Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937)

by Mayes, Frances

  The wife Estelle’s stone sinks to the right. The dead here seem really dead, and bone lonely, unlike the graves in Italian cemeteries, bedecked with fresh flowers, red votive lights, and photos of the deceased. I always imagine that they must rise at night and visit among themselves, the way they used to in the piazza.

  I did cry over Absalom, Absalom! Maybe I did like him; maybe I’ve taken a circuitous path to this grave.

  His compatriots in death are people he must have known. Near him lies Maggie Sue Lewis. Was she a music teacher who rapped knuckles of haphazard students? Opal Miller Worthy close beside Haley Dewey Worthy, Malcolm Argyle Franklin—did they read As I Lay Dying? Thomas Somerville Cully—there’s a Faulknerian name—then a child-sized indentation of a long-lost occupant identified as Baby Alabama.

  After lunch, where the waiter tells me “Yes, people often go out to have a drink with their old friend Bill,” I walk out to Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak. On the way, I pass a delectable southern-style home for sale. The sprawling clapboard house and screen porch seem to ride on a raft of azaleas that must be pink in spring. Massive shade of sycamores and oaks casts wavy subaqueous light over white boards and grass blue in shadow. My grandmother’s Rook partner, Mrs. Ricker, might be inside painting camellias on white china. Or, can I see myself cutting out biscuits on the yellow Formica counter? No—writing a novel in the spare room, calmly living out the southern life that would have been mine had I not headed west, yanked by some driving instinct for the tabula rasa. Instead, all these years of my life in California I’ve felt happily balanced on the last crust of the United States, just before the oblivion of the Pacific.

  Mrs. Ricker became a recluse. Through eyelet curtains beginning to shred, my friends and I spied on her. We saw her sitting on her oven door to keep warm. Gaunt in a white nightgown, her white hair spiked out around her face as she swiveled toward the window and her owl eyes found our three grinning faces. Oh, Jesus H. Christ. We scrambled out of the spirea, screaming and laughing.

  The cedar-lined entrance to Rowan Oak looks Italian, though the trees have gone gangly and unkempt. Orange caution tape drapes across the drive. The waiter told me that restoration soon will begin. Since the place looks deserted, I walk in anyway. Add to my résumé: trespasser at the house of Faulkner. A black-tailed deer chewing weeds regards my approach with mild interest. Rowan Oak, a peeling, modest two-story plantation house, looks anthropomorphically alone. Concentric brickwork marks an old garden. Pick a rose for Emily? Nothing but moss grows in the beds. Of what remains of abandoned places, the garden proves to be less ephemeral than you’d think. The broadest gestures, such as the leaning brick wall, retain tenacity. Even a great camellia, or a burst of yellow irises along a drive, can endure longer than the memory of the inhabitants. From a plane, sometimes a garden’s foundation architecture remains visible for centuries. A sign warns politely PLEASE DO NOT CLIMB THIS TREE. But no tree remains.

  Faulkner lived here from 1930 until his death, with a long sojourn in Virginia late in his life. I wonder if he’d had it up to here by then. Behind the veil of rain, I’m more intrepid than usual. I even try the door. He opened this door thousands of times. Locked. I cup my hands around my face to cut the glare. Peering into the windows of William Faulkner’s house! When I see the plain staircase to the second floor, suddenly his presence feels palpable. Here he stepped—barefoot, wearing boots or felt slippers up to bed. Descending in the morning, tying his robe, for a cup of what, Jack Daniel’s? Ovaltine? What sustained him through all those convoluted books? He plotted chapters on one wall, writing in pencil. Did he want to look literally at the handwriting on the wall?

  The house is flanked by a porte cochère and upstairs porches. They probably sweltered here in the days before AC. Any slight mosquito-laden breeze must have been welcome. In our house, the spinning blades of the attic fan drew air out of the wide hall, pulling coolness in through the windows. I could see the lift of curtains in the bedroom where my father napped and my mother rested in a satin cap to protect her hairdo. I lined up my dolls on the sills and fed them raisins to keep them cool and happy.

  I wonder if there was an attic fan at Rowan Oak to bring in the muggy, delicious night scents. Nothing about the South stirs me as much as the narcotizing fragrance of the land, jasmine, ginger lilies, gardenia, and honeysuckle blending, fetid and sweet. The scent entangles with the euphonious chorus of tree frogs, and the mouthy baritone swamp frogs croaking contrappunto. Only here can I step outside and, by merely inhaling the air, say, “Lord God.”

  I was born in late March on Easter Saturday and must have inhaled from the window the particular concoction that still brings me the undeniable sensation of home. Is it the smell of a just-washed newborn child, or a fox among wild dog roses, or the rattler’s skin shed in the woodpile? Maybe it’s pinesap dropping in spring water. Lawd o’ mercy, Uncle Remus, that must be the song of the South.

  How many countries I’ve seen, and nowhere else experienced the soft balm of a southern night. Somewhere, near the heart of India, exotic lotuses, cow dung, green mango, and the silty yellow river must throw out a powerful essence of the land. Or the African veld, mixing a perfume of acacia pollen, sun-toasted grass, ancient mud where animals have wallowed, and bleached bones of jackals. I don’t know. I’ve never been there.

  Faulkner made a deep place. I feel that instantly. Old mother magnolias shine in the rain, their lay-my-burden-down branches touch the ground. Did his wife, as my mother did, strain her hand to clip tough stems so the fireplace in summer was filled with great face-sized flowers? And the daughter, whose name I have forgotten, did she pick out red berries from the cones and fill the doll’s dish? When the Bartrams, early horticulturists and adventurers, roamed the South, they were awed by the magnolias. The bloom spells South, primitive and elegant. What other flower is there to lie on the dark wood coffin of your father?

  Out back on two arbors, grape vines still curl and twist. I pick a small leaf and carefully place it between two credit cards in my wallet. What a primitive impulse, to take something home, a talisman to remind that you once were there. As I turn back for a last look, a wave of gooseflesh runs over my arms. Ah! That’s why I’m entranced. Rowan Oak looks similar to the Mayes house, built on Lee Street by my grandmother’s father in Fitzgerald, Georgia. When I was growing up, the house had a wraparound porch, but after a fire, my aunt added spindly columns, thin as femurs.

  I have a few hours before my talk at the bookstore. Almost no one is in the café as I sit at a table by the window and look at my notes. The waiter brings me a glass of tea so sweet my teeth throb. The old Italian idea of place as locus of memory, I wrote last night in the motel. Back to my notes: Place as storehouse and generator of memory. I knew my hometown’s every twig, culvert, chimney, curb, fireplug, street sign, drain, birdcall, horn, and spigot. I have loved living in San Francisco and in Tuscany. I have been a lucky tourist enchanted for thirty years with the hedonic, aspiring city, with my vita nuova on the far West Coast, my face toward the unknown Pacific. I escaped to the West, as though you can be purified by a lightning strike, drink a horn of honeyed goat’s milk, and walk forth wearing a laurel crown into a new life one step from oblivion.

  San Francisco is the hyper-real, exciting present, constantly in formation, constantly leaving the past behind. It’s the only place to live, I’ve condescended to say many times to my southern relatives, who stared back without saying Have you lost your mind? You have no people there. But I have my work and my lively, ambitious friends; I have my Spanish-style house with lemon trees and a glimpse of the Pacific. I have the white city with water, water everywhere, the iconic bridge crossing north to the green Marin headlands; Berkeley blanketing the east, sparkling at night, and sparkling, too, with intellectual fire; the snarl of freeways south, leading to the promised land of Palo Alto and Silicon Valley, where our futures are flashing across thousands of computer screens, and “multicultural” no longer is a self-conscious word. T
ruly, what’s new today is old by tonight. The Bay Area—the optimistic bellwether for the country. Where what I imagine becomes what I do. Like it or not, what’s happening there now will happen everywhere later.

