Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937)

by Mayes, Frances

  “She won’t last up there in Yankeeland. She’ll be back begging for her job before Christmas,” Daddy Jack predicts. “Nigras don’t know when they’re well off.” He unfolds the Atlanta Journal and blessedly covers his face. We dread the news. My grandfather recently had cast the first Republican vote of his life. My mother had not. She thought John Kennedy was very attractive and Nixon’s nose looked as though it were carved from a baking potato. Daddy Jack, therefore, held Mother personally responsible every time Kennedy or his “upstart fool” brother Bobby made a move. “Where do you think the nigras are getting these big ideas of theirs?” he shouted at her frequently. The words “march,” “demonstration,” and “freedom riders” were beginning to be heard. When he reads that Bobby asked the freedom riders to cool off for a while, he rails, “Why don’t they have the fortitude to call out the tanks? What are tanks for?”

  The head of the freedom riders, James Farmer, countered, “We have been cooling off for one hundred years. If we got any cooler, we’d be in a deep freeze.”

  At that, Daddy Jack rips the Journal in half, staring at Mother, Fanny, and me as though we’d caused the whole thing. “Fanny, you know sure as you’re born, anybody who works for me, colored or white or speckled, gets a fair deal.”

  “Yassuh, Cap’n,” she replies. They don’t see her mouth twist down when she turns back to the sink.

  I cross my eyes at Mother and she rolls hers. My mother looks at her arms. “My skin is on fire,” she says every day. She gets hives by August and wonders what she’s allergic to. Citrus. Sugar. Heat. Fanny tells her the only cure is to find a man who’s never seen his own father and to have him blow in her face. Soon Mother excuses herself and heads toward the bathroom, where she has a bottle of gin hidden at the bottom of the wicker clothes basket.

  Willie Bell called a few times. “You’ve got to come back,” I’d say. “The recipe for fudge cake isn’t even written down anywhere.” She’d laugh. She was elusive on the subject of returning. Once she said to me, “I just had to take a chance, Miss Frances. You know nuthin’ was ever going to happen down there.” Within months, she’d disappeared from us forever, swallowed by the North.

  I put up with Fanny’s cooking. Her idea of summer vegetables is boil them to pieces with a hunk of salt pork. The barbecue practically catches fire, with sauce so hot you have to go sit in a creek. Her pound cakes always had gooey sad streaks in the middle. Bud, her husband, beat her so badly that Daddy Jack had him put in jail. I have to drive her home in the afternoons and she cries and asks me to go by the jeweler’s so she can pay a dollar on a layaway Bible for her son, also in the penitentiary. Alarming to have two family members locked up. She lives in a square house, the boards gone shiny with age, near Willie Bell’s old place. What had her son done? She won’t say. What she does say as we pull up is, “I hear tell Willie Bell’s doin’ fine up there. You can bet your bottom dollar Willie Bell won’t be back.” She doesn’t quite slam the back door.

  “Hey, Fanny, you think I’m thrilled to be here in the garden spot of the South?” I tease her, and I don’t say I worry about when Bud gets out of jail. When I let her out she always stops to water her scraggly purple petunias growing in rusty cans on the front porch.

  It was bad enough to be imprisoned in Fitzgerald; my college friends found jobs as waitresses in exotic places such as Ogunquit, Maine, or Yellowstone National Park. Daddy Jack would not allow me to work at something “ridiculous” like that. “A waste of time. You study Greek, of all things, and you want to wait on tables for people who have no manners at all?” He was similarly enlightened about scholarships: They were fine for people who did not object to welfare, which he did. No one in our family was going on the dole. I just leaned on my fist and stared at him when he went on and on. From excerpts I’d read in Philosophy 101 at Randolph-Macon, Marx was dead on, I thought, about the idiocy of rural life. I knew better than to quote Marx. I tuned out everyone on the home front.

  But I did come home. I knew he would not send me to college except on his terms and I didn’t want to end up as a clerk in the dime store selling nasty pond slider turtles all my life. I was supposed to do what, languish at home polishing my toenails and going to bridal showers? Read one thousand books? He didn’t seem to approve of anything, especially any boyfriend.

