I ought really to work on Household Gods. Great-Aunt Martha argued incessantly, just like Gwen. But unlike me or Gwen, she led crusades and carried banners and was in fact one of the representatives at that first women’s-rights convention in Seneca Falls. She was a temperance feminist; her husband was an alcoholic. I can’t prove this but it seems to me that either her father drank or her husband did. The fury with which she engaged the battle against drink must have had some personal meaning to her, must not solely have been an abstraction. In some of her letters I can detect such discontent; that is, it seems to me, she is not just fighting the good fight.
She is a good woman, a very good woman, her goodness is her goodness alone. She lords her goodness over the brood. It is like a flower is her goodness, it buds and blooms, and it is her armor against him and all that is tainted by the material world.
I have given her a transcendental slant.
My fight is a different fight, if it is even a fight. I am not intemperate, but certainly not temperate, in Martha’s sense of the word. My fight may not even be a skirmish. Is each life a struggle? Or does one have to be aware of struggle? I struggle with myself, my sense of futility, my desire to do good and to be original in my thinking, my need to find what is new and to hold on to what is good that is old. I’m actually somewhat less in thrall to and interested in my feminist forebears than in the abolitionist side of the family and the slavers.
I once was witness to a chain gang. A young child, I was traveling in the South with my parents. I couldn’t have been more than twelve. I remember the trip as both astonishing and dreadful, the winding roads frightening for what one couldn’t see behind the next bend. Gothic, truly. We came upon a chain gang, and I saw a man, a black man, a Negro. Actually he saw me. His eyes caught mine; the look was naked. His legs and hands were shackled. I was never more horrified. After that I began to imagine in the vivid way a child can the tortured life of a slave, the criminality of the white planters and their wives in regard to the treatment of these human beings. Since then, since that time, I have felt deeply that it was slavery that made my country the study in hypocrisy that it is. Reconstruction—! And what did Jefferson say to himself in the early enlightened days?
I’ve just learned — and how did I not know this? — that Liberia was settled in 1822 by freed slaves. Roger, a Southerner of all things, told me this recently, and I must admit, scoundrel that I am, that I pretended already to know it. But in fact I was stunned at my ignorance and thought immediately to research it further, perhaps to base a novel on the fearless black men. But I don’t want to leave this island, and the truth is that some work I ought to be doing requires me to leave it, this glorious place. I cannot.
Instead I tangle with a jumble of family material, letters, diaries, ledgers, all culled from brief homeside visits, all found in attics or seduced out of the houses of relatives whose guilt I fingered like the best pianist. It is my jungle, my undergrowth and overgrowth, and it cannot be clipped like a suburban lawn. It is uncontrollable, in a way. One’s ancestors oughtn’t to take one over, and yet they have me. I sit in my room, at my desk, in front of my typewriter, and see them. They are stern, foreboding figures. I don’t visualize them, precisely, but will them, will them into being, into a great chain of being, the way I once willed, when I was a small boy, American Indians — Apaches — to stand in my doorway.
I have always been fascinated by my family’s history. As a boy I learned that one of my ancestors had ridden with John Brown, and that another, from the Dutch side, traded in slaves. Since that time I have discovered that the Brown story was apocryphal, but on my father’s side there were slave traders. Martha was definitely at Seneca Falls; her name is on a list. Martha noted in her journal that Seneca Falls was home to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, I think, was too radical for Martha. My father’s family is nowhere as worthy as my mother’s; Father’s was loathsome and evil, I believe. Evil is always fascinating, to me at least, and that side did make the family’s money.
I am considered the weak link, but I am a moral man. Many would say I am not because of my love of men, but just as they who would condemn me could not choose anything but heterosexuality — and is that truly a choice? — I could not choose anything but homosexuality.
I linger over lunch, a parsimonious affair. Closing my eyes I drift away for a bit, then focus on a few of the mementos from home that are displayed in my room. The letters and diaries I pirated away are enough; they do count as evidence. This is what I reiterate to myself sub rosa — or is it sotto voce? But I ought to have more material. Still, evidence of what? Lived lives. On bits of paper. Will I ever learn what Martha truly thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and why?
Forget rigorous research, Horace. This is how I often remonstrate with myself — just do what you do, what you can, and make it new. Besides, I am outside the academy, and I am engaged in writing fiction. Fiction is true, of course, its own truth, not Truth; yet I believe one must always seek Truth, that is the ultimate quest. Were I to do a conventional history, traveling to Athens for books, perusing its English-language shops, or mailing away for material from the States, as I have on occasion, all this would be insufficient. Asking Gwen to find books for me in New York, that too is inadequate. She is bemused by my interest in slavery, I think, and has refused, in her elusive but deliberate way, to talk earnestly to me about it.
I ought to be at Smith College, researching in its library among stacks of musty tomes and aging letters, sifting through diaries written by people like my ancestors. How far away a place like Smith seems. I knew an English professor there once, he was my lover. Then, after long service to the college, his homosexuality was discovered. He had lived quietly in Northampton for twenty-five years, teaching Milton, I believe, yet he was dishonorably dismissed. It was, it is a terrible thing, a hideous nightmare to live through, and for that I am glad to be here, in Greece, where I won’t be bothered. Where do morals lie? That man hurt no one.
Whenever I begin to work and think that all this is inadequate and insufficient, and that I am not Gertrude Stein, or Virginia Woolf, or James Joyce, necessarily it makes it impossible for me to think, no less to write. I cycle like a rat in a maze. My mother thought me perfect and a perfectionist, but then I was her favorite child, for which my brother has never forgiven me. All seems futile — this frail, faded handwriting on a bit of yellow paper which may crumble at any moment and disappear. It might turn to dust, this fragment, this evidence of human life. It might disintegrate in my hot, puffy hands. My father thought me a dilettante, and perhaps I am, as I am one who’s not quite sure what he is looking for, or why he looks, unlike Stan Green, who knows exactly what he needs to find. But I think I would know the right thing, were I to come upon it.
Stan Green wouldn’t for a second hesitate if he wanted to visit Helen’s John, which makes him, John, sound tawdry, like a bad pun, and this observation rouses me to action, the pun and Stan Green, along with my need for escape. I put on my sandals and find my blue cotton cap that I used to wear when sailing in Boston Harbor. The cotton is very soft now and the blue has faded to a powdery hue from repeated washings. Helen has returned to her chair on the terrace. I wave to her but she doesn’t see me, so engrossed is she in whatever she’s doing or thinking.