But the owners, not ones to get their hands dirty, remained aloof. They might house Ed Bishop and his brood in one of their workmen’s cottages for a time. They might thank Ed after a bounteous crop of Black Twig and other vintage apples. But few cared enough to witness his science and his art.
A few years ago, I found an entry in my journal about that little long-ago scene between my father and my grandfather. What Granddaddy said that day resonated in so many ways within my family dynamics.
“I’m like the fly on the ox horn,” he told Daddy. “Don’t know when I’m there. Don’t miss me when I’m gone.”
The metaphor of a vulnerable insect dancing for attention on a beast’s unfeeling, unyielding horn would stay in Daddy’s mind over his lifetime. He would often think back on his father’s loneliness and feel his own in a county where you were either poor or rich, with few people in between.
* * *
EXCEPT FOR MY Granddaddy Bishop, most of my kin’s bosses were actually not much more prosperous than they were. For my parents, however, the asset gap zoomed from thousands of dollars to millions when, in the 1940s, they settled down to work for a du Pont heiress and her husband, the son of a Midwest hardware tycoon.
Anne Andrews McIntyre’s grandfather was Eugene du Pont, third-generation executive of the DuPont chemical empire and, until his death in 1902, patriarch of one of America’s richest and most powerful families. When Mom first met her, Anne was twenty-four and resting at her in-laws’ estate outside Roanoke, Virginia. She’d just given birth to her first child. Anne’s mother-in-law had asked other wealthy families about nursemaids and found my mother, then single, twenty-two, and longing for more stable employment.
Anne had attended Sidwell Friends in Washington, D.C., the Quaker school favored for the children of presidents and other national power brokers. She completed her education at a finishing school in Florence, Italy. The year before Mom connected with her, Anne had married John Sharpless McIntyre at the du Pont family’s ancestral place of worship, Christ Church Christiana Hundred in Greenville, Delaware. Buddy McIntyre, as he was called, was the son of John Joseph “J.J.” McIntyre, a bombastic Cleveland businessman who made his fortune in automotive bushings and bearings. J.J. moved his family to the Virginia countryside in order to raise horses.
It was at a horse show deep in the Virginia mountains that Buddy met Anne, a petite, auburn-haired socialite. Like Buddy’s parents’, Anne’s parents kept a stable of fine horses; she and Buddy were both ribbon-winning show riders. Buddy, also in his early twenties, was polished, somewhat shy, with slicked-back dark hair, suave in the manner of a young Richard Rodgers. Around the time of their wedding, Buddy bought Sunny Side, an old Keswick plantation and one-time inn. Buddy and Anne were staying hours away at Buddy’s parents’ house as their ten-bedroom mansion was being built to replace Sunny Side’s rotting one. They renamed the farm Bridlespur.
On my mom’s first night at the elder McIntyres’ place, Hobby Horse Farm, Anne instructed the cook to fix a supper plate and send it up to Adria’s room. Jane Byrd McIntyre, Buddy’s mother, intervened. No, she insisted, Adria Overstreet, the only white female in their house staff, would eat downstairs at the dining room table with the McIntyres. Later on, when Mom traveled with the baby to Anne’s parents’ plantation at Somerset, Virginia, Mom ate in the kitchen with the other servants.
The McIntyre grandchildren called Jane “Nano” and J.J. “Dompy,” and my mother did too. Nano bonded right away with Mom as they doted on newborn John S. “Buddy” McIntyre Jr., an adorable child with big brown eyes and bright-red curly hair. Eventually, Nano would become Mom’s principal ally in dealing with Ronnie, her secret son stashed off in another place.
Anne McIntyre, stylish striver in Virginia’s horsey high society, never pretended to be the mothering type. She left that to Adria, who’d been hired before to care for other babies as their mothers recovered from childbirth. Mom often told me about the time when Buddy’s diaper leaked as Anne held him, and she dropped him to the floor. Adria scooped him up. She acted as a second mother to him for the rest of her life.
A few years after the diaper incident, not long after Mom met Daddy, they were heading down a Keswick side road in his Willys sedan one night to visit friends. Anne and Buddy, out partying too, pulled their car up to Early’s for a chat. Anne mentioned that she’d left little Buddy locked up alone in the house. Mom politely wished her bosses a good night. When they drove out of sight, she told Daddy to turn around and take her home. She retrieved Buddy from the mansion and took him along to their friends’ house.
