A Further Excerpt from the Fauxtobiography

Benign Neglect

It was not that year but the next that that I spent the summer in a sleepy daze with mononucleosis (called ‘glandular fever’,  another case of diagnostic innocence) interrupted by occasional visits from the doctor, and by my mother’s insistent efforts to make me drink beef tea. By Labor Day I was up and about, but happily, I was granted a reprieve from school to compensate for my lost vacation. Grandma suggested that she and I could remain at the farm.

On the Tuesday morning after Labor Day we waved goodbye to the rest of the family without much grief. For two months she and I lived in great harmony and mutual satisfaction, each of us leaving the other to do entirely as he or she pleased[1], a highly satisfactory arrangement.

She made excellent company for a child. She was crammed with information that happened to interest her, chiefly involving song birds and botany. She could infallibly distinguish between a hairy woodpecker and a downy woodpecker. She showed me a secret patch of trailing arbutus discovered by her Aunt Jane in 1912.[2] I was not to tell anyone, as it was an endangered species. She had total recall for family gossip and local history from the end of the Civil War until FDR was elected (after which she lost interest in current events.) She was happy to share her information if I cared to listen (or not, if I didn’t.) She demanded nothing from a grandchild. There were no rules to be transgressed. There were no lessons. Nothing needed to be done. There were no heroes but myself.

She served dessert whether or not I cleaned my plate.

Visitation

On Friday nights my father would drive to Goshen in his 1939 Plymouth to bring us groceries and to be sure I took a bath (unlike Grandma, my mother had no notion of laissez-faire, in child rearing or anything else.)  He arrived late for on Fridays the bank stayed open until 8 p.m. and they had to ‘balance’ before they could leave (a mystery to me—I imagined tellers on tight ropes and rolling barrels, while Uncle John, dressed like P. T. Barnum, cracked a bullwhip.)

We were eager for his visit, his mother as much as his son, the only time we had him to ourselves. At 8:30 we went out to sit on the stonewall in the dark, watching for headlights on Route 63. There weren’t many cars out at night during the war. You could see lights on the horizon long before you could see the actual headlights. There would be a flash as a car rounded the corner near Breakell’s, then the lights would disappear, and reappear when the car came out of the little dip near the Forgey’s driveway. 

“Will this be him?”

“No,” she said. “It’s too soon. I think his will be the ninth car.”

I was disappointed but brave. “I think five,” I predicted.

The stars were spread over us in patterns. They had names. “You can see why that one is called The Big Dipper, and upside down from it is The Little Dipper—or the Indians called them The Big Bear and The Little Bear.”

“Were there Indians around here?”

“Oh yes. Pequots, mostly. They weren’t very brave. When the Mohawks came to visit the Pequots ran away and hid in the woods. My father often found arrowheads when he plowed the north meadow.”

“Were there Indians when you were a girl?”

“No, no. The Indians were all gone by then, except for Ben who lived in a shack north of the swamp, just where John Third dumps his trash. (I do wish he wouldn’t.) And those are the Pleiades. The very bright star, just to the right of the moon, is actually the planet Venus.”

I suppose she thought I hadn’t noticed the two cars that passed while she pointed out the constellations. According to her count, I was exactly correct; my father’s car was the fifth. However, I knew he was the seventh.

While I bathed, my father read me a chapter of The Prisoner of Zenda.  As I cautiously soaped my hair I asked, “Who is John Third?”

“That’s Johnny’s father, John M. Wadhams, the Third---and Johnny is John M. Wadhams, the Fourth.”

“How come everybody is named John?”

“Who knows? I suppose because in the old days every new baby was named after somebody else, and since there were so many Johns already, after awhile there wasn’t anybody to name a new boy after except somebody else named John. It’s like compound interest. Wash behind your ears, your mother is sure to ask.”

