Gerhardt's Children

Gerhardt’s Children

I AM YEARS GONE from my family and miles away. The nearest, my parents, are three hundred fifty miles to the south; the farthest, my brother, is three thousand miles to the west. But they raid by telephone with jarring suddenness; they have the cyclic constancy of a mortgage; and they are inevitable and relentless, like the erosion of my remaining youth. (Perhaps none of that remains. I am thirty-one. My contemporaries inflect young differently than they did when they were in their twenties.) Like certain frightening dreams, my family returns.

My sister is dying twelve hundred miles away. She may be the best of us, who are each other’s nightmares. I thought so once. She is the one to whom I have been closest with any consistency—a soul with some approximation to my own—and we have exchanged confidences that do not customarily pass between family members. Still, it has been a cautious and selective candor.

Nora, like her home and her children, was herself always controlled and orderly, never opening the box of her secret mind for fear that awesome and terrible creatures would spring out. Greater intimacy ripened between me and my brother-in-law, who was a stranger. Over the course of a few years we spent many days together in the north woods, drinking at night in piny bars and talking against concussive waves of jukebox polkas. Later we would retreat to our cabin and continue to talk, ever more mellowly as we sipped good Scotch, until we were luxuriously stunned by alcohol and exhaustion. Mornings, we were up before dawn, breakfasted on wheatcakes and sausages in the lodge, and we cast off the boat lines and fired up the motor as the first rind of gray came seeping into the eastern horizon, stars still glittering above us. We punished our bodies with unaccustomed rigors from sunrise to sunset in pursuit of muskies—large explosive fish that fight the tackle brutally. Lee began a little afraid of me, defensive and disliking me, with barely masked aggression. I began with a hidden sense of superiority and subtle little cruelties. We ended as brothers—though we are too divergent ever to be wholly friends. I wonder sometimes if Nora and I would have been closer had she been my real sister. She was so when we were younger. Only in the last few years, through her own and my mother’s design, did she become my sister manqué.

The family is not destroying Nora, at least not in this the final end game, but still the moves seem simply the logical development of what they began earlier. The nearest I ever came to personal contact with Vivienne, my mother’s older sister, was a telegram she sent to my uncle Dick eleven years ago: REGRET I CANNOT ATTEND, VIVIENNE. We were all at Nora’s house then, gathered to bury my grandmother. My mother was outraged, gleeful, and in a transport of vindication when she showed this to me. Now Vivienne is dead too. For me, hers was the death of a shade. She had never been more than a substanceless image in a few old photographs, a name infrequently wrenched from the unwilling memories of those who had lived with her. For them, she was as timeless as a mathematical equation, and death altered her no more than a change of hair color would. When Nora was four, Vivienne, her mother, dropped her at my parents’ door one afternoon and said, I’ll be back at five thirty. Watch her for me, will you? I understand that she took for granted a readiness in others to simplify and lubricate her life. She was twenty-eight years late in returning. Now the game concludes. Cancer will mate Nora soon, and the rest, despite the presumption of caskets, will be a story of worms.

Nora, I want to finish this before you die. I want to tell you what is here because we should not say good-by such strangers, though we have almost persuaded ourselves that we do know each other. And I don’t want to finish this, ever, because some fervent child in me believes that so long as I write and blow what breath I can into you on these pages, then you will somehow continue to live.

THERE WAS, I THINK, no one fine among our ancestors. Certainly no living member of this large clan demonstrates any such inheritance. Years ago one of my granduncles engaged a firm to trace our genealogy. When it was discovered that a not very distant relative had been run out of Illinois for stealing pigs, my granduncle chopped down the burgeoning family tree in mortified haste and it has, by common consent, remained a stump ever since. The Sproul family is German, and utterly lacking in what is best in that heritage; rather, it manifests the darker side—despotism, smug boorishness, dogma, suspicion, obedience, and deep scorn for the spontaneous and frivolous. There were some exceptions. My granduncle Otto for one, a jolly tolerant man. But then granduncle Otto married into the family and was not properly a Sproul, and none of the few others shone brightly enough to illuminate the general gloom. The Sprouls are a hardworking and mean people whose lives find validation in the concept of Original Sin. They are trapped together in hopeless entanglements of need and resentment, and in their instinctive knowledge of the ways to maim and cripple and hold the tops of their small hills they line unbrokenly back to the common troops of the Goths and the Huns. Their hands are too clumsy for the rapier; they understand best the knotted club.

