Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937)

by Mayes, Frances

  “She’s fine, I guess.”

  Mrs. McNeill pushed my hair off my forehead. “You’ve got your daddy’s head of hair. Where’d you get those eyes? Must be your mother’s people.” My mother came from Vidalia, over an hour and a half away.

  On Friday, Nancy Stone came into Mrs. Bailey’s class with a note while we were hearing Nancy Drew aloud. We’d started the series last year with Miss Pope, who hated every student in the fifth grade, especially on Friday, and so read Nancy Drew endlessly. We’d all become addicted. Mrs. Bailey had had a particularly bad day because Gill C. brought in a package of rubbers and tried to throw them on the girls. When Mrs. Bailey secured one she held it up and shouted at the class, “Every last one of you will sit there until I find out who brought this nasty thing in.” Just at that instant the door opened and Miss Hattaway, the principal, stopped in her tracks. The wild class froze for a moment until Gill C. blew up another rubber in the back row and let the air out suddenly in a loud farting noise. When this much happened by ten o’clock, we knew we could count on an hour of The Message in the Hollow Oak before lunch.

  Mrs. Bailey slammed down the book when Miss Hattaway’s best seventh-grade student came tiptoeing in with the note. Mrs. Bailey frowned and nodded as she unfolded it. She looked up at me and I knew without being told to run home because Mother Mayes had died.

  “No,” Aunt Hazel said, “it won’t be scary. She looks just like she’s sleeping.” She slid into the creamy Lincoln parked on the side of Daddy Jack and Mother Mayes’s. It was rude if you didn’t call on people in the coffin, even if they’d never know. “Your mother’s in there now. I’ll just drop you off while I run down to buy something dark for the funeral. Living in Florida, I don’t really have any dark dresses.”

  I wasn’t really afraid at all. I’d seen Willie Bell’s aunt dead and Carlyle McDonald, whose belly stuck up over the edge of the coffin, and Miss Florence Petrick, the high school voice teacher. They didn’t show Tom and Janet Langhorn’s mother, who’d blown off the top of her head, pulled the trigger on herself with her own big toe. They couldn’t make heads or tails of her. I could just imagine Mother Mayes lying there, the coffin tufted and soft like a doll bed. Hazel said she would be wearing a lilac dress, her favorite color, not the gray one Mother and Mary Helen picked out, which was too dreary for words, and would look peaceful the way she did on Sundays when she would lie down on the sofa and pull the afghan up over her feet before Fanny called us in to dinner.

  I loved Hazel’s car and her soft fawn-colored clothes that seemed to go with the deep leather seats and the music drifting from the backseat speakers as soon as Hazel turned the key.

  “Aren’t you going, Aunt Hazel … I mean, Hazel?” I remembered she didn’t want to be called “Aunt” anymore.

  “I’ll go later, when there aren’t so many people. This is a calling hour right now. You know, Mama and I were so close. I want to say good-bye to her all alone.” Hazel glanced in the rearview mirror and smoothed her eyebrow with her little finger. The lattice fence around the backyard receded as she accelerated down Lemon Street. “You know, when Mama last came down to visit me this winter she was saying how she felt closer to me than anyone in the world. There’s nothing like the love of a mother and the only daughter. Not that she didn’t love your daddy and your uncle Jack and uncle Mark.” Hazel’s voice broke off as she reached into her handbag and fished out a handkerchief. I stared out the window at the palm trees racing by the car window. I didn’t know what to say, so I leaned forward and tapped my chin with my forefinger.

  On Sundays before dinner, Aunt Mary Helen and Mother and Aunt Emmy sat in the upstairs guest room and said how selfish Hazel was and how she never thought of a soul on God’s green earth but herself. They said she came swanning home from Miami and expected to be waited on hand and foot. I didn’t know if that was true or not. I liked it when Hazel drove up with the backseat full of dresses and Fanny baked all the things Hazel had liked when she was a girl, Marshmallow Fudge Cake and icebox cookies and Lane Cake, if it were at Christmas. And Hazel teased Daddy and my uncles. Sundays were better when she was there. Usually, when we waited for dinner, I played the wind-up player my daddy had when he was young, half listening to the conversation in the guest room. They said Hazel’s husband, Wilfred, had a girlfriend in Richmond where he went on business. Lonnie Tyler saw them together in a hotel lobby when she went up for the national meeting of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. I thought that was unlikely because Wilfred was so ugly, who would have him? I played the thick records over and over. “Come, Josephine, in my flying machine” a faraway voice tinkled. I had to keep winding the Victrola or the voice would slow down to a long moan. When Hazel was at home, all the women except Mother Mayes, who rested, waited for dinner in Hazel’s old room and talked about gloves and patterns and linens and parties. Hazel was always asking Mother for recipes even though she never had made a piece of toast and even had breakfast out. They tried on Hazel’s new hats and admired all her dresses, pale and delicate as Miami sunrises. Later, Mary Helen would say how tacky they were and Lord, if Hazel could see herself from the rear. If Hazel saw a dress she really liked, she bought it in every color it came in. Mother said she had a warehouse in Miami just for all the things she’d bought in triplicate.

  Hazel swung the big car around the palm island in the middle of the broad street and came to a stop in front of Paulk’s Funeral Home, the prettiest house in town. I jumped out and before I could slam the door, Hazel pulled away.

  As it turned out, Hazel was “too upset” to go to the funeral. It was because she was the only daughter, Daddy explained. Mother had another idea. “She’s never even been to the funeral home. I looked at the guest book. Believe you me, she’s up to something.” Daddy always took Hazel’s part and it made Mother furious. Hazel still called him “Boofa”—she’d tried “Beautiful” when he was born and “Boofa” ended up stuck to him all his life. Hazel was taking it badly. Just before the cars pulled up to drive us to the church, I saw her in the kitchen. She was wearing a long rose-colored robe edged with swags of crochet. I’d never seen her hair out of its chignon and it hung thin and scraggly. Everyone else, even Mary Helen, who was always late, was waiting on the porch. Wilfred kept blotting his bald head with his handkerchief. The house was too hot. I was sent back to the back porch to tell my grandparents’ maid Fanny that our yardman Drew was on his way to get her. As I ran through the kitchen, Hazel was lifting a knife over the luscious chocolate cake Mother Mayes’s Missionary Circle had brought over. It was the best-looking cake I ever saw. Fanny was waiting right out back. She had on her black uniform and she was leaning on the lattice wall of the back porch, a checkerboard pattern of sunlight behind her. Her face was hidden in her hands and her shoulders shook. I stopped, holding open the screen door. Fanny looked up. “This is the saddest day, sugar. You don’t know how sad this day is.” She didn’t even tell me to close the door so the flies couldn’t get in.

  “Drew’s coming in the truck. Mother says to get Willie Bell at our house.” I jumped down the back steps, ran once through the yard, touching all four trees as I passed, and back to the front porch where Daddy Jack and the others waited. My funeral dress, dark blue moiré with a wide lace collar, weighed a ton. I just hoped none of my friends saw me wearing the ugly thing.

  As soon as the slow cars pulled off, Hazel, as I now imagine that day, lifts her long robe and runs up the stairs to her mother’s room. Just this morning Fanny aired it out and opened the heavy winter draperies. No one else had been in since Mama died. Hazel stops for an instant then pushes open the door as though someone were calling her in. Mama! Mama on the mantel in her wedding dress with Dad proud as a little god beside her. Mama’s clock, stopped at two on the organdy scarf, and there on the dresser all the bottles of White Shoulders, Boofa’s favorite perfume, and the silver brushes with the cherubs riding the waves. Hazel opens the drawer of the dressing table. Pins. A box of powder with a puff in it.
Dusty rose nail polish and the familiar manicure set made of tortoiseshell. Instinctively, Hazel inspects her shell-pink crescent moons, takes the small scissors, snips off a tiny edge of her thumbnail cuticle, and brushes it to the floor. Two boxes of pills and a blue tassel bookmark. Hazel slides the drawer closed and opens the small one on the left. “Oh!” she says aloud. She reaches for the blue velvet box. The aquamarine ring. Hazel had wanted it since childhood. She slips it on her middle finger and holds her hand up to the light. For a moment, she remembers Thanksgiving when I sat on the footstool next to Mother Mayes before dinner. Mother Mayes rested with her feet up. Her corns are now as big as crocus bulbs on her little toes and her feet hurt. I was trying on her rings. I heard Mother Mayes saying “Of course, after I’m gone, you’re my namesake so you can choose whatever you want except the silver. That goes to the oldest son.”

  “Well, this is just what I want,” I said, “this and the dishes Mrs. Beall painted.” I loved the flower plates. The only way they got me to eat all my dinner was to offer extra pecan pie if I ate enough to see which flower I got on my plate. Mrs. Beall painted a different flower from Mother Mayes’s yard in the center of each plate and a gold band around the edge like a wedding ring. I liked the white Cherokee rose, which climbed over my grandparents’ fence from the vacant lot next door.