Tucked into bed I was treated to a few more pages of The Prisoner of Zenda, then given a gruff hug, smelling of pipe tobacco, and sternly admonished to “sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite.” For a few minutes before I fell asleep I could hear them talking in the kitchen. I desperately wanted him to come back upstairs, for I had forgotten to ask about compound interest, how the bank could balance, or whether we could plow the north field and find some arrowheads.

In November I returned to Torrington, and to school. By then (aged 8) already marked by a kind of melancholic nostalgia, from which I have never entirely recovered. I wished that I might have been born in the 19^th century, to have been one of my grandmother’s brothers (so much more admirable than my own) to have known her grandfather, the man  who exercised such command over his family and their neighbors. I longed for their oxen and horses, and above all, for the austerity of their lives.

However, I did not envy Grandma her choleric father, for although she never spoke ill of him, I could sense, from the omissions in her memoirs, that he was not as nice a man as my own father, a droll fellow, fond of the mild exaggerations by which New Englanders beguile outlanders.

CIVIL DEFENSE

Back in Torrington I soon forgot about my two extra months of vacation. My next younger brother bragged that while I had wasted my youth collecting maple leaves at Aunt Angeline’s, he had been holding the archfiends of the Luftwaffe at bay.

Torrington was a choice target for the German air force, or would have been if Goering had ever succeeded in building a transatlantic bomber. Its factories produced precision parts for aircraft engines, bearings, bombsights, brass for munitions, and the machine tools required to build similar factories elsewhere. These “shops” (as we called them, actually large factories with acres of machine tools and thousands of workers) were spread throughout the town. We did not presume to guess the range of Hitler’s air force—but were determined to be ready, no matter what. 

My parents were “block wardens”, part of the great network of volunteers whose real task, whether or not they recognized it, was to keep the public’s attention focused on the war effort. Although the nearest actual Nazi depredations were submarine attacks, hundreds of miles from us, we were on alert for whatever might come.

My brother and I served as victims upon whose broken bodies my father’s First Aid class practiced bandaging. Periodically the factory whistles would signal an “Air Raid”, a kind of city-wide fire-drill. In case any of the neighbors ignored the sirens, the block warden (or one of his sons) swung a wooden claxon to remind them of the urgency. My brother and I would then take cover under the piano, hoping that my father would allow one of us to wear his white helmet and carry a message through imaginary smoke and flames[3] to Mr. Goodwin at the other end of the block. In favor of my selection I argued my greater maturity, while my brother claimed longer on-the-job experience. Opportunities were few—my father was not one to send a boy on a man’s errand—but he always remembered which of us had been sent last time, and carefully alternated.

And then it was over. As usual, the family had moved to the farm for the summer—but on VJ Day my father, a gregarious man, could not bear being isolated in the country while his neighbors were celebrating in Torrington. He took me along for the street party.  It was a revelation. I had never in life seen public exuberance, or ever witnessed a woman drinking alcohol. I remember my panic when I lost him among the wild celebrants.

DEATHS  IN THE FAMILY

I do not know what happened to the ‘firm and robust’ constitutions of those ‘laborious’ South End ancestors who founded our fortune. Perhaps they not only exhausted themselves, but their descendants, with their compulsive rock moving, wood chopping and sheave garnering. Or it may be that the four Wadhams killed at Cold Harbor were the strongest, most energetic members of the Wadhams’ family line[4]. Then again, Great-great Grandmother Hodges may have introduced some genetic deficiency into the family, for not only did she die young (the expected fate of 19^th century farm wives) but so also did most of her male descendants. 

Her only son died at 61.[5]  Of his two sons, the Banker lived a normal but unremarkable 75 years before toppling over with a sudden and massive failure of his heart. The Colonel’s life had ended just as abruptly, and from the same cause, at age 61. Later still, my father and his brother would pass away with equal unexpectedness—active and apparently ‘healthy’ one moment, dead the next. 

