When my mother died in 1984 we went back to the Virginia churchyard where my father and Herb were buried. It was a bitterly cold January day, and the wind off the Short Hill Mountain scattered the preacher’s words down the valley and made us cling tight to each other against the icy blasts of winter and death.
“They’ll never get me back up there in those sticks,” she used to say in the bad old Depression days after she had taken Doris and me out of Virginia and made us city people in New Jersey.
“Back up there in those sticks.” She made it sound so forlorn, such a Godforsaken backwater out beyond Nowhere. She said it so often—“back up there in those sticks”—that it became my memory of the place. For years I never wanted to go back. Sometimes I even told people, “They’ll never get me back up there in those sticks.”
She was talking of Morrisonville, the village where I was born. It lay in the Loudoun Valley of northern Virginia, a long sweep of fat, rich Piedmont farmland cradled between mountains that parallel the Blue Ridge into the Potomac River. Four miles to the north was the New Jerusalem Lutheran Church where Morrisonville worshiped and buried its dead. I remembered going there in a long procession of black cars for my father’s funeral on a golden November day in 1930.
“This is the biggest funeral there’s ever been in the Lutheran church,” an old gentleman told my mother that day, trying to make her feel honored, I guess.
A few weeks later my mother, Doris, and I were gone from Morrisonville. Gone for good, to hear her tell it. “Never get me back up there in those sticks.”
She had been brave then. Maybe the bravest of all the brave things she did was giving Audrey, her baby, only ten months old. for adoption by my uncle Tom and aunt Goldie. Uncle Tom, one of my father’s brothers, had a good job with the B&O Railroad and could give Audrey a comfortable life, not the kind of adventure my mother was in for as she headed off to New Jersey with Doris and me, off to patching those worn-out smocks in the A&P laundry.
“Never get me back up there in those sticks.”
Maybe it was only bravado, which was lost on a boy, but I was in middle age and had seen half the world before I came back to Morrisonville one day and gazed at it in wonder, thinking, My God, this is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.
Until then, I had never thought of it longingly with love, though it was my birthplace and my father’s, too, and had been home to my father’s family for two hundred and fifty years. For me it had always been a shabby, mean place “back up there in those sticks” which I had been lucky to escape.
So bringing her back at the end was not a vengeful attempt to have the last word in the lifelong argument between us. It was done out of a sense that a family is many generations closely woven; that though generations die, they endure as part of the fabric of the family; and that a burying ground is a good place to remind the living that they have debts to the past. This churchyard was where she belonged. It was full of her life.
The grave was beside Herb’s. He had died in 1962. My father was a short stroll southward down the slope, beside his mother, Ida Rebecca. Ida Rebecca and my mother had once been bitter competitors in the passionate matter of which one would rule my father. A short stroll westward was Uncle Tom, a good and gentle man who had been a loving father to Audrey.
Down the hillside a few yards from Ida Rebecca and my father were Uncle Irvey and his wife, Aunt Orra. Uncle Irvey was Ida Rebecca’s oldest boy, the solemn one, the responsible one. My mother never liked Uncle Irvey, although he and Orra had taken her and my father to live with them at Morrisonville when they were first married and too poor to afford their own place, and though I had been born in Uncle Irvey’s house. Maybe she could never forgive Uncle Irvey for having once needed his charity; still, she had dearly loved Aunt Orra.
There was far more of Morrisonville in the graveyard than there was in Morrisonville. Here was my uncle Edgar, one of Ida Rebecca’s twin boys, who used to manage the Morrisonville baseball team. Here was my father’s youngest brother, Uncle Lewis, who used to put me on a board on his barber chair and cut my hair with artistic scissor flourishes, then douse it with Jeris or Lucky Tiger when my father took me to his barbershop.
Nearby were the husband and wife with whom my mother boarded when she first came to Loudoun County as a young schoolteacher in the 1920s. And the preacher whose Sunday sermons she had attended. The teacher who taught the upper grades in the two-room schoolhouse they shared. Students she had taught in second grade.
That day’s ceremony was not among the biggest funerals ever held there. She was in her eighty-seventh year. Except for children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, most of her world had passed by. Doris, Audrey, Mary Leslie, and I huddled together under a canvas canopy crackling in the wind. The people we had married stood close behind with some of our children and three or four of our cousins from nearby Lovettsville who remembered her from long ago.
Our sorrow that day was tempered by relief. After six years of the nursing home, of watching her change into somebody else, and then into nobody at all, death seemed not unwelcome. It had been heartbreaking to see her mind run down, fading slowly at first, then swiftly emptying out almost everything but a few old memories that had got wedged in the crevices and the primordial instinct not to give up, not to quit, not to let life beat you, not to die.
