Things like the Truth

by Ellen Gilchrist

  When I finally got home I became sicker. I called my grandson and a cranial masseuse and read about dizziness in the Mayo Medical Dictionary. We all decided it was an inner ear problem from swimming although I had no ear symptoms or pain.

  I took a Zyrtec and a Mucinex in case the dizziness was caused by allergies. Then I went upstairs and lay down on my bed to pull on my ears as recommended by the cranial masseur and the Mayo Medical Dictionary.

  As soon as I lay down the room began to spin. Vertigo, just as I had suspected. Then I got up and went to the toilet and threw up the entire contents of my stomach. I felt better although I was in pain in all my limbs, not excruciating but enough to keep me from moving.

  In awhile I fell asleep and slept eleven or twelve hours, just waking occasionally to urinate and drink more water.

  In the morning I felt shaky but much better. I went to the cranial masseur and he worked on my head for two hours and I was better. Now it is a day later and I’m still shaky and unsure of myself.

  It’s freezing outside. Record-breaking cold for the Mississippi coast. I will read and write all day and ponder this mystery. I purged after I talked to Gunther. This is a fact that will not go away. I came to him thirty years ago after a brain concussion caused by drinking and falling down a flight of stairs. That was the last drink I ever had except for a couple of times. When I got drunk, I went back to Antabuse for months afterwards. I will not drink and be a drunk. It is never going to happen to me again.

  Drinking is my enemy and the people from whom I am descended. I hate it. I fight it in my students, in my progeny, anywhere I am in contact with its destructive power.

  While Talking to Gunther Perdigao on January 3, 2010

  I WAS TALKING NONSTOP, FREE ASSOCIATING LIKE MAD.

  Memory is so amazing, so vital and clear and all it is is chemistry. Or magic. I think it is magic after the three hours I just spent with Gunther. I hope to God I don’t lose my memory before I die. I don’t mind dying, as long as I do it my way. I will do it my way. I have a long time to screw my courage to that sticking point, but I will stick it. I think. I hope.

  Great doors were opened for me by becoming a writer and the fame it gave me whether I wanted fame or not. I didn’t like it. Its pleasures are not worth having your life opened to all sorts of people you wouldn’t ordinarily choose as friends.

  One never-to-be-forgotten thrill was getting to fly in the cockpit of the British Airlines Concorde, when the Concorde was new. I was sitting next to the president of Lloyd’s of London, the company which insures the British Airlines planes. We talked for awhile. I told him I was going to London to meet my British publishers at Faber and Faber. I told him I had never been to the British Isles although my ancestry was English and Scots.

  “We are landing at dawn British time,” he said. “Would you like to sit in the cockpit so you can see the British Isles from the air?”

  “Would I like to sit in the cockpit of the Concorde? Good lord, you must be kidding.”

  Thirty minutes before landing a steward came down the aisle and took me to the cockpit and I sat in the fourth officer’s chair behind the pilot. The cockpit was like a small room, almost square. From my seat I could see out the wide windows of the plane and when the British Isles came into view they were spread out before me like a beautiful living map.

  “Thank you so much for letting me be here,” I told the three officers in the other seats. “I promise not to touch anything.”

  “It would be better if none of us touched anything,” the pilot said. He was laughing. “Computers land this aircraft.”

  We all laughed then and watched as the home of my ancestors was lit by the rising sun.

  February 13, 2010

  A DEEP WINTER FOG AT SIX-THIRTY IN THE MORNING. I CAN’T even see my neighbors’ lights. Very beautiful, and warm enough to walk outside in a bathrobe for the first time in weeks. The coldest winter in decades all over the United States. It even snowed in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, two days ago. It covered the Dallas airport in snow. I ran into Carolyn Walton at the health club yesterday morning. She and Nick are going to south Texas for two weeks.

  The day before my birthday I’m going to Ocean Springs to build a huge cake covered with candles and let my grandchildren and sons help me blow it out. What fun. Then, if the weather is good, we will build a bonfire on the beach and watch it burn. We have to clean it up afterwards, which isn’t as much fun, but so what? That’s what tall strong grandchildren are for.