  My last two years of college were coming up. What did I plan to do? All I desired was to go to Greece. I frequently consulted the tonnage, Libyan crew, and the other information on the freighter Elysian Fields until Daddy Jack saw the pamphlet on the table and tore it up. “You’ll find out, young lady, that the world is under your nose.”

  Under his nose was Drew, our yardman, who had to cut Daddy Jack’s toenails when they got long enough to curve down and click on the floor. Fanny came over with the broom to sweep up the curls of horny yellow clippings that looked like curls of old wax or buzzard talons.

  My only goal was to memorize poems. I cauterized the memory of my recent lost romance with John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. I copied them on index cards and stuck them around my dressing table mirror. While I daubed Sortilege perfume on my pulse points, rubbed my gleaming just-shaven legs with baby oil, plucked three tiny hairs from between my eyebrows, outlined my lips with the sable lip brush, I repeated over and over, “I am a little world made cunningly.…” and:

  At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow

  Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise

  From death, you numberless infinities

  Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go

  It was the time of Donne and Dostoyevsky, Lawrence, Keats, and Yeats. All the books I’d charged at the Randolph-Macon bookstore, and Daddy Jack had sputtered over, now stood in the heavy revolving bookcase in my bedroom, my name on each flyleaf and black ink underlining the significant parts. I read for six or seven hours a day. “Would you get off that bed so I can make it up?” Fanny huffed. “Do something!” my mother shouted. I looked at them from Russia or New York or Spain.

  Early in the summer, I’d fallen in love. Paul was Anne’s older brother. I’d met him twice before I visited her in New Orleans, but he’d never noticed me among the throng of friends we traveled in. Brilliant like Anne, he finished college at twenty and now, at twenty-three, was just out of the navy, where he’d been a jet pilot. Also, he was engaged. His fiancée sailed for Europe in June. When school ended, Anne visited me in Fitzgerald, then we took the Southern Crescent to New Orleans.

  We love the train, the long hours of confidences. Someday we’ll take a train from Moscow to Novosibirsk, reading Chekhov aloud and eating cold potatoes with chugs of vodka. For now, shuttling through Alabama, we discuss what we want on our tombstones. Anne decides on lines from Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine”:

  From too much love of living,

  From hope and fear set free,

  We thank with brief thanksgiving

  Whatever gods may be

  That no life lives forever;

  That dead men rise up never;

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere safe to sea.

  A bit dreary, I thought, but Anne was Roman Catholic; that explained it. I liked Lawrence’s “Moonrise”:

  … beauty is a thing beyond the grave,

  That perfect, bright experience never falls

  To nothingness, and time will dim the moon

  Sooner than our full consummation here

  In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.

  The Magic Mountain gets us across Mississippi.

  Anne told me she had a summer job in her father’s office, but that she really had to go to work while I was visiting stunned me. At first I lounged around in her room, reading all day and copying Rilke and Larkin quotes in a notebook. After a few days, Paul asked me to go to the French Quarter to his favorite bar, Café Lafitte in Exile. It rained just after noon, when the heat hit the unbearable point, rained just enough to steam the streets. We talked books. We ran from
bar to bar and sat in doorways getting wet. He looked like the photos of the young Hemingway, and I’d heard he got smashed with a friend at the officers’ club and took a navy plane up without permission. They landed it with the wheels half up, laughing and oblivious to the rage that greeted them. So Lawrentian, his black curls and terse humor. We began to go out every afternoon. Some of the bars opened into rainy green courtyards. Strangers began to make remarks, “Ain’t love the damnedest thing?” and “Enjoy it while it lasts.” One bartender translated a sign in Italian: Love makes time pass; time makes love pass.

  Now when Anne came home at five, it was plain that I had not been bored and waiting for her. No one said anything because the family was wild about the fiancée. Lovely girl. Sweet and innocent. Sweethearts since she was twelve or something. I thought I should go home.

  My mother called and asked if I’d worn out my welcome. Paul inched behind me in the hall and whispered, lips against my ear, “Don’t go. I want you to stay.”