For seven years, Mom tended full-time to Buddy, then to his little brother, Byrd. She left Virginia for the first time when she traveled with the boys to their grandparents’ luxurious winter homes in South Carolina and Florida. Once the Bridlespur house was completed, she settled into the cramped maid’s quarters, up a steep, narrow stairway above the kitchen.
After Mom and Daddy’s courtship and marriage in the early forties, the McIntyres hired Daddy as their farm manager. Their primary focus at Bridlespur was their stable of Thoroughbred show horses, not far from their back door. They handpicked horse trainers and groomsmen and worked in close collaboration with them. Daddy raised the hay, gathered horse manure from the fields, and tended to incidental horse needs, but mainly he cared for the farm’s hundreds of back acres, the part of the farm of least interest to the McIntyres. They rarely walked or even drove to the luscious majority of their land. Their eyes glazed over as Daddy proudly reported how he’d saved the life of an ailing lamb, shot the weasel killing the chickens, or repaired a worn-out hay baler to save them money. They did want him, however, to make sure that the fields looked gorgeous from the highway and from their terrace when they held cocktail parties.
The bosses prized the yellow-green moss on the brick walkways of their formal gardens. To weed the moss before a party, Daddy would get down on his hands and knees, his left hand palm-down on the bricks, with tiny moss-embedded weeds sticking up between his fingers. He’d carefully pluck the weeds to protect the delicate moss. This took hours away from the cattle, the sheep, the fence repairs, and everything else. Daddy sulked as he did it.
But he was as willful as his bosses. He snuck around to practice the humane agriculture he thought right. He once told Buddy Sr. about a sickly calf, refused by his mother. The boss said to kill it. Daddy hid the calf in a back field, and when a neighbor complained about it bawling, the boss said again, kill it. Daddy put it in a barn and bottle-fed it Pepto-Bismol to ease its indigestion. It grew into a fine steer, eventually earning the boss, who didn’t know one bovine from another, $1,700 at the stockyard.
This stealth warfare went on between Daddy and the McIntyres for decades. They cared more about their horses and their French poodles than the farm itself, and that fact churned Daddy’s insides every day. He once told a neighbor, “It’s a terrible thing to fall in love with another man’s land.”
Daddy baled hay. He milked cows, and pulled pregnant heifers out of ditches in the middle of the night. He cleaned the swimming pool, hauled trash, and unstopped plumbing in the big house, no matter the hour. He fixed the water pump, took the I. Miller heels into town for a resole, ferried the mail, and shuttled the maid and the laundress in and out.
He tended to Anne’s hundred varieties of roses. When they developed canker, a fungal disease, Daddy researched it and advised her to cut the plants back. No, she said, and don’t spray insecticides on them either. So in a show of aggrieved servitude that may have gone unnoticed, Daddy lay on his back for days and painted each stem with fungicide. After his death, I found in his leavings a copy of her talk to a garden club about the history of her rose garden. She made no mention of Daddy.
Every winter as a child, I’d ride along when he delivered pickup loads of firewood to the saddest of Keswick’s black homes, where alcoholism slowed the lives within and cold winds whistled through the thin walls. Daddy did this for twenty years, until
Anne McIntyre found out. She ordered him to stop. She insisted he give her the proceeds from any wood gleaned from her property.
My father never explained that the wood was scraps—worm-eaten fence posts and fallen trees he’d cleared from back on the mountain—and that he gave it away. It was rough, half-rotten chunks with only enough BTUs left to keep a family from freezing for a few days. Nothing like the handsome seasoned oak logs he artfully stacked by Anne’s fireplaces.
In most matters, she, more than Buddy Sr., was boss. Anne was smart, determined, exacting. Nearly always done up in stockings and high heels, she spoke with a protracted nasal whine spliced with the entitled drone of the Duchess of Windsor. (Behind her back, Mom called her Annie Poo to mock her queenliness.) Anne always paid me kind attention and praised my good grades. She gave me a monogrammed sterling silver compact when I finished high school, and when I applied for my first newspaper job in Richmond, she or Buddy Sr. called their old friend the publisher to put in a word for me. Still, Anne intimidated me. I’d never been the target of her demands, but I saw what that was like. I did, though, admire her longhand’s artfully interlaced letters, and I still have some of her penciled notes to Daddy: “Early, please bring over some pretty wood 18 or 20 in long so I can lay a pretty fire in the master bedroom—Thanks Mrs Mac—Would like it before 10 a.m.”
