“She needs to settle down,” my grandmother would say. “She’s such a scatterbrain.”
“You never did like her,” my mother would put in. “You only like the boys.”
“Sister’ll be all right,” Daddy decreed. “She’ll marry a nice boy someday and have some babies. She’s still wet behind the ears.”
“She won some race,” Momma put in. “People talk all the time about the columns she used to write.”
“Well, don’t encourage that. Look what happened to Sissy Arnold. They let her work for that Hodding Carter down in Greenville and now she’s in New York married to that drunken man who wrote all that bad stuff about Clarkesville and all that nasty stuff about Aunt Frances’s house. After he was her guest. He said she had the family portraits held together with masking tape. He said her silver was black as coal.”
“She’s eighty-three years old,” Momma agreed. “Imagine having all that nasty stuff written about you in Newsweek magazine. When he was her guest.”
“He and Sissy were down there last summer handing out birth control things to the Negroes. She let them stay. Frances let them stay after he wrote all that nasty stuff about her.”
“She must be senile,” Mother said. “I don’t think she can think very well.”
“She is not senile. She has some trouble hearing. I don’t know where you got your information, Ariane, but my sister Frances is not senile. People in our family do not lose their minds. There has not been a single case.”
“Where are the little boys, do you think?” Momma would quickly ask. “I believe we should go on to Dunleith, Dudley. I think the movers will need us to be there when they arrive.”
Chapter
2
I swam a 6:45 in the Southeastern Conference Championships in Knoxville and a 1:09 in the 100-yard breaststroke and took home two blue ribbons. My butterfly had been off all spring and I placed third in that. Also, I completely quit going to Chi Omega meetings. I had only joined to save face anyway and I was reading Shakespeare in the Joint University Library at night hoping my English teacher would notice me on his way in or out of the stacks where he was locked up every night working on his Ph.D. He was a lanky Jewish intellectual who reminded me of Bob Rosen, my long-lost love in Harrisburg, Illinois. I had noticed him staring at my Chi O pin one day in class so I took it off and never wore it again. I think now he was looking at my breasts but who was I to know that back then? I didn’t even know it was against the rules for teachers to have love affairs with students. Not that I knew what a love affair was either. Once a boy had put his hand inside my underpants every night for twelve nights, but aside from that it was lost love in Illinois and things I wrote and stuff I read. I wish I had the notebooks I used to keep in those years. I wish I could read the lies I used to tell the pages in my careful legible teenage script.
My father showed up one day in early May and left a Cadillac at a friend’s house for me to drive to my new home when school was over.
“Your momma’s got the house in good shape,” he said. “You’ve got a big new room with a ceiling fan and all your things are right there where you had them. I’ve lined up all your cousins. They’re waiting for you. And there’s a dandy girl right across the street. Little Irise Lane. Her father’s the assistant editor of the paper so you can go right back to being a newspaper writer if your heart’s so set on that. I told him you were coming and he and little Irise are waiting for you. She’s a KD at the University of Alabama. I wish to hell you were down there at Auburn or Tuscaloosa instead of this goddamn liberal place. I tried to talk to those people at the administration building but they’re a bunch of nuts. I swear, Sister, a college education is the worst thing a man can have. I’m about to live mine down at last.” He paused, pulled out his billfold, and laid it on the table. We were eating dinner at a campus restaurant that specialized in beef fillets on biscuits. I was proud to be there with a man as handsome as my father, in his gorgeous handmade clothes from Harold’s in Lexington. This town had belonged to him once. He had played left field for the Nashville Volunteers in the old Southern League and the sportswriters in town knew and remembered him. He had been famous and I was only a slightly overweight, wet-behind-the-ears little girl who had not been invited to join Kappa Alpha Theta. “You shouldn’t have sent me here,” I said. “You talked me into this. You should have sent me somewhere where Chi O was the best. I didn’t even have any Kappa recs. If it hadn’t been for that girl who knew Uncle Jimmy in Mobile, I wouldn’t have even been invited to the second party. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life, Daddy, and it was your fault. You got me to come here and then Dudley got in all that trouble last year and was disgraced and you didn’t even tell me that. You should have told me that. I was here for three months before the Kappa Sigs told me why he left. It’s too embarrassing. I hate it here. You can’t be at Vanderbilt if you aren’t a Kappa. I hate it all and now you’re going to make me move down there.” I pushed my plate away from me. I began to eat my chocolate ice-cream pie. I ate it as fast as I could. He sighed. He pushed his chair back from the table. He laid his fork and knife down on his plate and began to fold his napkin across his knee.
