All my life with her, whenever any complications, whether medical or financial, were mentioned concerning a newborn, Mom would say reassuringly, “Every baby brings its own welcome.” But there was no welcome for Mom and Ronnie.
Someone who knew Mom told me that without anyone to care for Ronnie while she was on a job, Mom took him with her to a customer’s home. She needed to leave Ronnie and go across the house to do her work, so she pinned him in his diaper to a bed so that he wouldn’t roll onto the floor. She must not have been able to hear him wherever she was on the property, but his shrieks of frustration alarmed the residents. Someone alerted the authorities about this unmarried girl and her suffering baby.
Late in her life, I asked Mom what happened. “Did you really pin him to a bed in his diaper?” “No!” she replied angrily, frowning at me. She knew who’d told me, and she knew that person wasn’t likely to have manufactured something as bizarre as pinning a baby to a bed. Her voice grew quiet as she thought back to 1936. “I don’t know. Maybe I did.” Then her voice became softer yet. “I don’t remember much about back then.”
A “field visitor,” an early type of social worker, took charge of Ronnie. In her late twenties, with a flapper’s wavy brunette bob, the woman quickly lined up a childless couple to be his foster parents, and Mom was relieved. She long kept in touch with the social worker, who sent the gift of a high-chair pad when I was born years later.
* * *
ROY HALL WORKED on a Roanoke County dairy farm. He and his wife, Mellie Beal Linkous Hall, a former schoolteacher known as Polly, lived in a tenant house there. They were older than Mom. Roy was around thirty-six; Polly, about twenty-eight. They were unable to have biological children. Ronnie had a cold the day the social worker took him to the Halls. Adria had to go to work and didn’t meet the couple immediately. She worried about him all day, but when she met Polly and Roy, she knew Ronnie was in good hands.
Mom rented a room in a twenties bungalow in Roanoke County, just two miles from Ronnie. On days off, Mom walked those miles through farmland to visit Ronnie at Polly and Roy’s. She often brought along her Brownie and snapped many pictures of Ronnie. In one taken in winter, Roy, wearing a suit and a fedora, stands in a yard holding little Ronnie as Polly, appearing rigid in dark church clothes, looks on. “Polly, Ronald and Roy,” Mom wrote in the photo’s top margin. At the bottom, she penned two words with quotation marks around them for emphasis: “Our baby.”
From an early age, Mom was an eager picture taker. She carefully preserved thousands of photographs in albums and boxes. In all that trove, I never found a single one of her and Ronnie together. Not once, it seemed, did she hand that Brownie to someone and say, “Here, take one of us.”
A procession of boyfriends from that period slouch through her photo books: big old boys in gaudy ties, awkward Sunday suits, farmer’s tans, and white socks. Their faces are weathered; their hair, Vitalis slick. As she photographed them, they leered lustfully back at the leggy girl behind the camera.
During her workdays, she was getting a peek at how the other half lived. In Roanoke’s West End, she cared for the baby of a grocer who was on the Roanoke City Council. Then a well-to-do Jewish family of scrap-metal dealers needed Mom’s help with a newborn son, the care of his mother, and the last days of an elder. Mom was with the old woman when she died. The Methodist girl watched transfixed as the family kept shiva. They turned mirrors to the wall and buried the old lady without makeup, in a casket never open to view. It was all so different from Moneta, where people defied death with pancake makeup on the corpse, cheeks with clown-like circles of rouge, and lines of wailing mourners filing by open coffins. In 1938, that family recommended her to the McIntyres. Mom expected a short-term hire, like all the others, but she was hoping for more.
* * *
WHEN MY MOTHER arrived at Hobby Horse—by city bus or driven by the McIntyres’ chauffeur—she would have come up the long wooded drive to the house. This wonderland of Old South high living was like nothing she had ever seen.
Bells of grazing goats jingled in the thick forest below the house. Pastures, berry patches, and apple orchards were set off in the hilly distance. Just outside the house lay a formal English-style garden. Nano McIntyre had engaged a landscape designer to plant more than a hundred English boxwoods and to create ornate iron gates, a serpentine brick wall, red brick walkways, a goldfish pond with lily pads, and a wishing well surrounded by a tall, basketlike metal enclosure.
When Mom stepped inside the house, her eyes must have widened all the more: ten-foot ceilings, shiny oak floors, intricate wainscoting, Persian rugs, ticking grandfather clocks, and gleaming antiques. The living room alone measured six hundred square feet. The place felt more like a hotel than a home.
The staff took her to the kitchen and showed her how a needle on a clocklike device on the wall informed servants which room one of the McIntyres was buzzing from for service. The house was run by a black workforce—a cook, maid, chauffeur, and gardener/handyman. At least one horse trainer, a white man, and often a stable boy were outside with the horses. With Mom, the staff numbered seven.
The rest of the workers lived in their own homes or in the servants’ quarters in the backyard. Mom slept next to Buddy’s crib upstairs in the main house. The cook, who’d moved with her chauffeur husband from Cleveland with the elder McIntyres, whipped up lobster Newburg and cheese soufflés, the first fancy food Mom had tasted. Mom and the cook listened to gospel music on the kitchen radio Sunday mornings. Years ago, I called another of the McIntyre chauffeurs. When he went off to World War II, Mom wrote to him every week until his return.
Nano, missing her daughter, who had died in childbirth, must have seen something that touched her in Mom. Nano’s granddad had owned a hotel in Ohio. She hadn’t grown up impoverished, but neither had she been born into the kind of wealth Dompy had built for them. Right away, in October 1938, Nano and Mom bonded in their love for baby Buddy. Nano became like a mother to Mom, and Mom became like a mother to Buddy.
He was different from lean, platinum-haired Ronnie. Buddy was plump, cherubic, with large brown eyes, red ringlets, and a houseful of people showering him with affection. While Adria had struggled to dress Ronnie in secondhand shirts and booties, Buddy came swathed in hand-knitted sweaters and the finest down-filled bedding New York had to offer. Buddy didn’t make her feel guilty. This was babyhood done up right.
The earliest pictures I have of Mom and Buddy are soon after Buddy’s late-October birth. Those black-and-white photographs are so tiny, I long overlooked the moment of wonder captured there. A bit of window, shutter, and dentil molding in one picture tell me that Mom and Buddy are almost certainly on the lawn at Hobby Horse. The grass has not yet turned brown and only a few leaves lie on the lawn. Frost has not yet come.
Mom is kneeling beside Buddy, who is dozing within downy light-colored bedding in a low baby buggy. Mom’s wearing a warm-looking coat. A silk scarf is tied around her hair and under her chin. Her tender gaze at Buddy and her softly cupped hand resting on the edge of the buggy lend reverence to the scene.
Circumstances prevented Mom from caring for her own child, whose face reminded her of the man who disgraced her. And yet here she was, paid to love Buddy, who looked nothing like her and was three years younger than Ronnie. Her crisp white uniform and white shoes announced to the world that she was the professional nanny attached to this baby. She could love Buddy publicly, wholeheartedly, with pride.
Anne and Buddy Sr. were itching to move into their new Keswick house, designed by an architect who’d worked on restorations at Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg. It was taking a while.
As winter turned to spring at Hobby Horse, Mom settled into the cushioned window seat on the wide stair landing each afternoon as Buddy napped. While she read magazines in the sun, song sparrows caroled high in the forest. This wait was fine with Mom. She was swept up in a movie-like set of glamour. Forget hauling water. Forget tobacco worms and a hi
ckish old stepmother. Mom felt like a queen. She didn’t tell anyone about Ronnie. With him safe and far away, she was aiming for a more honorable life for herself, and just maybe, Ronnie could eventually be part of it.
* * *
EARLY IN THE forties, Mom and the McIntyres finally moved to Bridlespur Farm. Rich people weren’t just here and there in Keswick as they were in Roanoke. Keswick crawled with them. Mom had entered a deeper culture of prosperity. The new house—ten bedrooms, nine baths, eight fireplaces—was larger and more opulent than any place she’d seen.
Pushing Buddy in his baby carriage, Mom began to explore the farm’s 332 acres. The two of them would pet the towering horses’ velvety noses and peer inside the bustling milk house. They checked out the small tenant house and the larger, more weathered one, empty then, at the far end of the place. Some days Mom pushed Buddy all the way to the foot of the mountains, where farm owners from a century before were buried in a small cemetery, their slaves in unmarked graves nearby.
Mom and Buddy described those early years at Bridlespur as a languid, lovely time. The McIntyres had dinner promptly at seven o’clock. Afterward, on dark winter nights, Mom and Buddy would watch from a window as a lantern’s glow slowly approached from the direction of the distant, wooded settlement where a young kitchen servant lived. Her husband was coming across the fields to walk her home. After she’d wiped the last dish, the couple and their spot of golden light slowly disappeared back into the darkness.
Ronnie, Mom’s secret boy, was receding from the forefront of her mind. But not for long.
9
Polly and Roy
Ronnie’s faith in Polly Hall is unmistakable here. His combed hair and clothes show her attentiveness.
I was growing ever more curious about Ronnie as Mom lived out her final years, but I held off serious research. I didn’t want to torment her with puzzling details I might uncover. I’d be too captivated with them to keep them to myself.
But in 1999, when Mom was eighty-three, my local newspaper in Roanoke carried a story about the Linkous family. I knew from Mom that Ronnie’s foster mother, Polly, was born a Linkous. I called a family member mentioned in the article, and soon I was on the phone with Polly’s sister. Polly was in a nursing home, but at ninety-one, she was still sharp. It was now or never. I had to see her.
Ronnie had been dead almost eight years. He’d described to me how happy he’d been with Polly and Roy. He was sixteen months old when he went to live with them. He believed they were his parents. As soon as he could talk, he called them Mother and Daddy.
