by Lee Smith
“Why, Mrs. Newhouse,” he said. “What an unexpected pleasure!” His voice echoed out in the empty fellowship hall. He had the most beautiful voice too — strong and deep, like it had bells in it. Everything he said had a ring to it.
He stood up and came around the table to where I was. I put the brownies down on the table and stood there. We both just stood there, real close without touching each other, for the longest time, looking into each other’s eyes. The he took my hands and brought them up to his mouth and kissed them, which nobody ever did to me before or since, and then he kissed me on the mouth. I thought I would die. After some time of that, we went together out into the hot June day where the bees were all buzzing around the flowers there by the back gate and I couldn’t think straight. “Come,” said John Marcel Wilkes. We went out in the woods behind the church to the prettiest place, and when it was all over I could look up across his curly yellow head and over the trees and see the white church steeple stuck up against that blue, blue sky like it was pasted there. This was not all. Two more times we went out there during that revival. John Marcel Wilkes left after that and I have never heard a word of him since. I do not know where he is, or what has become of him in all these years. I do know that I never bake a pan of brownies, or hear the church bells ring, but what I think of him. So I have to pity Lavonne and her cup of coffee if you see what I mean, just like I have to spend the rest of my life to live my sinning down. But I’ll tell you this: if I had it all to do over, I would do it all over again, and I would not trade it in for anything.
Lavonne drove off to look at fabric and get Sherry Lynn an Icee, and I went to the hospital. I hate the way they smell. As soon as I entered Mr. Biggers’s room, I could see he was breathing his last. He was so tiny in the bed you almost missed him, a poor little shriveled-up thing. His family sat all around.
“Aren’t you sweet to come?” they said. “Looky here, honey, it’s Mrs. Newhouse.”
He didn’t move a muscle, all hooked up to tubes. You could hear him breathing all over that room.
“It’s Mrs. Newhouse,” they said, louder. “Mrs. Newhouse is here. Last night he was asking for everybody,” they said to me. “Now he won’t open his eyes. You are real sweet to come,” they said. “You certainly did brighten his days.” Now I knew this was true because the family had remarked on it before.
“I’m so glad,” I said. Then some more people came in the door and everybody was talking at once, and while they were doing that, I went over to the bed and got right up by his ear.
“Mr. Biggers!” I said. “Mr. Biggers, it’s Joline Newhouse here.”
He opened one little old bleary eye.
“Mr. Biggers!” I said right into his ear. “Mr. Biggers, you know those cardinals in my column? Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal? Well, I made them up, Mr. Biggers. They never were real at all.” Mr. Biggers closed his eye and a nurse came in and I stood up.
“Thank you so much for coming, Mrs. Newhouse,” his daughter said.
“He is one fine old gentleman,” I told them all, and then I left.
Outside the hall, I had to lean against the tile wall for support while I waited for the elevator to come. Imagine, me saying such a thing to a dying man! I was not myself that day.
Lavonne took me to the big Kroger’s in north Greenville and we did our shopping, and on the way back in the car she told me she had been giving everything a lot of thought and she guessed I was right after all.
“You’re not going to tell anybody, are you?” she asked me anxiously, popping her eyes. “You’re not going to tell Daddy, are you?” she said.
“Why, Lord no, honey!” I told her. “It is the farthest thing from my mind.”
Sitting in the backseat among all the grocery bags, Sherry Lynn sang a little song she had learned at school. “Make new friends but keep the old, some are silver but the other gold,” she sang.
“I don’t know what I was thinking of,” Lavonne said.
Glenn was not home yet when I got there — making his arrangements, I suppose. I took off my hat, made myself a cup of Sanka, and sat down and finished off my column on a high inspirational note, saving Margie and Mr. Biggers for the next week. I cooked up some ham and red-eye gravy, which Glenn just loves, and then I made some biscuits. The time seemed to pass so slow. The phone rang two times while I was fixing supper, but I just let it go. I thought I had received enough news for that day. I still couldn’t get over Margie putting her head in the oven, or what I had said to poor Mr. Biggers, which was not at all like me you can be sure. I buzzed around that kitchen doing first one thing, then another. I couldn’t keep my mind on anything I did.
After a while Marshall came home, and ate, and went in the front room to watch TV. He cannot keep it in his head that watching TV in the dark will ruin your eyes, so I always have to go in there and turn on a light for him. This night, though, I didn’t. I just let him sit there in the recliner in the dark, watching his show, and in the pale blue light from that TV set he just looked like anybody else.
I put on a sweater and went out on the front porch and sat in the swing to watch for Glenn. It was nice weather for that time of year, still a little cold but you could smell spring in the air already and I knew it wouldn’t be long before the redbud would come out again on the hills. Out in the dark where I couldn’t see them, around the front steps, my crocuses were already up. After a while of sitting out there I began to take on a chill, due more to my age no doubt than the weather, but just then some lights came around the bend, two headlights, and I knew it was Glenn coming home.
Glenn parked the truck and came up the steps. He was dog tired, I could see that. He came over to the swing and put his hand on my shoulder. A little wind came up, and by then it was so dark you could see lights on all the ridges where the people live. “Well, Joline,” he said.
“Dinner is waiting on you,” I said. “You go on in and wash up and I’ll be there directly. I was getting worried about you,” I said.
Glenn went on and I sat there swaying on the breeze for a minute before I went after him. Now where will it all end? I ask you. All this pain and loving, mystery and loss. And it just goes on and on, from Glenn’s mother taking up with dark-skinned gypsies to my own daddy and his postcard to that silly Lavonne and her cup of coffee to Margie with her head in the oven, to John Marcel Wilkes and myself, God help me, and all of it so long ago out in those holy woods.
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.
“Sshhh,” 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 that 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 we got there I went up in my tree-house 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 blonde 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 movies such 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 tree-house 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 the 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 that 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 eleganc
e, 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 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.