  Anne arranges a blind date for me for her friend Ginger’s party. A chartered bus drops us at her house across the lake where we walk up the oak alley behind a band playing “Saints.” Soft-shelled crab gives me the creeps to eat and the lake bottom feels mushy and dark to my feet. My date looks down on dancing, probably because he can’t, and just wants to talk all night about Dorothy Sayers’s sense of religion. Somehow we are home early. Anne has a late date with Jimmie and they ask Paul and me to go listen to jazz. We bar hop, laughing all night. Just at dawn we drive to the river and Paul and I walk along the levee. Mythic river, the ruined plantations with oak alleys, the lilt and roll of Mark Twain, the brown swirling color of an old meandering looping wide river. A big gold sun hoisting out of the dark spreads munificent light over the Mississippi. He picks wild blue morning glories and strings them in my hair then slowly leans to me, so slowly that time seems to wind down and suspend. We kiss, then again. After all the kissing I’d done, this was the first time I felt passion like knockout drops. Like in books. Ecstasy, the word “ecstasy.” So it’s true. Kisses that I feel along the backs of my legs, in the hairs on my arms. “This is not the last time, hear?” Down the levee, I sense Anne’s shocked face. What will happen?

  As we turn in the driveway at six thirty, Anne and Paul’s father in his bathrobe, a workday coming up, walks outside to pick up the newspaper. He looks at us with eyes hard as nickels and does not speak, just slaps the Picayune against his thigh and walks inside.

  I sleep until two. Anne staggers out to work early, practically whimpering with fatigue. When I wake up, Anne’s mother is out. I wash my hair and put on a straight black skirt, striped blouse, and a red belt that shows how small my waist is. I try not to remember overhearing Paul ask Anne when I first arrived, “Is your friend old enough to drive yet?” In front of the full-length mirror, I dance the way we danced last night. So sexy, his tight turns. I think I look twenty-one. He can really dance; they don’t know anything in Fitzgerald. Paul is reading in the living room. He tells me he’s looked in the bedroom four times to see me sleep. He says he can’t break his engagement. I am too interesting, unspoiled. He loves her. Could he read The Hound of Heaven to me? He can’t understand how he’s become attracted to his little sister’s friend. He wants to show Lisbon to me and a small village somewhere in Spain. His fiancée is the sweetest person imaginable. Shall we go to the Quarter now?

  That live current in the air, no one escapes. Even dogs and cats feel it. Looking at him is more satisfactory than talking to most people. Holding hands, I’m conscious in my tendons, hair, shoulders, of exquisite happiness. His hand! Even looking at the rain together feels like an event. The house is zinging, this Catholic-to-the-core house, where the Latin words for “guilt” and “responsibility” should be emblazoned on the family crest in the foyer. When Anne comes home, I hear whispering in the kitchen. Will she defend us? She, the soul of justice, feels confused and righteous at the same time. The fiancée is her friend, too, poor thing off in Vienna with a busload of Newcomb girls. How could Paul?

  I wear to the country club dance a white eyelet dress with a ribbon sash woven of three deepening shades of red velvet: rose, scarlet, burgundy. Paul is not a boy, I realize. He has an edge I like; he’s complex enough, and gorgeous, in a dark way, a movie star from my mother’s era. We dance under the enormous chandelier until no one else is dancing. As I look up at him, brilliant shards of light whirl behind his head. The night blooms, deep tropical night I’ve always loved, as fragrant as the word “frangipani,” with a breeze the same temperature as flushed skin. Even Paris, I think, couldn’t be better. We drive to three a.m. fishermen’s mass in the cathedral then order beignets and chicory coffee at dawn. The gray air and lambent light of the French Quarter gives the iron balconies and faded pastel walls, and even the people, a tawny sepia tone.

  Anne is torn. Her boyfriend tells her not to worry; everyone has a last fling. We all decide to go to Lake Pontchartrain because I’d never been on carnival rides. In Fitzgerald, they were always breaking, leaving someone stranded for hours on top of a rickety Ferris wheel. Anne looks annoyed when I scream on the swings that throw us out with such strong centrifugal force that I fear we’ll be flung into the lake. Paul, a pilot, after all, laughs.

