One
of the most important things you can do with the concepts
at this Web site is to use them in "getting a handle
on" the members of your family.
The concepts can help to distance you just enough from
your relatives and from the intimate process of thinking
about them for you to see them with some clarity.
I
don't know how it is with you, but I seldom had relatives
say very much to me about themselves or other people
in the family when I was growing up. In my later years,
though, I did get some scattered stories and insights,
and the information cleared up some of the mysteries
of my family for me.
Among
the things that were kept from me when I was young was
information about my father's father. He died when I
was five, and I remember crying at the news, not because
he was dead and that was a bad thing, but because I
had picked up on the fact that the rides in his big
black Pontiac with the elongated head of an Indian chief
as a hood ornament were gone forever. The car would
not become my father's property. It would be sold. (As
is normal, I suppose, I was little more than a bundle
of childish egocentric needs and desires at the age
of five.)
Oddly
enough, I have no specific memory of being in that car,
and I have only one memory of my grandfather: I remember
him giving me a small glass of ginger ale, telling me
to drink it, and laughing at the face I must have made
when it burned my small tongue and my nostrils. I recall
being a bit on edge about the whole project at the time
and of feeling a bit embarrassed, irritated, and put
upon. Even though I rather liked the ginger ale, I didn't
like being laughed at.
That's
absolutely it for me when it comes to
my memories of the man.
But
over the years, I learned enough of the bare facts about
him to narrow down the organizing adventure of his life,
if not to work it out completely.
He
was an Englishman and an orphan when he first came to
this country. He was sixteen years old and making a
trip with a family party to visit various family members
around the world before entering into some kind of apprenticeship
in an office in London. The itinerary began in Philadelphia,
and the party intended to go through Texas, on to South
America, then to India, and finally back to England.
He
did not want to return to London and serve as an apprentice.
So, while the party was in Texas, as the story goes,
he was sitting along the road outside the home he was
visiting, feeling greatly irritated with his life and
his family. A muleskinner came by on his wagon and struck
up a conversation with him, and he simply rode off with
the muleskinner.
I
don't know much about his first twenty years here (except
that he was married and divorced somewhere along the
line in that period), but at the age of 35 or so, he
was a conductor on the Cotton Belt Railroad and living
in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
I
have been given to understand that railroad conductors
in those early years were in charge of the train. They
essentially gave the orders as to what was to be done
and how it was to be done. They had pretty much the
status in the public mind that airline pilots have had
in more recent times.
He
married my grandmother in the early part of the twentieth
century, when she was seventeen, and they did not live
happily ever after.
My
grandmother went into her marriage with significant
cash and real estate as her dowry, and in that time
and place, the woman's property became her husband's
property upon her marriage. She simply ceased to have
any control over the money matters in her life.
The
attitudes that my grandfather brought into his marriage
seem to have been pretty much the attitudes of the English
gentleman of the late nineteenth century. In particular,
he viewed my grandmother's money as his to do with as
he pleased, and with his income as a conductor to supplement
the pile of resources my grandmother brought into his
life, he lived very well.
He
spent my grandmother's money on liquor, automobiles,
and other women that he supported in the various places
that he traveled to in his work. He also reestablished
contact with his family in England and brought two very
austere maiden aunts to live with him and my grandmother.
At least one of them had allegedly been a seamstress
to Queen Victoria, and my grandmother (as she told me
many years later) found them very intimidating. (And
indeed, even the pictures I remember of them were very
intimidating.)
He
was abusive in many ways, and he and my grandmother
were separated from time to time. They never divorced,
though, and he always came back.
In
the end, he timed his death perfectly. My grandmother
was left with no money and the real estate that was
left was mortgaged for as much as the banks would loan.
All she had were a wife's pension from the railroad
and title to her home, to one rental house, and to a
few lots. The South being the way it was, she also had
her social status, which was significant. (She was a
DAR, UDC, Garden Club type and, as I recall, served
as state president of one or more these organizations.)
She supplemented her income after her husband's death
by giving piano lessons in her home and by selling women's
corsets and other undergarments. I am reasonably certain
that my parents also kicked in whatever they could from
time to time.
I
hesitate to say that she lived in poverty after her
husband died. I spent a lot of time in her home and
never felt any sense of deprivation, although I certainly
never felt any sense of luxury, either. Her refrigerator,
for example, was the oldest working piece of electrical
machinery that I have ever seen, and the stove that
she cooked on was unique in my memory in its antiquity.
But both appliances did work, and they worked very well.
And I was always given to understand that political
and social access were mine for the asking, which actually
seemed to be the case a couple of times in my life,
even though I made the decision very early on that I
was not going to be a part of the Southern society scene.
I came over the years to think of my grandfather as
a scoundrel. But he was probably no worse than your
average nineteenth-century English gentleman adventurer
type who "made a good marriage." The money
was there. It was essentially his to spend, and he spent
it. He probably expected his sons to follow his example
and marry money, too — which neither of them chose
to do, probably in reaction to the example that he set
for them. My father, at least, had very little use for
his father and his father's ways.
My
grandfather had a good deal of charm and presence. He
even ran for mayor once, but lost. He died from a heart
attack, as I understand it, on the sidewalk outside
of a bar on Main Street. I also understand that his
doctor had told him that his next drink could kill him.
So,
what was the organizing adventure of his life?
My
best guess is that the marriage adventure was the organizing
adventure of his life — but that his conception
of the marriage adventure was so different from my grandmother's
(and so different from the Franklin's conception in
the previous case) that the experience could not be
a happy one for either party.
My
grandfather was profoundly egocentric, and in his mind,
marriage was not a partnership in anything like the
way that most of us think of marriage as a partnership
today. But it may also be that his attitude towards
marriage and women was so strongly sanctioned in the
England of his early youth and in this country in the
early twentieth century that he saw absolutely nothing
wrong with any of the abuse that he inflicted on my
grandmother. Her body, her property, and indeed the
world itself were his by right as the son of an English
gentleman. It was the duty of his sons to follow his
example and marry money. If they chose not to do so,
that was their problem.
On
the other hand, it may be that he saw life in terms
of his sex and money adventures, which included whatever
he could acquire in marriage. If this is the right perspective
on him, I can't really determine whether money or sex
was the organizing adventure of his life, but it could
certainly have been one or the other of them. The only
other possibility I can see has to do with preserving
his self-image, and that adventure is
so dependent upon inner realties that I have no idea
how to give the concept any substance here.
Love
was certainly not the organizing adventure of his life.
Neither was any form of business or public service,
and in spite of what may have been certain romantic
notions in the public mind of his age, I doubt that
being a railroad conductor actually had sufficient substance
as a career to be the organizing adventure of anyone's
life. And there is no indication at all in the remarks
I have heard that he was interested in maintaining the
social position of the family he married into. In his
mind, I would guess that he carried with him (in his
perception of himself as an English gentleman with consequential
relatives) all of the social prestige that he required.
Upon
reflection, I would classify his life as one of the
saddest stories I know because of its effects on his
wife and children. I suspect, though, that he saw things
quite differently. I would guess in fact that he found
his life more than satisfactory, even though I can't
help but wonder if that's true.