These are the forebears of my mother’s family. My father’s family is shadowy and hints at nothing remarkable, but has about it an air of sturdy pleasantness. My father left Nebraska during the Depression and married my mother in Chicago, becoming thereby the property of the Sproul clan. He did reserve his own few blood relatives, but unobtrusively—occasional letters, birthday phone calls, a visit every half decade or so. He rarely initiated conversation about them. When I was curious I had to coax him, and often he seemed to doubt the honesty of my interest. At twenty-five he was an intelligent and determined young man, but an innocent from the isolated plains, only five years past literal belief in the horns of Jews. Nebraska State University had eliminated that and other mythologies and had radicalized him to the point of nearly enlisting in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; but still, the stories he tells of his early experiences in Chicago are predominantly humorous, and the humor is at his expense. Terrified and very lonely, he needed my mother, and he paid what he had to for her. He humbled himself before these brutish German Catholics who resented his education and despised his Anglican cornfield ancestry, and, smiling slightly, he pledged to raise his children in the Church and submitted to the humiliation of being married in the rectory since his presence before the altar would have offended the Living God. Angered by this last, my mother refused white and wore a dress of scarlet brocade, which they have carried and carefully stored in the attics of the several houses they have owned. My mother says, and has said so many times, nearly back to the dawn of my memory, that the color was symbolic since she had the curse that day. Poor Dad, she laughs. Even after we were married he had to wait. The anecdote is a family tradition. Whenever my mother tells it, my father smiles a little.

IDALLA SPROUL RECEIVED THE last rites five times before she stretched her withered body easily, like a cat, said, Ach. So, and died. On the third occasion, the earnestly murmured Latin of a priest roused her from her coma long enough to cast an irritated eye on him and say, Not yet, you. Go out of my house. Each of the four times she resurrected herself she chased nieces and granddaughters from her flat and was doing her own cooking and cleaning within days. Her tenacity and will were a proud clan legend.

The wellspring of that fierce determination was not discovered until after her death: the old woman had several secret bank accounts scattered across north Chicago, and she had refused to die and leave her money to be lost or claimed by her children.

In fourteen years of marriage, Gardell Sproul sired ten children upon Idalla and provided her with the fetal material for two miscarriages. Eight of those ten children lived to maturity and seven, including my grandfather Gerhardt, remain alive today. Idalla, a widow, began tithing her sons and sons-in-law in the early Depression, and she continued until her death in the 1950s. She forbade each to mention his contribution and assured him that he, with perhaps one unnamed other, was her sole support. Surely most were suspicious, but the family was always stormy with feuds that prevented brothers from speaking, some were embarrassed, and a few were caught between the unmanly alternatives of admitting to fear of their mother’s wrath or consciously submitting to this brigandry in silence, so they simply preferred never to liable themselves to unhappy certainty. As a consequence Idalla had at her monthly disposal quite a handsome sum of money.

By 1950 the Sproul clan numbered nearly two hundred persons, none of whom either possessed or desired any knowledge of relatives in Germany. But in 1890 three cousins had scrimped enough money to send Idalla, a sixteen-year-old girl, to America and a new life. Idalla had promised never to forget, and she was faithful to that pledge, despatching money overseas each month. Prior to World War II she was supporting four entire families in Germany; after the war, nine—all composed of persons she had never met. The final time she swam up through the oils and wriggled free from the conditional absolution of Extreme Unction, she closed all but one bank account, remitted a single great check to Germany, listed the number of the remaining account in her will, and died three months later with an estate of $700 cash.

LEE AND NORA’S MARRIAGE had degenerated into a shaky and jury-rigged affair which trembled daily on collapse. I spoke to Nora occasionally, but it was painful for her and so calls were infrequent. Lee believed all of Nora’s relatives to be antagonists and he talked to none of them, except a few times to my father—whom he has always loved—but in a vague and guarded manner.

So I was surprised, last year, when they both telephoned.

They were in good spirits, and chatty with minor pleasantries. I was bewildered. After a pause Nora said, Well, we just, uh, wanted to check in and, uh, touch base.

Hesitancy and evasion are not her style. And? I said.

Well, I—uh, have to go into the hospital for a day or two and we wanted to let you know.

