Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937)

by Mayes, Frances

  Also by Frances Mayes

  UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN

  BELLA TUSCANY

  EVERY DAY IN TUSCANY

  SWAN

  IN TUSCANY (with Edward Mayes)

  A YEAR IN THE WORLD

  BRINGING TUSCANY HOME (with Edward Mayes)

  THE TUSCAN SUN COOKBOOK (with Edward Mayes)

  THE DISCOVERY OF POETRY

  SUNDAY IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

  AFTER SUCH PLEASURES

  HOURS

  THE ARTS OF FIRE

  EX VOTO

  Copyright © 2014 by Frances Mayes

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mayes, Frances.

  Under magnolia: a southern memoir/Frances Mayes.

  pages cm

  1. Mayes, Frances. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Authors,

  American—21st century—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3563.A956Z46 2014

  811′.54—dc23

  [B] 2013042448

  ISBN 978-0-307-88591-3

  eISBN 978-0-307-88593-7

  Photographs courtesy of the author

  Illustrations by Ippy Patterson

  Jacket design by Elena Giavaldi

  Jacket photographs: (magnolia) Georg Dionysius Ehret/Getty; (tree) The Granger Collection, NYC. All rights reserved; (plant) ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, NYC. All rights reserved; (map) Historic Map Works LLC/Getty Images; (stamp) Georgia Brown Thrasher and Charokee Rose © 1982 United States Postal Service. All rights reserved. Used with permission; (young Frances, Frances’s mother, Frances’s father, house) courtesy of the author

  v3.1_r1

  for my daughter, Ashley

  Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

  WILLIAM FAULKNER, LIGHT IN AUGUST

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface: A Grape Leaf from Faulkner’s Arbor

  Looking Toward Home

  By My Lights

  Under Magnolia

  A Silver Globe in the Garden

  Talking Back

  Coloring

  Islands in Summer

  Watering

  Namesake

  Riddles and Tricks

  Whatever Was Hidden

  Frankye: A White Tucked-Chiffon Crystal-Beaded Dress

  Ten Thousand Rules to Live By

  The Walking Rain

  To Florida

  The Last Wedding

  Coda: Life Along the Eno

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  At a few times in my life, I’ve not been aware that I’ve just stepped onto a large X.

  Change might not be on my mind. Why change? I’ve always admired lives that flourish in place. The taproot reaches all the way to the aquifer, the leaves bud, flourish, fall, and grow again. I like generations following one another in the same house, where lamplight falls through the windows in squares of light on the snow, and somebody’s height chart still marks the kitchen doorway. But there I stand on the X, not knowing it’s time to leap, when, really, I’d only meant to pause. In Oxford, Mississippi, one chance weekend, the last thing I expected was a life-changing epiphany.

  Looking up at a white southern manse with the requisite rocking chairs and hanging ferns on the porch, I ratcheted my carry-on bag up the steps and rang the bell.

  “Is this all right? Everything decent is full because of the football game,” the woman who gave me a lift had explained.

  Decent, she said. You hear that word all the time in the South: a decent person, a decent meal, a decent amount of time, that’s decent of you. I don’t recall hearing the word often at home in California. As she drove away, I waved and her car picked up speed.

  A shutter hangs slightly askew, and from paint-encrusted windows white flakes scatter on the porch floor. Lead-based. If I pressed a screwdriver into the sill, I’d find rot. Now, standing on the other side of a screen door, I’m biting the side of my forefinger, as I do when I’m nervous. But why should I be nervous? A memory flashes of my mother dropping me off at camp, gunning the Oldsmobile out of there as soon as my trunk of summer clothes was unloaded.

  No one is on the other side of the door, but on a table I find a note: “WELCOME! You’ll find number three at the top of the stairs on the left.” The hallway smells familiar. Pound cake? A toasted slice smeared with butter, my preferred snack when I was a southern child.

