Reconciliation Road: A Family Odyssey

19. His Brother's Witness

19 HiS Brother'sWitness M y TIME IN WASHINGTON is almost finished. I have been with Burt and Betty for a week, have called their home my home, have grown accustomed to the habits and rhythms of their lives, breakfast at the same hour around the kitchen table, dinner in the dining room, accompanied by one glass of wine, a cheese course at the end of the meal in the European manner. I have treated them to dinner at their favorite Chinese restaurant, with Burt in a Levi's jacket and rare humor, recounting the time when a woman asked him what fish curry was and he replied, "That's the curry with the fin on top." Burt and Betty have treated me, too, with Sunday brunch at the Cosmos Club, generations of old-line Washingtonians in a gilt-edged setting, hearty handshakes between longtime friends in the buffet line. We have had a fine time together, with no disagreements or tense moments, three relatives who have gone from being strangers to friends. I have appreciated their hospitality-they take care of a guest with true grace-but more than that, I have valued the chance to forge a link with my family's past. Thanks to Burt, I now have a mental scrapbook filled with images of ancestors I never knew. Caleb, his father, a hulking short man with a 17 Yz-inch neck, known for his brute physical strength but also a man of the mind, pursuing his self-guided study of theology and logic throughout his life, a pessimistic man, austere, religious, no machismo about him, a sense of humor whose main focus was the dispensing of twisted aphorisms ("He who is lost hesitates," "Leap twice before you look"). 213 214 RECONCILIATION ROAD Alice, Burt's mother, who had met her future husband when she was seventeen and he was twenty-two, the two of them attracted to each other in a Baptist congregation in St. Louis and married soon afterward . Alice is his opposite in many ways, optimistic, intuitive, sentimental , a woman who, during the Depression with troubles of her own, happened to learn about malnutrition among the children at a school near EI Paso and set in motion a feeding program that began in her own kitchen and later grew to provide 2,500 meals every week for two years. And the Marshall household, working class, seldom well-off, but always with good books and magazines, and usually a piano as well, although there was a time in Niles, California, when they had to do without a piano and Alice, Burt's and Sam's older sister, "practiced " her piano chords on a plain table top instead. A home often visited by tragedy and grief, with three of the six Marshall children not surviving past childhood, but still a home where there would always erupt one riotous water balloon fight every year, water balloons loosed from the second-story windows, wallpaper inevitably ruined , much hilarity, even Caleb joining in. Burt's older brother is often mentioned in our talks together, especially his formative years. Burt tells me how susceptible Sam was to sickness and mishap as a child, his early years a succession of diseases and broken bones, leading his sister, Alice, to later remark, "If a mad dog had come to town, Sam would have been the first victim." This may help explain why Sam was so taken with testing himself later in life, why he became so enamored of the Army and its manly rigors, truly loved the Army in a way that Burt considers romantic , idealized, the Army as "some sort of spiritual fulfillment." Sam was so bedeviled by illness as a boy that Burt's fondest memory of his brother is not of some boyish hijinx. It revolves around one of Sam's illnesses, this time at sixteen, some horrible swelling of his glands, diagnosed first as syphilis, the family shocked. A visit to a second doctor was ordered, Sam returning home terrified , young Burt peering through the keyhole of his brother's room and then returning to his own room where he prayed and prayed that whatever was the matter with his brother would go away. "The next morning, Sam woke up and went to the bathroom and shouted for his parents," Burt recalls. "All the swelling was HIS BROTHER'S WITNESS 215 Three generations of Marshall men, shown on the roof of the Detroit News, around 1937. From left...