Ambushes

By Paul Gray

LAST STANDS by Hilary Masters Godine; 210 pages; $14.95

Author Hilary Masters begins his memoir with two endings. First, his maternal grandfather is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in June 1954, just a month shy of his 94th birthday. And then Hilary's father, Poet Edgar Lee Masters, is interred in Illinois four years earlier, at age 82. This narrative order runs counter to chronology, of course, but it remains true to the odd regressions of memory, that domain where the last events are most recent and hence preludes to all that went before. Masters' relatives grew old while he grew up; to recapture their pasts, he travels backward from the present.

The trip is well worth taking. The author's father commands some literary notice as the author of Spoon River Anthology (1915), a collection of imaginary verse epitaphs that celebrated and exposed small-town life in America. Nothing he wrote later earned as much praise and attention. He was nearing 60 and in his second marriage when Hilary was born in 1928. The young boy was both saddled and blessed with an old father who was already fading into vivid history. The poet regaled his child with anecdotes: "He could remember his grandmother on her deathbed, talking of Andy Jackson, of how she had heard him speak one time. His father and grandfather had known Lincoln, had hired Abe as a lawyer."

The aging writer needed peace and quiet to salvage his dwindling reputation. His wife, nearly 30 years his junior, insisted on working toward a graduate degree at Columbia University. A child, however welcome, did not fit in with their plans. So they stayed in New York City and sent Hilary to live, except for summer vacations, with his mother's parents in Kansas City. He remembers: "The arrangement gave me the best of two different worlds, for a time; moreover, no one told me it was unusual."

Exposure to his grandfather also gave Hilary another purchase on history. This leathery old bird had led a storybook life. He arrived in this country from Ireland in 1874 and then served some five years in the U.S. cavalry in Montana and Wyoming. Later, he helped build railroads in Central America and returned rich enough to earn a name in Kansas City. He remained a cavalryman at heart. Ages later, he tells his grandson that the spot where he will be buried affords a good view of Washington, D.C. The author writes: "Rustlers and stage robbers had been the objects of his patrols and not the pitiful remnants of the Sioux and Cheyenne. But the views were still important: the views of Jackson's Hole and the Tetons, or of the old Indian camps. Or the view of the Little Big Horn, where he and some of his platoon would ride from Fort Custer to pick over the site, for holiday and to bury pieces of bone and harness and indulge in the traditional recreation of soldiers visiting an old battlefield: to re-fight the engagement and win the day."

Last Stands takes its title from Custer's misadventure in 1876. The author watches old age ambush the adults around him. His grandmother loses interest in living. Her husband leaves her and enters an old soldiers home in Washington. Hilary's father suffers a physical breakdown in New York City; the newspapers make much of the once famous poet's nearly starving to death in a residential hotel. His mother, now launched on a teaching career, rescues her estranged husband from his solitude and takes in her vegetating mother from Kansas City. "Well, what can I do?" she asks her son. "These people all just collapsed in the middle of the floor on me."

She props them up for a time, before the inevitability of death. The author recalls a tranquil scene in his mother's faculty apartment. He is a participant, as are his parents and grandmother: "As we sit for this last picture, each of us in this room has been similarly reduced, our lives slowly coming together, reduced to this peaceful essence layered by fragrant pipe smoke, this remedy of time that my mother's pen stroke seems to prescribe with each scratch upon a term paper. My travels are over." And so is his moving, inclusive book, near the point at which it opened: the end that is the beginning of memory. --By Paul Gray

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