Once I saw her split open her thumb with a hammer, squirting blood like juice from a crushed grape. She made only a quick sound of anger, then muttered Boy, boy, that smarts, as she went to the medicine chest. Pain and sickness were cheap insults to Nora; she ignored them. I grew alarmed: What for?

I’ve got a little lump in my breast, she said quietly. My gynecologist reads the X-ray as a tumor, but my surgeon says it’s only a cyst. They’ll find out when they go in.

Oh, shit.

Uh-huh. That’s what I said.

They had known for two weeks, but hadn’t told my parents, who’d left for Europe a week ago. There was no point, they said, in ruining Hadden and Teresa’s vacation. Also, it was tacitly understood that Lee and Nora did not want to be blanketed beneath Teresa’s elaborate concern. Nora made it clear that she didn’t want to probe her own fear or to be comforted. So we tried to be light, did mention a few women we knew who’d had simple cysts removed, and that I myself recently had had one carved out of my buttock (a lie, that was some time ago), but we could not avoid a sense of pretense.

After we’d hung up Miriam said, How much more can happen to her, for God’s sake? My wife has been accused, with some justice, of being able to look at a cesspool and call it a swimming pool. But she said it was a tumor, and she grew insular. Equally out of character, I was sure it was a cyst and that we’d be seeing Lee and Nora this summer to begin new good times with them.

Nora was to enter the hospital Friday night, undergo surgery Saturday afternoon. I called on Wednesday and Thursday, and it was the act of calling that was important, not whatever we might have said.

Lee did not phone until late Saturday evening. It was malignant, he said wearily. They removed her breast. We’ll find out Thursday how far it’s spread.

He’d informed my uncle Dick and my brother Chuck. When he had told Chuck that Nora was in the hospital, Chuck said: Did she finally have a nervous breakdown?

Miriam and I called Nora on Sunday night. She was drugged and hazy, cried because Dick was going to drive up from Chicago to Madison and she didn’t want him staying in her house and disrupting Lee and her children. But she wouldn’t stop him; nor would she permit me to: she had been told to cease arranging for Lee.

Miriam expected me to brood and to get drunk, sloppily. I do that in times of bafflement or pain, wallow in the pigpen corners of my mind and eat the garbage there, and sometimes I cry and sometimes I hear my voice as it was when I was a child. Miriam listens then. She does not judge, and I do not ask explanations of her. It is of little practical worth, but large personal value, a rite of beginning. But that night I drank a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette in silence with Miriam. Then I opened the tinfoil I’d wrapped around a wet paint brush the night before to keep it from stiffening and went back to work on the frames of the French windows in the kitchen, which required careful attention. Miriam tried twice, without success, to get me to talk, then left. I finished the windows, took a new brush and painted one cabinet before I walked into Miriam’s den and told her I would fly to Madison on Wednesday.

She said, I think that would be good.

Nora was more lucid the following night, even made weak jokes about the mastectomy. I spoke to Lee later, at his home: If you’re not ready and would rather I didn’t come, okay, I can understand. You want me to?

He was quiet a long time, but I didn’t say anything more. He said, Yeah.

Nora was stronger on Tuesday. She was happy I was coming. It’ll be good for me, and just as good for Lee. You don’t know how good. Dick had displayed a sensitivity and tact that surprised her. He had visited her during the day, had a polite dinner with Lee, then checked into a hotel rather than sleeping at her house. That cheered her.

Lee called us after midnight. When a breast is amputated it is customary also to remove the axilla portion of the lymph system from the adjacent arm to determine the extent of the cancer. Lee had just learned that it had already metastasized into twenty-one of the thirty nodes.

AS THE ELDEST SON, my first and middle initials are G.G.—for Garvin Gale; surname Fletcher. My uncle George, who is my mother’s brother, was also an eldest son and was named George Gardner Sproul. My great-grandfather was Gardell Garrick Sproul. Between him and his father lay five thousand miles of ocean and the spotty recollections of a few clan elders nearly engulfed by senility. I imagine, though, an unbroken line of G.G.s that winds back through aspiring burghers and rough serfs to sullen barbarians who crouched in caves and gnawed upon meat bones. I named my second, my blood son, Wyatt. (I did not meet my first until he was five.)

