Things like the Truth

by Ellen Gilchrist

  After Mother said yes to Daddy we had to plan a second wedding for my parents. They were seventy-one years old and Mother wanted to be married in the cathedral on Saint Charles Avenue by the bishop of Louisiana. She had been the director of music for the bishop for two years while Daddy was in Wyoming having articles written about him in magazines for learning to ski when he was seventy years old.

  I will tell about the wedding later and how I laughed out loud when the bishop tied my mother and father’s hands together with his scarlet sash. Not because of the ceremony but because my philandering brothers and cousin Bunky and my husband, Freddy, were crying. Matrimony, monogamy, all the difficult things they sentimentally believed in, but were not very good at practicing. It was a great moment, etched in my memory forever. I have forgotten what I was wearing, that’s how important the ceremonious moment became, the ancient ritual, Mother in her blue silk suit, Daddy looking thin and determined, not guilty, but repentant, all the men crying, me laughing so hard I could not stifle the sound, my sons lined up behind my father, his grandchildren, his gene bearers. Up in Jackson my six nieces were probably feeling a chill in their bones, a wind from the south, knowing their indomitable grandfather was on his way home to set things right in their lives and shape them up and for sure get rid of my niece Kathleen’s black friends or friend. Odysseus come to kill the lovers.

  I think I was wearing a blue print silk dress with a ruffle cut very low and the top of my breasts showing. I had on three-inch heels and was towering over my five-foot-eight-inch wealthy Jewish husband whom I really loved and admired. He adored my family, he adored all my brothers and male cousins and my sons. He was a gem of a husband. I wish I could have kept him and still become a writer but the choice had to be made. I wish I had let him give me some money when I left him to go live in Fayetteville, Arkansas, but I didn’t let him and I suppose I’m proud that I didn’t take money I had not earned.

  My Momma and Daddy Get Married in the Cathedral, Or, Forgive Us Our Trespasses As We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us

  THE BISHOP OF LOUISIANA TIED THEIR HANDS TOGETHER WITH his golden sash. Momma had been volunteering to help with the bishop’s robes at the cathedral during the year she lived in New Orleans. After Daddy got a divorce in Mexico and married Lucy because Momma wouldn’t live with him in Wyoming.

  Momma loved the beautiful Baptiste and handmade lace gowns that went under the bishop’s velvet robes. She saw to it that they were washed by hand and carefully ironed. Also, she attended early communion twice a week and met with the bishop on Saturday afternoons.

  My momma was a beautiful lady with the loveliest legs in the American South. More importantly, she was an angel, considered so by everyone who crossed her path. Her nickname was Bodie, which means sweet in classical Greek. My mother’s family was from England and studied Greek and Latin from the time they were children.

  Bishop Northrup of Christ Church Cathedral in New Orleans was not the first bishop to become Momma’s friend. She attended All Saints Episcopal School in Vicksburg where she and her sister lived with the fabled Bishop Green. There were no high schools near the plantation where they grew up. During my childhood the bishop of Mississippi borrowed our summer house on the Alabama coast and performed marriages in our living room when girls in the family had to marry in a hurry. This happened four or five times during my life in Momma and Daddy’s house. An ordinary week would be going by, then, suddenly, there would be a wedding. My brother and my friend Mary, my cousin Augusta and my cousin Quart, daughters of my mother’s friends. Finally, my outrageously beautiful niece and the governor’s youngest son. Most of these weddings took place in Decatur, Alabama, where Daddy made his millions, but later there were weddings in Jackson, Mississippi, after he bought the Caterpillar Tractor dealership there.

  The progeny of these couples are a group of young men and women who are exceptionally beautiful and talented and smart. Centuries of literature tell us that children conceived from such passions are always special. Leonardo da Vinci is a case in point.

  In the world in which I live now, the twenty-first century, A.D., these shining, fresh, fertilized eggs are mostly aborted, some even cut from their mother’s wombs at four or five months. These modern young men and women have better things to do than give birth and care for their young. They plan to write boring books about their boring lives and addictions or paint abstract paintings with dark, sophomoric jokes for titles or train for triathlons or just move back into their parents’ houses and smoke dope and occasionally get a job waiting tables or serving coffee in coffee shops.

  They are a pleasant, charming group, almost a new cult. They collect Medicaid and college tuition and food stamps from the government and elect whatever politicians will give it to them.

  But I am getting away from the story. My angelic mother was remarrying my father in Christ Church Cathedral at eleven in the morning on a cool, glorious April day. In attendance were my two brothers and their current wives, my darling Jewish husband and myself, my cousin Bunky and his young second wife, my Aunt Margaret and my Uncle George, my Aunt Roberta and Uncle Charlie, my maid, Traceleen, my mother’s maid, Sophia, four or five of my parents’ sixteen grandchildren, including my three sons, and a few of Momma’s friends from New Orleans.

  When Bishop Northrup took off his sash and tied my Momma’s and Daddy’s hands together I got so tickled I almost had to leave the church. Most of the men were crying. My husband, Freddy, and my youngest brother and my cousin Bunky were weeping. If my father could be forgiven for getting a Mexican divorce and going off to Wyoming to live with my oldest brother’s mother-in-law for ten months, any man could be forgiven for anything and the men in that congregation needed to know such forgiveness was still in the world since they had all had it and at any moment might need it again.

  Back to the second wedding of my Momma and Daddy. At Mother’s request, Bishop Northrup was conducting the ceremony out of the old Book of Common Prayer, created in the year of our Lord one thousand, seven hundred and eighty-nine by the best writers ever to use the English language, not the watered-down version the church is using now. I met one of the thin, pasty-looking New Englanders who rewrote the Book of Common Prayer in the nineteen eighties to fulfill some outlandish desire to make it more accessible to the social-climbing Baptists who were at that time joining the Episcopal Church in droves. Many of them have become ministers which is why I never go to church anymore.

  Momma was wearing pale blue silk, a soft dress just to her knees and pale blue high-heeled slippers that made her seventy-year-old legs even more beautiful than they had been when she was a girl. I inherited those legs and they have opened many doors for me.

  Daddy was looking serious in a dark suit and he didn’t laugh when the bishop tied their hands together. “This time forever,” the bishop said, loudly enough for the congregation to hear.

  Daddy really needed Momma to make up with him. My second oldest niece was running around with a wild crowd in Jackson and had been dating black men. Daddy thought if he and Momma moved back into the big house on the farm in Jackson they could corral all the grandchildren and save them from the craziness of the 1970s. He had moved to Wyoming to get all of us away from that craziness but no one would come out there and live with him. We all liked to go there to hunt and ski but we wouldn’t move there and run small businesses as he had planned. He offered to buy us small banks and dry cleaning establishments and filling stations but no one took the bait. We could get him to give us anything we wanted where we were. Why should we move to Wyoming and freeze to death?

  My two oldest sons stayed the longest in Wyoming. When we caught them using and selling dope in New Orleans we sent them there, singly and together, but it didn’t work. When they went to live on Daddy’s ranch together they started growing marijuana in an abandoned trailer house behind one of the barns. By the time my younger brother, Bob, went out to visit and found the plants my sons had a thriving business going at Buffalo Hig
h School.

  Bob said, “When I opened the door there was a forest. They were heating the place with space heaters and had a humidifier going at both ends. I can’t believe Daddy or one of the ranch hands didn’t notice the smoke. I guess the boys were buying off the ranch hands with product.”

  “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this company, to join together this Man and this Woman in Holy Matrimony; which is an honorable estate, instituted of God, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church: which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence and first miracle that he wrought in Cana of Galilee, and is commended of St. Paul…,” the bishop read. A couple of the men were crying already, before he even tied my parents’ hands together.

  It was a perfect morning, cool and fragrant with lilies on the altar. My Jewish in-laws had sent three dozen lilies to the cathedral. The sunlight shone down from the great stained glass windows upon my parents where they stood before the bishop holding hands. I have never understood how my mother could go through such a fine ceremony and still not allow my father to have a golden anniversary party when the time came. “No,” she said, one of the singular mean moments of her life. “He gave up that privilege when he married that woman.” The woman was the other grandmother of her first five granddaughters. Another mean thing Momma did was blame one of them for her grandmother’s transgression.

  “Wilt thou have this Woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour and keep her in sickness and in health; and, FORSAKING ALL OTHERS, KEEP THEE ONLY UNTO HER, SO LONG AS YOU BOTH SHALL LIVE.”

  “I will,” my father answered. I guess he was crying too.

  We should have had doves released from the ceiling, I was thinking, or at least we should have all the little children here, especially the two babies.

  “FORASMUCH AS AURORA AND DOOLEY HAVE CONSENTED TOGETHER IN HOLY WEDLOCK, AND HAVE WITNESSED THE SAME BEFORE GOD AND THIS COMPANY, AND THERETO HAVE GIVEN AND PLEDGED THEIR TROTH, EACH TO THE OTHER, AND HAVE DECLARED THE SAME BY GIVING AND RECEIVING A RING, AND BY JOINING HANDS; I PRONOUNCE THAT THEY ARE MAN AND WIFE, IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER AND OF THE SON AND OF THE HOLY GHOST. AMEN.

  “God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, bless, preserve, and keep you; the Lord mercifully with his favour look upon you, and fill you with all spiritual benediction and grace.…”

  My mother and father came down gracefully from the altar and embraced all of us, Bunky and my older brother still crying shamelessly and my aunts hugging my mother with worried faces. They had had their precious Bodie with them for two years, talked her into having a thirty-thousand-dollar face lift, flown to New York City together on private planes, fixed her up with a federal judge she had known at Ole Miss and a retired surgeon she had danced with in the delta when she was young. She had a beautiful apartment, a car service, her daughter, me, around the corner with my wealthy Jewish husband, my youngest son practically living in the basement of her duplex, where, unknown to us, he was running a bar supplied by my husband’s wine cellar, but at least he wasn’t selling marijuana and at least he wasn’t caught until a week after the wedding when Momma packed up her apartment and moved back to the farm in Rankin County to try to save the grandchildren from the madness that was overtaking the world she knew, the world she so fantastically, perfectly represented.

  The reception was at my and Freddy’s tall stucco house on Story Street. The bishop stayed for several hours and drank several bottles of Piesporter Goldtropfen Freddy’s Uncle Irby had supplied for the party. He and Freddy’s brothers had not come to the wedding but had been waiting for us at our house getting things ready for the party.

  “Life goes by like a dream,” Eudora Welty taught me and certainly that day and afternoon and evening have a dreamlike quality in my memory. Not fuzzy. Quite the opposite. I have vivid, lifelike memories of the ceremony and the men crying and my breaking into hysterical laughter and the billowing silk of Mother’s dress and the seriousness of my father’s face and the beauty and strength and good humor of my family, all still in perfect health and rich in money and power and fun and ideas and the breath coming in and out of our bodies and Uncle Irby’s French wines and champagne and the waiters and the food and walking out onto the front porch with my cousin Bunky and savoring all of it and the afternoon going by and everyone’s joy at the happy ending. Momma and Daddy back where they were supposed to be in our lives and the Black Witch, Lucy, alone in Nashville with the daughter my older brother had to marry when he was eighteen years old because she was too stupid not to get pregnant and her stupid genes mixed with ours now forever.

  The whole time Daddy lived with Lucy I wanted to kill her. I dreamed of it all the time.

  Blowjobs, my brothers blamed for the problem. He’d never had one before.

  He’d never cheated on her before, we all believed.

  Now we were all in my and Freddy’s house on Story Street with the fabulous French wines and Mother glowing with happiness and only my aunts worrying about anything.

  I do not remember much about the evening. My mother and my father and my brothers left at dark and drove home to Jackson, leaving my aunts and me to begin to shut down her apartment.

  My darling, funny, brilliant, Exeter- and Harvard-educated, beautiful of face and figure and mind, Jewish husband and I went to bed and played around and made love and he got out his camera and took photographs of me naked in our bed, something he had never asked to do and I still believe it was because he was studying the photographs of Edward Steichen and wanted to do some nudes. When I divorced him a few years later so I could go off and write books to make up for my children embarrassing me to death by selling drugs I went through all his negatives and took the ones of me with no clothes on. Not because I didn’t want him to have them but because I thought I was too fat to be in a nude photograph and was afraid they would get into the wrong hands and end up on the cover of People Magazine. I had already had enough success to know there was a chance I might get famous and I sure didn’t want nude photographs with bunches of fake Chinese violets covering my red pubic hair becoming part of my fame.

  I never tore them up, however. I am looking at two of them now, forty-seven years later and to tell the truth I don’t look very fat, maybe seven pounds of unnecessary flesh but not ten, maybe not even seven since I was running nine miles a day at the time they were taken and most of it is muscle.

  Freddy is dead now, of a terrible and fast-acting leukemia and Bunky died the other day and I had to go to his funeral in the same cathedral where my Momma and Daddy got married for the second time. Uncle George and Aunt Margaret are dead and Aunt Roberta and Uncle Charlie and Mr. and Mrs. Kullman and Freddy’s Uncle Irby. The names of the lost go on and on and on.

  It was during Bunky’s funeral, surrounded by his four sons, by my cousin Abigail and his second wife, which love story I told in “The Famous Poll at Jody’s Bar,” and their daughter, Sissy, and many of his grandchildren and all three of my sons and their children and grandchildren and living cousins, men who adored me and still adore me but I couldn’t concentrate on the living and count my blessings. I just kept calling on the dead to come back and live with us again and not die and not go to heaven and leave us only our myriad, amazing, wonderful, fabulous, heavenly memories of all we had and did and were and said and drank and ate and walked and ran and sailed and skied and drove and cars we wrecked and walked away from and airplanes we chartered and owned and flew and sailboats we sailed in storms, and diamonds and gold bracelets and paintings we bought and gave away and artists we supported and work we did and goddamn it to heaven, blessings, blessings, blessings.

  I decided to try to write some of it down before the oxygen stops pouring into my lungs and nourishing my blood and feeding the unbelievable storehouse of my seventy-eight-year-old brain. Here it is. Everything I can remember a
s fast as I can write it down.

  Further In and Deeper Out (Wyoming)

  WE WERE A PARTY OF THIRTEEN IN THREE VEHICLES. MY MOTHER, Aurora Alford Gilchrist, my father, William Garth Gilchrist, Jr. (Big Dooley), my brother Bob Gilchrist, my brother William Garth Gilchrist III (Little Dooley), and four of his daughters, Ellen, Lucy, Penny, and Cindy, his second wife, Sandra (mother of Penny and Cindy), myself, Ellen Gilchrist, and my three sons, Pierre, Garth, and Marshall Walker.

  Thirteen was not a problem for us. My father was born on January 13, 1908. He had always told us thirteen was our lucky number.

  We were going north and west from Casper, Wyoming, to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and then further west to the Grand Targhee Ski Resort in Driggs, Idaho.

  It was a five-and-a-half-hour drive to Jackson Hole. How we got there. Highway 25 to Riverton, then to DuBois, then Moran, then south for forty miles to Jackson Hole. We stopped in Moran late in the afternoon to ski the dangerous steep runs the resort was famous for. Garth and Marshall loved the black runs and skied them until it was dark. When I was coming down a blue run I saw a huge thermometer that said minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

  We skied Jackson Hole for four days. Marshall and Garth were out on the black runs all day. Strange to remember that I never worried about them. Pierre and the girls were taking turns skiing and buying things in the ski lodges. We would meet at night to eat real meals but the rest of the time they were feeding themselves in the warming huts at the top of the runs.