Ancestors Read Free Page B

own children that their first duty was to their mother or me, not to themselves, they would be astonished.
    Max and his mother had a falling out, of a lasting kind. He continued to write to her, and from time to time she went to Cincinnati for a visit. Her daughter-in-law and her granddaughter figured in her conversation. But the awkwardness persisted.
    If Max’s mother could not or would not abandon her grievance against him, there was somebody who was always waiting to receive him with open arms: my Aunt Maybel. He loved her also, for she had helped bring him up, and he didn’t hold it against her that she lived in the 19th century, not the 20th. During his boyhood, her house, where nobody ever came home drunk and knocked over the furniture, or for that matter even so much as drank a glass of beer on a hot night, was a haven of refuge his mind must often have dwelt on. She was totally unlike his mother physically and in every other way. She always did what she said she was going to do. And most of all she took him and all his concerns seriously.
    She took everything seriously, including the solemn business of proving that she had a right to be a member of theD.A.R. And she managed to interest Max in genealogy. He was a lot brighter and better educated and more thorough than she was, and he went at it in a businesslike fashion, reading out-of-the-way books and carrying on a lively correspondence with county clerks. He and my Aunt Maybel wrote back and forth about whether the one who died in 1771 could have been a son of John, d. 1756, not the first James … Gibberish unless you put your mind to it quite firmly.
    At no time in his life was my cousin as securely situated as I thought when I was having dinner with him. His marriage was happy, but even a happy marriage requires having your wits about you, and Max’s situation was not uncomplicated. The world he married into was socially a cut—several cuts—above the one he was born into. His father-in-law was the head of the Cincinnati traction system and a public figure. Max’s wife was ambitious for him and it was probably her influence that led him to give up engineering, a field in which advancement was likely to be slow, in favor of starting a brokerage business. My Aunt Maybel and my Grandmother Maxwell loaned him the money to open an office, and he did well enough but not spectacularly—I mean he wasn’t a millionaire at twenty-seven. At first they lived with his wife’s family, then on the second floor of a duplex; his wife had a miscarriage, which in turn produced an emotional crisis, and they ended up living with Max’s father-in-law as before. When their daughter was born, Max’s wife kept the baby in her room, and Max moved up to the attic. This arrangement must have lasted for quite some time, for Max’s daughter remembers her father coming down to the second floor in his bathrobe to shave. But eventually he asserted himself and they lived in their own house again.
    Max’s father-in-law’s interest and affection were so centered on his own son, who did not turn out well, that he was not much aware of Max, who did. The relation wascordial but not close. I think of my relations with my father—of how consistently I resisted his opinions, from the age of fifteen, and at the same time believed that he offered the only possible model of decent behavior. And then I think of Max, of what it was like for Max with no father to ape or take issue with.
    At the age I was then, I never asked personal questions, but I wish I had somehow given him a chance to say what it was that he hoped to gain for himself as he went about collecting facts having to do with births, deaths, and marriages of several generations of self-respecting, not very well-educated, for the most part devout men and women nobody has ever heard of.
    The genealogy was never finished. Outlying branches of the family did not always take the trouble to answer Max’s letters. Or if they did, the