Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937)

by Mayes, Frances

  Daddy Jack up and dies. As soon as Frankye hangs up the phone, my first thought is Now she will be all right. Frankye had prefaced her explanation of his death by, “Now, I don’t want you to think I had anything to do with it.” Why would she begin that way if she hadn’t?

  Daddy Jack’s house, The House, burned. A neighbor found him in shock, clinging to the monumental magnolia tree in his front yard. Daddy Jack died in two days, just stopped, with no apparent physical cause. Shock, all the newspaper articles lauding his life would repeat. Several stiff drinks probably caused him to fall into a little nap in his chair, where supposedly, his cigarette fell and started the blaze. No doubt he woke with a shock, found himself outside, watching flames rise in the windows of the house his father-in-law built for him and Mother Mayes, his Fanny, in 1906.

  Another story quickly forms in my mind. Red and yellow, kill a fellow.

  Earlier in the evening Daddy Jack and Frankye had supper at the Fitzgerald Country Club, and then stopped at our house for a few nightcaps. I know the bitter water mixed into each drink they shared. My mother was sick of his sour tyranny. “He has a mean streak,” she repeated, and I pictured a broad yellow swath down his hairy back. Because my father never was truly well after his heroic act, and because he was the favorite boy, even though he often was a bad boy, and because my parents used all their money for my father’s long illness, and because my father neglected to renew his insurance policy when he knew he was dying, Daddy Jack had by now “taken care” of us for six years. With a constant reference to the lack of appreciation he received (a drone that echoed my father’s “You all think I am made out of money”), he doled out the cash that paid the bills at our house. Frankye, like a child reminding the parent of an allowance, had to ask for everything each week. I wanted a warm grandfather who genuinely cared about us. Instead, D.J. the D.J., as I called him (to his nonamusement), only criticized. He didn’t like it that I wanted to go out with boys all the time (“Party, party, that’s all you think of”). But he didn’t like it that I liked to read six or eight books a week, either (“Lift your eyes off that book and you’ll see life is not a bed of roses”). I was not allowed to work because it was “beneath” me, or to apply for a scholarship because “we don’t take handouts,” but at the same time I liked clothes too much. I was vain, frivolous, too serious, impractical, smart-mouthed. (Probably all true.) My mother’s flimsy attempts to get a job were ridiculed. While Daddy Jack infantilized her, at the same time he resented her dependence. For the few months she commuted to South Georgia State College in Douglas, taking English 1A and trying to think of something she could do to get out of her financial situation, Daddy Jack denied she had a problem, and constantly made fun of “the college girl.” The dark undercurrent was his sexual attraction to my mother, his favorite son’s lovely wife. My mother used his attraction for her own purposes and hated him for it.

  Is it my impotence that provokes the imaginary action now? Did I want her to burn his house?

  In this fantasy, it’s late and Frankye sends him home. Reeling a little, she changes to her red flats and walks the two blocks from our house to his. With no moon, the house looms large and solitary against the dark. She sees his profile in the window as he nods in his armchair. She lets herself in the always-unlocked back door and silently passes through the kitchen and dining room. As she leans into the living room, she hears him snorting in sleep. The yellowing chintz draperies, not changed since Mother Mayes died, hang stiffly with old dust. She glances out the window. No one. She strikes a match and touches it to the printed coral and pink roses. Immediately, a blaze erupts. She slips out the back door, down the alley to Roanoke Drive, and then turns back toward Lemon Street, throwing the match in the Arnolds’s yard. By the time the sirens start, she is at home in her nightgown, sipping a bit of Southern Comfort, or so I imagine.

  My sister from Lakeland drives by Gainesville and we head toward Fitz to Daddy Jack’s funeral. “Do you think Mother set Daddy Jack’s house on fire?”

  My sister keeps her eyes on the road north. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Didn’t Big Mama’s house burn, too, that weird house in Vidalia?”

  “I don’t remember and I don’t want to remember.” She turns up the radio and I slump down, pretending to fall asleep. Perhaps the fire did spread from his fallen cigarette, and my mother remains innocent. Big Mama’s weird house on Franklin Street did burn mysteriously long before I was born. And Big Mama’s mother’s house—I recall that sepia photograph taken on the porch where the big family squints into the light, with Big Mama in glasses holding a baby.

  Frankye in white sits on the bottom step, a little flame. Later the house will burn. The matriarch, Big Mama’s mother, Catherine, looks stony. I’ve wondered if she, too, was capable of a rant or two. Why all the fire? My aunt Mary said the burning house in Vidalia was the last thing Big Mama saw clearly before her eyesight dimmed. Did she start the fire, too?

  Do we have an inheritance of fire, the same way we all got her waxy skin? In winter our too-white legs turn the pale green of cut turnips. Frankye’s identity is housebound. Never able to convince Daddy to buy the big house she wanted, she coveted The House. Not, as for me, hills, pines, streams, rivers, but for her wax, silk, canopies, silver, paint. She likes a gardenia, as I do, beside her bed. (Baked from the same flour.) For every drapery a cornice; for every plate a mat. A paper napkin never touches our lips. Not as long as I’m in the mill business. She draws patterns for needlepoint chair bottoms, serves quail with grits soufflé. When I was little she monogrammed my dimity doll dresses with the tiny cursive initials of the dolls’ names, Amanda Anne Mayes, Baby Girl Mayes. She has a sofa that looks as though Napoléon should perch on it, covered and re-covered. She collects hand-painted Gone with the Wind lamps, even though we all tell her they’re corny. Turn the doll upside down and the other pops out. It stands to reason that she’d want to destroy The House.

  We cross into Georgia. The leaning oaks and pines trailing their moss in swamp water are romantic from a distance. Up close the exposed branches twist out like arms and legs. Frankye, a floating island, roots dangling. Bald cypress stumps look like burned people standing in black water, with sun-polished knees sticking up. Trees rising on their own reflections. They are wrong and beautiful at once.

  As soon as we’re home, I ask Frankye if she set the house on fire. She laughs but will not answer. My grandfather always said he would leave us my father’s fourth of his estate. So, my sisters also believe, Mother can begin her life again. She’ll go to Charleston for bridge tournaments, move to Atlanta and meet someone fascinating. I will go to Paris and write poetry. We feel the enormous lift of this Dickensian presence from our lives, a feeling that will prove to be temporary when his lawyer reveals the will to the whole assembled family.

  Daddy Jack’s will was read in the lawyer’s office. As promised, my father’s share came to Frankye, but with a hitch. My mother will have only the small income on her portion of the estate during her lifetime; my sisters and I will inherit the bundle of money upon her death. Diabolically, or shrewdly, he put my mother in the same position he had been in: We, he thought, would be waiting for her to die so we could collect.

  There was a good-bye to me, too. A list of subtractions from our inheritance was read out in detail—expenditures Daddy Jack made that he did not approve of. Among them, my telephone calls to boys at several fraternity houses at Emory, Tulane, and Florida State. “$2.37, call to Jimbo Taylor, $3.11 to Carter Thibodaux, $6.80 to David Willcox.” He’d listed the minutes and time of day. My casual use of the telephone always drove Daddy Jack mad. I squeezed my hands together to keep from laughing. No one among the gathered relatives in black smiled, not even my aunt Mary Helen, who had Daddy Jack’s number.

  No math whiz, Frankye knew right away that interest on one-fourth of the estate was not going to support us, much less send her on bridge cruises to the Caribbean. He had far less money than anyone thought,
and everything was invested in the most conservative stocks. No provision was made for my “worthless” college expenses. Hey, Daddy, so much for taking a bullet for him! Larkin has a poem in which someone realizes he is ugly, unappealing, and no one ever will love him. “Useful to get that learned,” he concludes. Daddy Jack’s retort from the grave remains: You never know what someone silently stores up against you. Useful to get that learned.

  D.J. the D.J., with that annoying habit of the dead, took a long time to cool off.

  My father’s sister and one brother both have endless money but no one offers any help. My other uncle, always financed by Daddy Jack, recently has cleaned up his life and become a teetotaler, although he maintains that he “hasn’t had a lick of fun since.”

