Except for the name of the town and the names of the people, this story is completely true. The only point that worries me is the business of Ruth’s changing the tickets; I know she did it, but it seems odd to me that the Pullman conductor let her. Possibly he issued her a voucher and she got a refund later, at the company offices in Seattle.
Technically, this ought to precede “The Figures in the Clock,” since it happened a year and a half before Miss Gowrie’s play. But I have placed it here because in “Yellowstone Park” I seem older. This may have been because I was not in school. Also, in Medicine Springs, I was having to live up to a role that “grew me up” overnight. Once I was out of that curious wonderland where all the men were married, I shrank back to my normal age. There is another explanation too. In my first years at the Seminary, I finally achieved my wish of making friends with older girls; except for Betty Bent, all my intimates were juniors and seniors. Their talk was mostly of men, dances, and fraternity pins, one of them, a girl of eighteen, was engaged. When they graduated, all this changed; my friends, now, were my own classmates, who, if anything, were rather young for their age. The fact that there were no beauties among them may account for this. Their interests were sports, studies, and eating. Most of them had never been out with a boy, and many of them did not even smoke. As it turned out, being with my contemporaries was more fun than I had expected; it was less of a strain, for one thing. I did not have to pretend to greater experience than I had. We were busy too, as seniors, running the school; two of us were studying for college boards. This absorbed most of our energies and drew us closer to our teachers.
The reader has heard a great deal of my grandfather and very little of my grandmother. One reason for this is that she was living while most of these memoirs were being written. Sooner or later, however, I knew I was going to have to touch on her, or the story would not be complete. Even when she was dead, I felt a certain reluctance toward doing this, as toward touching a sensitive nerve. It meant probing, too, into the past, into my earliest, dimmest memories, and into the family past behind that. The sense of a mystery back of the story I had already told traced itself more and more to the figure of my grandmother, who had appeared only as a name, a sob, a lacy handkerchief, a pair of opera glasses, a pearl-handled revolver. The McCarthy family, great talkers and romancers, revealed their secrets readily enough, even if some of their revelations were dubious as fact. As a man, my grandfather Preston was an open book. His history was a matter of public record, for the most part, and if it contained hidden chapters, those chapters occurred, precisely, I found, at the point where his history met or merged with my grandmother’s.
They met, one story has it, at a military ball, he was in gala uniform, and they fell in love at first sight. But this cannot be right, because, so far as I know, my grandfather was never in the army, nor does “love at first sight” jibe with my grandmother’s account of their courtship. “Their relations opposed the marriage.” Possibly so, but I never heard this from any member of the family; on this subject, the principals were silent. As a man, my grandfather was an open book; as a husband, he is an enigma. My grandmother is the key, in her character too may lie the key to that strange favoritism shown to me and the cold reserve with which my brothers were treated.
All I know of her is told in the following, final chapter. She and my grandfather had three children. Both of her sons are living, and neither have had any issue. After them, the Preston name will be extinct.