“Don’t be a quitter, Russell,” she used to tell me. “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a quitter.”
Toward the end, sitting by the bed, holding her hand, I had silently told her, “It’s not worth fighting for anymore. Give it up. Let go. It’s all right to quit now.”
For three days we argued the point in absolute silence. I don’t think I won that argument. I don’t think she finally quit there at the end. She was just overwhelmed by superior power.
Afterward, I felt bad about having broken the faith. Maybe I had let her down at the end. This was romantic nonsense, of course, because for all practical purposes she had been gone for years, and, in any case, that silent argument over the final three days had not been an argument at all, but only my own mind privately doubting the values she had hammered into me in childhood. Still, even in death, she retained the power to make me dissatisfied with myself by dwelling on the failures.
There was my failure to become the next Edwin James, for instance. Hadn’t I disappointed her there? Never mind that I lacked the temperament, the desire, and the talent to run a big bureaucracy like the Times’s news operation. Maybe I could have overcome those drawbacks if I hadn’t given in to Old Devil Laziness. Or so I told myself when the memory of her battle cries rattled my peace of mind.
“If at first you don’t succeed…”
“For God’s sake, Russell, show a little gumption for once in your life…”
To be sure, the column had been successful enough. I had been writing it nearly twenty-two years by the time she died. It was not a column meant to convey news, but a writer’s column commenting on the news by using different literary forms: essay devices, satire, burlesque, sometimes even fiction. It was proof that she had been absolutely right when she sized me up early in life, guessed I’d been born with the word gene, and steered me toward literature, believing that writing might be the way I could make something of myself, could amount to something.
The column had got its share of the medals American newspaper people give themselves, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1979. My mother never knew about that. The circuitry of her brain had collapsed the year before, and she was in the nursing home, out of touch with life forevermore, with the world of ambition, success, prizes, and vanity.
I could only guess how the woman she used to be might have responded to the news of the Pulitzer, but the guessing wasn’t hard. I’m pretty sure she would have said, “That’s nice, Buddy. It shows if you buckle down and work hard you’ll be able to make something of yourself one of these days.”
In training me to pass hard judgments on myself, she finally led me to pass hard judgments on the values by which she lived. Long before she died, even before her mind collapsed, I had begun to have a bad conscience about the constant hunger for success that had consumed those good, early years in the business.
Things had come my way too easily. Hadn’t I repaid Buck Dorsey shabbily, considering how much he seemed a father to me? I hadn’t even been involved in the great stories of my era, as the earlier generation of World War Two reporters had been. Reston, Phil Potter, Bill Lawrence, Price Day, Bill White, Gerry Fay, Eric Sevareid, Harrison Salisbury—tempered by their experience of the war, they all seemed to have a depth of character, a passion for their calling, and a sense that there were things even more important than success, another raise, a promotion, a gaudy title, and a prize citation to hang on the wall.
Well, of course, in my time as a reporter, which was from 1947 to 1962, there were not many great stories to broaden a newsman and deepen the character. Those were the good times, from the summer I started at the Sun in 1947 to Dallas in 1963, at least compared to what had gone before and what came afterward. They were especially good times if you were young, ambitious, energetic, and American. Being young makes all times better; being American in that brief moment that was America’s golden age of empire made it the best of any time that ever was or will be. Provided you were white.
Good times, though, are not the best times for a reporter. When the country began to pull apart in the 1960s and 1970s, I felt melancholy about being left out as a new bunch of reporters went off to cover the demonstrations, riots, wars, and assassinations; to challenge the integrity of the government my generation had believed in; and, eventually, to change the entire character of American journalism, and change it for the better, too.
Part of the upheaval of that time was an attack on the values my mother had preached and I had lived by. The attack on ambition and striving for success was especially heavy. People who admitted to wanting to amount to something were put down as materialists idiotically wasting their lives in the “rat race.” The word “gumption” vanished from the language.
Our children were adolescents now. They brought the fever for change into the house. Not wanting to be the dead hand of the corrupt past, I tried to roll with the new age. I decided not to drive my children as my mother had driven me with those corrupt old demands that they amount to something.
Materialism, ambition, and success were out the window. The new age exalted love, self-gratification, mystical religious experience, and passive Asian philosophies that aimed to help people resign themselves peaceably to the status quo. Much of this seemed preposterous to me, but I conceded that my mother might have turned me into a coarse materialist, so kept my heretical suspicions to myself while trying to go along with the prevalent theory, enunciated best by The Beatles, that “love is all you need.”
