by Lee Smith
“Huh,” Tommy said. You could tell he was not impressed. Some Japanese people came up all around us and started taking pictures.
“Richie,” I said, “isn’t that something?” but Richie grinned just like Tommy and said, “So what?”
Tongues of Fire
The year I was thirteen—1957—my father had a nervous breakdown, my brother had a wreck, and I started speaking in tongues. The nervous breakdown had been going on for a long time before I knew anything about it. Then one day that fall, Mama took me downtown in the car to get some Baskin-Robbins ice cream, something she never did, and while we were sitting on the curly chairs facing each other across the little white table, Mama took a deep breath, licked her red lipstick, leaned forward in a very significant way, and said, “Karen, you may have noticed that your father is not himself lately.”
Not himself! Who was he, then? What did she mean? But I had that feeling you get in your stomach when something really important happens. I knew this was a big deal.
Mama looked all around, as if for spies. She waited until the ice cream man went through the swinging pink doors, into the back of his shop.
“Karen,” she said, so low I could hardly hear her, “your father is having a nervous breakdown.”
“He is?” I said stupidly.
The ice cream man came back.
“Sssh,” Mama said. She caught my eye and nodded gravely, once. “Don’t eat that ice cream so fast, honey,” she said a minute later. “It’ll give you a headache.”
And this was the only time she ever mentioned my father’s nervous breakdown out loud, in her whole life. The older kids already knew, it turned out. Everybody had wanted to keep it from me, the baby. But then the family doctor said Mama ought to tell me, so she did. But she did not elaborate, then or ever, and in retrospect I am really surprised that she ever told me at all. Mama grew up in Birmingham, so she talked in a very Southern voice and wore spectator heels and linen dresses that buttoned up the front and required a great deal of ironing by Missie, the maid. Mama’s name was Dee Rose. She said that when she married Daddy and came up here to the wilds of north Alabama to live, it was like moving to Siberia. It was like moving to Outer Mongolia, she said. Mama’s two specialties were Rising to the Occasion and Rising Above It All, whatever “it” happened to be. Mama believed that if you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all. If you don’t discuss something, it doesn’t exist. This is the way our family handled all of its problems, such as my father’s quarrel with my Uncle Dick or my sister’s promiscuity or my brother’s drinking.
Mama had long red fingernails and shiny yellow hair which she wore in a bubble cut. She looked like a movie star. Mama drank a lot of gin and tonics and sometimes she would start on them early, before five o’clock. She’d wink at Daddy and say, “Pour me one, honey, it’s already dark underneath the house.” Still, Mama had very rigid ideas, as I was to learn, about many things. Her ideas about nervous breakdowns were:
The husband should not have a nervous breakdown.
Nobody can mention the nervous breakdown. It is shameful.
The children must behave at all times during the nervous breakdown.
The family must keep up appearances at all costs. Nobody should know.
Mama and I finished our ice cream and she drove us home in the white Cadillac, and as soon as we got there I went up in my treehouse to think about Daddy’s breakdown. I knew it was true. So this is it, I thought. This had been it all along. This explained the way my father’s eye twitched and watered now, behind his gold-rimmed glasses. My father’s eyes were deep-set and sort of mournful at best, even before the twitch. They were an odd, arresting shade of very pale blue which I have never seen since, except in my sister, Ashley. Ashley was beautiful, and my father was considered to be very good-looking, I knew that, yet he had always been too slow-moving and thoughtful for me. I would have preferred a more military model, a snappy go-getter of a dad. My dad looked like a professor at the college, which he was not. Instead he ran a printing company with my Uncle Dick, until their quarrel. Now he ran it by himself—or rather his secretary, Mrs. Eunice Merriman, ran it mostly by herself during the time he had his nervous breakdown. Mrs. Eunice Merriman was a large, imposing woman with her pale blond hair swept up in a beehive hairdo as smooth and hard as a helmet. She wore glasses with harlequin frames. Mrs. Merriman reminded me of some warlike figure from Norse mythology. She was not truly fierce, however, except in her devotion to my father, who spent more and more time lying on the daybed upstairs in his study, holding books or magazines in his hands but not reading them, looking out the bay window, at the mountains across the river. What was he thinking about?
“Oh honestly, Karen!” my mother exploded when I asked her this question. My mother was much more interested, on the day I asked her, in the more immediate question of whether or not I had been invited to join the Sub-Deb Club. The answer was yes.
But there was no answer to the question of what my father might be thinking about. I knew that he had wanted to be a writer in his youth. I knew that he had been the protégé of some old poet or other down at the university in Tuscaloosa, that he had written a novel which was never published, that he had gone to the Pacific Theater in the War. I had always imagined the Pacific Theater as a literal theater, somewhat like the ornate Rialto in Birmingham with its organ that rose up and down mechanically from the orchestra pit, its gold-leaf balconies, its chandelier as big as a Chevrolet. In this theater, my father might have watched such movies as Sands of Iwo Jima or To Hell and Back. Now it occurred to me, for the first time, that he might have witnessed horrors. Horrors! Sara Nell Buie, at school, swore that her father had five Japanese ears in a cigar box from the Philippines. Perhaps my father had seen horrors too great to be borne. Perhaps he too had ears.
But this did not seem likely, to look at him. It seemed more like mononucleosis to me. He was just lying on the daybed. Now he’d gotten his days and nights turned around so that he had to take sleeping tablets; he went to the printing company for only an hour or two each day. He rallied briefly at gin-and-tonic time, but his conversation tended to lapse in the middle of itself during dinner, and frequently he left the table early. My mother rose above these occasions in the way she had been trained to do as a girl in Birmingham, in the way she was training Ashley and me to do: She talked incessantly, about anything that entered her head, to fill the void. This was another of Mama’s rules:
A lady never lets a silence fall.
Perhaps the most exact analysis of my father’s nervous breakdown was provided by Missie, one day when I was up in the treehouse and she was hanging out laundry on the line almost directly below me, talking to the Gardeners’ maid from next door. “You mean Missa Graffenreid?” Missie said. “He have lost his starch, is all. He be getting it back directly.”
In the meantime, Mama seemed to grow in her vivacity, in her busyness, taking up the slack. Luckily my sister, Ashley, was a senior at Lorton Hall that year, so this necessitated a lot of conferences and visits to colleges. The guidance counselor at Lorton Hall wanted Ashley to go to Bryn Mawr, up North, but after the visit to Bryn Mawr my mother returned with her lips pressed tight together in a little red bow. “Those girls were not ladies,” she reported to us all, and Bryn Mawr was never mentioned again except by Ashley, later, in fits of anger at the way her life turned out. The choices narrowed to Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina; Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina; Sophie Newcomb in New Orleans; and Sweet Briar, in Virginia. My mama was dead set on Sweet Briar.
So Mama and Ashley were very busy with college visits and with all the other activities of Ashley’s senior year at Lorton Hall. There were countless dresses to buy, parties to give and go to. I remember one Saturday that fall when Ashley had a Coke party in the back garden, for the senior girls and their mothers. Cokes and finger sandwiches were served. Missie had made t
he finger sandwiches the day before and put them on big silver trays, covered by damp tea towels. I watched the party from the window of my room upstairs, which gave me a terrific view of the back garden and the red and yellow fall leaves and flowers, and the girls and their mothers like chrysanthemums themselves. I watched them from my window—just as my father watched them, I suppose, from his.
My mother loved to shop, serve on committees, go to club meetings, and entertain. (Probably she should have been running Graffenreid Printing Co. all along—I see this now—but of course such an idea would not have entered anyone’s head at the time.) Mama ran the Flower Guild of the Methodist church, which we attended every Sunday morning, minus my father. She was the recording secretary of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, which literally ran the town as far as I could see; she was a staunch member of the Garden Club and the Bluebird Book Club.