  But Hazel shakes her head. Mama didn’t mean that, Frances is only eleven or ten, what could she do with rings besides just lose them? Mama would enjoy my enjoyment so much.

  Hazel’s hands had never touched Ajax or dishwater. I’d heard whispers that she “had an operation right after she married so she’d never have babies.” She lightly rinsed her nylons every night and hung them over a towel to dry. Everything that touched her had to be perfect, especially her hands.

  She finds the tiger’s-eye necklace with gold beads interspersed, a gift to Mama from Boofa. Mama would love for me to have this, she thinks. She never said a thing in the hospital; she just wouldn’t have upset us for the world. Hazel rolls up the jewelry in the silk case Mama carried when she went traveling. Oh! I should have the pearls. They’d look nicer on me than on Frankye or Mary Helen or certainly on Emmy with those awful sapphires she likes. Quickly she unrolls the case and slips in the long loop of creamy pearls. She looks up and catches her breath. Mama! But how foolish—her own face centered in the oval mirror. She leans closer and lifts the corners of her eyes. Holding up the silver hand mirror, she twists her black hair into a high chignon. Shoe polish black, my mother said. Would she be blue haired and wear lavender? Already she liked flowered scarves around her neck or dresses with soft ruffled collars. I told her she looked like the queen of England in my history book with the white stiff collar on her yellow piqué. Hazel pins up a loose strand and thinks of my tangle of curls. That child runs wild. What is Frankye thinking of? She was never that way with the older girls. It’s as if she gave up by the third child. But Frances has Boofa’s ways, hard as nails, and thinks when she says jump we should all say how high. Hazel feels the aquamarine through the soft jewelry roll. She will wear it with the sea green evening dress she found at the Nifty Shop the same afternoon she looked for a dark dress to wear to the funeral. She hates dark clothes. But she had seen this swath of pale silk, what she came back to the house with—nothing for the funeral.

  The funeral! That would be half through by now. Mama. She looks over at the high bed where she and her brothers were born. It’s made up stiffly, the Martha Washington coverlet taut as if no one ever had lain there. Hazel opens Mama’s closet. Her smell, the sachet pillows on the shelves and musty lingering in the sleeves and collars of the dresses. From the zippered bag, Hazel pulls out the mink stole. Mama agreed entirely with her about that. When the three boys had chipped in and bought it for her last Christmas, they’d asked Hazel if she wanted to go in on it. She told them Mama wouldn’t wear it that much; it was too hot in Georgia to get the use from it. She rubs the fur against her cheek. It was much less suitable for the climate in Miami, but there are some cool nights. Mama seemed so thrilled when she opened the box from J. P. Allen’s, but later she admitted to Hazel she probably couldn’t wear it too often. It looks brand-new. Hazel drapes the stole around her shoulders even though the room is stifling. From the balky chest of drawers she takes peach, blue, and muted pea green cashmere sweaters. Mama has a champagne silk blouse that doesn’t look too much like an old lady. Where would it be? She finds it in the top drawer. Carrying as much as she can, Hazel crosses the hall to her room. She tosses the things on the bed and pulls Mama’s suitcase out from underneath. Ten of three. She packs fast, stuffing the jewelry in the elastic pockets along the sides of the bag. Just as she starts downstairs, she pauses and looks back in Mama’s room. Two great arcs of soft sun curve across the bed from the big windows facing Lemon Street. Suffocating in there. How Mama hated the heat! On her bedside table lies a church fan with a picture on it of Jesus kneeling beside a rock. Mama’s room is so full of her absence. Hazel notes the little things on the table one by one: the thimble, the neatly folded lace handkerchief, the small photograph of Mama’s mother, Sarah America Gray, a fuzzy shape in white named Charlotte, Mama’s long-dead sister, and now, with Mama’s passing, utterly forgotten. There was Dad as a baby in England, held by a mother named Elizabeth Repton, who was shortly to die, leaving only this ugly little baby and a name that would reappear years from then in the middle of Frances’s. Hazel’s eyes follow the trailing vine of trumpet morning glories down the wallpaper. Idly, she pulls open the bedside table drawer and finds a scrap of notepaper with Mama’s sprawling handwriting in brown ink: bell peppers, yellow thread, 2 hens, lemon, matches, squash. Hazel squeezes the list into a ball. All at once she feels a cold flare of sweat: Her mother’s life is over and there is nothing left but these tiny clues. How I hate that foreign house in Miami, she thinks suddenly. She hits the taut bed with her fists over and over. “No, no, no, no. It’s not fair. Why did this have to happen?” Then she notices the bedside table and pulls out the drawer; there’s the ring box. Mama kept her big diamond there at night so the setting couldn’t catch at threads in the embroidered sheets. Hazel opened the box and the ring flashed out rainbows over the wall. Mother Mayes had worn it ever since her mother died and they’d soaped her hand and worked the ring off because she’d grown so stout. Mother Mayes soaked it in ammonia overnight, then wore it every day.