When her mink coat went missing from her boudoir, she quizzed the black maid, who swore she didn’t know where it was. Anne remained suspicious. Later on, she asked Daddy to investigate a stench. Turns out, a sick opossum had climbed through a vent and, in clambering indoors, pulled the coat down behind some furniture and died curled up in mink.
Our house was furnished with the McIntyres’ fancy trash. When Anne became convinced that aluminum pots caused dementia, she gave their entire set to us. Mom cooked with those thick pans for the next fifty years.
Daddy rummaged through everything the McIntyres sent to the burn pile or to the mountain trash pit. He salvaged and fixed hundreds of things for us, some of which I still have: broken chairs, a desk, a shoehorn made from an antler, a trash can with a clipper ship on it, a brass letter opener from a busted office set, a fine-bristled shoe brush, a lighted art deco makeup mirror.
Daddy’s biggest prize was a Patek Philippe men’s watch tossed out when it quit running. Decades later, when my folks moved off the farm and made the acquaintance of a jeweler, Daddy asked him to fix the Swiss watch, which the man said was worth $8,000. Daddy bragged about it to a younger man he didn’t know well. Soon after, someone broke in my folks’ bedroom window when they were out one night. The thief left behind a trail of snuffed matchsticks and stole only the watch.
Every fall throughout the fifties and sixties, Anne sent word that Mom and I could come help ourselves to clothes she was sending to the annual SPCA thrift sale in town. Had Mom been a small woman, she would have worn the clothes. But she was much taller and half again as wide as Anne, a frequent shopper at Bonwit Teller, Bergdorf Goodman, and other expensive New York stores. So until I outgrew them, which I did by my midteens, I got Anne’s clothes.
Mom and I would feast our eyes on the bounty heaped on the McIntyres’ long dining room table: alligator purses, cashmeres, chiffons, and tweeds still exuding Anne’s perfume. We ran our hands down the silk linings. Pulled zippers that purred. Snapped handbag clasps over and over to hear the amazing muted phlumpt. Marveled at buttons heavier than silver dollars. Imagined our bodies, if they were suntanned, toned, lotioned, and powdered to perfection, slithering in and out of those dresses.
We trudged the long gravel road toward home, my skinny arms embracing scarves and dresses. Mom’s strong arms held suit jackets and coats, her wrists encircled with purse handles. We walked silently, quickly, self-consciously, in case Anne might have just gotten home and be spying out a window and think we’d taken too much. Or the poorer hired help might be watching from a barn or a field and envy us. Or maybe somebody would think we were stealing. We definitely didn’t feel worthy of these rich-lady clothes, and I was too young for them. But Mom would lengthen the sleeves and the hems, and I wore the Lord & Taylor coats to church.
* * *
FROM THE NEWSROOM of the Philadelphia Inquirer one afternoon in July 1981, I made my usual call to Mom. Just a routine check-in. As soon as she heard my voice, hers turned grave. “I have something to tell you.” When she was this solemn, she had major news to share, and it usually wasn’t good. I’d been at the Jersey Shore the week before. She hadn’t wanted to spoil my vacation, so now she was laying it on me. Two weeks earlier, Anne had fired Daddy. I began to sob.
Buddy Sr. had died of emphysema in 1978. A year later, Mom, Daddy, and I stood on Anne’s mossy patio and watched her marry a Missouri packaging company executive. They continued to live at Bridlespur. Daddy kept trimming the grass on John McIntyre’s grave at Grace Episcopal Church in Cismont. When Anne threw out John’s monogrammed mirrored trash can, a copy of his father’s photo portrait, and other McIntyre things, Daddy gathered them up for Buddy and Byrd.
Anne didn’t care much for my father. She was known as a flirt, and my father’s proper Presbyterian-elder demeanor made her uncomfortable. Finally, she got rid of Daddy.
