Ancestors (2 page)

Though in theory the castle could have held out forever against Edward I, he took it without much difficulty, and it remained an English stronghold until after he died. When it became clear that there was less reason to be afraid of Edward II, the keeper of the castle for the English, Sir Eustace Maxwell, declared for Robert the Bruce. He was besieged at Caerlaverock but held out. Later on (it being Bruce’s policy to deny the English any stronghold that might prove useful to them in a later campaign) the castle wall was pulled down in places, so that it could not be defended. By 1347 the castle was again fortified and being lived in, and Herbert of Maxwell delivered hostages there,
after submitting to Edward III, and in return had letters of protection “to himself and to his men and to the castle, with its armor, victuals and other goods, and the cattle which were in it.” A good deal of the present castle was built at this time. It went on figuring prominently in the Scottish wars for the next three hundred years, until it capitulated to the Covenanters in 1640. They made an uninhabitable ruin of it.

There is no evidence that any ancestor of mine ever lived in Caerlaverock Castle, even in the capacity of a kitchen boy or swineherd. Tenant farmers commonly took the surname of their landlord, and so it does not follow that every Maxwell is a blood relative of every other person of that name. The nobility and the gentry, who would have come by their names directly and not through adoption, didn’t emigrate to America. But the photograph was all the proof the older generation required that the loins from which they had sprung were ultimately aristocratic, and if it ever occurred to them that their religious affiliations were with those who stripped the castle of its furnishings and pulled down the roofs and made a breach in the walls, they kept this unsatisfactory thought to themselves.

Without the photograph it is doubtful if my first cousin, William Maxwell Fuller, would have gone to the trouble of making a genealogy of his (and my) Grandfather Maxwell’s family. His mother, my Aunt Bert, was my father’s favorite sister. I loved her, but Max I hardly knew at all. He was ten years older than I was, and grew up in a different place. I saw him from time to time at family gatherings, and talked to him alone only once, when he was in his late thirties. He had a brokerage business in Cincinnati, and was married, with a twelve-year-old daughter. I was living in Greenwich Village, and he came east on a business trip and took me to dinner at an expensive restaurant on lower Fifth Avenue. We were beautifully at cross purposes all
evening. I thought he had called me out of a sense of duty, whereas in fact it was because something—that I was a misfit introverted child, that he was fond of my mother and father, that I represented the younger brother he wished he had had—made him interested in me. All I know for sure, and I wish I had known it on that occasion, is that he was immensely pleased and proud of me because I had published a couple of novels.

I can see us now so clearly, in that lime-green hotel dining room—his face across the table from me, and his double-breasted dark-blue pin-stripe suit, and his courteous manner of speaking, and his habit of lighting one cigarette from another—that it almost seems possible to live the evening over again the way it ought to have gone.

At first, in our efforts to lift the relationship to where it seemed to belong, we were not quite natural with each other. As people go, we weren’t much alike, but it wasn’t true either that we had nothing in common. He was named for my father and so was I. Max spent the early part of his childhood and I spent all of mine in a small town in the dead center of Illinois. We both went to high school in Chicago. My father felt that Max had failed in his responsibilities to his mother, but we could hardly talk about that. When other relatives got around to speaking of my writing, it was to point out kindly that there were novels which did sell—historical novels with lots of action in them, and plot. And that were afterwards bought by the movies for a considerable amount of money. It was not a conversation I wanted to repeat with Max. I had been in Cincinnati once, overnight, and hadn’t called him. So we couldn’t talk about Cincinnati. I had never met his wife and daughter. And I didn’t own any stocks and bonds. Meeting my eyes over the top of his menu, he urged me to have turtle soup with him. I don’t think I did. I can’t remember what I had. But when his soup came he summoned the headwaiter
grandly and demanded a glass of sherry to put in it, and I wondered how he knew that this was what you were supposed to do.

