Under Magnolia : A Southern Memoir (9780307885937)

by Mayes, Frances

  Inside the house, the mellow heart-pine rooms glow in firelight, and we’re inside a thrumming hive, alive in amber light. The magnolia and pine boughs, berries, and mistletoe that I’ve arranged on all the mantels must have been placed there by many a hand in the last two hundred years.

  Upstairs, one of the old doors pops open when I pass by. “Good morning, Mr. Faucette,” I say, he who stood in that hallway in rough tweeds, needing a shave, heading out to help mule drivers through the mud. In a closet, Ed found tacked on the inner wall a list titled “The Stamps I Have on Hand.” The yellowed paper dates only from 1958 but for fifty-four years no owner took it down. Now I know that someone who shared my writing supply closet once owned four Lincoln-Douglas Debate stamps, three Minnesota Statehood, four Overland Mail. A scrap. Like memory, how arbitrary what endures. Where are those stamps now?

  Hillsborough lies two miles east. We have landed in a town of 6,500 souls, many of whom are writers, photographers, painters, book designers, historians, professors, singers, and other dreamers. As in Oxford, Mississippi, I’m reminded of Cortona: hospitality, raucous humor, the conviction that the table centers the universe. In Italy, one breathes art. The arts seem paramount in these parts, too. Books are handed around. Talked about. Recommendations fly via email. The riverine walk around Ayr Mount, a pre–Civil War house, is called Poet’s Walk. Pencils and paper are provided at the outset, should you become inspired. This is light-years from the South I knew as a child.

  Usually, dinner launches other fun: a spiritual sung by a guest, or a Puccini aria or two. Ed might want us to listen to the four best “Blue Moon” recordings, or to see which tenor holds the longest note in “Nessun Dorma.” As in Italy, the hosts are lauded, then toasts outdo each other. Guests may read a play as they pass the olives and prosecco. We orchestrate black-tie pot-lucks with an array of oysters, slow-simmered quail in cognac and juniper berries, crown roast pork, and delectable lavender-scented panna cotta. Or, we spread quilts on the ground and serve retro food—bing cherry Jell-O, ham biscuits, fried chicken, and churned peach ice cream. I love it when someone throws a low-country boil in fresh-corn season, or just serves Brunswick Stew by the fire. To commence, there may be a blessing or, once, a reading of Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter.” Light the candles. Turn up Eva Cassidy singing “At Last.” Bring on the laughter and the goose confit.

  These are the ties that bind. Daily life in Hillsborough draws me close to my earliest, best connections to the South. My father invited his office workers and other friends on Friday to our backyard, where everyone ate smothered doves and grits soufflé, Willie Bell’s crunchy biscuits, potato salad, peach pickles she and my mother put up, and platters of pound cake, Pecan Icebox Cookies, and Frankye’s Chocolate Icebox Cake made with ladyfingers and cloudlike mousse.

  On certain Sundays, our church offered dinner on the grounds and my mother would bake a stupendous Lane Cake or, what still makes me feel deep lust, her famous three-layer Caramel Cake. Daddy preferred her Lemon Cheesecake—not a cheesecake at all but cloud-soft layers of butter cake, with thick curd filling that must have reminded someone of cheese. Maybe it’s the food of the South that makes its children long so for home.

  Now, how the traditions multiply and cube. Many of the obsolete North Carolina tobacco farms are given over to the production of organic kale, baby turnips, radishes, golden-yolked eggs, goat cheeses, and heritage livestock. What luck to come home in the midst of a food revolution, and one that circles back to the farmers who beeped at our back door, rattling a hand scale as Willie Bell picked out plums, collards, and butter beans at the back of the truck.

  What a surprise to see that the fine old country manners endure, even a formality, so that our very handyman who can fix anything remains Mr. Farley to my Mrs. Mayes. Blessedly the good ol’ boys have retreated, though they’re not totally gone. At least no one any more offers to buy the little lady a drink.