Her bridge club met every Thursday at noon for lunch and bridge, rotating houses. This bridge club went on for years and years beyond my childhood, until its members began to die or move to Florida. It fascinated me. I loved those summer Thursdays when I was out of school and the bridge club came to our house—the fresh flowers, the silver, the pink cloths on the bridge tables which were set up for the occasion in the Florida room, the way Mama’s dressing room smelled as she dressed, that wonderful mixture of loose powder (she used a big lavender puff) and cigarette smoke (Salems) and Chanel No. 5. The whole bridge club dressed to the hilt. They wore hats, patent-leather shoes, and dresses of silk shantung. The food my mama and Missie gave them was wonderful—is still, to this day, my very idea of elegance, even though it is not a menu I’d ever duplicate; and it was clear to me, even then, that the way these ladies were was a way I’d never be.
But on those Thursdays, I’d sit at the top of the stairs, peering through the banisters into the Florida room, where they lunched in impossible elegance, and I got to eat everything they did, from my own plate which Missie had fixed specially for me: a pink molded salad that melted on the tongue, asparagus-cheese soufflé, and something called Chicken Crunch that involved mushroom soup, chicken, Chinese noodles, pecans, and Lord knows what else. All of Mama’s bridge-lunch recipes required gelatin or mushroom soup or pecans. This was Lady Food.
So—it was the year that Mama was lunching, Daddy was lying on the daybed, and Ashley was Being a Senior. My brother, Paul, had already gone away to college, to Washington and Lee up in Virginia. At that time in my life, I knew Paul only by sight. He was incredibly old. Nice, but very old and very busy, riding around in cars full of other boys, dashing off here and there when he was home, which was seldom. He used to tell me knock-knock jokes, and come up behind me and buckle my knees. I thought Paul’s degree of bustle and zip was promising, though. I certainly hoped he would be more active than Daddy. But who could tell? I rarely saw him.
I rarely saw anybody in my family, or so I felt. I floated through it all like a dandelion puff on the air, like a wisp of smoke, a ghost. During the year of my father’s nervous breakdown, I became invisible in my family. But I should admit that even before my invisibility I was scarcely noticeable, a thin girl, slight, brown-haired and brown-eyed, undeveloped (as Mrs. Black put it delicately in health class). There was no sign of a breast anyplace on my chest even though some other girls my age wore B and even C cups, I saw them in gym. I had gone down to Sears on the bus by myself the previous summer and bought myself two training bras, just so I’d have them, but my mother had never mentioned this subject to me at all, of course. And even after I got the training bras, I remained—I felt—still ugly, and still invisible in the midst of my gorgeous family.
Perhaps it is not surprising that I turned to God.
I had always been interested in religion, anyway. When I was a little girl, my favorite part of the summer was Vacation Bible School, with the red Kool-Aid in the little Dixie cups and the Lorna Doone cookies at break. I loved to color in the twelve disciples. I loved to make lanyards. I loved to sing “You Are My Sunshine” and “Red and Yellow, Black and White, They Are Precious in His Sight.” I loved to hold hands with Alice Field, who was my best friend for years and years until her family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. I loved Mrs. Treble Roach, the teacher of Vacation Bible School, a plump soft woman like a beanbag chair, who hugged us all the time. Mrs. Treble Roach gave us gold stars when we were good, and I was very good. I got hundreds of gold stars over the years and I believe I still have them upstairs someplace in a jewelry box, like ears.
I had always liked church too, although it was less fun. I associated church with my grandparents, since we sat with them every Sunday, third pew from the back on the left-hand side of the little stone Methodist church which my grandfather had attended all his life, which my grandmother had attended since their marriage fifty years before. Usually my mother went to church too; sometimes Ashley went to church, under duress ever since she became an atheist in tenth grade, influenced by an English teacher who was clearly not a lady; my father attended only on Easter. Frankly, I liked those Sundays when none of them made it, when Mama just dropped me off in front of the church and I went in all alone, clutching my quarter for the collection plate, to sit with my grandparents. Even though I was invisible in my own family, my grandparents noticed me plenty. I was their good, good little girl . . . certainly, I felt, their favorite. I did everything I could to ensure that this was true.