  A four-poster bed with a nubby white bedspread almost entirely fills the square room. Crocheted doilies adorn scuffed bedside tables; a fake bouquet fails to brighten the chest of drawers. There’s a smell, not bad but not good, no, not good. Pine-scented disinfectant, worn-out shoes, and certainly a mattress someone has sweat-soaked during August naps. Speckles of blue mildew border the shower curtain. Dust motes. A thousand memories suddenly free-fall through me.

  I’ve long since cut the tie that binds. I left the South a million years ago. And I’m midway into a book tour, a celebratory trip; this will be only a short hiatus before my reading at Oxford’s famous Square Books. For two weeks, I’ve been traveling—the exhilaration of events in bookstores, jaunts on everything from supersized flying mastodons to kite-sized flap-a-doodles, sumptuous feasts, even the late-night minibar dinners, have been fun, plus the constant joy of new places. My energy even overpowers the chronic sleeplessness that keeps me rotating on the sheets until my skin feels rope-burned.

  Ah, it’s the quiet old house that throws me back inside the globe. Shake it and golden dust falls down over the fairies. The high ceilings, the graceful proportions of the room, the trapped time—that’s it, a room where a newborn squalled and a reprobate uncle slept it off and a woman sat monogramming pillowcases in the rocker. When I was eleven and stayed overnight at my grandfather’s house, I’d sleep in the square pale green bedroom where my grandmother spent her illness before she died. Mother Mayes rested in a slipper chair by the window. The coils of her shimmering silver hair sprung close to her pink scalp. I caught a faint, rank odor: her flowered, flounced gowns—talcum, yes, Fleur de Rocaille perfume, rice pudding, starch, rose lotion, a back smell of pee-pee. In the glass by her bed, her false teeth seemed to smile.

  My heart booms. It’s damned hot, even though October is half over.

  When I left the South at age twenty-two, the force that pushed me west was as powerful as the magnet that held me. For years when I went back home to visit, I broke out in hives. The insides of my arms erupted in the same place as when I had severe poison ivy at thirteen as a junior bridesmaid at my sister Nancy’s wedding. My mother was annoyed. Keep your disgusting arms close to your sides. The weepy yellow seepage stained the pink tulle dress.

  Powerful juju, I say aloud.

  My cell phone has no signal. In the hall I find a house phone and call a taxi. After a hundred rings, a woman answers. She covers the phone with her hand and I hear her yell, “Can you go get this lady?” I wait on the porch with my bag. The ancient man who pulls up in a dilapidated car takes me to a motel near downtown. I need neutral ground. Not Tara Redux.

  Good luc
k—they do have one last tragic little room. At least I can walk out to a restaurant, instead of eating a package of cheese crackers for dinner. At least I see no giant oaks spreading their bony fingers outside the window, no hedges of arching bridal wreath, no rectangular panes of gossamer light on polished heart-pine floors. Just a shaky wall heater that sounds as if it’s flying to Atlanta, and a maroon bedspread covering thousands of nights of unspeakable acts. The carpet resembles matted hair.

  Late in the afternoon, I walk into town and am stunned by the human scale and harmony of glossy white and redbrick nineteenth-century buildings, some with upstairs porches called so charmingly in the South “piazzas.” Shaded streets complete the natural complement of architecture that does not dwarf but, instead, extends the excellent proposition that the body will live well in this space. Under the protection of the sun-spangled leafy canopy, I feel suddenly buoyant. The verdurous air sends me reeling back to my Georgia hometown’s trees: crape myrtle, oak, palm, longleaf pine, magnolia, pecan, sycamore. Roller-skating on bumpy, root-torn sidewalks, in and out of shade, down the street as though down a green chute, I knew the blitheful cool, then—what a shock of difference—the sliding into light. The sun could melt a bar of gold. In Fitzgerald, so much green—that’s how we saved ourselves from the burning eye of God.