  I returned to a South where racism, while not erased, is no longer publically virulent, and this makes it an entirely different South from the one I knew. You still can see the Stars and Bars flying over a trailer in the woods on Martin Luther King Day, still hear an occasional slur from someone who doesn’t have the sense to see that you don’t agree. But mostly the good inheritance of southern manners in both races prevails. Even in the worst of times, there existed a layer of deep familiarity, a shared bond of coming out of a place once ripped and ravaged by one of the worst wars in history. Because the land once soaked in blood remembers, we do, too. And there’s a shared bond, too, of coming out of a place of unpredictable weather and terrain, a sun strong enough to melt your bones, a place where the second coming is still expected, where the night creatures sing the most soulful music that can be imagined. Back in the South, the tribal pulse of the place beats, the primitive gift that I sensed as a child riding to sea on the back of a turtle.

  The day-to-day warmth that transpires in ordinary interactions simply thrills me. “Don’t be a stranger,” I heard when I was growing up. People talk to you everywhere. Waiting at the dentist, filling the tank, checking out at the grocery store. Each gesture may mean little but cumulatively there’s a message: You are not alone.

  My daughter remarried a Southerner. We live close to Ashley and Peter, which means we are also close to my grandson, Willie, or as only I call him, Wills. I can attend his first saxophone recital, help him with Spanish homework, serve Frankye’s pot roast on a Wednesday night. After so long in Italy, where three generations of a family often share a house, the idea of living a long distance from one’s family seems terribly wrong and the breaking up of a family even more drastic. I want to take over to them a baked pasta, pick up the sore throat medicine, keep the dog when they’re away—everyday closeness, as well as state occasions and big celebrations.

  The brilliant boy I married when I was very young was a long part of my life, but not my life. Divorce, which feels like being cleaved, sometimes can be one of those X spots. So it was for me, when at last I lived alone and worked. So this is what it’s like, I thought. My inner compass began to align. I had the great luck of meeting Ed. Always fearful that what I love will be snatched away, I hesitate even to write that we are every day joyful. Per ora, the Italians say, for now, as a charm against the gods’ envy of happiness.

  I like the town’s dignified white houses with black shutters. I like the cottages with friendly front porches, the fixed-up mill houses where someone’s alone with his fiddle, the square brick houses of the fifties, the bottle trees to trap haints, the courthouse that anchors the square, and the street names that recall a town history I don’t even know.

  The interiors of friends’ houses are wonderfully quirky—taxidermy that makes me squirm, walls of sagging books, screened porches on stilts so one can sleep as if in the trees, church windows inset above a desk, peculiar collections of skulls, plaster busts, Elvis memorabilia, retablos, folk art, model houses, Virginia Woolf’s circles paintings, woven early American coverlets. Okay, I admit some of these are my collections. One writer keeps all the clothes he’s ever owned, plus some of his father’s and grandfather’s, in the attic, and thus appears often in a big bear coat, a World War II uniform, or formal morning coat with spats. Another friend bought the contents of a costume shop that was closing, so that many of us have a vast selection to choose from for any occasion. The South always has enjoyed its eccentric people. I’m glad because I intend to become more and more that way myself. I’m done with my life quest to appear normal.

  In Fitzgerald, the woman who kept a coffin in her living room was tolerated; the town klepto was tolerated—her husband was billed quietly for her picked-up trinkets. When she visited a bride’s display of gifts, she was watched. Ella Mae drove with the windows down so her wild red hair flew out behind her. Her husband had his thing, too: He memorized the numbers of everyone’s annual license tag and on New Year’s, my daddy always said, “Poor Jim, he has to start all over.” Ella Mae passed our h
ouse frequently and yelled out the window, “Are you having ’cue? I smell ’cue!”

  As in Italy, old houses in town have names. Pilgrim’s Rest. What a wonderful abode, with its suggestion of travel and return. Heartsease, yes, shouldn’t home be that? Burnside, a Scot-built home beside the flowing burn. Montrose: Life is stately; life is upright. It Had Wings, named for a short story by neighbor Allan Gurganus. The owners collect antique model houses; hundreds of them line the rooms. Sunnyside, Mouse House, Seven Hearths, Teardrops, Woodthrush Cottage, Twin Chimneys—all have souls. Most houses’ names recall the owner: Nash, Ruffin, Snipes, Forrest, Judge Gattis, many of whom lie still in the cemetery, along with CSA soldiers, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and one woman whose epitaph reads SHE DID WHAT SHE COULD. I am sure there are many women’s graves that could support that thought, maybe even my own someday.

