by Lee Smith
This is my story, then, but it is not a sob story. Whenever either of my parents was gone, everybody—our relatives, neighbors, and friends—pitched in to help take care of me, bringing food over, driving me to Girl Scouts or school clubs or whatever else came up. People loved my parents, and in a mountain family and a small, isolated town like ours, that’s just how people were. In times of trouble, they helped each other out. Also, I had my intense reading, and my writing, and usually a dog.
All their lives, my parents were kind, well-meaning people—heartbreakingly sweet. They did not understand their problems or what caused them. It is possible that they did not even understand their problems as illnesses, but they did not blame each other for them. Nor did they involve me in any way, other than trying to make sure that I would “get out” of whatever it was that they were “in”—Grundy, it often seemed to me, and I fought against this. I loved Grundy. But they were adamant, sending me away to summer camps and then to preparatory school, where they felt I would have “more advantages.” Or maybe I was just too much for them, too lively, this child who came along so late in their lives.
Only once, the year I was thirteen, did my parents’ hospitalizations coincide, when my father was at Silver Hill in Connecticut while my mother was at the University of Virginia Hospital in Charlottesville, and so I was sent to live with my Aunt Millie in Maryland. She enrolled me in a nearby “progressive, experimental” private school named Glenelg Country Day, where a friend of hers taught English. With thirty or forty students at most, Glenelg was situated in a grand old house—a mansion, I thought at the time—surrounded by rolling fields. We called our teachers by their first names; meditated each morning; memorized a lot of poetry; and played a game I had never even seen before, called field hockey, with weird sticks. Everybody said I talked funny, but I thought they talked funny, too. I made some new friends and got to ride their horses, which I loved.
While I was there, I received an invitation from my mother’s psychiatrist, a Dr. Stevenson, who proposed to take me out to lunch the next time I took the train down to visit my mother. In retrospect, this luncheon appears to me highly unusual, and I am surprised that my over-anxious Aunt Millie even allowed it. She customarily arranged for me to spend the night in Charlottesville with an old family friend whenever I went to visit Mama in the hospital, though neither the family friend nor my Aunt Millie had been invited to lunch. But Dr. Ian Stevenson was a well-known and respected physician, the new head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. He specialized in cases of psychosomatic illness—which must have included my mother.
Later, Dr. Stevenson would become famous for his interest in parapsychology, especially reincarnation. He thought that the concept of reincarnation might supplement what we know about heredity and environment in helping to understand aspects of behavior and development. He was especially interested in Children Who Remember Previous Lives, the title of a book he would publish in 1987. But if Dr. Stevenson had any curiosity about my own past lives, he kept mum about it. Our luncheon remains one of the most memorable occasions of my youth.
HE MET ME AT THE train station. He was a tall, angular man holding a pink rose, which he presented to me as he bowed. He was all dressed up in a suit and a vest and a tie. I was all dressed up, too, in my pleated plaid skirt and navy blue jacket and Add-A-Pearl necklace. Dr. Stevenson put me and my little bag into his big, shiny car and took me to a fancy restaurant up on a hill, with linen tablecloths. He told me to order anything I wanted from the largest menu I had ever seen. I chose lemonade and a club sandwich, which arrived in four fat triangles with a little flag stuck into each one, plus curly potato chips and pickles. I ate every bite.
Dr. Stevenson said that he had heard a lot about me from my mother, and he had wanted to meet me because he thought that I must be an interesting little girl. He asked me a lot of questions about my new school, and what books I liked to read, listening very carefully to my answers. I had just read Jane Eyre twice, cover to cover. Dr. Stevenson nodded as if this were the very thing to do. I loved poetry, I told him. Then I recited the poem we had just learned, “ ‘Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land?’ ’’ I took a deep breath and followed that one up with “Annabel Lee” in its entirety. Nobody could have stopped me. “It sounds like a wonderful school,” Dr. Stevenson said, smiling.
Then Dr. Stevenson leaned forward intently and said, “Lee, since your parents are both ill, I wonder if you have ever worried about getting sick as well.”