“Now you’re going to start hating your brother, Sister? That’s the ticket now? You’re going to believe what these sapsuckers tell you about your brother? I’ll tell you one goddamn thing. He’s got more spunk and guts than this whole goddamn place and all its teachers put together. He’s down there in Knoxville playing with the varsity team at night and taking care of his family and running one of the mines for me on the weekends.”
“He lost his scholarship.”
“We don’t need any goddamn scholarships, Sister. He wouldn’t tell on his fraternity brothers. Just like I’ve tried to teach you all your life. You don’t tell on your friends, Sister. But you’re a tattletale anyway. Always have been. I guess you’d have just gone on and told their names.”
“He let people copy off of him in tests. He cheated, Daddy.”
“Sister, finish up that cake and let’s get out of here. I’ve got to drive three hundred miles tonight and I’m tired. You make a fellow very tired, Sweet Sister.” He stood up and put a tip on the table and picked up the check. He took three one-hundred-dollar bills out of his billfold and laid them on the table and said, “That’s for clearing up everything down here before you leave. You’ve got the map I gave you, haven’t you? Your mother will be waiting for you. Dudley and Annie will be in their new house by the time you get there. It’s right around the corner. Little Ariane’s the cutest little girl you ever saw in your life. Well, come on, let’s get out of here.”
I stood up beside him. He was so beautiful, so perfect, so powerful and impossible and brave. Nothing I would ever do would make him love me.
“I won the five-hundred-yard freestyle and the hundred-yard breaststroke. Did Momma tell you?”
“Good for you, Sister. What happened in the butterfly? You let them take you to the cleaners there, didn’t you?”
“I swam the five hundred in six forty-two point three in practice. I couldn’t believe I did it.”
“Did you read about that new Channel swimmer in England? She broke the men’s record last week. Well, hurry up, Sweetie, I’ve got to get on the road.”
* * *
The semester dragged on to its end. I got permission to bring the car Daddy had left for me onto the campus during exam week and park it in front of the residence house. It was a dark red Cadillac, embarrassingly long and heavy and funereal. I packed all my belongings in the trunk with my typewriter stowed beneath piles of sweaters and cutoff blue jeans. I stacked my books on the backseat and threw all my 45 rpm records on the shelf beneath the rear window. On the morning of my last exam I drove the car over to Ransom Hall, the domain of the history and English departments, and parked it in the back and went inside to take the exam. The exam was in World Lit, “The Ancient World Through the Renaissance.” All my life I had loved to take exam
s and write essays. I grabbed a stack of blue books at the door and began to fill them with opinions. I discussed Job in the Old Testament, then moved on to Homer, then to Plato’s Symposium, then to Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Shakespeare. “Then you will do your duty,” said Don Quixote, “for it is not necessary to be dubbed a knight to engage in battles such as these.” That was the text I chose to open my essay on simile and metaphor, an extra-credit question. I wrote happily away. When I looked up two and a half hours had gone by. There were only three other people left in the room. “Anything can stand for something else,” I wrote in conclusion. “Any key will turn the lock into the secrets of our brains. Everything is like everything else and everything is hooked up to everything else and everyone is included. ‘Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!’”
I closed the blue book, picked up the stack of them I had filled, there must have been nine or ten, and began to gather up my things. My English teacher, whom I had worshipped so desperately from afar, came over to me. “You wrote all of these?” he asked.
“I had a lot to say.”