  One of my favorite pastimes is to “ride around,” in the country, as I did as a child. So many simple pleasures come back, but without the complications. My parents, who touched not a drop on Sundays, took an afternoon ride in the country. I could hop out of the car and pick plums and violets or wade in creeks while they watched from the car. Here, I like to let the windows down and drive the lost roads, photographing abandoned farmhouses, wacky mailboxes, barns, and churches. The roads are named for churches, country stores long gone, or creeks. I pull over and explore tiny cemeteries, and lean over fences to pet the noses of horses. This is what I do in Italy, too, though it’s a different world.

  Frankye still is not behaving at Chatwood. In her frame on my chest of drawers, she slides down in the night, thwunk, waking me. The tacks fall out of the wood and she’s often catawampus, although other family members stay in place, even Big Mama on the back row of her family group, cradling baby Annie Ruth, who later would raise quite a bit of hell.

  As I lit out for California with Frank, I thought I’d had my share and more of trouble, that in the rest of life one adventure would cede only to the next. But just starting were decades of visiting Frankye. In the early years, when we had little money and lived three thousand miles away, that lonesome trip to Fitzgerald became my yearly vacation. My sisters and I met in Atlanta and drove the 180 miles south—green pines, green air, buzzards circling, heat wave rising off asphalt, possum smeared pink in the road, indelibly home—for an excruciating stay in Fitz’s finest, a motel fast going from tired to grungy.

  Half-paralyzed, Frankye still insisted on staying with us.

  We’d check her out of the nursing home. Two queen beds; I bunk with her.

  Who can sleep? Willful and bossy, she is terribly incapacitated physically, as well as mentally. We barely can haul her out of the backseat. She wants a bath, not her everyday shower. She has to be hoisted in and out of the tub, a terrifying ordeal always about to end with three of us in the water. Wrapped in a blue robe on the bed she looks like one of those beached seals we take excursions to see on the California shore. As in former days when she was beautiful, she is still concerned with her perfume, her nails, her rouge, which she rubs in clownish dark circles. Her skin stays luminous, without a sag or wrinkle, her hair silvery and wavy. Years down the line, she won’t wear false teeth and keeps her lips pursed so we won’t fuss at her about it again. She barely can walk but insists on lumbering into the drugstore, with my sister and me holding her up, to select new lipstick. We take her back to the car and she claws our arms as she cranks down, a lunging fall we control, rolling our eyes at each other behind her back. I go in again to get the rest of the things on her list. Lotion. Cigarettes. Eyedrops. There is a certain kind of compact she likes. Rose Ivoire. The one I selected will not do.

  Often my sisters and I wanted to shoot ourselves but we lived on gallows humor instead. At least the trust company allowed the nursing home costs to come out of our inheritance from Daddy Jack, which lasted for the first thirty years of her care. A sincere thank-you, D.J. the D.J. What would we have done without his bequest? Then the last nickel was gone. One day, she forgot that she smoked. She acquired diabetes, then slimmed down and it disappeared. She was rushed to emergency with a ruptured appendix. My sisters and I arrived quickly, but she had recovered. We walked in just as she demanded omelets and French fries at the hospital.

  Cataracts to cancer, she endured. We grew old ourselves, visiting her in the nursing home.

  Frankye needs a new frame, something silver and gleaming. Propped beside her mother, will she, at last, just, please, sit still?