Gardell Sproul was killed six months after the birth of his last child, near the beginning of the century, when the tapping spout of a cupola failed and sent a ton of molten pig iron washing over him. His employers paid Idalla $500 in compensation. Gerhardt, my grandfather, left school and went to work shoveling coal in the same foundry in which his father had died. He was thirteen then. Idalla got a barmaid’s job in a German saloon. Her older girls took in laundry and helped with the infants, while her middle children earned pennies carrying sandwiches and buckets of beer to factory and foundry workers.

The next eldest Sproul boy, Jacob, turned twelve two years after his father’s death. He was large and strong, and Idalla wanted him to quit school and go to work. Gerhardt opposed this. The family’s main staples then were potatoes and beans, measured rations of tough beef and fatty pork. The three biggest girls shared a single pair of good shoes, which fit the eldest; the two younger ones wadded newspaper into the toes to wear them. The shoes attended each neighborhood function that demanded dress, the girls attended in rotation. The Sprouls lived no more poorly than did a great many others, but Idalla was driven by a sense of favored destiny that had been temporarily thwarted; had she been a monarch she would have looked with calculation on the throne of God. Her tribe was large and vigorous. She intended to flog it to the highest pinnacles and she was impatient to begin. Gerhardt conciliated her by taking a second job delivering milk, finishing his rounds and returning the wagon to the dairy half an hour before he was to begin his day at the foundry.

Idalla was not satisfied long. She grumbled about money and she chided Jacob over his lack of manliness until he left school six months later to work in the foundry. Shortly after, Idalla told Gerhardt he was grown now and could best serve the family by leaving home and providing for himself, turning over to her whatever earnings were not consumed by his survival needs, which she made clear would be small. She said to Ernestine, her first child and one year Gerhardt’s senior, that the girl was of marriageable age and it was time to find a husband. Gerhardt left Chicago with a friend to hire out to a lumber camp in South Carolina, perhaps the single action in his life with a romantic cast, but even then he might simply have been expressing anger at Idalla—though he remained a faithful son and did remit the great part of his wages to her each month.

Gerhardt’s Children

MY EDITOR LIVES IN Connecticut and commutes to the city. Her husband is a blood and cancer specialist, an excellent man who would be better off in some other, less terminal, discipline; each death he attends diminishes him. When younger, he sometimes wept for those he could not save. He has armored himself since then, but sadness lies limply about his shoulders, like an old man’s shawl, and there has been a commensurate hardening of his eyes.

I called Saul at his office. Miriam and I have sailed weekends with him and Joan in the Sound, and they have camped with us in the mountains around our home. We are infrequent but decent friends. He grew wary when I told him it was my sister.

Well, he said after I’d finished. I’m sorry, Garv.

Thanks. So—what’s the prognosis?

"There’s no such thing as ‘a prognosis.’ Cancer’s consistent only in the loosest sense. You have to treat each case as unique."

I know. I’m not asking for a program, only a statistical picture.

Statistics don’t mean much.

They’re all there is right now.

A little less than fifty-fifty for a cure.

That’s better than I’d thought—about one out of what, every two and a quarter?

One out of three.

That’s thirty-three percent, Saul. Not a little less than fifty.

Garv . . . when I say cure, I’m using the word as it’s used in the field. I mean a five-year cure.

What happens after that?

Fifteen to twenty percent for a ten-year cure, five to ten percent for life. He continued hurriedly: What people rarely understand, though, is the great variation possible even when you can’t stop it. In some cases it becomes more or less a chronic condition. I’m treating a sixty-year-old woman who’s had it nearly thirty years. It flares up, you cut something out, it goes dormant five years, flares up again, continues like that. It’s not pleasant, but at least you’re still alive and you can function with some semblance of normalcy.

Thirty years is atypical, isn’t it?

Yes.

What would be usual, at the far end?

Ten, maybe twelve years.

At the short end?

I’ve seen them go from start to finish in three months, he said quietly.

Christ.

It averages somewhere around a year or two.

I slipped. That’s not too goddamn long, is it?

Gently, he said, No. It isn’t.

Does it usually sweep through the nodes so quickly?

No. But it’s standard to remove the nodes and schedule radiation therapy if you find it there. Has anyone mentioned an oophorectomy?

What’s that?

Removal of the ovaries. It used to be common in breast cases—the cancer often strikes there next if it’s on the move.

Uh-uh. Her husband would have told me.