“You mean, if I am going to go crazy, too,” I blurted out.
“Yes,” he said, “if you are going to go crazy, too.”
I stared across the table at him. How did he know? because that was exactly what I thought about, of course, all the time.
“Yes!” I said.
“Well, I am a very good doctor,” he said, “and you seem to me to be a very nice, normal little girl, and I am here to tell you that you can stop worrying about this right now. So you can just relax, and read a lot more books, and grow up. You will be fine.”
I sank back in my chair.
“Now,” he said, “would you like some dessert?”
“Yes,” I said.
The waitress brought the giant menus back.
I ordered Baked Alaska, which I had never heard of, and was astonished when it arrived in flames. The waitress held it out at arms’ length, then set it down right in front of me. It looked like a big fiery cake. “Oh no!” I cried, scooting my chair back. Everybody in the restaurant was pointing and laughing at me. Even Dr. Stevenson was laughing.
“You’re supposed to blow it out,” the waitress said.
I tried, but the more I blew, the higher the flames went, and the more they jumped around. I felt like I was at some weird birthday party where everything had gone horribly wrong. “I can’t,” I said finally. Dr. Stevenson stood up, his expression changing to concern. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see waitresses and kitchen staff converging upon our table. I could feel the heat on my face. I blew and blew, but the Baked Alaska would not go out.
Lady Lessons
WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, my mother drove me all the way across the entire state of Virginia to visit my Grandmother Marshall and my Aunt Millie and Millie’s best friend, Bobbie, in Baltimore. This annual trip was part of my mother’s grand plan; she was raising me to be a lady. The drive took two days with my mother at the wheel. We broke our trip by staying with Mama’s friend Frances at Port Republic in the Valley of Virginia. My mother always said “the Valley of Virginia” in a certain way, with a certain tilt of the head. Frances’s family lived in a huge house, a plantation really, with a white-columned portico and a long view out over the golden, rolling land.
These summer journeys symbolized the difference between my parents. Mama was a real lady from the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where her father had been in the oyster business. He was a high roller and harness racer. A picture of him hung in our sitting room: a handsome man with a big mustache, dressed to the nines, standing tall and straddle-legged atop what appears to be a small mountain of oyster shells. He carries a silver-headed cane; he wears a dark broad-brimmed hat; the drooping gold chain of his watch hangs down from his pocket. A man of consequence, of style. The family lived in a substantial square white house with sidewalk and street in front, green lawn sloping down to the Chesapeake Bay behind. In the backyard stood the summer kitchen, the smokehouse, the icehouse, the cistern for catching rainwater, the little train my grandfather had constructed mostly for his children and his own amusement, which carried loads of mainland goods and groceries from dock to house. (In those days before the Bay Bridge was built, the only way to the mainland was by boat. In winter, Mama said, she had to “walk the ice” to get back to Madison Teachers College after her Christmas vacation.)
My mother was named Virginia Elizabeth Marshall, called “Gig,” and she was, I have to say, an abso
lutely adorable young woman. Early photographs show a mop of unruly dark curls, huge blue eyes, a carefree smile, and deep, mischievous dimples. Her flapper-style looks exactly fit the prevailing beauty ideal of the day. No wonder my father fell madly in love with her at first sight and brought her home to Grundy, to those peaks and hollers where she would feel a little bit out of place forever, even though she adored him. And he adored her. In fact, as a child I was horribly embarrassed by the Technicolor-movie-style quality of my parents’ passionate marriage.
I remember one bright summer Sunday when my cousins gave me a ride back from Sunday school—for some reason, my parents had stayed at home. I ran down our flagstone walk, burst into the house, and yelled, “Hello! I’m back!” but the sunlit living room seemed strangely empty. I went into the kitchen, following my nose. I smelled bacon and coffee. Sure enough, their breakfast plates were still on the table. This was not at all like Mama, the best housekeeper in the world. Maybe they had been kidnapped by aliens, I thought, which happened frequently in the pages of the National Enquirer, which Mama and I loved.
“Mama?” I called. “Daddy?”
Nothing.
