Downstate near the Mississippi River there’s an old house that used to belong to my family. It’s a small clapboard house built in the classic heartland style, with a big yard, lush gardens, and the inevitable white picket fence out front. It stood on the outskirts of Edwardsville, right where the last streets gave way to open countryside. It is–or at least it used to be–a beautiful place. When you looked out from the porch on a summer’s day, you had an unbroken view of meadows and fields and remote blue hills shimmering in the golden heat. You’d swear that nothing had ever happened there more dramatic than a passing thunderstorm.
But there were always lessons at the house. It was really a boot camp in what are now called traditional family values. Our four old hosts–my great-aunts Hilda and Helen and my great-uncles Marty and Eugene–made it plain to us that everything said and done and thought there was swathed in morality and custom. We learned the proper way to be deferential to our elders, the proper way of washing our hands before meals (the soap was scratchy and smelled of coconut), the proper way of saying prayers at bedtime (on your knees, out loud, hands folded on the bedspread, an adult auditor present). There was a proper way to say please and thank-you at the dinner table, and, more crucially, a proper time to say them–the airspace above the table was as crowded as O’Hare, and a wrongly calculated grab at a bowl or pitcher or platter could cause a disastrous midair collision.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Edwardsville was the first place where I understood what manners were for. Back home they made no sense; they seemed to be nothing more than a bunch of meaningless gestures parents foisted on kids to test their obedience. But here they were unobtrusively essential. They allowed people who may not have even liked each other much to get along effortlessly in the closest quarters. They were a way for tradition, faith, courtesy, and habit to exchange places in a ceaseless dance.
And you could be certain you would be the target, sooner or later. The four of them were brutal about everything they didn’t like, and the main thing they didn’t like was the world outside Edwardsville. That included us: they thought we were citified, willful, too big for our britches, forever putting on airs. When I had to start wearing glasses, they spent that summer calling me “Four-eyes” with ever-replenished hilarity. Once when one of my cousins staged a play she’d written, with the rest of the kids as actors, our hosts broke it up by standing in unison and booing and hissing and pelting us with wadded-up Kleenex, until the author ran off in tears.
But more than that, Edwardsville is still my baseline for human behavior. The manners and morals I learned there are the only ones I’ve ever believed in. I can’t abide rudeness or disrespect or casual obscenity; even though I’ve been buffeted by decades of counterexamples, I still expect everyone I meet to be unfailingly courteous. At the back of my mind is a model of an ideal society, and it’s an Edwardsvillean dream: shady side streets and solemn-pillared banks and dim post offices, neighbors chatting over back fences and customers gossiping around sales counters, men doffing hats, women instantly given seats on trolley cars, well-scrubbed children in school uniforms snaking down sidewalks on field trips–a whole complex web of civility, decency, patience, and good humor.
I’m sure our ancestors would have understood. They didn’t mean to leave anything of themselves behind. No colorful anecdotes, no fond memories, no diaries; only a handful of letters and a thin scattering of mementos: most of my family lived deliberately without drama, without attracting the slightest notice from the outside world, as though being visible was no different from being immoral. They lived and died in remote farms and obscure villages and dusty provincial market towns; they were train conductors and telephone operators, seamstresses and land surveyors, gandy dancers and oil field workers, bachelor uncles and spinster aunts and drunken grandfathers and agoraphobic widows–a whole lost world of marriage vows kept, mortgages paid off, jobs held until retirement, deaths at home surrounded by children and grandchildren, as placid as the bottom of a deep, still pond. It’s as though they all wanted to pass through their lives unobserved by anyone but God.