As we ate, he asked one question after another. I have done it myself so many times since with somebody who was younger and not very talkative. It is the only thing you can do. He asked about my job, and about what it was-like living in New York, and I saw how attentively he listened to everything I said. He was like an imaginary older brother—interested, affectionate, perceptive, and more securely situated in a world of his own making. I liked him very much, but I went on answering his questions with a single statement that obliged him to think up some new question—instead of saying to him, “I was living in a rooming house on Lexington Avenue and I had dinner with somebody from the office one night who said there was a vacant apartment in the building where he lived, so I went home with him, and the door was unlocked but there weren’t any light bulbs, and I took it because I liked the way it felt in the dark. The rent is thirty-five dollars a month. You go past an iron gate into a courtyard with gas streetlamps. It was built during the Civil War, I think. Anyway, it’s very old. And my apartment is on the third floor, looking out on a different courtyard, with trees in it. Ailanthus trees. I like having something green to look at. Technically it’s a room and a half. The half is a bedroom just big enough for a single bed, and I never sleep there because it’s too like lying in a coffin. I sleep on a studio couch in the living room. The fireplace works. And once when I had done something I was terribly ashamed of, I went and put my forehead on the mantelpiece. It was just the right height.

“The kitchen is tiny, but it has a skylight that opens, and by putting one foot on the edge of the sink and the other on top of the icebox I can pull myself up onto the roof, and I sit there sometimes looking at the moon and the stars. In the
morning, when I’m shaving, I hear the prostitutes being brought to the women’s prison. Shouting and screaming. Though I’m on a courtyard, it’s never really quiet in New York the way it is in the country. Just as I’m drifting off at night I hear a taxi horn. Or I hear the Sixth Avenue el, and try to fall asleep before the next one comes. The building directly across from my windows is some kind of a factory, and in the daytime the workmen come out and stand on the fire escape talking, and when the doors are open I can hear the clicking of the machinery. At night there is a cat that sits on the fire escape and makes hideous sounds like a baby having its throat cut, until I get up and throw beer bottles at it. If I don’t get any sleep I’m no good at my job. It’s an interesting job and I like it and I’m lucky to have it, but I have to deal with so many people all day long that when night comes I don’t want to see anybody. When the telephone rings, which isn’t very often, I don’t answer it. I let it ring and ring and finally it stops, and the silence then is so beautiful. I read, or I walk the streets until I’m dead tired and come home hoping to fall asleep. At the far end of the courtyard there’s an intern from St. Vincent’s Hospital who never pulls his shades. I see his light go on about eleven. He has a girl—she is so nice—she brought him a balloon when he was sick. But there is another girl she doesn’t know about who sleeps with him too. Next to the factory, on the second floor, there is a young married couple. In the morning when I’m drinking my coffee by the window, the sunlight reaches far enough into their apartment for me to see the shapes of their bodies under the bedclothes. Sometimes she comes to the window in her nightgown or her slip and stands brushing her hair. You can tell they’re in love because their movements are so heavy. As if they were drugged. And once I saw him sitting in his undershorts putting on his socks. Everything they do is like a painting.

“I tried to get a job in New York once before, in 1933, before my first book was published, and couldn’t. It was like trying to climb a glass mountain. The book had two favorable reviews but it didn’t cause any commercial excitement whatever, so I went home, and started another novel, and when that petered out I started another, and made my savings stretch as far as possible, and took help from friends. Not money. Room and board, in exchange for doing things for them that they were perfectly able to do for themselves. This was so I wouldn’t feel obligated. When I finished the second book I came back here and this time I managed to stay. But my job takes up so much of my energy that I write less and less. I can do stories, but that’s all. And not many of them.

“I’ve fallen in love three times in my life, and each time it was with someone who wasn’t in love with me, and now I can’t do it any more. I have friends. There’s a place uptown where I can go when I feel like being with people, and the door is never locked, you just walk in and go through the apartment till you find somebody, and they set an extra place at the dinner table for me without asking, and so I don’t feel nobody cares whether I live or die. But I can’t sleep at night because when I put out my hand there isn’t anybody in the bed beside me, and it’s as if I’d exchanged one glass mountain for another, and I don’t know what to do …”

We left the restaurant together, and shook hands under a street light, and that was the last I ever saw of him.

If I had put my cards on the table, would he then have laid his down too? Perhaps. And perhaps not. I really don’t know. Usually what triggers this response is the similarity of two experiences, and ours were not at all similar. Shortly after he was born, his mother divorced his father and so far as I know never saw him again. Max spent the early part of
his childhood in my Grandfather Maxwell’s house, and then in my Aunt Maybel’s. That as a boy he lay on that horsehair couch looking up at the picture of Caerlaverock Castle there can be no doubt. When he was six years old, his mother remarried. She divorced that husband too. Around the turn of the century it was not common for women to extricate themselves from marital difficulties. Rather than be exposed to public criticism, they dramatized their 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 with
which 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, or
for 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: