AS I SAID, my name is Tom Burton.
Apart from the beauty of that spring morning on the coast of Maine a few years ago — a beauty just slightly marred, perhaps by that uncharacteristic behavior of a black-backed gull — I recall nothing unusual about the first hours unless it was a reference my wife made to my mother. But she often spoke of my mother. My mother was on hand when each of our three children was born. She wanted to be there to wash dishes and scrub floors and to tell me how lucky I was. She was quite as delighted to be a grandmother as I was to be a father — each time. We are all fools for Family.
My mother looked on my wife as one who had saved me from a Mormon girl who rode in horseshows and wore net stockings and earrings before noon, and from a girl who cooked for us on the ranch in Montana and also rode horses, but not in horseshows. My mother worried because I was a dreamer and left the ranch and security and wanted to write books. She knew no one who wrote books and although her father, my grandfather, was himself something of a dreamer, he certainly never left the ranch in Idaho because his wife, the Sheep Queen, would never have put up with it. She did not put up with much.
My mother knitted suits for our two little boys; anything so homely as knitting is the last thing you'd associate with my mother, but so was her insistence that when she scrubbed a floor it must be done on her hands and knees. And that's how I scrub a floor.
That morning on the coast of Maine the forsythia was waning and the lilacs were waxing. Each year our friends are afraid the lilacs won't be ready for Decoration Day to round out the artificial flowers that strike me as a better argument for eternal life than fresh ones.
The tide was coming in. A tart breeze began to whistle in over the ocean and my wife and I discussed birds, about which I know little, even with Peterson's bird book in my hands. Many birds look alike, except crows and robins and bluebirds and gulls. The others won't stay still long enough to identify, but I was glad to see the birds back and I spoke of the chickadees, which I knew.
My wife was reading. She reads and she reads. She read War and Peace during her confinement with our first son when they used to keep them in bed for ten days, and again with my second son by which time hospitals had decided ten days was nonsense. By the time our daughter was born the hospitals had so shortened the period of confinement my wife had time only to get through Bleak House. During the Depression she and her parents were poor because her father was a professor of English and for entertainment they made fudge and ate it and read all the novels of Dostoevsky and Gone with the Wind.
Scarlet O'Hara was not beautiful…
“Chickadees?” my wife said. “They've been here all winter.”
“I had catbirds more in mind,” I said. “And all those vireos.”
“They've been back for some time.”
“The catbirds are flirting around the chokecherry tree,” I said.
“They nest there. One time your mother and I picked choke-cherries up in the hills where somebody saw a bear — you know, that year we were on the ranch in Montana during the war and people had to color their margarine in those funny plastic bags, it was sort of obscene, except of course we didn't because we had butter on the ranch. Your mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, the most beautiful person.”
“She knew how to dress.”
“And how to walk. For so small a woman she seemed so tall, and all those hats. I never understood how to tie a scarf. We had long talks.”
“I remember.”
“We talked a lot about you. She was afraid something awful would happen to you.”
“Maybe it will.”
“So of course she was glad when the movies gave you fifty thousand dollars because they understood that, out there.”
“Chokecherries are bitter,” I said.
“But not the jelly and not the syrup. Can you imagine eating the way we used to out there on the ranch, and at six o'clock in the morning? Pancakes and fried eggs and ham and potatoes? And when I was pregnant it made me ill when the cook began searing those big roasts.”
“Roasts have a basic quality,” I said. “Something elemental and cruel. Roasts are a reminder that no cow gets off scot-free.”
