box of hats arrived at our house from southern Illinois, every one of them fetching. And reasonably priced. Within twenty-four hours they were all sold. Another box arrived and went just as quickly. Before my aunt could send a third, my father got a letter from the secretary of the local Chamber of Commerce. Nate Landauer, the owner of a ladies’ ready-to-wear shop on the courthouse square, had complained that my father (who didn’t know one end of a lady’s hat from the other) was operating a millinery shop out of his house in Park Place. My father would have liked to tell them both to go to hell, but he didn’t. In some obscure way they had him. He wrote my Aunt Bert that she wasn’t to send any more hats.
    This blow was one more proof, which she didn’t really need, that her luck had deserted her. But she still had Max. If she was forced by ill health to give up her job she couldgo and keep house for him. He didn’t even have a house at this time—he was an engineering student at the University of Cincinnati. But people do not go to school forever.
    Max upset his mother’s plans by getting married, when he was only five months out of college, to a girl from a well-to-do family in Cincinnati. My aunt did not disapprove of his wife but of his marrying at all, when his first duty was to her. She saw this as something unarguable, a moral obligation he had failed to meet. The older generations would have unhesitatingly agreed with her, but hers was the last that was able to entertain such an idea. Max was a child of the twenties, and it was not a period that went in for ancestor worship. If I were to suggest to my