  And Italy, magic realism for me—to live in such beauty, where art is as natural as breathing, and every turn off the road leads to discovery. I bought an abandoned villa in Tuscany on impulse. Often, seemingly spontaneous acts come from a deep, unacknowledged place, and a sudden decision feels inevitable and right. One summer day, I stepped out of the car, onto a mysterious invisible X. As I looked up at a rose and gold façade and faded shutters, I said, “That’s my house,” as though I had known about it forever. More than two decades later, I’m still enamored with the Tuscan way of life. Although the Tuscans are thoroughly contemporary people, time runs slowly. My friends speak of Hannibal battling the Romans at the bottom of our hill, the Medici art patrons, and their own ancestors who minted money, jousted, and built houses still standing after ten centuries. Time seems alive, like a warm hive buzzing. My neighbors meet in the piazza every day to nip espressos, shop for bread, and catch up on all the momentous events that have happened since this time yesterday.

  The waiter refills my glass. I am going to fly out of here on sugary caffeine. Give me some sugar, my father said, raising his cheek for a kiss. Add a tablespoon of sugar to tomato sauce, my mother said, to cut the acid. Such sweetness, the South. My high school love and I parked on sandy country roads to listen to Cajun music from New Orleans on the radio. We rolled down the windows for the wafts of plums, wild violets, and dusty cotton fields; the night chorus of stridulous crickets and tree frogs accompanied the music. If I mistook the drift of honeysuckle for the scent of his hands, the nectar inside the bloom for the taste of his hard mouth, then the mistake was well made. When we swam in the Oconee, the dank, tannic smell of the river rose from the slicing of our arms through the current. We would kiss behind the gardenias in my backyard, the heady, heavy scent penetrating my skin. He pressed me against the wall of the barn and we kissed and breathed in and out of each other’s mouths until I almost fainted. Lack of oxygen, I see now, but I thought it was the gardenias.

  My last note: I wonder if I have the courage to reimagine the place I fled. A large question starts to form. X marks the spot.

  Where is the red diary I began to keep when I was nine? For each day, five lines. Why was “I’ll Fly Away” my favorite song? In the moments before he left the South, Willie Morris wrote that he always felt some easing of a great burden … as if some old grievance had suddenly fallen away. Yes, I know that lift, which I’ve experienced so strongly that the force itself seemed to raise the plane off the steaming asphalt. Get. Me. Out. Of here.

  And now, this sweet succor of air.

  After the reading and dinner, walking back to the motel, I suddenly think, All my memories of California are portable. This place is not. Previously, I thought that was a good thing, like the writer who said that his subjects were his home. Well, that’s a bleak, disconnected idea. I roamed. I flew away to Italy and made a home. The South always stayed resolutely in place, as resolute as my uncle’s grave, which has carved under his name the letters “MPDSHW.” “What in the name of glory does that stand for?” my mother asked when she saw the stone put in place. Aunt Hazel whimpered, “My precious darling sweet husband Wilfred.”

  And there he remains. Flipping through my notebook, I read something I copied: What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee / What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage. Thanks, Ezra Pound, you could have chiseled that onto the palm of my hand. Reft—I underscore the word.

  My husband, Ed, is thousands of miles away. It’s seven in the morning in Italy, his best writing time. A rational hour, he says. Here, it’s midnight. Now I’ve spilled water on my notebook but still can read a quote from Eudora Welty I copied today: The boat came breasting out of the mist and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that. Ed is probably awake. The phone rings and rings in his study where a hook-nosed portrait of Dante looms over the desk. Before he answers I’m preparing to say, “I want to move back to the South.”

  Bees swarm inside a giant boxwood near the kitchen door. Hundreds of them. The whole bush hums. As I pass, four golden furry ones zoom out and dive around my face. As soon as the weather warmed, a six-foot black snake adopted the front porch for its shady naps. Proprietarily, it coils on a chair, and sometimes slinks behind the cushion, which can be startling if you happen to take a break in late afternoon with a glass of tea and a book. Late one night when guests were leaving, we found it draped around the doorknob, dangling a long tail. I lifted it with a broom handle and flung it onto the grass.

  Owls belong to no peaceable kingdom. In the wee hours, I hear their solemn oboe notes, often followed by terrible shrieks as they pounce on their prey.