The mail came into Georgetown, Maine, in a pickup truck at ten o'clock. By ten-fifteen the mail was sorted except during Christmas season when all those cards come bringing a sense of guilt and leaving you to wonder what to do about Jewish friends. Christ is a sore point. However, had there been no Crucifixion, there'd be no Resurrection. I drove the Volvo through the woods to the post office and opened Box 263 with the combination CHF. Inside I found an appeal from the blind who had sent me a necktie for which they expected I would send five dollars. The blind send quite nice neckties, and quite often, but as a novelist I have little use for neckties, but what are you going to do? I seldom go anywhere and when I do it is to lunch at the Ritz in Boston, paid for by my editor at Little, Brown, and I assume Little, Brown reimburses him. Not even successful editors can afford many lunches at the Ritz; martinis and open-faced sandwiches there demand magnificent money. My editor is a capital companion. So few have a sense of humor. His ancestors got here on the Mayflower and something of them is reflected in his shoes which are highly polished and never new. I have often wondered who first wears them. It is my understanding that old Emperor Franz Josef hired people to break in his lederhosen. The neckties from the blind are not quite good enough sometimes; they have an annoying sheen.
I found an appeal from a priest in Montana who runs a school for Indian children, and who signs himself Your Beggar — most effective. The enclosed literature included a snapshot of a thin little girl with enormous eyes. Did I inherit my mother's concern for the Indians? And she her concern from her father, Thomas Sweringen? Each Christmas she sent the Indians boxes of food; they often visited the ranch where she gave them sides of beef and sacks of flour. The squaws came in and had coffee and cigarettes with her in the living room and they talked Shoshone. Zant-nea-shewungen means I love you. She bought their gloves and moccasins at twice the price the stores paid for them, and distributed them among her friends. She once wore a fancy pair of high beaded moccasins to a cocktail party in New York given by a tony friend who knew Edda Mussolini and later committed suicide on Capri. Money isn't the answer. When I got married, this handsome woman gave me a pair of white silk pajamas, five hundred dollars and a mandolin.
Also in the mail was the proof of the dust jacket for my new novel. It showed a handsome face very like the Arrow Collar Man, circa 1912, but not so handsome as my father who much resembled the fellow in my novel. Somewhere around the house I had a few studio photographs he had taken at the time he tried out for the movies. The contrived shadows point out his cheekbones and Barrymore nose; he casually holds gloves and looks into the middle distance where are perhaps fame and money. Why on earth he didn't make it when Rod La Roque and Richard Barthelmess did, I shall never understand. His presence before the camera of those days could not have been more wooden than theirs. As lookers, he and my mother in their brief years together must have been quite a pair.
He ended up editing trade journals in Los Angeles for the painters' and carpenters' unions. I was disappointed as a boy when at last I knew what a trade journal was.
And here was an ad from the Kozak people urging me to buy a special rag so processed you can wipe mud and grit off your car without scratching it. The remarkable thing was, the rag worked. The company would do well to make their product available in retail stores and not require you to send for it. Life has gotten so complicated nobody has time to sit down and send for things. There is no time to locate, to box, to wrap, to secure and address and stamp and mail the raincoats and hats and eyeglasses and single earrings left behind by departed guests. One friend of mine now dead of alcoholism made it clear to guests that she had no intention of ever mailing anything back to anybody, that she simply couldn't and wouldn't do it. She had a special closet for the leavings of guests: gloves, hats, tennis racquets, Hallowe'en masks, even a set of tails. She was interested in local theater groups and played whoever it was in The Philadelphia Story.
Hello, Mother. Hello, Dad. The calla lilies are in bloom again … When I knew her in college she didn't drink at all. Alcohol isn't the answer, either, nor is many marriages. I wrote a novel about her that was published in 1970.
The last piece of mail was a surprise, a letter from my youngest aunt, Pauline. The return address was simply, “Polly, Salmon, Idaho.” Everybody in Salmon knew who Polly was. She and her husband Bill were still known in the family as “the kids” because her father, my grandfather Thomas, had lived to be a hundred, and his sister, my great-aunt Nora, was still living at a hundred and two. Aunt Nora was working against time finishing up writing “The Early History of Lemhi County.” In it she speaks of her father's discovery of gold and the gold chain he made during the winters when the water was frozen and the sluice box was idle. The chain was four feet long. I had last seen Aunt Nora when she was a hundred and one. Her black hair had just begun to gray a little, but she was nicely made up with a bit of rouge; she wore beads and earrings. She took me aside. “You know, Tom,” she said, “I am very old.”