But none of those deaths was as important, from the perspective of childhood, as that of my father’s cousin (the John we called Uncle John.) There was a subtly feudal element in the relationship of the cousins. I believe they liked each other, and could have been good friends, but they could not help being family. The elder could not escape the obligations of his prosperity—the younger could never extricate himself from the burden of gratitude. They lived next door to each other in two houses that had been owned by their grandfather, but in the 1940’s Uncle John owned both. 

Like all of Grandma’s male relatives, they were both quite handsome, but Uncle John had a certain gravitas, appropriate to a second generation banker, which my father lacked entirely. In addition to the two houses in town, Uncle John owned a gentleman’s farm with a herd of purebred Guernseys, horses (including a riding horse for his daughters) bonds, bank accounts, and a couple of late model Buicks. His three daughters attended excellent colleges, and their marriages to Yale graduates (or the cash equivalents) were noted in the New York papers. Above all, he was president of the bank founded by their grandfather, in which Dad toiled like Bob Cratchit, a perpetual assistant.

Although we imagined that the bank’s success was due to Dad’s hard work, Uncle John might have taken pride in the fact that he had kept a family member employed throughout the depression.[6] Maybe they were both right. 

By calling him “Uncle” we claimed a closer tie than the rules of consanguinity allowed, but, on the other side of the balance, Uncle John enjoyed the psychic benefits of being the squire. By keeping his younger cousin employed, providing him a home at below market rents, and overlooking occasional missed payments (for my parents were dogged by illness, excess children and other catastrophes) Uncle John cultivated his avuncular image as the undoubted head of the family. 

And then he died. He went to bed one night, and did not waken in the morning. He was 58 years old. It was the most shocking of all the family deaths until then, upsetting our domestic world more than the great depression or the Second World War, for although our economic situation improved in the post-war boom, our claim to any social distinction was permanently deflated. It had depended on the connection between the cousins. Once the ‘other half’ of the town’s leading family, we were now unrelated to anybody who counted.

His widow, Aunt Sela, sold both houses. She and her son, Johnny, moved to their farm down the road from Grandma’s farm. Salt and Pepper were put out to pasture, the Buicks, were replaced with newer models, and although they still lived “next door’ (now about a half mile away) the connection to our side of the family gradually withered to the minimum that politeness and convenience required.  Our dynastic pretensions had ended. Now we’d have to invent ourselves.

A TENSE SITUATION

Aunt Sela offered to sell Dad our house in town. In retrospect, it seems odd that he did not accept. In 1950 the house couldn’t have been worth more than five or six thousand dollars, an amount he might easily have borrowed from his mother, if not from ‘the family bank’. But he, and through him his children, had so often imagined the day when we would move to Grandma’s farm (and have a pony) that I do not believe he gave it a single thought. How much better things might have been if he had.

It turned out that my mother and grandmother did not care much for each other. Perhaps Dad hadn’t noticed. He got along with everybody, and as long as the two women had lived in separate houses, they too had gotten along. Summers at the farm had never been a problem, for neither of them were confined to the house, and at worst, it was ‘just for the summer.’ Then too, they both subscribed to the New England credo, “Mind Your Own Business,” so their antipathy may have been dormant, waiting for an occasion to spring into life.  It did not take long.

On the appointed day I rode to Goshen in the movers’ van, deputized by my mother to make sure that her furnishings were put where she wanted them (never mind that the house was already filled with my grandmother’s furniture and the sacred relics of her family.) Thus began their long, tight-lipped struggle, not so much to dominate each other, but to avoid being subordinated.  Both women were of that New England temperament that can endure anything as long as necessary. Or so they thought. When we moved in with her, Grandma was 78. How could either of them have imagined she would live to be 99—that twenty years of their lives would be spent in lip biting silences, and irritated asides?

Neither of them got what they had hoped for. Grandma imagined that by re-occupying her home she was re-entering her life—that the future would be a pleasant stroll along the Post Road—a Frost poem, lilacs in a forest clearing, enigmatic foundation stones—where pebbles dropped in a well evoked her sacred dead.  

