I often thought of that lady’s things when I was unpacking yet another box from my former life. Laid out “in front of everybody,” many of the contents would look embarrassing or mystifying to others. For me, an occasional item in a box would restore a memory; another would shed light into some obscure corner of my past. But on the whole I would be glad when the final box, packed by a social worker back in Jewel, was emptied and stomped flat and put outside for the island’s trash collection.
Weeks ago I had concluded there had been no system in the packing of these boxes. If I had been the social worker I would have gone room by room. I would have packed all the books together, all the woman’s clothes, the boy’s things, the kitchen stuff, the bathroom stuff. After all, it was only three rooms, counting the bathroom. But having grown used to finding toothbrushes and kitchen items packed together, children’s books on top of elastic stockings and a shabby coat, I expected to find discrepant bedfellows in each new box.
In tonight’s box was Mom’s heavily underlined paperback of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which she always kept rubber-banded with the “serious” hardback that was in Greek on the left side with a stranger’s interlinear translation. And underneath those was an eight-by-ten framed photograph of my coiffed and stylish grandmother, who I now also thought of as Brenda, the older sister, who had referred to my great-aunt as “Crazy Charlotte.” And beneath those was a furry black bear in a gray hoodie—which had reminded me of the lady’s rat in the red coat. At the bottom of the box, its sides buttressed by crumpled newspaper, was a toy lumber truck my mom had loved as a child. Once it had carried six-inch logs of real wood, but all but one of them had disappeared by the time it became mine. I had loaded its truck bed with toy cars, or twigs piled like logs, and once, briefly, a live frog who jumped off in a huff and vanished into the shrubbery. Later, the black bear in his hoodie rode in it, sitting sideways against the one remaining log. GASTON & SONS LUMBER was emblazoned on both sides of the truck in gold letters against a background of forest green.
Gaston & Sons Lumber had been founded by Samuel Gaston, my great-great-grandfather, in Cass, West Virginia, and after that I hadn’t paid attention whenever Mom tried to take me through her side of my forebears. She must have figured I needed her forebears all the more since for all intents and purposes I was a bastard. For the summer of my twelfth year, which would have been next summer, she had been planning a trip for us to ride the Cass Railroad up to Back Allegheny Mountain, so I could get a feel for the land I came out of. And at a later date, when I had reached a “responsible age,” she had promised to tell me about the other side, the side of the man in the photo in her drawer. Regarding the responsible-age thing she had been right. I certainly had failed to be responsible at age nine, when I showed Wheezer the photo in the drawer. Now I was left to guess what age she’d had in mind for the responsible me—not that it mattered now because it was never going to happen.
Marcus Aurelius, who I was named after, had been three when his father died. Later Marcus was to write that he had learned “manliness without ostentation” from what he had heard and remembered about that father. In those days, a father acknowledged a child as his own by lifting the infant up from the hearth in a special ceremony, which I thought was a wonderful idea. Marcus’s father had lived long enough to do that. Marcus’s mother stayed faithful to her husband’s memory. She had always been rich, and died young without remarrying. Marcus remembered her in his meditations as his model for “piety, generosity, refraining from wrongdoing, simplicity in life, and distancing herself from the ways of the rich.” I liked that phrase: distancing herself from the ways of the rich.
After his father died, Marcus was adopted, raised, and educated by his grandfather, from whom, Marcus writes, “I learned courtesy and serenity of temper.” At seventeen, Marcus was adopted by the emperor, whose wife was Marcus’s aunt. The emperor had no sons of his own and named Marcus as his successor. Marcus later wrote of his adoptive father that “all men recognized in him a mature and finished personality that was impervious to flattery and entirely capable of ruling both himself and others.” I also liked the idea of a mature and finished personality, and wondered if I would have one someday.
When Marcus was forty he became emperor and ruled wisely until he died of the pestilence at fifty-nine.
Alec Guinness’s mother refused to tell him who his father was. Later, when he was an old man, he confided to a friend that she probably hadn’t known. A snob, she gave him the surname of a famous brewery family on whose yacht she had once been a guest. However, it was a banker who had been sixty-four when Alec was born who paid for his schooling and visited him often in the guise of an uncle. Alec was ashamed of his mother and stayed angry with her all his life. She sent him away to boarding school when he was five, paid for by the banker. Alec loved his school. When he got his first acting job at seventeen, his mother showed up intoxicated at the stage door and asked him for money.
When Aunt Charlotte gave over her bedroom to me she left it so hospitably bare that, as I’ve mentioned, it took me longer than it should have to realize it had been her room. When I entered it for the first time back in May, I faced a double bed with two views of the ocean, front and side, a table with a lamp on it and a straight-backed chair tucked under it, an empty bookcase, and a bureau with four drawers. Nothing hung on the walls, which had been freshly painted an off-white color that I would discover took on the yellow of clear mornings, a pearly gray on overcast days, and changed into a lavender-blue as it grew dark outside.