We all love each other. My aunt Maude, the middle aunt, once told me, “You know, Tom, we've always liked each other better than anybody else.” It is not that we think we are better than anybody else but that we are better company, at least for each other. We like to have fun.
I have felt especially close to Polly and her husband Bill because they are scarcely fifteen years older than I. They have treated me as a contemporary. They like picnics in the backyard at night by the light of tonga torches — cans of kerosene on sticks poked into the lawn, wicks smoking away — and music from old seventy-eight records pouring out from the open doors of the garage.
I found a million-dollar baby
In a five-and-ten-cent store.
Fun was a sudden decision to drive to Las Vegas, and to telephone the other relatives to join in and drive south in convoy through the Craters of the Moon country, stopping occasionally to have a drink and let the others catch up, and then into Nevada where all those good hotels are, and the gambling and meeting interesting people.
Polly went to the College of William and Mary in Virginia where she flunked Greek. She came back to Idaho on the Milwaukee out of Chicago wearing a suit whose folds and drapes were inspired by the opening of Tutankhamen's tomb; she carried a long gray swagger stick. A few years later I remember her driving her fiancé's brown Chrysler 60 roadster down the road, sitting up on the folded top, steering with her feet; the sun was just coming up. That's a nice way to remember an aunt. There had been a party the night before that my mother gave at the ranch in Montana, my stepfather's place. A woman had been hired to play “Marcheta” and “Tea for Two” on my mother's Steinway and a guest who people said would have been a professional if she hadn't married sang “The Life of a Rose,” a song that like certain sunsets and the smell of sagebrush after rain remains with me. That night they mixed their gin with Silver Spray; I have never since known anyone who has ever heard of Silver Spray. And then the sun came up and there was my aunt steering the Chrysler with her feet — my God, almost fifty years ago.
She had never been much of a one to write. And so? Was Aunt Nora dead? Hardly likely. Had somebody been divorced? There had been a good many divorces in the family. If anybody felt himself too much of an individual and insisted on standing apart from the family, he was divorced, usually quietly, usually with little ill will. He should have known what he was getting into. One man had to be divorced because, as my mother pointed out, he didn't take his wife out for a steak. He was sullen and jealous, always watching. Some had been divorced because they were no fun, had balked at fishing and camping and horses and hotels; others had disliked what they interpreted as our ancestor worship. Our attitude seemed natural enough to us. We felt that our ancestors were worth worshipping. Their possessions, wooden churns, candlesticks, gold scales, Bibles, firearms, reading glasses, mirrors, coffee pots, dishes, ledgers, valentines and bookmarks were cherished and displayed. My aunt Polly sometimes gathered up the stubs of old candles and recast them in the old candle mold. I myself, one Christmas, stole the only studio portrait of my great-grandfather. It is here in a box at my side. He is wearing the gold chain he made.
We picnicked annually, sometimes as many as fifty of us, on the very spot where George Sweringen had discovered gold and we ate what he had eaten: beans and bacon and trout fried over the fire, and dried apple pies. We felt we could reach out and touch him and his wife Lizzie who had often sung hymns. We were proud of them and felt they would be proud of us. They would have liked us better than anybody else.
My mother divorced my father in 1917 when I was two years old. I had heard it remarked that he was “no good.” “No good” was a phrase often on my family's lips. Applied to women, it meant they slept around. Applied to a man, it meant he slept around or drank badly, didn't know the value of a dollar, was a poor provider, was cruel or indifferent or selfish or didn't fit in. Any one of these faults was liable to lead to all the rest. As a child growing up, I did not often dwell on what “no good” meant, for as a son I wished to believe the best of my father, to read what I wished into the studio portraits and the snapshot of him with his fancy car.