  The great white courthouse presides, a promise of justice that so long eluded this handsome square. William Faulkner called the courthouse “musing, brooding, symbolic and ponderable.” Ponderable, yes, much to ponder. How could only twelve thousand people in this small kingdom need so much legal help? The names on small swaying signs—Chaffin, Clisby, Fondren, Percy, Mason, Hatcher—seem like authors’ striving attempts to brand their characters as memorable. One shingle says Landon Tallesin Calder, a name Faulkner easily could have made up. Where’s that drugstore where he checked out mysteries from the lending library? The department store window looks like pre-WWII families still shop there. Overalls, green jumpers, undershirts, kneesocks. Kneesocks. Inside, I buy a pair of black sneakers because my flats feel like tightened vises around my heels. I’ve pricked both blisters with the needle from a hotel sewing kit I found in my luggage. I run my hand over stacks of coarse plaid wool shirts—hunting season is starting, a thought I’ve not had in decades. Not my father, but someone will be bringing home passels of doves for a luckless woman to pluck and stack in mounds of mauve pink flesh. Those downy feathers rising in the air. Many’s the time I’ve bitten buckshot.

  Thinking of dinner, I start to notice how many inviting restaurants enliven the streets. I’ll love the updated hushpuppies with mint and crab and the pork tenderloin with pecan crust. But surely some old place still slings out fried pies heavy enough to sink a rowboat, peppery smothered quail, cheese grits, and smoky barbecue. Ah, that’s what I want. All of that.

  Like Cortona, my best beloved Tuscan hill town, Oxford invites you in, makes you a participant in the repetition and variation of its particular themes. As in Piazza Signorelli, you’re a star in the cast as you step into the daily play. Your breathing slows, your shoulders push back. All the proprioceptors agree: This is how a town should be built. But unlike any Italian town, here the green air under massive trees dislodges my senses: world in a jar. You may stroll in this vast terrarium, or so I felt growing up in a one-mile-square town in south Georgia. One reason I felt immediately at home in Tuscany was that certain strong currents of life reminded me of the South. The warmth of people and their astonishing generosity felt so familiar, and I knew well that identical y’all come hospitality. “It’s unhealthy to eat alone,” our neighbor in Italy told us early on. “We’re cooking every night so come on over.” I learned that the attitudes toward food were not an external custom, but, as in the South, a big cultural clue about how people weave together their lives.

  A faint church bell sounds and a bright-eyed terrier joins my walk. Although no bells tolled, in Fitzgerald we had the Tuscan sense of campanilismo, the bonds among those who live within the sound of their parish church bell’s ringing. Those who hear the five dongs and three dings live at the center of the world; those outside of range live in terra incognita. We had no visible gates into Fitzgerald, but still they were there. When Southerners meet, in Mexico, Cleveland, or Sri Lanka, in a way they know each other. “Do I hear a southern accent?” the dental hygienist in San Francisco asks as she gouges. She stops. It is as if we have gone to the same college or survived an earthquake together. “I’m only from Louisville,” she admits, “but my mother is from Chapel Hill.”

  The complex interconnections of family and friends, the real caring for one another, the incessant talk, emphasis on ancestors, the raucous humor, the appreciation of the bizarre, the storytelling, the fatalism, the visiting, the grand occasions—in both Tuscany and the South these traits offer an elaborate continuity for solitary individuals. Deeply fatalistic, Southerners, again like Tuscans, can be the most private people on the globe.

  Tuscans are at home with the past, and when I was a child, we locals also felt that comfort. “Now, your great-grandmother Sarah America Gray,” my aunt began. She had only a small cache of stories about this “Mericky,” as she was called. The half-moons of Mericky’s nails repeat in mine, or so my aunt told me.

  Science may discover the truth of backward time. Southerners and Tuscans already know it in their bone marrow. I can lie awake at three a.m. and imagine that I am lying awake at three a.m. in all the places I’ve had insomnia. I am still in that camp cabin, still on the sailboat Primavera, still in my old house in Somers, still in the upstairs room in Tuscany. I transport myself from bed to bed, year to year, multiply myself simultaneously until I am extant in times and places, wide awake in all of them.