He grinned at that and carried them before him up to his desk and put a rubber band around them and then walked with me outside. “I have a surprise for you,” he said. “I didn’t want to tell you until you’d finished writing. I was afraid it might distract you.”
“I got an A?”
“Oh, I’m sure you got an A, Rhoda. No, it’s something else. You won the freshman writing contest. I entered that essay you wrote on The Fugitives and you won first place. Not even edited. I’m proud of you.”
“What did I win?”
“A set of books. They’ll send them to you this summer.” He stood with his hands folded in front of him. We were outside on the steps now. Wide marble steps that led down onto the beautiful lawns of a quadrangle with huge old oak trees.
“I don’t know what to say. That’s wonderful. That’s so good. I mean, thanks for entering it. It’s really wonderful. I won first place?”
“You did indeed. I thought it was a fine piece of writing. When are you leaving for home?”
“Right now. I have a car to drive. They left me a car because my family moved somewhere this spring. I won first place?”
“You did. When you get back next fall, come and see me. I want to set you up with some extra studies. I’m going to be in charge of the honors program for English students. Hopefully, I’ll have finished my dissertation by then.” He smiled and laughed to himself. “God knows I’m sick of working on it.”
“I will. Well, thanks again. I mean, thanks so much.”
“You did it. Well, goodbye then. I’ll look forward to reading your exam.” He laughed again and shook his head.
“I’ll see you in the fall.”
“I’ll see you too.” I walked on down the steps, putting each foot down into a pool of sunlight, so exhilarated and pleased, so thrilled and excited it seemed that my whole life had been lived to arrive at this one conversation on this one day. I walked down the steps and around the building and got into the car and started driving. I glanced in the rearview mirror once and noticed that my entire collection of 45 rpm recordings had melted in the sun into crazy little warped black sun hats but it didn’t mean a thing to me. I had won the freshman writing contest. I was a writer. I could write things and win. Nothing mattered in the world but that. I left the campus and turned onto the highway leading out of town and began to drive to my new home.
Chapter
3
North Alabama, in the middle years of the twentieth century. Towns with names like Sheffield and Florence and Tuscumbia. Muscle Shoals and Elkmont and Tanner, Aberdeen and Dunleith and Wheeler. The Tennessee River flows through this country, flowing southward to meet its eastern half at Guntersville Lake. This is the Appalachian Valley, the Appalachian Highlands, and the Piedmont Plateau. This is where my father’s people came when they left Scotland. They are cold laughing people, with beautiful faces and unshakable wills. They are powerful and hot-tempered. They never forget a slight, never forgive a wrongdoing. They seldom get sick. They get what they want because they believe they are supposed to have it. They believe in God as long as he is on their side. If he wavers, they fire the preacher. I had never been comfortable with them. Never liked to visit long in Aberdeen, their stronghold in the middle of their cotton fields. They had settled the land on Spanish land grants and cleared it with slave labor. They loved to read the old wills in which their ancestors left slaves to each other. It made them sad to think they couldn’t keep slaves anymore but had to let the black people do anything they liked, might soon even have to let them vote.
I came due south from Nashville and drove into the sleepy little town of Dunleith in the afternoon of the last day in May. I found the main street, using a map my father had drawn for me, and followed it to Wheeler. I turned onto Wheeler and immediately began to be seduced. Huge elm trees lined the street on either side. Behind the elms were magnificent houses, each one bigger and more elaborately Victorian than the last. I began to want to live in one of these huge painted houses. I do not know what I thought such a house might do for me, but I wanted the biggest one of all. Three blocks from the corner there it was. A huge chocolate-colored palace with turrets and balconies and porches. I parked the car and got out and looked up at the door. My mother came running down from a screened-in porch. She was wearing the black Mexican wedding skirt she had bought the year before when my father was having his love affair and she had run away to New Orleans for her nervous breakdown. She came flying down the steps with her hair all in ringlets and began to hug me. “My goodness, honey,” she said. “You’ve gained so much weight. I thought you were on the swimming team.”