Dear Tom:
The stationery my aunt Polly wrote on was long since outmoded. It was headed THE STATE THEATRE. And under that, Where there's always a good show. In that theater, long before my aunt and uncle took it over as another one of their numerous projects, I had cheered Tom Mix and Yakima Canute. There in the darkness Dracula had scared the hell out of me. When television brought moving shadows into the house and scuttled the movies, my aunt and uncle had the seats removed, installed dim lights and turned the place into a bar, soon to be called a cocktail lounge. The music on the juke box, whose plastic front was lighted up with a swooning display rather like the aurora borealis, had a strong western flavor, for the Old West and the Cowboy were a lingering presence in Salmon and even gas station attendants wore high-heeled boots as if, but for adverse circumstances, they too would be riding the range instead of looking at it across the Salmon River.
THE STATE THEATRE was now THE STATE LOUNGE. The tilt of the floor towards what had once been the stage gave strangers who drank there the feeling they had drunk more than usual or that they were on board ship.
The town of Salmon, populated by scarcely two thousand, supported eight more bars and lounges for the ranchers and cowboys and sheepherders who came in from up and down the valley with their high heels and Stetsons and their faithful dogs that went on inside, out of the heat or the cold.
But there was the problem of what to do with all that stationery, but really no problem at all. My aunt Polly simply used it, and it was a pleasant reminder that nothing much had changed. She kept the many boxes of paper in the garage along with a professional vacuum cleaner once used to suck up popcorn and chewing gum wrappers from the aisles of THE STATE THEATRE, and a fetus preserved in alcohol. The fetus had belonged — if belonged is the right word — to Polly's father-in-law, the second doctor to come into Lemhi County. The first doctor to come into the county was my great-aunt Nora's husband, Uncle Doctor. Uncle Doctor had died rather young, shortly after he bought a Model T Ford, retired his buggy and turned his team out to pasture, but Aunt Nora continued to prepare with mortar and pestle certain capsules of medicine which she passed on to friends and relatives who had counted on their magic while her husband was living years and years before. It made no sense to her that what she was doing was illegal so she ignored the fact.
Sometimes over drinks my aunt Polly and her husband talked of abolishing the fetus, but there was the question of whether there should be a service of some kind if they buried it, or should they simply take it to the dump, since it had no name to grace a marker. There might be some legal question, some regulation on the books down in Boise.
And there in the garage was the old Victrola and stacks of records and extra rolls for the piano in the house. “That Old Gang of Mine.”
“Valencia.” Spain got a big hand in the twenties — roses, romance and castanets were on the loose. Some sang that they were determined to marry the belie of Barcelona. In his Hispano-Suiza, Alfonso XIII raced off to Cannes.
Somebody remembered a roll that was certain to retrieve certain nostalgias — must be in the garage — and drinks in hand, host and guests traipsed across the lawn where they came on many wonderful things; a warped ukulele prompted long thoughts of Whispering Smith singing “Gimme a Little Kiss.” And here was a hearing aid once used by a long-ago Sweringen who embarrassed the family by asking strangers if they believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, and huddling close to hear their answer. The thing resembled the larger intestine.
Again and again they were brought up short by the fetus in its boozy limbo.
In her letter, my aunt Polly urged me to forgive her scrawl. Her typewriter, she wrote, was broken and the man who fixed them had suddenly moved to Idaho Falls where his daughter was, some kind of trouble, she guessed. Anyway, an attorney in Seattle had called her. They had just got back from Las Vegas and had scarcely got into the house when the telephone rang, this attorney. He had tried, he said several times. He said this woman client of his claimed to be the daughter of Elizabeth Sweringen and Ben Burton. The next day came a letter from the woman herself.
I stood there in the post office in mild shock, and then I surprised the postmistress by laughing. But what an irony, I thought, that the attorney's preposterous call and the letter from this preposterous woman should come almost to the day on the tenth anniversary of my mother's death.