•••

I looked at family photographs with a small magnifying glass. In a picture taken at the beach in the 1950’s I see sand on the back of my brother’s legs, a paper carton of bait, the burned place on the half-buried log where we used to build fires. In a picture of the dining room at a Thanksgiving dinner I saw the table settings and the turkey and the sweat on the black windowpanes. I scanned, shingle by Necco-wafer shingle, the candy house my mother made and somebody photographed one Christmas. I rented cars from a garage in the basement of the World Trade Center and drove to many places within eight hundred miles that had been important in my ancestor’s lives. I read gravestone inscriptions disappearing like movie credits into the advancing sod.

•••

I wanted my parents lives to have meant something. I hunted all over for meanings of any kind---not, I think, simply out of grief or anger at their deaths, but also be cause the stuff they saved implied that there must have been a reason for saving it. The smell of an old hymnal, the weave of a black mesh hat veil, the tone of a thank-you note, each struck me with the silent force of a clue. Something was going on here. I believed bigger meanings hid behind little ones; that maybe I could follow them to a source back tens of hundreds of years ago. I didn’t care if the meanings were far-flung or vague or even trivial. I wanted to pursue them. I hoped maybe I could find a meaning that would defeat death.

And not in grief or regret merely but rather
With a love that is almost joy I think of them

•••

And I would overpay for a coop apartment and carry a mortgage and fret about money just like my dad; he and my mother accompany me through a life that would be much like theirs, and at every step I would compare myself especially to him, would judge if I was doing better or worse than he had done at being middle-class and putting kids through school and not terrorizing my family and staying between the lines while trying not to forget what I actually want to do. And unknown things would happen and sooner or later I would die, too---I understood that now, clearly, the way you suddenly become aware of the sky and the diving board after the person in front of you has jumped---and my kids would perhaps see me off the way I had seen my parents off, or perhaps not. And soon all the people who had accompanied me through life would be gone, too, and then even the people who had known us and no one would remain on earth who had ever seen us, and those descended from us perhaps would know stories about us, perhaps once in a while they would pass by buildings where we had lived and they would mention that we had lived there. And then the stories would fade, and our graves would go untended, and the graves of those who had tended ours would go untended, and no one would guess what it had been like to wake before dawn in our breath-warmed bedrooms as the radiators clanked and our wives and husbands and children slept. And we would move from the nearer regions of the dead past the dead who are remembered in the far regions of the forgotten, and on past those, into a space as white and big as the sky replicated forever. And all that would remain would be the love bravely expressed, and the moments when you danced and your heart danced with you.

•••

Mostly my ancestors were Protestants. In fact, of all the ancestors I can name over the last three hundred years, only one or two were possibly not. I imagine myself in a grange hall full of ancestors---their dark clothes, perhaps a wooly , smoky smell, their inward demeanors---and I think conversation between me and them would be even more strained than usual at family get-togethers. My ancestors talked and wrote a lot more about God and Jesus Christ than I do. They prayed out loud, cited Scripture in conversation, and generally gave a strong appearance of belief. They approved of mirth, but not “dissolute mirth”.

They could be a tough audience. In church they often hummed when they liked what the preacher was saying and sometimes hissed softly when they didn’t. Many of my references come from popular culture, theirs usually come from the Bible. Months and years sometime pass without my giving any thought to religion. The only religious observance I observe every year without fail is on Good Friday when I call my friend Mark Singer and discuss the charges and counter charges of this whole crucifixion snafu.

•••

My grandmother lived most of the last two decades of her life in Florida. She became the tannest of all my relatives. She wore her silver hair up in a chignon, with little curls at the temples. Her faded blue eyes looked at you over a sill of wrinkles. Like most people who loved my grandmother, I had trouble with her sometimes. She could be a pain. But tears always filled my eyes, as well as hers, when she said how old the veterans were. The last time she told me that story she was approaching ninety herself.

Family by Ian Frazier, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994
 

•••

Harry’s worldly ambition I think was no ordinary youthful eagerness to “succeed at the law”. Rather it seemed a ferocity, an obsession, though, quite obviously it gave its victim intensest pleasure, which obsessions are not supposed to do. Harry’s sons would one day suffer from their father’s single-minded pursuits of his interests. The second time I saw my brother look down into hell was when one of his boys, at eighteen, broke down, and a doctor told my brother that he had neglected his sons.” It’s true,” Harry said, and his eyes as he said it again had that haunted look. “It’s true what they say. I have cared too much for law and music.” No sooner was the trouble resolved, however, than my brother was at it once again. I must have reached forty when he made another of these family confessions that seem so startling when they occur. It was on the occasion of my son Ezra’s entering the Navy in World War II. Before he enlisted, Ezra said he wanted to change his name and put Drinker into it, Ezra Drinker Bowen. When I asked Harry how to go about it he was astonished. He said he had suffered all his life from the name.” The only thing that rhymes with Drinker is stinker, I found that out in grammar school”. I had fights before I got rid of it. At college I told myself I was going to do something to make Drinker a name to be proud of instead of embarrassed about.”

Family Portrait by Catherine Drinker Bowen, Atlantic, Little Brown, 1970

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