Kinfolks by Lisa Alther Page A

German trenches during World War I.
    As a wedding gift my father gives me a box of bullets and the .38 special his father carried in his medical bag on house calls in case of attack by a drug addict. My father kept the pistol in his sock drawer at our house in town for the same reason. But the West Nineties clearly trump the streets of Kingsport when it comes to danger. So I take the pistol to a gun shop on Broadway to get it cleaned. When I pick it up, the dealer tells me I’m lucky I didn’t fire it because a metal guard is missing and I’d have blown my hand off.
    As I walk back to our apartment, I imagine a scenario in which I shout at an attacker, “Stop or I’ll blow my hand off!”
    I’ve spent my first two decades struggling with whether I’m a southerner. Since my mother is a New Yorker, I feel genetically entitled to spend my next two decades struggling with whether I’m a Yankee. So I put my banjo in mothballs, buy some suits at Saks, and start work as an editorial assistant at Atheneum Publishers. Richard and I attend operas, concerts, and ballets. We eat at ethnic restaurants all over the city and attend plays both on and off Broadway. On weekends we join the nearly inert lines of traffic in and out of the city in order to ski in Vermont and swim off Long Island. We eat lobsters on Cape Cod and cotton candy on the boardwalks of New Jersey. I conclude that I like being a denizen of my mother’s motherland.
    My mother’s grandmother, Ruth Griswold Greene Pealer, was a piano teacher and choir director who rose to the rank of national genealogist for the Daughters of the American Revolution. En route, she traced eleven lines of her family back to England — and one to the
Mayflower
(along with six million other Americans). Late in life she modeled for a bust included in an international exhibition called
The Family of Man
under the label “Caucasian Female.” A cast of it sits on our piano back home.
    Ruth lived in South Danville in upstate New York. Her husband, Phillip Greene, died of Bright’s disease when her son, my maternal grandfather Floyd Greene, was five. She married again, this time to a farmer and state assemblyman named Peter Pealer. Peter had lost several fingers in a fireworks accident (in a novel variation on my childhood horror of extra fingers).
    Caught up in the fight for women’s suffrage, Ruth delivered a speech entitled “Woman and Her Advancement” to community groups. In it she maintained that since God made the creatures of our world in order of increasing significance, Woman as the last created was intended as “the crowning work of the Creator.” This was confirmed, she insisted, by the fact that Woman was the “last at the cross and the first at the sepulcher” and that it was to Woman that Christ first appeared after His resurrection. However, because of Eve’s having been unjustly blamed for the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, “eternity has no time and words no power to express the despairing anguish and woeful heart experiences which have been the lot of Woman through all the ages.”
    Upon discovering that she was a third cousin once removed to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ruth longed to go where the big-league suffragists roamed. In a letter to her teenage son Floyd she explained, “If I don’t get out of this town, I’ll go crazy.” So she left Floyd to finish high school while living with an uncle, and she dragged Peter Pealer to Washington, D.C.
    Hating housework, Ruth insisted they live in a hotel. While Peter worked at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Ruth joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Wimodaughsis (short for Women/mothers/daughters/sisters), a suffrage association. She also served as president of the Women’s National Press Association.
    Ruth attended rallies addressed by Susan B. Anthony and commented in letters to my grandfather on