My grandmother had wispy blue hair and a whole lot of earrings and brooches that matched. She was the author of four books of poems which Daddy had printed up for her at the printing company. She suffered from colitis, and was ill a lot. One thing you never wanted to do with Grandmother was ask her how she felt—she’d tell you, gross details you didn’t want to know. My mama, of course, was entirely above this kind of thing, never referring to her own or anybody else’s body in any way. My grandfather wore navy-blue suits to church with red suspenders underneath. He was a boxy little man who ran the bus station and had a watch that could tell you the time in Paris, London, and Tokyo. I coveted this watch and had already asked Grandaddy to leave it to me when he died, a request that seemed to startle him.
After church, I’d walk up the street with my grandparents to their house on the corner across from the Baptist church and eat lunch, which frequently ended with lemon meringue pie, my favorite. I kept a close eye out the window for Baptists, whose service was dismissed half an hour later than ours. There were so many Baptists that it took them longer to do everything. In pretty weather, I sat out on the front porch so that I could see the Baptists more clearly. They wore loud suits, and made more noise in general than the quiet Methodists.
Our church had only forty-two members and about twenty of them, like my grandparents, were so old as to be almost dead already. I was not even looking forward to joining the MYF, which I’d be eligible for next year, because it had only eight members, two of them definite nerds. All they did was collect food for the poor at Thanksgiving, and stuff like that. The BTU, on the other hand, did great stuff such as have progressive dinners, Sweetheart Banquets, and go on trips to Gulf Shores. The BTU was a much snappier outfit than the MYF, but I knew better than to ask to join it. My mother had already explained to me the social ranking of the churches: Methodist at the top, attended by doctors and lawyers and other “nice” families; Presbyterian slightly down the scale, attended by store owners; then the vigorous Baptists; then the Church of Christ, who thought they were the only real church in town and said so. They said everybody else in town was going to hell except for them. They had hundreds of members. And then, of course, at the very bottom of the church scale were those little churches out in the surrounding county, some of them recognizable denominations (Primitive Baptist) and some of them not (Church of the Nazarene, Tar River Holiness) where people were reputed to yell out, fall down in fits, and throw their babies. I didn’t know what this meant, exactly, but I knew I’d love to see it, for it promised drama far beyond the dull responsive
readings of the Methodists and their rote mumbling of the Nicene Creed.
Anyway, I had been sitting on my grandparents’ front porch for years eating pie and envying the Baptists, waiting without much hope to be seized by God for His heavenly purpose, bent to His will, as in God’s Girl, my favorite book—a biography of Joan of Arc.
So far, nothing doing.
But then, that fall of Daddy’s nervous breakdown, the Methodist church was visited by an unusually charismatic young preacher named Johnny Rock Malone while Mr. Treble Roach, our own preacher, was down at Duke having a hernia operation. I was late to church that day and arrived all by myself, after the service had already started. The congregation was on its feet singing “I Come to the Garden Alone,” one of my favorite hymns. One unfamiliar voice led all the rest. I slipped in next to Grandaddy, found the right page in the hymnal, and craned my neck around Miss Eulalie Butters’s big black hat to see who was up there singing so nice. It looked like an angel to me—probably the angel Gabriel, because of his curly blond hair. And he was so young—just out of seminary, somebody said after the service. It was a warm fall Sunday, and rays of colored light shot through the stained-glass windows at the side of the church to glance off Johnny Rock Malone’s pale face. “He walks with me, and He talks with me,” we sang. My heart started beating double time. Johnny Rock Malone stretched out his long thin arms and spread his long white fingers. “Beloved,” he said, curling his fingers, “let us pray.” But I never closed my eyes that day, staring instead at the play of light on Johnny Rock Malone’s fair face. It was almost like a kaleidoscope. Then the round rosy window behind him, behind the altar, began to pulse with light, to glow with light, now brighter now not, like a neon sign. I got the message. I was no dummy. In a way, I had been waiting all my life for this to happen.