Good. If it’s suggested, don’t let them do it. It’s criminal to remove healthy organs. And an oophorectomy can be a severe trauma. But, Garv, the biggest problem isn’t physical. It’s that people start putting on mourning garments as soon as they hear the word. They treat the patient as if he’s already died. It’s morbid and destructive. It can cut months, years off the patient’s life.

I don’t think that applies, but I’ll remember.

He didn’t recognize the names of the internist or the surgeon, but said he would make inquiries for me. If you think you’re not getting a full picture, I’ll call them. Or if you want, I have a couple of free days coming up, and a friend in Madison I haven’t seen for a while. It would have to be casual, of course, you can’t go pushing into another man’s case.

A girl named Kirsten, a childhood friend of Joan’s, had been a congenital diabetic who’d died at the age of thirty. Because both Joan and Kirsten had asked him to, Saul had overseen her treatment in the final two years: as her stomach refused to accept food, as her ovaries disintegrated and were excised, as she went blind. . . . He swore after Kirsten’s funeral that he would never doctor anyone close to him, or to a friend, again.

You’re a nice man, Saul. I thanked him and we said good-by, love to Joan and love to Miriam, which was meant.

GERHARDT WAS OF MEDIUM height, but densely built and strong, willing to work long hours. While there was no lack of muscled backs and stamina in the South Carolina lumber camp, Gerhardt’s readiness to push himself daily to stupor was extreme. But even more interesting to his employers were his singular conscientiousness and reliability; every job given him was done, and properly. He confirmed this when tested with minor responsibilities and was transferred to a larger but more loosely organized and anarchic camp in eastern Michigan. His first duties were clerical, to which he was naturally suited. His love of order verged on mania. He had a miser’s shrewd sense of economy. And he was as facile with ledger books as other people are with shoelaces. When we were children, Nora and my brother Chuck and I would draw up long columns of numbers with five and six digits and present them to Gerhardt (whom we called G.G.). He would run his finger with a fluid motion from the top number down to the bottom, then look up and give us the sum, which was usually in the tens of millions. We never once caught him in error.

He was a meticulous, exacting man, and small mistakes and oversights distressed him no less than major ones. He never permitted the latter, and on the infrequent occurrence of the former he suffered headaches and digestive difficulties for days. In Michigan, he slipped nimbly up the short administrative ladder and within the year had been promoted to third in command. He was eighteen then, a sober, reserved, and diligent man of goals. When production faltered he would strip off his cuffs and visor and work beside his men on the skid teams and screaming buzz saws. He demanded hard, punishing work and he suppressed the occasional rebellions with his own prodigious strength. But he was just, requiring at least as much from himself, so the camp was generally harmonious. He shaped it into an efficient and steadily profitable operation, and was compensated in fair equation by Republic Lumber & Supply.

In his leisure he studied books on business theory and managerial technique. He worked crossword puzzles to better his vocabulary and he subscribed to The Mentor, a twice monthly publication Established for the Development of a Popular Interest in Art, Literature, Music, Science, History, Nature, and Travel. He owned the poems of Longfellow. He could not comprehend the purpose of fiction. He played pinochle and cribbage with his peers and with the priest from the nearby town. On occasion he boarded a wagon with lumberjacks for Saturday night bowling. He fished with them.

When he was in his sixties he said to me, Show me a man who likes to fish and hunt and I’ll show you a man of morality. In his middle and later life he took trips to the north woods twice a year with other parish businessmen. They smoked cigars, cast baronial eyes upon the waters, and fished with determination. He also fished, and frequently, in his early retirement, but mechanically, with motions of habit and drill, rocking on the boat seat in a small unconscious rhythm, eyes vacant.

He married Anna Levesque in Michigan, a small, shy girl with delicate bones. One of her brothers was a feller in Gerhardt’s camp, the other a limb stripper, and they were both in nervous awe of him and flattered by his interest in their sister. Levesque père, a farmer, weighed Gerhardt’s black suit and creased pants, his shined shoes and daily shaven face, his assumptive manner, and saw a husband of stature for his daughter. Indeed there would have been no union had not the three Levesque males chivvied and bullied Anna and flushed her in excited panic from the sanctuary of her attic room. This was not an abuse, for she was strongly attracted to Gerhardt. His manners, resonant voice, and careful speech thrilled her, and she fancied that she could become totally devoted to him. Once begun, the courtship was rapid and culminated in marriage four months later. Though he caused her great pain in their long life together, Anna never stopped believing that he was some kind of god (which helped her to endure his cruelties, for gods are not bound by the same strictures as men) and she loved him without reserve until her death.