  I made coffee and went back outside at six-forty-five and there was light in the sky. Not as beautiful as it was right before sunrise but still beautiful. The fog means that warm air is moving in from the coast. Hallelujah. I don’t fear cold and winter, I just hate it.

  It’s nearing my birthday, the time when the days start seeming longer and the winter seems bearable. As always I wish I had planted bulbs in the fall, but I never do. It would make me too mad when the squirrels and rabbits ate them, as they would surely do.

  SECTION TWO

  Mother, Father, Ancestors The People Who Made Me

  Wyoming, 1976

  MY FATHER TOOK ONE VACATION IN HIS LONG HARD-WORKING life. He was gone two years, high in the mountains of Wyoming, riding the snow-covered roads in a covered pickup truck, or on horses, and finally, coming down the slopes on skis. My mother was with him for awhile but she was a southern lady and could not figure out how to live in cold and snow. Also, she did not share my father’s vision of a new land opening before them where they could bring their children and grandchildren and save them from the madness that was infesting the cities and small towns of the American South.

  “They’re not going to come out here and live and run dry cleaning establishments,” she told him. “Just because they come out here and hunt and drive around with you doesn’t mean they are going to tear up their lives and come live here.”

  “We’ll start again, Bodie. Just like our great-grandfathers did. I’ll buy Bob a small bank to run. At Christmas I’m going to bring them all out to learn to ski. You’ll see. They’ll love it. How could they resist?”

  “It’s too cold,” she kept saying. “I can’t even go outside. I’m too old for this, Dooley. I have followed you around all your life and finally I’m back in Mississippi with my friends and my family and I’m going to stay there.”

  “Wait until after Christmas. Wait until I get them on the slopes.”

  So she agreed to wait. He had bought her a beautiful modern home with six bedrooms and sheds for the ski equipment and a heated garage but she was having a hard time finding any help. The big monosyllabic German women he found for her barely dusted and they were too big to get under the beds. She longed for her old maids, small, elegant black women who shared her vision of how to set a table or make up a bed or answer the phone or let visitors in. Not that they had many visitors in Casper, Wyoming, although her sons did fly in without notice and spend the night now and then.

  After six months, especially after all the chaos of the skiing trip at Christmas, she gave up and went home to live in New Orleans near me and her sisters, Margaret and Roberta.

  Two months later, in the spring, Daddy went to Mexico and got a divorce and married the other grandmother of his six granddaughters. Her name was Lucy Benedict and she had been in love with him since the day she met him. She came right out and Daddy moved to Buffalo, Wyoming, and bought a ranch. It had been his first choice all along but he thought Mother could tolerate the larger town of Casper better.

  That marriage lasted two years, what Daddy called his vacation, then Lucy went back home to Nashville with five hundred thousand dollars and Daddy went down to New Orleans with his hat in his hand and begged Mother to forgive him and help him with his plan to move back to Jackson near the grandchildren and save them from the chaos of the 1970s. “Kathleen is running around with a black man,” he said, with tears in his eyes. “We have to go back to Jackson and do something with those girls.”

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sp; Mother wavered for awhile, consulting with her sisters and with me. She had moved to New Orleans and was living around the corner from me in an elegant duplex on Henry Clay Avenue. She was going to Mardi Gras balls with my Uncle George and Aunt Margaret and being squired around town by attractive men her age, including an old beau from her glory days at Ole Miss. Also she was spending long days with her younger sister, Roberta, who was trying to recover from the death of her oldest son in a drunk driving accident in Jackson just before my parents moved to Wyoming from the farm in Rankin County. Neither my cousin Chris or his girlfriend had been drinking. A Jackson matron barreled around a corner of Fortification and High streets, ignored a red light and hit them head on.

  St. Vincent’s Hospital called my parents at two in the morning and they went to the hospital to watch Charles Christian Klienschmidt die. Within hours my Aunt Roberta and Uncle Charlie and their fraternal twins, Nell and Ken, and half the congregation of Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church of Metairie, Louisiana, were in Jackson staying on my parents’ eighty-acre farm or in the area and walking around my mother’s parlors trying to think of something comforting to say.