  Hazel snaps shut the box and puts it exactly where she found it. She will have to wait and see if Dad gives her that. Before she closes the drawer, she takes out the Murine and the glass eyedropper and puts them in the pocket of her robe. She must run down to pack the Lincoln now, but as she hears the cars return she will freshen her eyes with the drops that look just like tears.

  All the time Hotch Dickinson delivered the eulogy, the eyes of everyone in the church fasten on the tall ivory candles around the coffin. One by one they slowly give up to the heat and droop over like the necks of swans bending toward fish under water. Most fall to the left and flicker out. A few stay lit, spattering white wax onto the burgundy carpet last winter’s collection bought. The blanket of roses over the coffin turns dusky, the tight buds feathering out like heads of sleeping birds against the leaves.

  I sit almost still but my dress scratches the backs of my legs and I try to inch it out from under me so my skin will be cool against the smooth white wood. It is the hottest May in memory, one of those unexpected, blistering warnings in spring of what’s to come. My mother shoots me a look: Be still. Daddy Jack mops off his mustache of perspiration.

  “I will lift mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help,” Rev. Dickinson says. I look out the open window, past the two shacks, past the railroad tracks, past the apartment building where Johnny Leverett lives. Not a hill in sight. I turn around in the pew. There is Miss Hattaway, the principal. I remember how to spell “principal” because my teacher said that the principal is your pal. Miss Hattaway, some pal, in the seven years I went to Third Ward School, never c
racked a smile once. Way in the back I spot the dark faces, Fanny and Drew and Willie Bell sitting together. Fanny still hides her face in her hands. Over where her family always sits, Edna Lula, my best friend, waves to me. As I start to smile, Aunt Mary Helen pokes me sharply with her elbow.

  I sit straight. I smell something and wish Aunt Mary Helen would move over because her green silk dress has ugly wet quarter moons under the arms.

  In the funeral home car, I ride on Daddy’s lap, feeling the town rather than seeing as we drive from church, up Central, down Main, left on Lemon, our street, and out Evergreen Road to the cemetery.

  Daddy holds open the door and helps Daddy Jack out. Suddenly Daddy Jack’s suit looks too big for him and he is looking around as if he doesn’t have on his glasses but he does. Mother Mayes will be the first to lie in the family plot. Her people and Daddy Jack’s are buried in North Carolina. The threshold has MAYES carved in the center. I liked the old part of the cemetery better. One iron gate gives a three-syllable squawk as you swing on it. Mother Mayes, I see, will sleep near a lamb in a nearby plot. Carved under the lamb: ASLEEP IN JESUS.

  “Now what does that mean?” I whisper to Mother. I’d asked the question before. Mother squeezes my hand too hard.

  “Shhh. It just means he died of diphtheria. It means that you should hush, that’s all.” Her answers usually involved at least one crazy link but I understood her. Rev. Dickinson stands by the hole, his big angel sleeves billowing out. The air is cooling off, mercifully. All the people from town gather around the tent, but only the family sits down in the folding chairs on a strip of carpet. Is Mother Mayes really in the coffin? I sit between Daddy and Aunt Mary Helen, who keeps checking the run she got in her stocking when she stepped out of the car. I can’t see Aunt Emmy or my uncles down the row, or my two sisters, who sit on the other side of Mother. Rev. Dickinson picks up a handful of red dirt, raises both arms, and says, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” in a loud voice. I look up to see if that makes Daddy mad. My father’s face looks out between the tent poles, toward the fields and out as far as he can look. I take his hand in mine. Mother glances down and frowns. His hand is limp, not like his face that looks as set as wax. With his right hand he wipes his cheek on both sides with his whole palm. “Don’t cry,” I say softly. Rev. Dickinson throws down the dirt on the clean coffin. Daddy doesn’t look at the grave hole. He had come out of her and now she is inside a box. I rip off my thumbnail with my incisors.