Yet a thin blue haze of their cigarette smoke still hung in the air. “Mama?” I looked out on the back porch and into the backyard where her beloved roses bloomed. Nobody. “Daddy!” I yelled.
“Why, honey, what’s the matter?” Suddenly they were there. Mama bent down to kiss me, with Daddy right behind her. Yet something was wrong with them, I could tell. Mama’s pansy-sprigged blouse was buttoned up wrong, her red lipstick slapped on a little askew, while Daddy just stood there in the doorway as if in a trance, smiling at Mama, not at me—not at me, who had been so worried, so scared! The next day, at school, I told everybody I was an orphan. (“No you’re not,” my patient teacher said.)
A YEAR OR SO LATER, when I was sick, I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night with my throat on fire. I headed for their bedroom, knowing that Mama would get up and give me an aspirin and put Mentholatum on my chest and a cold washcloth on my forehead, and maybe even dose me up with some of her surefire cough medicine—a spoonful of honey and bourbon. But their bedroom door stood ajar, the lamp burning on the bedside table. The chenille bedspread lay undisturbed on their carefully made bed—clearly, it had not been slept in. I checked the clock: 1:15. I padded down the hall and paused at the narrow back staircase where suddenly I heard music. I crept downstairs, with Nancy Drew–like stealth, until I could see them—dancing barefoot in the kitchen! How gross, I thought; they were old. I plopped down on the step in disgust.
My parents were jitterbugging wildly to the Louisiana rhythm of Hank Williams singing, “Jambalaya and a crawfish pie and filé gumbo . . . Son of a gun, we’ll have big fun on the bayou!” Daddy would pull her to him, then swing her around. Her red skirt flew out on the turns. They were wonderful dancers. Then the record changed to that sad whippoorwill song and Daddy pulled her close and they were dancing cheek to cheek, dipping and gliding around the kitchen floor. Now he held her in a tight embrace. “The moon just went behind the clouds . . . I’m so lonesome I could cry,” Hank Williams’s mournful voice floated up the stairs. I started crying myself. I snuck back to bed where I lay in quivering pain and silence for a long time. Maybe I’m having a nervous breakdown, I thought, like Jane Eyre when they put her in the Red Room.
Mama was a very popular teacher at the high school; even boys signed up for her home economics classes. Years later, at her funeral, one man stood up and said that he had “gone to school to Miss Gig,” and announced that she was “real nice, for a foreigner”—this despite the fact that she had been married to my father and had lived in Grundy for over fifty years.
I WAS NOT A FOREIGNER. I was my daddy’s girl through and through, a mountain girl, a born tomboy who loved Grundy and everything about it, especially in the summertime when I was part of a wild gang of neighborhood children who roamed from house to house, ran the mountains as we pleased, and generally enjoyed a degree of freedom that it is almost impossible now to imagine. Summer spread out all around us like another country, ours to plunder and explore. Aside from chores and one week of compulsory Bible School (red Kool-Aid, Lorna Doone cookies, lanyards) we were on our own. We had no day camps, no lessons, no car pools. We played roll-to-bat, kickball, Red Rover, dodge ball, Pretty Girl Station, tag, statues, hidey-go-seek. I was utterly fearless in those days; I could run like the wind, and hit like a boy.
Sometimes I wrote plays, which we’d all put on in the breezeway at Martha’s house, using a quilt on a clothesline as the curtain. Some of the more fundamentalist parents got very upset, I remember, at one particular production named The Drunken Saloon that ended with all of us, cowboys and cowgirls alike, pretending to be passed out cold on the concrete floor.
Inspired by Nancy Drew, my cousins and I concocted an elaborate ongoing plot concerning a mystery train that ran around the tops of the mountains and an evil group of invisible beings who were inhabiting the bodies of townspeople we didn’t like. We spied on these people and kept official notebooks filled with our clues and “findings,” written in code.
One time my cousin Randy and I pushed an old oil drum off its rusty perch at an abandoned tipple and watched with great satisfaction as it crashed down the mountainside, gathering speed, then crossed the road and slammed into a filling station, where luckily nobody was hurt.