Gerhardt included news of his marriage in his next monthly support to Idalla. He received no answer, but was unconcerned since she had sent him only one letter and two Christmas cards in the two and a half years he’d been gone. He began arrangements for his return to Chicago. There was little else he could aspire to in the camp, and he did not intend to spend more years simply repeating himself in the Michigan woods. The company had outlets in the city and it seemed logical for him to continue his association with it. He met resistance, and, miffed, spoke of quitting, though he would not have done so. The company made part concession by offering a transfer to Milwaukee or Detroit. Gerhardt sensed victory and would not compromise. His doggedness won out; he arrived in Chicago with Anna six months after their marriage.

The Sproul family had assembled in Idalla’s flat. Idalla sat in a high-backed armchair flanked on either side by her children. Ernestine, two months pregnant, had come with her husband, a baker whose hands pinched and pulled at each other when idle, as if yearning for dough. The youngest child, Max, who was seven, opened the door to Gerhardt’s knock. Good evening, he said formally. You will follow me, please? He lost control crossing the linoleum of the kitchen, giggled, and did a little hop step, but was sober again upon entering the living room. He went to stand beside his mother and folded his hands behind his back.

Gerhardt took Anna’s hand and led her forward. Mother, he said, I would like you to meet my wife, Anna. Anna, I present my mother, Frau Sproul. He stepped to the side.

Idalla looked into Anna’s face, then lowered her eyes slowly down Anna’s body and just as slowly back up. Hold out your hands, girl.

Anna glanced questioningly to Gerhardt, who remained impassive. She extended her hands. Idalla rose, took Anna’s hands and turned them over, ran her fingertips over the palms. She grasped and measured Anna’s thin wrists. Turn around, she said. She kneaded Anna’s shoulder blades, jabbed her lightly in the ribs, snorted. She put her hands on Anna’s hips and shook the girl’s pelvis. She is not built to hard vork, Gerhardt, she said.

She is capable, Gerhardt said.

Idalla grunted. So skinny, she is. Vell—she can be fattened. Anna had turned to face Idalla again, her eyes wide. Idalla looked severely at the massive coils of hair on Anna’s head. Let down your hair, girl.

Frau Sproul, it takes so long to—

Let it down, girl!

Anna obeyed. She removed the pins, loosed the coils with her fingers, and shook her head. Rich chestnut hair fell in cascades down her back to brush the floor. Anna lowered her eyes and hung her head.

That is stupid, indulgent, and an interfering bother, Idalla said. It vill have to be cut.

Anna was stricken. Gerhardt moved to stand beside her. She enjoys it, he said.

It vill have to be cut.

There was silence. Then Gerhardt said, When she is ready.

Idalla nodded curtly. That vill be soon. Introduce her to your brothers and sisters.

Gerhardt took Anna down the line. The boys bowed to her and the girls curtsied. Anna acknowledged them awkwardly, her eyes shifting back to Idalla, who stood waiting. Ernestine took Anna’s hands and, smiling, asked her a question about Michigan. Idalla called Gerhardt to her.

"She is not Deutsche, vhich ve must allow for, Idalla said. I suppose you could have done vorse. But there vill be trouble with Kinder. She is too narrow in the hips."

Anna cried out, clapped her hands to her face, and ran through a door.

Idalla stared after her. Sobs were heard. Gerhardt, Idalla said. Your vife is in my bedroom.

Gerhardt and Anna rented a converted wooden garage within walking distance of Idalla’s flat. It was entered from the alley.

Gerhardt was unhappy. His profile had loomed large in the limited parameters of the Michigan base, but here, in a large installation which produced wooden shipping boxes and milled and assembled cheap furniture of raw wood, he was indistinguishable from a dozen other lower echelon workers and he became aware, as he never had been in either of the wood camps, that the true hierarchy of power pyramided to heights he could not yet perceive, or even conceive. He enrolled in business school, attended classes four nights a week and studied, while Anna slept, with the fixed purpose of a scholarly monk. Only four of Idalla’s ten children remained at home, and of these the eldest two were employed. Idalla herself still worked, and money, while not abundant, was in comfortable supply. Gerhardt turned over to her only a small portion of his pay, lived frugally on a little more, and regularly deposited what was left into a bank account. Gradually, with the relentlessness of an advancing glacier, he pushed himself into the notice of his superiors and made slow gain on promotion and salary.

