UNTIL Alwyn Tower grew to manhood he never forgot that everyone was older than he. People remembered things not in existence now, and many of them had been born in houses which had vanished long ago.
A cabin which had stood in the melon patch had been his father's birthplace; and as a child, jumping over the heavy, downy vines, he tried in vain to find a trace of its foundations.
His uncle Jim, the minister, on the other hand, had not been born in the garden, but in a building which was now the woodshed. Alwyn asked himself how anyone could have slept in that poor shack, whose floor was the ground, trodden and scattered with chips, where the snow sifted in winter on the woodpiles. Of course when his grandmother had lain there with a baby in her arms, it must have been warm, safe, and pink, in the firelight. Now she was a strong old woman with sandy-gray hair; and only with difficulty, by calling to mind the family daguerreotypes, was he able to imagine a young mother in that vanished bed.
Alwyn's father and mother shared with his grand-parents the third house on the farm which his grand-father had bought from the government when Wisconsin was a wilderness. In that house his young aunt Flora had been born, in what was now his mother's parlor, exactly below the spare bedroom papered with forget-me-nots where Alwyn himself had slept when he was a baby. The house had been rearranged frequently, and augmented by new rooms, porches, doors, and windows, as the family grew. Now the old people and Fiora kept house by themselves in the south wing.
In their sitting room the sunlight burned brightly on stiff patterns of wallpaper, on the red garlands of the carpet, the ripples painted on the woodwork in imitation of quarter-sawed oak, and the false-Nottingham curtains looped up in the windows. A rack on the wall held a row of hand-painted plates, the work of his aunt and his great-aunt Nancy, decorated with birds, wild roses, and rosebuds.
Beneath the plate rack stood a couch, upholstered in rows of yellow tapestry biscuits, with a green button at each intersection of the crevices. It had the proportions of a lion's body—the legs carved in claws, the sloping back, the head uplifted under a mass of fringed pillows. In spite of its discomfort, Alwyn's grandfather took his nap there every afternoon, his spectacles in his hand, an open newspaper over his face.
In front of the couch in winter the woodstove crouched on a mat of zinc, with a rosy spot in the middle of each dead-black cheek. In summer it was kept in the woodshed, swathed in old carpets. A bow-legged table spread with a lace tidy marked the center of the room; and on a square shelf just above the floor the great family Bible, studded with gilt nails, lay diagonally.
The corner between the windows was occupied by a secretary a writing-desk which made, when it was let down, a noise like the winding of a large clock, and a pair of bookcases with glass doors, framed in jig-saw scrolls. The books on the shelves hid behind family photographs. A blue-and-white Wedgwood sugar bowl and a stuffed owl stood on one side; on the other a mandolin without strings, and three gray squirrels in a tree crotch; their eyes resembled beads, and in his tenth year Alwyn discovered that they were beads, in fact. Above the secretary hung a row of embossed portraits in one frame: Emerson, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Bryant, Lowell, and Whittier, equally complacent and almost equally muffled by untidy beards.
These great men, just beneath the ceiling, gazed across the room at a pair of enlarged pictures of Alwyn's grandparents in middle life: Rose Hamilton Tower's scarcely womanly head, the ash-blond hair combed back from her low forehead, her eyes unusually small, pale, and close together, her mouth drooping stoically; Henry Tower's face, stubborn and melancholy, his teeth set so firmly that the cheeks protruded a little over the jawbone, the chin lifted in a knot between the two tufts of his faded beard. Though the heads within the identical frames were of the same size, one saw at a glance that this man was smaller than his wife.