Modern American Memoirs Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book About Pilgrimage ( 1987 ), Originals: American Women Artists ( 1979 ), and Through the Vermilion Gates ( 1971 ).
    A graduate of Smith College, Munro completed graduate studies at Columbia University and the Sorbonne .
    Her fascinating Memoir of a Modernist’s Daughter ( 1988 ) largely concerns her father, Thomas Munro, a curator of the Cleveland Museum of Art, who wrote Scientific Method in Aesthetics, and her first husband, Alfred Frankfurter, who edited Art News.
    This section describes her paternal grandfather, the son of Scottish immigrants, who grew up farming in Nebraska. He married a New England woman, Mary Spaulding, and later retired with her to a “little homestead” in the Catskills .
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    from M EMOIR OF A M ODERNIST’S D AUGHTER
    T here it was that our grandfather, by then a knobby, sour-faced Scot with the deferential manners of some country people, would take me and my brother on his knee when we begged him to tell us a story.
    â€œBappa, tell us about Rip van Winkle!”
    â€œWhat? That one again?” He would settle into his rocker covered with old scarves and a crocheted afghan. He would raise his head, lean back against the chair and close his eyes while he called up the lines. I looked up into the long deep pleats of his throat. I jabbed my brother as we settled ourselves in his lap. My brother jabbed me.
    â€œSoo, soo,” our grandfather would say, stroking our arms and our hair. “Settle down and listen. There was a man a long time ago…”
    (Our eyes were closing, my brown head leaning on my brother’s curly gold one.)
    â€œâ€¦and he lifted his hand to his face and felt a long beard. ‘Oh, what is this?’ he cried. ‘What has happened? I just lay down for an hour, and now I am changed…and where is my home, and my wife and my son?…’
    â€œThen came a lady…
    â€œâ€˜I remember a Rip, a long time ago,’ said she, ‘but he went away into the woods and his family is gone to the ends of the world. But come into my house, old man, and I’ll care for you till you die.’”
    Thus did our grandfather weave for us the first intimation we had of the exile’s lament, the pain of separation and the impossibility of finding one’s way back to the place of beginning. So much had been lost out of his own life by then, a whole clan vanished on the winds, his sisters Flora and Ferny, his mother and dad, and behind them in memory, the patriarch, Big Alexander of the Prayers, an evangelical preacher-teacher born on Skye after the catastrophe of Culloden.
    On us, our grandfather shed the love those clansmen shed on their children and the lore he had learned by the sea and on the prairie. He taught us the Indian walk and how to lift birch bark with a penknife, bend it and seal it with candlewax for a toy canoe. He gave me my name, Hiawatha Painted-feather, and ordered me moccasins and a bow and arrow from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. One day when the rain was blowing in sheets, he strode out into the storm to cut me Indian grass for a basket.
    â€œBecause he loves you,” said Mary, biting off a thread. I watched through the window as he leaned against the wind. He came back stamping, shaking rain all over the kitchen, his eyes grave behind spotted glasses, speaking in a brogue full of tenderness, “It rains on the housetops and all through the land…”
    When I dropped my doll, old and floppy, down the outhouse, he raked it up and washed it. “Because he loves you,” said Mary tightly, watching it blow on the line. It must have hurt her to see how such small acts touched us while her demanding labors left us unaware.
    He seemed very wise and knew all the tales, and even those he may not have known I attribute today to his telling, for they all come out of the same well. “Pison, Giheon, Hiddekel and Phrath,”he would begin, “four are the rivers that run toward the