Anna became pregnant. Idalla felt and poked the embarrassed girl’s belly and pressed her ear to it when Anna was in her seventh month, and announced that the child would be a girl. Down through the years, each gestating female of the Sproul clan—to grandnieces and great-granddaughters—was presented to Idalla. Her predictions were accurate the first five or six times and she thereby established a reputation of seership that she never lost, even though she erred repeatedly in the following decades. Anna had cut her hair (my mother still possesses the thick rope) and had demonstrated herself quiet, respectful, and obedient. Idalla endured her as a kennel master would an ill-formed mongrel pup his offspring dragged home; so long as it kept peace and place, it would be tolerated. But she remained critical of Anna’s fitness to breed and warned her to prepare for hardship and possible disaster. She reduced the girl to tears several times as the birth neared. Gerhardt arranged for delivery in a hospital. This angered Idalla. She had borne all her children in her own bed, and Gerhardt’s sister Ernestine had recently delivered a baby boy at home. Idalla viewed the hospital as an extravagance, a device of fraud that could do no more for the girl than she, as midwife, could, and she did not speak to Gerhardt or Anna during Anna’s final month.

The child was a girl and the birth was hard. Anna was in labor thirty-nine hours. The day the baby was born Gerhardt punched his timecard out at the end of his workday and stopped to visit his wife for half an hour before going on to classes.

Gerhardt had hoped for a son despite his mother’s prophecy. He had even selected a name—George Gardner, the third G.G. Sproul in the New Land. He was disappointed and left the naming to Anna, who chose Vivienne. Many years later Vivienne would give birth to Nora, who became my sister and who, many more years beyond that, would bury Vivienne, a stranger, without tears. Anna was the bloodless color of a pure cloud when Gerhardt brought her and the infant home, and too weak to stand or even hold a fork very long. Idalla set aside her rancor and arranged for either herself or one of her daughters to cook and clean and attend Anna and the baby each day and night until Anna regained the strength to do for her own household again.

Ernestine had borne Idalla a grandson and, this milestone of the blood passed, Idalla was free to enjoy the arrival of a granddaughter. When Anna’s milk dried up and she could no longer nurse Vivienne, Ernestine, whose own great gourdlike breasts produced milk in torrents, assumed the responsibility. Idalla delighted in this, the failure of die Franzosische, and her own flesh and blood suckling both her grandchildren.

LAST MONTH, WITH NORA worsening and my mother quickening toward hysteria, my father said quietly to me: I never aspired to much. Probably because somewhere I believed I couldn’t have it. I suppose I must have had an insecure childhood. The careful structure of his life was under siege, and giving way in places. He was uncomplaining, but weary and baffled, had begun to rethink many themes and to try to find some new comprehension of himself and the people he loved. I felt very close to him and wished to be a father who could hold him and somehow explain and make it easier, even though he is closing hard on sixty now.

He is not naturally disposed to psychoanalytic interpretation. But he watched in helplessness as one of his sons eluded rational and even philosophic arguments with the frantic ease of a greased pig slipping the hands of his pursuers and rushed desperately and with almost sexual hunger toward the bright edge of suicide. He saw that son check on the very brink, hold wavering balance long enough to touch, tentatively, the amulet of analysis, then close his fingers round it in a tightening grasp, and slowly retreat back into life. And he saw it begin to work once more, before the cancer, after the walls of Nora’s long stability ruptured and her agony burst through. Analysis, when it is good (and that is as infrequently as fineness in any other human endeavor), is vastly more an art than a science, and thus it is closer to mystery and magic. My father does not truck with mystery or magic, but he does respect and is moved by art, and is sufficiently a pragmatist to respond to practical results.

It is true that he never aspired to the stars (though his achievements were not mean), and I believe he has lived with a sense of doors closed to him by cosmic fiat. The Depression affected him profoundly. He and his brothers scoured miles of railroad track for coal to burn in the stove through winter; sometimes they used scrap wood and even dried cow dung. His father, my paternal grandfather, lost the family drugstore early, did whatever odd jobs were offered him, and painted houses when he could. He was a meticulous worker, personally affronted by paint runs and visible brushstrokes. At first he allowed his sons to do only the scraping and sanding,