  My father asked me to take the twelve-year-old twins off to distract them for awhile. I had a new white Chevrolet Camaro he had given me as a reward for the straight A’s I was making at Millsaps in an attempt to complete the education I had interrupted to have three sons. On old Highway 90 I had noticed a new automatic car washing machine. You drove into the machine and it washed the car with you sitting in it. I’d been wanting to try it, so as soon as I got Ken and Nell in the car we drove around the farm for awhile and then I took them to try out the car washing machine.

  It was a terrifying adventure but they both enjoyed it, Ken sitting in the front seat with me and Nell staunchly sitting in the back with her hands folded in her lap. If either of them were frightened they didn’t let it show.

  I wish I could remember what I talked to them about. I’m pretty sure I told them about going to see Chris the week before to talk about what classes he should sign up for for the spring semester. He had called me, probably at Aunt Roberta’s urging, and I had driven right over to see if I could help.

  He was tall and blond and blue-eyed and serious. A serious young man with a lovely shy smile. He still had a few pimples, which he was covering with a colored paste young people used back then. My young husband, the father of my children, had suffered pimples until he was twenty-four so I was sympathetic to Chris’s plight and full of advice. “That makeup stuff looks good,” I think I said.

  “Please don’t worry about a few pimples. It’s only one or two. My husband, Marshall, had lots more than that and I fell madly in love with him and had three children. You are so tall a girl can’t even see them.”

  I had picked him up behind his dormitory on a narrow campus street. When I got there he was standing waiting for me, looking so much like the boy his age I had married not many years before, tall, straight, serious, beautifully dressed in khaki pants and a light blue oxford cloth shirt, a narrow, handsome belt, and a patterned tie.

  “I have a girlfriend,” he told me. “You’ll meet her. I’m going to bring her out to the farm to meet Aunt Bodie and Uncle Dooley. She’s from the delta. She’s a Chi Omega like Momma and Aunt Bodie and Cousin Nell and you. She’s a year older than I am, but we don’t care. Well, not a whole year. Just a year ahead in school because she started when she was five. Her name is Janet Harbison. She says I should go S.A.E. because they don’t drink as much as the Phi Delts and the Kappa Sigs. I don’t know. I’m more interested in signing up for classes next semester.”

  “Take Dr. Boyd’s Shakespeare class. If you get worried about reading it, call me up and I’ll come over and read it to you and tell you about it. You have to know Shakespeare to be an educated person, Chris. You can’t just take any old thing. We are from generations of Greek and Latin scholars. You’re here to become an educated gentleman. Really, promise me you’ll take it.”

  “I will. I have to choose the classes tomorrow.”

  “Go this afternoon before it fills up. Dr. Boyd’s the best teacher in the English Department. He’s the one who let me be in Eudora Welty’s class at the last minute.”

  “Okay, I will. Momma told me to talk to you. I like your new car. It’s really pretty.”

  “Daddy gave it to me for making A’s in science and math. Did you know I’m writing a play for New Stage Theatre about Miss Welty’s stories? Well, it’s made out of her stories. All I’m doing is dramatizing them.”

  “Janet told me about that. She read it in the newspaper. She wants to meet you, Cousin Ellen. She really does.”

  “Let’s go over to the Union and get something to eat. Are you hungry?”

  “I’m hungry all the time. I’m on a football team for the S.A.E.’s. I guess that’s the one I’ll join. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

  “You’re lucky. When I was at Vanderbilt I didn’t get bids to the three best sororities. I’d never even heard of any of them. All I knew about was Chi Omega. I got my feelings hurt so bad when I didn’t get bids to them. I still can’t understand it, but Momma says it’s because I didn’t have recommendations to them. I don’t think so. I think it’s because I gained ten pounds the first two months I was at Vandy. I was homesick and I didn’t know people up there and I just started eating my head off.