And then I broke. The trouble was that too many people were not playing the love game. Too many people were still playing my mother’s gumption game, and playing it very hard. Gradually I saw that these people were quietly preparing themselves to take over the country. Slowly, I began to fear that our three children—Kathleen, Allen, Michael—were not going to be members of the take-over class. I started preaching the ambition gospel to them.
It was silly, of course. Adolescence is too late to start hearing about gumption. Still, something had to be done. The schools were sending home alarming report cards. Reading that progression of grim report cards, I reached a shameful conclusion: I had failed to fire my children with ambition.
This was a time when, despite the new age, parents talked about getting their children into Harvard the way old folks once talked about getting into Heaven. It was the old rat race. Still going on. And plenty of children not too love-besotted to run the course. Everywhere I saw adults transforming their children into barracuda, pressuring tots for grades that would get them into elite colleges, which would get them elite jobs, where they would eat life’s losers.
My children’s report cards read like early warning signals. I panicked. Were my lovely children destined to feed the barracuda because I had failed them?
One evening at dinner, when the report cards had been as bad as usual, I heard myself shouting, “Don’t you want to amount to something?”
The children looked blank. Amount to something? What a strange expression. The antique idea of life as a challenge to “make something of yourself” meant nothing to them because I had never taught it to them.
I had been at the martinis before dinner.
“Don’t you want to make something of yourselves?” I roared.
The children studied their plates with eloquent faces. I could see their thoughts.
That isn’t Dad yelling, they were thinking. That’s those martinis.
They were only partly right. It wasn’t the gin that was shouting loudest. It was my mother. The martinis had freed me to preach her old-time religion. The gin only gave me the courage to announce that yes, by God, I had always believed in people trying to make something of themselves, had always believed in success, had always believed that without hard work and self-discipline you could never amount to anything, and didn’t deserve to.
In gin’s awful grip, I was renouncing the faith of the new age in the power of gentleness, love, and understanding. I was reverting to the primitive faith of my mother. She had embedded it in my marrow, bone, and blood. There, anchored beyond reason’s power to crush, it would keep me always restless, discontented, always slightly guilty for not amounting to something a little bit more.
In those days it led me into misunderstanding the children. The bleak report cards did not forebode failure, but a refusal to march to the drumbeat of the ordinary, which should have made me proud. Now they were grown people with children of their own, and we liked each other and had good times when we were together.
One defect of my mother’s code was the value it placed on money and position. The children never cared a lot for that. To care, I suppose, you had to have been there with her during the Depression.
The ceremony in the churchyard was briefer than it might have been, because of the icy wind off the mountain, and afterward we went to a house in Morrisonville for food and the warmth of oak logs burning in a stone fireplace.
A house of primitive log construction, it was maybe a hundred and seventy years old, maybe more. Nobody could tell for sure. Some long-dead forebears of mine, names lost to the twentieth century, had probably helped dig the foundation, raise the logs, or mix the chinking. The family had been in those parts since 1730, but they had not been a people who wrote things down, except for an occasional ancient tombstone inscription here and there around the county.
The house was filled with a sense of timelessness that afternoon. Doris, Audrey, Mary Leslie, and I were children of the twentieth century. Up the road a short distance, I had been babied and spoiled by my grandmother, Ida Rebecca, who was born in the time of the Civil War.
My mother, whose death had brought us there, back up there in those sticks, had spent childhood in the age of the horse, buggy, and Teddy Roosevelt.
Two of Audrey’s eight children had come down from New England with her, and Mimi’s and my three children were also there. These were the children of America in the good times, born in the middle of the twentieth century, destined most likely to know what the twenty-first holds.
And two of our granddaughters were there, Mimi’s and mine, born in the 1980s, who would, all going well, reach far into the next century. I was aware of my life stretching across a great expanse of time, of reaching across some two hundred years inside this old house and connecting Ida Rebecca’s Civil War America with whatever America might be in the middle of the twenty-first century.
My father’s funeral procession had set out from another house just up the road from this one. Thirty-three he was at death. And now my daughter Kathy was thirty-two, my son Allen thirty-one, my son Michael twenty-nine.
Looking at them grouped with Audrey’s children around the fireplace, I realized that if my father were mysteriously compelled to join us this day, he would gravitate naturally to my children for the companionship of his own kind. If he noticed me staring too curiously at him, he might turn to Kathy or Allen or Michael and whisper, asking, “Who’s the old man in the high-priced suit?”
I was now old enough to be his father.
So it is with a family. We carry the dead generations within us and pass them on to the future aboard our children. This keeps the people of the past alive long after we have taken them to the churchyard.
“If there’s one thing I can’t stand, Russell, it’s a quitter.”
Lord, I can hear her still.