Sometimes my daddy took me up on Compton Mountain to ride the mine ponies, blind from their years underground. Often I’d go to town with him and work in the dimestore. But mostly summer consisted of roaming the mountains with the other kids—“like little wild animals,” Mama said in disgust—building forts, waging wars, and playing make-believe games of every description. Sometimes we’d flatten out cardboard boxes and take them up to the tree line where we’d sit on them, holding the front up to form a kind of sled, and slide down the long sage-grass hillside to the road, then trudge back up again. After a few rides, the flattened grass would be really slick. We would do this all afternoon.
Despite my inclinations, my mother kept at it, trying her best to raise me to be a lady. She sent me to visit my lovely Aunt Gay-Gay in Birmingham, Alabama, every summer for two weeks of honest-to-God Lady Lessons. Here I’d learn how to wear white gloves, sit up straight, and walk in little Cuban heels. I’d learn proper table manners, which would then be tested by fancy lunches at “The Club” on top of Shades Mountain. I’d learn the rules: “A lady does not point. A lady eats before the party. A lady never lets a silence fall. A lady always wears clean underwear in case she is in a wreck. A lady does not sit like that!”
I didn’t want to be a lady, of course; I wanted to be a boy.
EVEN THOUGH OUR VISITS TO Baltimore were a part of Mama’s grand design, I enjoyed them. I loved Baltimore itself, with its clanging streetcars, funny-looking people, lamplights, pigeons, and ice cream cones. I loved to sit out on the marble stoop after dinner and watch the teeming parade of street life; I always had a nickel in my pocket just in case the organ-grinder came by with his monkey. This monkey wore a little green coat with brass buttons. I loved my sweet, refined grandmother in her dim, high-ceilinged row house with lace at the windows and doilies on the tables. She always referred to my late grandfather with great respect, often making such statements as “Mr. Marshall raised trotters, you know” or “Mr. Marshall loved oysters in any form.” This deference enchanted me.
Much, much later, I was astonished to learn that Mr. Marshall had, in fact, hanged himself when my mother was five years old and Millie was only three, leaving my grandmother alone with a half a dozen young children to raise. She’d turned their house into a boardinghouse; later, she’d sold it and followed Millie to Baltimore, where everybody’s favorite cousin, Nellie, had made a brilliant marriage and lived in style, with—of all things—a butler! Family legend tells that I’d been instructed again and again how to behave in the presence of this butler before I was first presented to him; then I’d d
isgraced everyone by rolling on the floor.
In my own memory, my elegant Aunt Millie was always referred to as an “executive secretary,” a phrase that fascinated me, as there was no such thing in Grundy. I loved my Aunt Mille, but I absolutely worshipped her friend Bobbie, the most glamorous woman I’d ever seen.
In hushed tones, my mother informed me that Bobbie was a divorcee; back home, there was no such thing as that, either. Bobbie was said to be a crackerjack stenographer. She was a tall woman with stylishly cut suits featuring big shoulders and tiny waists. She wore stiletto heels, stockings with black seams up the back, and red lipstick. She had the long, lovely legs of a fashion model, and—best of all—lacquered hair, which she wore up, in a jaunty French twist. It looked like patent leather.
Despite these attributes, Bobbie was reputed to be “unlucky in love,” an expression that never failed to send a great dark thrill shooting through me. During our visits, Mama and Millie and Bobbie always sat up late and giggled and blew smoke rings and drank Black Russians, and talked about men. I’d fall asleep to the muffled sound of their squeals and laughter.
My grandmother died when I was about ten. This time, our long trip was a sad one. My father drove, my mother cried. They both smoked cigarettes all the way, filling our fishtailed car with a blue haze indistinguishable from the constant rain outside. I was asleep when we got there, waking at noon to hear myself deemed “too young to go to the funeral.” Bobbie would stay with me.
I will never forget that long afternoon, which I spent sitting on the horsehair sofa looking out at the rain and the row houses opposite us while Bobbie drank red wine and railed against the latest “jerk” who had betrayed her. She wore black silk pants and a lime green sleeveless angora sweater.