  We ride the streetcar named Desire, walk in Audubon Park. We order turtle soup and play gin on rainy afternoons at the country club. We try mile-high ice cream pie in an old hotel, dine at Antoine’s with the Maxwells, Paul’s knee pressing mine while his father inquires what the news is from our little world traveler.

  After driving the Maxwells home, we find a bar near Tulane. Paul alone, dance floor dark and cool, the smell of beer and—what?—something sweet, damp gardenias, heartbreaker, that song, wherever you’re going, I’m going your way, two drifters, that’s what we wanted, just drift off, read Russian novels aloud to each other forever. Then kissing in the car, sliding down, rubbing our faces hard together. Good animals, soul, though. I want to say I want, so this is giving, giving. I never have. “I don’t know about you all.” Anne opens the car door. “But tonight I have to get to bed. These hours are getting ridiculous.”

  Everyone’s asleep at the house and she tiptoes down the hall while we stand in the living room doorway. All quiet, except for the cool whir of the air conditioner. I almost can feel Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell’s breathing in their room just a wall away. “Wait here,” Paul whispers. He comes back with a bottle of wine. “I bought this in Portugal. I was planning to have it on my wedding night.” He opens the bottle and pours. Our eyes hold. Imagine such brown eyes; I’ve always liked green or blue. I take a sip and he kisses me, pressing his tongue into my mouth, and I give him the wine in mine. He drinks and I take his wine. We’re falling into the down sofa. Grace of dissolving time, boundaries, the bloodstream a brush fire started by children. I want to pull him so close that our bodies absorb each other. He lies on top of me and through our summer clothes I feel the entire velocity of his body on mine, feel our bright holy skin, a swarming fierce right. “Love,” I say. “Love.” We begin to laugh; he licks my face, throat. His hands, my blouse, over. “I always knew it,” he whispers. “I can love this way. I’m going to be the one to teach you everything there is to know about passion. I’m going to make love to you for the rest of my life.”

  The next day, three letters with big foreign stamps arrive from Italy, Austria. Anne, with particularly aulic posture, I think from my pillow, leaves for work without waking me to make a plan for later. Mrs. Maxwell is cordial but looks troubled. I call the Southern Crescent for the schedule to Georgia.

  En route home, I stop in Atlanta. I have a sudden wild idea that I will not go home. I will not go to college. If he was going to marry what’s-her-name, I’ll just take off for … where? My sister Nancy picks me up at the Peachtree station. At her house, I look in the want ads and see that TWA is hiring stewardesses. I should fly like Paul. The next morning I go downtown to a hotel suite where a lot of girls wait in the hall.
We’re all weighed and measured and some are dismissed. At five foot four, 108 pounds, I’m afraid I am fat but I pass. I think of Rome and the little house where Keats died, the Pyramids, Ireland, the blue waters of Greece; the interviewer talks about evacuation procedures, safety chutes, loss of cabin pressure—a training program somewhere in the Midwest, then six months of routes starting in Des Moines or Kansas. I see myself in slow motion, emptying trays in people’s laps. “Why do you want to fly?” “To see the world,” I answer, thinking of Paul in the navy. How soon can I start? The interviewer looks raw somehow, and his Adam’s apple dips and rises. Planes taking off make me sick, especially if the pilot banks so steeply that I look sideways down at the receding red clay earth. I want to read Chaucer in Middle English. I don’t want to be a stewardess, even if I eventually can go to Europe that way. I want to go to Paris in black, with sandals, and big sunglasses, and write on a tiny iron table in the Tuileries while little boys with French maids sail toy boats. I flee.

  In August, no one is reasonable, if anyone ever was. If it rains, it’s over too fast to cool anything down. The only thing that comes down is heat; heat descends in sheets. Always the rain begins as a trapezoid of gray lines slanting against the horizon. I watch it “walk” across the field, pushing cool air toward me, until surprisingly warm, it hits, a hard pelting. I lie in the grass and let it soak through me. In August, my skin feels permeable. The sky cracks, lightning darts down so close I instinctively draw back. Then more rain. Just as quickly, it stops and the sun makes an angry comeback, pulling clouds off the hot streets, wilting the dresses of ladies who have risen from their naps, blistering the glaring white sides of houses. The rain, for all I know, walks somewhere else, walks all over the South.