Her new husband did the firing. He insisted that the job was too hard for my father at sixty-three. He noted that some of the Aberdeen-Angus beef cattle had developed pink eye, a common infection. On the farm and at the big house after that, Anne avoided Daddy as her new farm manager took over and Daddy tinkered on the outskirts, trying to be useful. She sent word through her husband that my folks could stay in the tenant house until they found a new place.
I went back to the farm to help my folks pack up the farmhouse. While Daddy was gathering his tools at a barn, Anne and her husband eased by in their car. When they turned around, Anne waved from the passenger seat. I dug my hands deep into my jeans and glared at her. I felt defiant, rude, a little bit brave.
Daddy had no pension. His Social Security payments were going to be low because his wages had been low. Furthermore, Social Security exempted farmworkers and domestics until the fifties, so the McIntyres hadn’t paid into Social Security for either of my parents during their first years of service. Anne offered Daddy a hundred-dollar-a-month retainer for fourteen months in case her new manager needed advice on the big spread. Later on, after Buddy Jr. and Byrd appealed to her, she sent Daddy a check for $8,000, and the boys sent more.
* * *
ON MY DRIVE into the farm that July evening, I choked up as I looked around at the evidence of Daddy’s handiwork—the fences and gates, the tidy white-painted barns and sheds, the bridge he built between the sheep barn and Anne’s rose garden, the fields so rich that an agriculture professor brought students there to sift the fine soil.
When I pulled my Volkswagen Beetle up to the house, my folks were sitting on the front porch in the twilight, waiting for me. Daddy usually worked until nightfall. Mom weeded and harvested in their garden out back until it was too dark to see the sweet peas. It was rare to see them sitting together on the porch.
That night we silently looked out across the hills. We listened as a quail in the tall grasses called its name, “Bah-ob WHITE! Bah-ob WHITE!” We surveyed the beauty that had been ours on a daily basis and soon would be gone from us. As night fell, I glanced down the porch and saw Mom’s lower lip trembling, her eyes brimming with tears. Each night that week, the three of us lined up in porch chairs and cried softly to ourselves. I gave up mascara.
Our misery lasted just a few months. My parents bought their first home, in Charlottesville, near their new church and a bus ride from Mom’s new medical school job at the University of Virginia. Daddy went to work at the farm supply where he’d been a customer since he rode a wagon there with his father.
* * *
AT CHRISTMASTIME IN 2000, Anne was dying in a Charlottesville hospital. She was eighty-six. Her designer dresses had been replaced by hospital gowns. Her reddish French twist was gone forever. Sh
e was bald and weighed a mere eighty-five pounds.
Buddy Jr. rushed in from his Mississippi home. Hospice nurses told him she was near death but hanging on. She wanted to see someone, but they couldn’t figure out whom. Buddy thought it might be her husband. He’d just had back surgery and hadn’t seen Anne for days. Buddy brought his stepfather to her. Anne still wasn’t satisfied.
Buddy had witnessed a dramatic change in Anne in her last years. Once a tigress, insistent on things being done her way, she was now gentle and patient. She thanked him repeatedly whenever he came. She had never been so humble, so thankful, so sweet. Then it dawned on Buddy and Byrd that maybe she wanted to see Early. They said his name, and she perked up.
On New Year’s Day 2000, my eighty-one-year-old father was home watching TV. Buddy called. He was coming over. He thought his mother wanted to see Early. Daddy pulled on his shoes. Mom grabbed his jacket and pulled its sleeves over his thin arms. At the hospital entrance, Buddy slipped Early into a wheelchair and rolled the crumpled little man to Anne’s bedside. She stared straight ahead with her eyes half-open. Hospice nurses assured Buddy she was aware and could hear quite well. Buddy left Anne and Early alone.
Early, the venerable Presbyterian, knew just what to do. He took Anne’s thin hand in his still-strong ones. He gently squeezed it. “Don’t you worry,” he whispered close to her ear. “We’re still friends. Everything’s going to be all right.”
He bowed his head near hers, closed his eyes, and softly prayed that God would take care of his old friend, that he would bring her peace and comfort, ease her suffering, and let her know that all her sins were forgiven. She was as loved as any other child of God. “In Jesus’s name we ask it,” my father said, as he always closed his prayers, “amen.”
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