Like Newell, Chester was a blip on the east bank of the Ohio River, part of a cluster of small towns that make up the panhandle, Hancock County, a region of steel and brick, but mostly clay. The clay was unique. Plentiful and unusually malleable, it was perfect for making crocks, jugs, stoneware, and china.
Potters lived there, whole generations of them, growing up in cramped company houses, knowing only the job they were trained to do and the folks around them. Starting as early as 1830, people moved to what is now Hancock County, discovered the clay, became potters, and stayed. It was a marriage of resource and craftsman, and it was a marriage for life. “The second-oldest profession,” they called it.
The clay along the Ohio River had a blue tint and smelled of standing water. Once in your nose, the scent never left, just dug deeper into your pores, so each breath reminded you where you were. It was persistent in other ways, digging into fabrics and under fingernails, like white blood, thick and seeping, growing crusty when it dried. Most potters didn’t even bother trying to eradicate the clay; there was always more carried in their pant cuffs, in their hair, on their toothbrushes. Andrew Blair was a potter. And when his sons grew old enough, they, too, served their time in the factories, until the war called them away to more epic fates.
Throughout Aneita Jean’s life, the Blair family was well known in the valley. The family’s combined good looks and social acumen made them easy to spot. Forbes was an usher at the theater. Petey Dink danced with all the ladies, and danced so well that even the wives among them never refused. The whole family, save Edna, was dapper, but even she transcended her plain frocks aided by her round biscuit cheeks and knowing black eyes. Her husband favored layers of starch, stiff shirts and vests and jackets, so crisp and pointy, he looked to be cut out of cardboard.
In one family picture, Petey, fifteen, wears a floral-print necktie with a rumpled dress shirt and high-waisted pants. Aneita Jean, thirteen, wears a pleated skirt and wide-collared shirt. Forbie, eleven, aping his father, looks strangely adult in a herringbone suit, while Alan, nine, and Nancy, seven, sport fitted sweaters and stovepipe pants. Together, they seem to sing from the page, the clothes incidental trappings rustling around their collective confidence; except Alan.
Alan Blair had the misfortune of being born agreeable in a family of severe stoics and manic charmers. He was neither the oldest boy nor the youngest child. He was not the handsomest or the smartest or the cruelest. He was not a jock, a scholar, or a delinquent. He was just good old Alan Mead, shy and curly-headed, and he kept low to the ground and quiet. (Later, he would become an elementary school science teacher who rarely mentioned how he had piloted a drone plane through the mushroom cloud of the first dummy atomic bomb test, or how, as a full commander in the war, he had nearly died in a hurricane off the coast of Japan when his plane pitched into the ocean like a javelin.)
His older brother Forbes Wesley was quiet, too. But his reticence was a manifestation of control and a touch of snobbery. His father, whom he closely resembled, told him that he was better than everybody else, and Forbie believed it. His haughty air won him few friends in the valley. He didn’t mind. Such was the cost of superiority. In the future, his truculence would make him a significant force in the Republican party, friends with the likes of Hoover and Reagan.
Nancy, the youngest, was a change-of-life baby, born when Edna was in her forties. Aneita Jean thought Nancy’s was the most beautiful face she’d ever seen. It was perfect, with skin as lively as water and hair darker than molasses, and she spent a lot of time pretending Nancy was her baby.
Petey Dink, the eldest child, was the most magnetic of all. Lean and beautiful as a greyhound, he was quick-witted and full of beans. He wasn’t much for schoolwork, believing himself smart enough already. He preferred stealing—candy, comics, cigarettes. His teachers tried reprimanding him, but they found it impossible against the tide of his charm.
“I’m sure I could concentrate better if I wasn’t so distracted,” he’d say with a lewd grin when they confronted him about his failing grades.
An instinctive athlete, Pete mastered football and baseball, then quit sports, finding them less stimulating than the company of women, up to and including his sister, Aneita Jean, a girl he adored, even if she was a little loopy.
“He thought I was nuts,” says Grandmother. “But he loved me to bits.”
The Blair family resembled the others in Hancock County only in that they were large, Scottish, and struggling. “We were never going to be wealthy,” says Grandmother. “But my father wanted us to have class.”
And so Andrew dressed his children like adults, and stressed the value of self-improvement. He made rules forbidding most childhood games like tag and hide-and-seek. And he made rules for conduct. Manners were of the utmost importance, as was grammar. At the Blair house, you stood up straight or were poked in the spine with a stiff finger. If your jaw fell open when you read, it was soon smacked shut from the chin.
“Quit your crying,” Andrew would say whenever his children washed up on his knee with troubles. “There’s a price for being special. You want to be like everybody else?”
“He had a hard life,” Grandmother says in a level voice. “His mother was run over by a train.”
The Blair house sat on a corner lot, right at the Harker pottery trolley stop. Because of this, it was a social hub. As potters waited on the front porch for the trolley, Edna would feed them rich slabs of homemade chocolate cake, fan herself with her napkin, and chortle at the stories they shared about the pottery. She liked hearing about life beyond Phoenix Avenue, what men got up to behind closed doors. She could imagine them there, slapping one another on the back, hauling ware, biting into their apples around that big wooden plank they used as a lunch table. She hadn’t been to the factory herself. Andrew wouldn’t allow her to visit, so she rarely went farther than the porch.
“He wasn’t jealous,” my grandmother explains. “He just thought it looked bad. He found my mother disgraceful because of her weight. He used to take her picture off the mantel and slam it on the floor.”
Still, Edna didn’t want for attention. She had the potters, who never tired of her cake or her company, and who shook with laughter when, indecent or not, she matched them joke for joke. Edna tittered most of all. Aneita Jean would sit at her feet, watching her face crack, anxiously mimicking the pitch of her mother’s laughter.
There are just a few photos of Edna in the memory book. In one, she is old as old gets, standing outside next to a neighbor, smiling in her apron, her hair pinned back in a tousled bun. In another, she is young, sitting beside a window in a ladder-back chair, her hands clasped behind her head in reverie. She is gazing off to the left, her face heavy, her eyes shaded with sadness. She wears a linen dress with lace draped along the collar and sleeves. Her hair is in the same loose bun.
Edna Blair mesmerized her elder daughter. Aneita Jean was in awe of her mother’s size, the way her breasts rose like sacks of flour under her apron, how her rump jutted out like a shelf. She often stared at her mother’s fleshy arms, which shook like hung laundry and were badly seared from the too-small oven. Big as Edna was, the men cared little. “Most men didn’t want any bag of bones back then,” says Grandmother. Besides, Edna had ripe skin and a bow mouth and the endearing idiosyncrasy of not knowing how sexy both were. And so when the men laughed, it was because she was funny, but also because in their hearts they imagined for that moment what it might be like to be wrapped inside those giant arms, buried into the soft folds of her chest.
Sometimes, on her way into the house, Edna would turn suddenly and make a garish face, her eyes yanked down to her cheeks, her lips bulged from underneath by her tongue. This would send the potters roaring. Aneita Jean watched her mother and learned without trying how easy it was to please a man. Food and laughter and willing eyes. Everything else blanched to nothingness with time. At least that is what she believed then, as a child cushioned in the shadow of her mother, cake crumbs on her chin, the sweet of it still packed in her teeth.
Aneita Jean knew of no other mothers who made faces. Nor any who made men laugh. The other mothers she knew were sour and tired and barely