“I won the freshman writing contest, Momma. I didn’t even enter it. I won first place.”
“We’ll take you to a doctor tomorrow and get you some of the new pills. We’ll go in the morning. Well, come on in and see the house. Isn’t it beautiful? Don’t you like it?”
“Are Dudley and Annie here? Have they moved in yet?” I spotted my little brother Alford lurking on the porch with his B-B gun. The summer before he had shot a B-B in my hand when I tried to take the magazine out of his gun at an ice-cream party we were having. “I can’t believe you still let him have that gun. I can’t believe you do it.”
“Don’t start a fight with Alford. Come on in, Rhoda. Everyone’s on the porch waiting to meet you. Some of your cousins. They’ve been here all afternoon waiting for you to come.” I walked up on the porch and was introduced to my cousin Martha Ann, who lived across the street, and her husband, Frank, and Mrs. Hunter Waits, Senior, from Aberdeen, and Daddy’s cousin James’s wife, Lelia. I shook hands with everyone and answered their questions, then Momma and Lelia took me to see my room and tour the house. It had fifteen rooms and an attic and a basement. It had three screened-in porches and three parlors and a den. It had six or seven bedrooms depending on if you counted the maid’s room. My bedroom was on the second floor. It was three times as large as any room I had ever had. Its windows looked out upon the high branches of a majestic elm. My cherry furniture was all arranged and a new bedspread was on the bed. A quilted spread in subtle shades of yellow. There was a ceiling fan above the bed and a braided yellow rug was on the floor. Mother stood beside the bed waiting for me to tell her how wonderful it was.
“Where’s my eiderdown comforter, Momma?” I asked. “Please tell me where you put it. It better be here.”
“It’s in the chest at the foot of the bed. That’s my old chest that held my trousseau. I’m giving it to you.”
“That’s nice. That’s really nice. Look, are all those people down there going to stay all afternoon? I’d really like to get my stuff out of the car. My typewriter’s in the trunk. I want to see if I can find a copy of that paper I wrote that won in case anyone wants to see it. I’ve forgotten what it says.”
“Of course, darling. I’ll bet you’re tired too. I’ll have the maids
bring your things up and help you put it all away. You go take a bath and change clothes. You look like you’re worn out.” She was opening my dresser drawers. “See, honey, everything’s here. Right where you left it.”
“Well, not quite.” I walked over to the window and looked out through the trees and across the street to where a small brown-haired girl was standing on the porch of a small blue house. “Who’s that, Momma? Who’s that girl?”
Momma came and stood by my side. She put her hand on my shoulder. “That’s Irise Lane, honey. She’s just your age. She’s dying to meet you. Shall I call her over? Shall I invite her over?”
“No, wait until tomorrow. I’m really tired, Momma. I had to drive a long time to get here. Who’s in our old house in Franklin? Did someone buy it?”
“Daddy sold it to Val’s cousin Donald. Val said to tell you goodbye. He said you could keep on writing columns and send them to him in the mail if you wanted to.” I was still watching the girl on the porch of the blue house. A heavy boy in a loose white shirt and a pair of shorts came walking up the sidewalk and took her arm and the pair of them went into the house.
“Who’s that with her?”
“That’s Charles William Waters. He’s very artistic. He’s studying architecture at Georgia Tech. He’s Doctor Freer’s nephew. We really need to go see Doctor Freer tomorrow and do something about this weight. I don’t want you to be fat. You’ve never been fat.”
“You shouldn’t have sent me to that goddamn school without getting me some Kappa recs. It’s been terrible. It’s the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life.” My voice was rising. Daddy’s cousin James’s wife, Lelia, backed out into the hall. “I had to join that goddamn new Chi O chapter you and Aunt Lucille cooked up for me. It’s the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life. You didn’t even tell me about Dudley being kicked out of school for cheating. You let me go up there with that hanging over my head and you didn’t even tell me.” I turned on her then, so full of rage and incomprehension and despair, so glad to find a target for my wrath.
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