  Often we see foxes, delicate does with fawns, rabbits, coyotes, and a charming young skunk, still mostly white, who sashays across the front lawn. And birds. Are we living in a giant aviary? Even I, with a violent phobia, am enchanted by the darts of bluebirds and finches among the hedges, and by the individual songs. One repeats “T-shirt, T-shirt, T-shirt”; another simply chirps “Birds-birds-birds-birds.” Looking into layers of spring green, I recall that the etymology of “paradise” means walled garden. Not walled, this one still feels Edenic. I would not be surprised to see Adam and Eve cavorting naked in the meadow.

  We live in a plain, two-story pale yellow Federal house, a former tavern and inn on the Eno River in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Built on the burned foundations of a 1770 structure, the house dates from 1806. Thomas Jefferson was president; Lewis and Clark prowled the Northwest; the Napoleonic Wars raged, and Beethoven wrote his fourth symphony—none of which was of immediate concern to the farmers who hauled their grain to the gristmill and stopped in for a pint of ale, or, if the river flooded, an overnight at Coach House. The inn section had only two bedrooms so they must have slept piled up like puppies. I imagine fleas and snoring and sweat and couplings with the serving girl and corn husk mattresses full of weevils—not the genteel South of family portraits, canopied beds, and silver dresser sets. I doubt if the inn had slaves, so at least there’s not that haunting. The place became Chatwood in the 1950s, when the bird-watcher owners found that chats (a kind of thrush) stopped there on their migrations. They also planted a complex and extensive garden, which I am trying to revive.

  The basement feels just like home to possums, snakes, and mice. Because an air-conditioning vent mistakenly opens there, their lairs stay nice and cool all summer. All the rooms in the house are warm, honey-colored heart pine. Read: dark. Every system needs work. To the old house, another even older house was attached in the 1930s. The twenty-inch-wide floorboards glow as though they have light inside them. Where one house meets the other, it’s fine downstairs, but upstairs the two parts link via a tiny room where there is a toilet. You must go through this toilet closet to get from one bedroom to the other. Now that’s beyond funky and will have to go, thank you very much, National Historic Register. I like the way the house sometimes creaks in the night, as though we are on an old schooner plying the high seas.

  Two years after my impulsive Mississippi-midnight call to Ed, we disentangled ourselves from California and moved. Ed already was thinking of a change. Ever since graduate school in Virginia, he’s loved the mellow southern winter, the humane pace, and the sweet green beauty of the land. Like me, he even likes the soul-melting heat of July. My daughter, new Ph.D. in hand, divorced, and with a child, wanted a fresh start. Long story short, we picked up and headed south.

  I always have visited my good friends in Chapel Hill—Anne, close to me since Randolph-Macon Woman’s College days, and her family. When I was invited to start a furniture collection in High Point, we began to travel more frequently to North Carolina. Ed researched universities, cultural life, and the proximity to a good airport, so when friends asked why we were moving to “the d
ropping-off place,” we mentioned those attributes, plus the four distinct seasons. But, really, such an uprooting is instinctual. Time to rebel. Internal gears began to grind, propelling you forward—then you invent the reasons.

  My ties with California had been fraying for a while. I loved my university life, and my department encouraged experimentation; we never bogged down into the dangerous repetition of teaching the same play or novel thirty times. But the teaching load was tough. Until I was department chair, I taught four intense graduate courses each semester. One Christmas Eve, as I was sitting down to dinner with my family and friends, a student called. “I’ve got to read you what I just wrote. I think it’s my best.” I refrained from saying, “Do you know it’s eight o’clock on Christmas Eve?” I listened to several long stanzas. At the table, my family and guests banged their glasses and groaned, but, really, I was touched that he felt free to call, and I liked his poem. There’s little to compare with the privilege of mentoring those who strike out into the wilderness of a creative life. But after many years, my own writing became limited to the summer break.

  After my first book of prose, Under the Tuscan Sun, unexpectedly took off with a life of its own, I had just barely enough financial stability to take a chance and quit my job. Should I? I decided to step off that X, gamble on my writing, and give up secure tenure. When in doubt, I reasoned, fly. I’d taught for twenty-three years. Time for the new.

  I was surprised when the intense bonds with most of my colleagues faded quickly. Twenty-three years and it was as if we’d been on a cruise ship together, had seen the islands, danced at midnight, and weathered some mighty storms. Back on shore, scrawled email addresses on menus are quickly lost in a stack of maps and receipts.