  You may thrive, you may never scale the slippery glass terrarium walls and fly away, and this enclosed and greenest-green world is so beautiful that you may never want to.

  The dog spots a woman pushing a stroller and patters after her without another glance at me. At Square Books, pilgrimage site for readers and writers, I wander the hallowed sections, pull down Absalom, Absalom!, and at random place my finger on a paragraph:

  Do you mark how the wistaria, sun-impacted on this wall here, distills and penetrates this room … That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel—not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for … —Once there was … a summer of wistaria. It was a pervading everywhere of wistaria (I was fourteen then) as though of all springs yet to capitulate condensed into one spring, one summer …

  As children, we opened the Bible and stabbed a finger down onto a verse that we read as a personal message from God. And so I take out my notebook and copy Faulkner’s passage. I’m loving all those colons connecting everything so nicely. Wistaria. Once there was a summer of wistaria.

  Soon Oxford pulls me back outside. I would like to walk for days. I’m pressed to know: why the exuberance and melancholy attacked me, why the abrupt heart flips, why the primal rush of memory, why this physical magnetism that feels dangerous … there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for. He’s nailed that. The intense physicality of being here seems to electrify the synapses in my brain. I’m returned to my hand reaching down into ice water to pull up a Nehi soda, my feet avoiding the cracks that break my mother’s back, my arms feeling the hoist up the knotted rope into the pecan tree, all extensors working, my straight spine a muscle that remembers.

  The fall-touched air tastes like home. Not home as I knew it but home behind home. Does this make sense, Mr. Faulkner? Now why did you spell wistaria like that?

  Morning is iffy. Great stony clumps of cloud seem more likely to pour down an avalanche than the spitting rain starting now to sting my face. Let it rain—my raincoat has a hood and I’m taking this free day for a Faulkner quest. Let the backlit leaves filigree against the sky. Faulkner wasn’t ever a favorite of mine. In hi
gh school, I could fall into his sentences that meandered like old rivers curving back and snaking forward. Most of his characters seemed as familiar as the red clay dirt my bare feet learned to walk on, as the flat-out ornery, peculiar, unto-themselves folks I knew as the only possible world—those who might have a fake eyeball monogrammed “RG” (means real good, he leers), or who could go on and on about somebody swallowing a fly, or wear aqua chiffon with sneakers. My high school boyfriend lived to catch dreary-faced rockfish with poison spikes on their backs. He hardly ever snagged one, but every blue moon he hauled up an old horror with a dozen rusted hooks dangling algae from the lower jaw. These splotched creatures somehow detoured up brackish creeks from the ocean bottom, rootled the blackest pools for two hundred years, and grew two feet long.

  Because when I was young, Faulkner felt so known, I often smacked down Light in August or As I Lay Dying, thinking I don’t want to. What did confound me was the transcendence Faulkner could achieve, like a sudden leap of a circus lion onto the higher perch—ah, there’s the magical lion face, impassive, imperial, looking down on the little ringmaster with the puny whip. The South I knew didn’t transcend. I wanted out of there. No future I imagined took place below the southern fall line. “She took the first thing smoking on the runway out of here,” my family is fond of remembering. But they forget; there was no runway.

  Saint Peter’s Cemetery would not be a bad place to lie, if one must. Among the graves rise obelisks, draped urns, broken columns, and languishing, ministering women, the everlasting symbol. The word “obelisk” originally meant skewer. Sacrificial bits and pieces were strung on poles for veneration. Well, we’re skewered by death, aren’t we? I pass some Falkners, but not the big guy who changed the spelling of the family name. One of them, his stone says, has been “borne on eagle wings” to the great beyond. Ah, the mythic South, the only swath of America not strangled by the deadly literal mind. Wandering about, I see a grave with an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s on it. Here’s where I find William Cuthbert Faulkner.