My mother, I think, must have imagined a life free of the oversight of her in-laws. Oh sure, she’d have to live with her mother-in-law, for a year or two—but then she would be free. Free to run things her own way. Nobody to say (or whose raised eyebrow might suggest) “that’s not the way we do things.”

Freedom (for her) encompassed the happy notion of bondage for others. She meant to have exclusive jurisdiction over her children’s lives (in their best interests, of course.)  She imagined a sort of family kibbutz (what the Hawaiians call a hui—she’d read about it in a Michener novel) where, under the benign supervision of the family matriarch, family members contribute their earnings to the family pot, so the Mama can spend it for their collective benefit, perhaps sending the worthiest child to medical school, or buying land to raise pineapples (or whatever Mom imagined might grow in a stony pasture.) To look at them you would have imagined my father was the more fanciful of the two partners—but this was far from the case. Mom had all sorts of ideas.

In his History of the Town of Goshen, Connecticut, published in 1897, Reverend Hibbard lamented:

The young men, sons of those who established its churches, schools, factories, and places of business, have been leaving the town during the past sixty years. Farms that for a century had been in the possession of the same family are now occupied by aliens. Houses once filled with life and activity...are now desolate and falling in decay, or their places marked by clumps of lilac shrubbery...

I thought we were coming home—but we were aliens.

---

[1] There was no television, of course. There was a huge Zenith radio, but it stood in the corner, silently awaiting post-war production of a critical tube. We had no daily newspaper, nor even mail delivery. We had to find our amusement in the fields and woods, in conversation, and among the miscellaneous histories, biographies and old-fashioned novels that had drifted to rest on the bookshelves of the summer house.

[2] It was in the woods just off the abandoned Post Road, near a granite foundation she called “Aunt Angeline’s”. Just to the west of Aunt Angeline’s the road crossed a stretch of rocky ledge where the Albany stage coach was upset one day in 1877 or 78. At the one-room schoolhouse, just down the hill, the students laughed to hear the coachman swear. Their teacher (her Aunt Jane, but of course, called Miss Wadhams) scolded them.

“But what did he say, Grandma?”

“Oh, I shan’t repeat it, but I remember he called one of his horses a ‘lop-eared jackass.’ Or perhaps he was speaking to a passenger.” While we collected fallen leaves, the coachman’s curses rang through the woods, as bright as the paint on my dump truck.

[3] For putting out any actual fires we had two five gallon water pumps. These were kept ready to hand in a little closet under the front stairs. No wonder Hitler lost! We boys contributed to his defeat by singing “...Hitler only has one ball...Tojo has no balls at all...” At the time I thought this was due to rationing. Certainly it was difficult to get a new ball, or replace a bicycle tire, but I couldn’t see how this affected Tojo, whose army had control of the Malayan rubber plantations.

[5] The self induced death mentioned above—maybe it’s unfair to count it against her. On the other hand, she may have injected melancholy into our inheritance—for it is both a genetic and a situational malady.

[6] Known to us as “FDR’s depression.” In our family it was an article of faith that President Hoover had been unjustly maligned. In fact, among mother’s relatives, it was thought that FDR, Pius XII, the Irish, and other worshippers of graven images (the gravest of all being FDR) were in diabolical concert to subvert American liberties. The details were uncertain, but their theory was largely confirmed by the arrival in Torrington (during WW II) of a couple of  Soviet engineers (sent by Stalin, and no doubt warmly welcomed by FDR) as liaison to local shops engaged in war production. These proletarians worked in the factories during the day, and (probably) conspired with the UAW, or sent coded messages, at night. Sometimes, on summer evenings they strolled along Forest Street wearing baggy pajamas and sandals. (Yes! Incredibly! The very street where I had once, in my innocence, driven my dump truck!) We sat on our porches and watched with wary eyes. They nodded and smiled to us in a touching, rather goofy, effort to build Antifascist solidarity.