  “I’ve lost it now but when I look at photographs of that fall I know why they didn’t give me bids. I thought because I was so smart and made good grades and published poetry and wrote for the newspaper they would all like me like everyone always has.” I think we laughed at that. I want to think we did.

  “Do you get lonely here at Millsaps? Are there other people from New Orleans here, other boys?”

  “Not many. Not anyone I know. But some of our cousins from the delta and sons of Momma’s friends from Ole Miss are here.”

  I had stopped the car and he jumped out and came across and held the door open for me and we walked together across the campus, kicking the fall leaves and being glad we were cousins. He was so nice, so special.

  Telling the story to Ken and Nell, I almost started crying, but the water and the huge brushes were beating on the car so hard it made me stop.

  Ken was leaned all the way into the windshield watching the machine. Nell was sitting quietly in the back.

  We drove out of the drive-through car wash and went back to the farm and I took them out to my cottage and let them watch the new television set while I went inside to talk to the mourners. I kept going up to Uncle Charlie and Aunt Roberta and trying to think of something to say. I just said anything I could think up, but none of it helped them or me.

  A car arrived at the front door and Daddy went outside and brought Chris’s girlfriend, Janet, into the house with her mother and her father. She sat near Aunt Roberta all afternoon while my mother talked to her mother.

  The next day we all drove down to the delta to my grandparents’ plantation and all our relatives came there and our Aunt Zell and Uncle Floyd fed everyone and talked to them and we spent the night at Hopedale, where Aunt Roberta had lived every day of her life, mostly being happy and cared for and loved.

  Now she was here to bury a child. The worst thing that can happen to a human being is to bury a child. It had already happened to my Aunt Margaret and Uncle George and I don’t think they ever recovered from it. Now it was Aunt Roberta and Uncle Charlie’s turn.

  Two months before we had all been in the same place burying my grandmother, Nell Biggs Alford, “Dan-Dan.” At nine in the morning the next day we went to the Episcopal Church in Rolling Fork and had the same service for Chris we had had for Dan-Dan. Except there were many young men and women in the church, cousins and S.A.E.’s and Chi Omegas from Millsaps College.

  Then we drove out in the country to the ruins of the beautiful brick Episcopal Church my ancestors had built in the 1880s and buried Chris beside my grandmother and grandfather and my great-grand
mother and great-grandfather and the twins Dan-Dan lost at birth, and my cousin Floyd who was just my age and had been my playmate for eight years until he died from anesthesia in Touro Infirmary while having a small operation to straighten a broken index finger on his left hand.

  It was a beautiful clear day with soft cirrus clouds turning the golden sunlight into pink and mauve and blue and violet and soft yellows. All those graves, the one where only the ashes of my greatgrandfather were buried because he died of yellow fever and they had to burn the body on the levee because my Uncle Robert was afraid it would spread the disease. Uncle Robert was buried here too. Robert Finley, M.D., for whom Aunt Roberta was named because he had delivered her when she was born right after Dan-Dan lost the twins.

  Our living twins were beautiful and strong. Aunt Roberta had carried them nine months and they had weighed eight and nine pounds, respectively. I can’t remember which one came first or which one was the biggest although I was there, at the hospital with my mother and my brother. They were so cute and as soon as they got back to her house from the hospital Aunt Roberta put them in the same bed because she and Uncle Charlie decided they might be lonely for each other in separate beds.

  It was out on the lake front, in Aunt Roberta’s living room, drinking coffee from my great-grandmother’s demitasse cups, that my mother decided to give my father another chance. Aunt Margaret was still objecting but Aunt Roberta pled my father’s case and my mother forgave him. She punished him later by not letting him celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary which was a few years later.

  I had already told Mother to go back to him. I hated to have her leave New Orleans because she was very useful to me as a babysitter for my youngest son, Pierre, but down in my heart I always took my father’s side in everything. So what if he had married my older brother’s mother-in-law for two years? He only did it because Momma refused to live in Wyoming because the women were so ugly and fat and it was so cold she could hardly stand to go to the grocery store.