  Clearly Mother could do the same, according to Hazel. “Moral failure,” she murmurs. “Really, she’s an embarrassment and should get control of herself.” Yes, that’s rational. Rational doesn’t count with Frankye, but no one sees that. I’ve been smoldering mad at her for years. But I am whacked by her helpless bad luck. “Your parents owe you nothing,” my rich uncle says. Yes, not even love. Family. Those who hang you out to dry.

  My mother has been the chief hostess of the family. What galls her most is all the times these aunts and uncles, who now look at us as though we exist at a great distance, over-ate at our laden table. The whole family had made fun of Hazel, who inquired at dinner what’s for supper that night. My uncle buys an immense chandelier for the Presbyterian church. He sometimes invites us to use his houses at Highlands and Daytona Beach. Hazel keeps her kitchen as a storeroom and eats out at every meal, though that has become difficult for her since integration started to hit Miami. She keeps a warehouse for her clothes. Charity begins somewhere else, not at home. My mother and I are two flies in amber. Hazel buys The House, what’s left of it, for almost nothing, and that little windfall from our one quarter sustains Frankye and me for the moment.

  No one seemed to want it, so I drove back to Gainesville in Daddy Jack’s green Oldsmobile ’98. I collected forty-seven parking tickets.

  Money or not, Daddy Jack’s removal blesses the air. I can breathe. Gertrude Stein said, “As everybody knows, fathers are depressing but our family had one.” Mine had two and both in their mildest forms were depressing. My father was maddening and unpredictable and violent but he was hospitable, wry (Fitzgerald should be named “I heard”), and generous with love and money. Daddy Jack was stingy and rigid. As a nine-year-old boy he sailed alone from England. His mother had died, his father gone ahead to America to manage a cotton mill. His aunt waved him off. A small boy with a satchel and a bag of apples. In the only early photo of him, his mother, Elizabeth Repton Mayes, gazes fondly down at him as he glares at the camera, mouth turned down, his tiny fists already clenched.

  The story always touches me. Now and then he recalled being met by a redheaded stepmother who disliked him before he disembarked and proceeded to make his life miserable by criticizing every breath he took. Point of definition: one foot on the boat from England, other foot on the wharf in America. And, ah! How we learn.

  “What’s on the agenda today?” he asked every morning. His route for the day did not vary. Derail him and he’d have to start over, beginning with his liquid egg and bourbon breakfast.

  With both Daddy and Daddy Jack gone to the same plot of dirt at Evergreen Cemetery, my mother was at last free. She was fifty-one—attractive and vivacious, until the point each night when every little bottle said Drink Me. Down the rabbit hole, she’s Alice and she’s the Red Queen.

  All junior year I take five courses a semester to atone for my sins. Dr. Folger is the first man I’ve ever met who is “a queer.” A small man in a large brown suit and gold glasses, he minces and gestures, rising to his tiptoes when he makes a salient point. His lectures are brilliant and I’m deep in love with his modern poetry course. At a conference on my Wallace Stevens paper, he asks, “Where are you from, Miss Mayes?” When I tell him Fitzgerald, Georgia, he says, “My God, isn’t that a bit much?”

  In French class, we translate Les Misérables and Lettres de Mon Moulin. The instructor, whose accent is not that great, smirks that I speak French with a southern accent. After that I hide in the back row. I devour all the texts for world religion and a double door swings open: Other religions are on a par with Christianity! Buddhism makes sense. Astronomy, which serves as a math requirement, collides with world religion. On nights of insomnia when I half-expect Frankye to materialize in the doorway and perform her sorcery, the unimagined vastness of the universe swirls through my brain. Every page in the astronomy text proves that I am merely a speck on a speck, so how to reconcile the importance of every sparrow that falls? Christianity, I fear, just isn’t up to a satisfactory explanation of little planet Earth spinning in a minor galaxy. Does Jesus on the cross for our redemption reach all the way out to where space bends and black mass, black holes, and endless other galaxies begin? In the planetarium, the moving pointer across the sky map works like a Ouija board, searching for an answer. The big question, it seems to me, is the one posed by Leibniz: Why is there something rather than nothing? And here the Buddhists beg off by offering only a belief in the motion of birth and death cycles, a kind of thermodynamic principle: What’s put in motion stays in motion; or, as I envision, the universe as a giant hoop snake. Aristotle seems to believe in the state of motion, too, except a force sets the motion in action. I like the idea of that unmoved mover. For first cause, the Bible offers a charming literal story that frankly begins to look quaint. But then, it is not that far from the unmoved mover. Head in the clouds. Come down from the clouds.