  The day is mild, 21 December, and dark falls early. The shortest day. I’ll start my own swing toward the light with a belated thank-you to Daddy Jack, the boy on the boat with the sack of apples and the gumption to succeed that he must have owned as a child. Already that kernel of determination and drive was sprouting as he balled his fist in the baby photo, and later as he boarded the boat to America. He could add a three-digit column of numbers in his head. He was kind to the people who worked for him. Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

  Holding Daddy’s photograph to the light at the window, I sense something frail in the handsome, wary face. Because he died at forty-eight, my memories of him are both sharp and vague. If I had died so fatally young, I would not have had the chance to write my books. All his possibilities remain unfurled. He willed to me the fatalism that is the lot of those who lose a parent when young. I’m phobically frightened that I will lose someone I love, that I will be left at the rest stop, and that the man next to me on the plane is the terrorist. When Rena’s son drowned, I found out the worst that can happen to a parent. Other losses have been literally unbearable, but one bears them. You become sessile and keep small visitation rooms in your mind where those you lost still live. In one of those Daddy opens his coat and shows it lined with doves he’s brought home for dinner. In another, he leaps in his white suit into the mill sewer to save me. His curse words still turn the air blue. I’ve recently seen where he was born in Mayesworth, North Carolina (now Cramerton), on a hill called Maymont. I’ve found his grandfather’s big shingle house, he who exiled Daddy Jack to Fitzgerald, still standing in Charlotte. These threads, tendrils, let me travel way back to where he, Mother Mayes, and Daddy Jack launched, and to those people he came from, layers I never knew about.

  From a recently found distant relative, I even have a poem written by Mother Mayes’s father in Gastonia, North Carolina. John Laban Smith, a writer in this family! The house he built still stands. My sisters and I found it from an address on an old photo. Above the door, a stained glass panel was similar to the one in the house he built for his daughter, Frances, my Mother Mayes, in Fitzgerald. We have lists of cousins, grave sites, obituaries of relatives. The state of North Carolina is all over my DNA and somehow I was pulled here without knowing anything of that.

  Tracing Daddy’s family mysteriously realigned him in my mind. He has a context that has nothing to do with me. Recently, my sister came across several letters Garbert wrote to Frankye, full of passion and signed I love you with worship. For that, he has from me a red ribbon and gold medal around his neck.

  Sometimes a dream offers a gift. I am near The House. The oak tree stands no taller than the porch. A stranger looks over the lattice fence and tells me, “You know it is 1922.” In the garden, I see Daddy Jack. Young! Smiling. His hair parted, not the bald man I knew. “Where are the others?” I ask the stranger. “They are playing inside.” I hear a faint few bars of a saxophone and I want them to come running out the back door, clattering down the steps, Daddy at sixteen, my uncles and aunt. I almost see them and although the dream stops short, I’m thrilled to have taken this dip behind time, when I was still out in oblivion and they were who they were, all possibility.

  Forty-eight—a cruel age to die. My nephew hunts birds with Garbert’s guns. Surely he would have tamed eventually. From him, I take my love of beaches. He liked to joke. In any grand situation—in a fancy car or restaurant—he’d lean over to me and say,
“Wonder what the po’ folks are doing, Bud?” He had sweetness, too, which I remember more as a feeling than an instance. Still, I was right to turn on him the hard spurt.

  For Frankye, oddly enough, the word “munificence” comes to mind. Not that I ever forget her halo of negative ions. In the years since she’s been gone, I’ve not had the wild rash on my arm. I’ve learned to relax when I shampoo my hair. Forever, when I poured on the shampoo, I’d feel my shoulders seize and my eyes squeeze tightly shut. One day I suddenly thought relax and I physically recalled Frankye’s red nails scratching and digging into my scalp when she washed my hair over the sink. How much longer than memory the body reenacts what happened to it.

  But from her, a shower of gifts. When I was at camp or in college, she constantly mailed boxes of cheese straws and peanut butter cookies. From her I inherited my gusto for food and the table it’s set on—who’s there, what’s talked about, what’s for dessert, the old linens and silver, the flowers, the ritual. The premise that you go all out for a guest. And from her, the impetus to go. Even if it were only to Fernandina, or St. Simons, or Atlanta, she was quick to yank her bag from under the bed. I’m on a quest to see everything I want to see, which is everything she never saw. Before her long fall, she had about her every day an air of possibility, as though she were riding in on the crest of a wave, there, balancing just where the wave starts to curl, always expecting something fantastic, ready to be delivered to shore.