Glenway Wescott

“ Alwyn's grandmother sat in the sitting room only when there were guests, or when, by the south window she held the Milwaukee Sentinel or the Christian Herald on a level with the ridge of her old-fashioned corset, discovering what went on in the world through her unsuitably small spectacles. Her life, like that of primitive women, revolved about the place where food was prepared. ”

“ Her extravagant love of the past was a way of continuing to be a mother, now that she was only a grandmother. If the men and women she had brought into the world had still been dependent upon her as they had been in their childhood, or if she could have usurped her daughter-in-law's control over Alwyn and his little brother and sisters, she would not have been so tireless in her efforts to remember and communicate what she remembered. ”

“ For the memory of another is like a ship which one sees coming down a bay—the hull and the sails separating from the distance and from the outlying islands and capes—charged with freight and cutting open the waves, addressing itself in increasingly clear outlines to the impatient eyes on the waterfront ”

“ There were the daguerreotypes in leather cases, one in a case of tortoise shell on which there was an inlaid lily, brought back by his grandfather from the South. Unknown men and women in a north light that was eternal; good, bad, and indifferent people. . . . The adolescent boy, cross-questioning his grandmother as to their identity, wanted to ask them questions as well—with no hope of being answered, since they were dead; curious and proud, he wanted to be able to explain to himself their failures, to love and hate them as they had loved and hated one another. ”

“ There was a watch chain of braided leather, and his great-grandfather John Tower's silver watch, wound with a key, three-quarters of an inch thick, the lid over the face decorated with birds and cat-tails. There was a picture frame, not Serena Cannon's work, but his great-aunt Nancy's: leather daisies and bunches of grapes and tendrils, varnished and tacked on strips of wood. ”

“ Side by side above the chest of drawers, on a level with his knees, hung a pair of portraits of his grandmother's two little girls who died, enlarged from tin-types: two sober faces like boys' faces, wearing round white collars; one looking straight ahead, good-natured and unabashed, the other resting her chin in the palm of her hand with a sick child's thoughtfulness. ”

“ Sometimes she replied to questions which he was too young to ask with obscure allusions or partial avowals, which, like the rays of a magic lantern, illuminated with disconnected pictures the darkness of many lives—in fact, the darkness of life itself. ”

“ And like the wild morning of that world, the eyes in the daguerreotype were cold and clear, and were not anxious about the afternoon or the evening.
"Whew! the heat!" the grandmother would say to the dreamy boy, wiping her flushed face on her apron. "Your pa will want some cold water in the field. Take the pail and run down to the well and bring up a little to the house, and then you'd better take a fresh jug to the men."
Alwyn would pause on the doorstep. There lay the countryside which, sixty years before, had been her wilderness—changed no less than she. ”

“ Over the itinerant photographer's head they must have seen miles of tough bushes and grass; strong men chopping down the forest in a high wind; pigeons dropping heavily from branch to branch; pasturing deer continually alarmed. ”

“ In the kitchen alone, of all the rooms in the house, Alwyn could imagine his grandmother as a girl, standing up very straight against that green plaster wall; her cheeks not quite rosy (for whoever had colored the familiar daguerreotype had mixed violet with the red) ; each gold earring swinging in the shadow of a curl ”

“ Many gravel roads running parallel through the distance, as white as marble; chickens dusting their feathers in them, frightened away by automobiles. Thousands of telephone poles making the sound of a tuning fork. ”

“ Alwyn's grandmother could identify piece after piece: "My sister Abigail's best dress when she was a girl. The dress I had made when your grandpa and I visited the relations in Iowa. Your aunt Flora's first party dress. A sacque that a woman named Minerva Foote gave me to cut up into a jacket for one of my children. The goods your mother's aunt Melissa Duff went on a lumber wagon to Milwaukee to get a whole bolt of, so nobody should have anything like it—she was the meanest woman ever lived! ”

“ In all there were fifty-six names, badly faded, in a script full of old-fashioned flourishes, and fifty-six garlands, having a great variety of designs: braided hoops, medallions. like bits of Spanish lace, and spider webs, combinations of loops and zigzags and coils and shadowy scallops, executed in every quality and shade of hair—gray of tin and gray of iron, sandy and chestnut and dead black, one maroon and one almost orange ”