  Religion becomes my minor. Except for architecture, which I don’t dare go near, English is the only major I can imagine. Look how James Joyce illuminates a defining moment, and what an exact word for it: epiphany. Leap over to Virginia Woolf’s moment of being: the private distilled instant caught, a cup scooping running water. T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: My notebook fills with quotes about time past, time present. I’m whirling with the pleasure of so much to learn. My black-speckled composition books fill with quotes, questions, thoughts, ideas, fragments of poems.

  The breakthrough class is the required logic. Ad hominem, ad bellum, ad ignorantiam, post hoc ergo propter hoc—ways to name what I know! Inductive, deductive. Up the ladder, down the ladder. How to think suddenly makes sense when you have precise language. How to analyze. In my family, we leap from A to D to F. We are walking fallacies. Ah! Reductio ad absurdum.

  After a week at home for the summer, I start traveling. My sister in Atlanta likes for me to visit because I adore my nephew, which frees her and her husband to go out. We spend long weekends at their log house at Lakemont. Frankye behaves there, as she always does when she leaves the city limits of Fitz. Always we seem to arrive before anyone else and always we have the wrong key. The kitchen window pushes in. I’ve climbed in before. Here’s the loft, here’s the bed made of limbs where the water moccasin coiled on the pillow. Frankye goes into a cleaning frenzy. Mice have been in the flour bin, wasps, dirt daubers. Here’s where I lay, eyes freezing on Marjorie Morningstar while I listened with my whole body to my aunt in the swayback bed, what is he doing to her, whimpering like a run-too-hard hound. Then quiet. The lake lapping. Shadow of antlers on the window, spiders in the shower. Damp quilts.

  Slowly everything works. The hoist lowers the boat back down in the water, Frankye’s blackberry cobbler slides into the oven, waxy laurel blossoms float through my fingers. I can hear my hair growing. I suddenly realize: The cape jasmine sends up its fragrance whether I am here or not. Can it be made of words, the faint scent hovering along the edge of the lake? I imagine there is someone I can tell this to. My voice recrosses the lake three times. Hello. Hello. Hello.

  We’re in the water all day, swimming, floating, waterskiing, and at night Cleve, my brother-in-law, and I take the old restored Chris-Craft out in the dark and idle around docks, shining a flashlight into
shallow water until we stun a frog with light and stab it with the gig. Late, we all line up along the porch facing the water and talk. Frankye and I sleep in the lower floor bedrooms in the log beds with red quilts. One morning, she steps out onto a gigantic furry tarantula, like squishing a banana. David comes for a visit, then Gwynne, my R-M roommate, and we go to the square dances in Clayton. The lake is pure joy, green as a Coca-Cola bottle, and furred around the shore with layers of other greens.

  Back in Fitz, Frankye starts her night walks, and now I’m old enough to get away.

  I take a bus to Gainesville, catch a ride, and visit Gary in Palm Beach. We’re lying on a blanket on the beach at night, listening to music on a portable radio. The program is interrupted to announce that Ernest Hemingway has committed suicide. A policeman walks up and asks for Gary’s license. He checks the address to see if he’s local. Can’t have just anyone making out on exclusive Palm Beach. I’m wild about the Addison Mizner houses. We walk in the ultrafancy neighborhoods, the bushes groomed within a millimeter, and fantasize about the princesses and princes who live in such mighty splendor.

  After a few days, I visit my other sister, who now lives in a spacious house with a curved lanai surrounded by birds of paradise and banana plants. So much about Florida speaks my native language.