On a drizzly January afternoon, I found Polly in a wheelchair off a long hallway at Meadowbrook Nursing Home, between Roanoke and her hometown of Blacksburg. Like most white people of advanced age, Polly’s pigment had faded long before. Ivory skin, wispy white hair, she was as translucent as a window sheer flapping in the breeze. Her eyes, however, were startling pops of blue.
“Polly?”
Her eyes searched for me. I took her hand.
“I’m Mary Carter Bishop. Ronnie Overstreet’s sister.” She let this sink in, then squeezed my fingers. “Oh, my goodness. How is Ronnie?”
I told her he had died. She fell quiet. “I’m so sorry.”
I’d brought pictures, but Polly was mostly blind. She couldn’t see Ronnie in middle age. Nor could she see how much I looked like him. She strained to hear me. Wax clogged her ears. With her lower teeth and gums collapsing, her little chin rose almost to her mouth.
But when I sat close and directed my questions straight into her better ear, she remembered everything. I visited her four times. Even so many years later, she remained mystified about Mom’s behavior toward Ronnie. “It was hard to understand. I felt so sorry for her.”
* * *
POLLY AND ROY began looking for a child soon after witnessing friends’ overjoyed adoption of a little girl. Somebody heard that a social worker had a homeless baby boy. “We said, well, we’d be happy with a little boy.” The social worker came to interview them straightaway and in just a day or two, she returned with Ronnie in her arms. It was Christmas, and Ronnie was the best present Polly and Roy ever had.
Because he’d been confined so much during infancy, Ronnie’s muscular development was delayed, but soon after arriving at Polly and Roy’s, where he could stretch, crawl, and kick to his heart’s content, Ronnie began to walk.
For the next five years, by all accounts, he was a contented child. Pictures show him dressed up, grinning behind a big, round birthday cake, surrounded by toys, and scrunching his face in laughter while petting a dog. In my favorite, he stands atop a porch railing, Polly holding him safely around his torso. One of his arms curves familiarly around her neck while the other touches her arm.
Polly’s brothers ran three small stores in the New River Valley, forty miles west of Roanoke. Not long after taking Ronnie, Polly and Roy moved to Blacksburg so Roy could work for Polly’s brothers and their new family could be embraced by the whole Linkous clan—aunts, uncles, elders, and more cousins than Ronnie could count. Polly had eight brothers and sisters, and a mob of nieces and nephews.
One Christmas when Ronnie was around four, Polly and Roy lined up a spectacular holiday for him. Too excited to wait, they woke him up at two o’clock Christmas morning and announced that Santa had come. Ronnie raced downstairs to find a Lionel electric train chugging along its tracks and a pile of other presents. It had snowed overnight, so later on, Roy put chains on the car and off they rode to Polly’s parents’ farm at Merrimac, a coal-mining community on the other side of Blacksburg. Ronnie and all the Linkous grandkids feasted on candy, oranges, nuts, and everything a kid could want. Grandpa Linkous gave him a hand-carved wooden dancing man and the most-prized part of the dinner rabbit, the back.
Ronnie did well in his first year at Blacksburg Elementary. He took piano lessons and voice lessons. Those years were the pinnacle of his childhood. He felt loved and wanted.
People had told me Polly was a rigid fundamentalist Baptist who thought her Episcopalian and Presbyterian relatives were going to hell because they didn’t adhere strictly enough to the Scriptures. Maybe she’d mellowed in old age, but she was nothing but sensitive and kind when I was with her. She’d had polio as a child and suffered sickly bouts with arthritis and other ailments throughout her life. Frail Polly may not have been the hardiest or the warmest of mother figures, but she could give Ronnie what Mom could not: her unwavering attention.
Polly’s kin were farmers and gardeners. On birthdays and summer holidays, tables were set out in the yard at Polly’s parents’ house and loaded with ham biscuits, fried chicken, butter beans, and homemade ice cream. Ronnie had a pony to ride, vast lands to wander, and dozens of Linkous playmates.
Whenever she could, Mom visited Ronnie at Polly’s house. She’d accompany Polly and Roy when they drove him to Moneta to visit Grandpa Emmett and Miss Belle. Ronnie was their first grandchild.
For the rest of her life, Mom had only good things to say about Polly and Roy. She would be forever grateful to them. They had embraced little Ronnie when she could not. She warned them, though, that she’d want him back if she ever found a husband.
Early on, Polly and Roy were urging Mom to let them adopt him. Unless they did, they had to run every little decision past her. They wanted to truly be his parents. Mom kept putting them off. But the years were slipping by and she was still single. Polly and Roy grew impatient.
At one point, Polly and Mom arranged for Ronnie to move to another foster home where he would have brothers and sisters. The two women agreed that a larger family might be good for him. Quickly, however, they saw that the mother was favoring her biological children. One night when Polly and Mom knew the woman would bring Ronnie to a church service, they went there unannounced to observe. The woman had laid Ronnie on a pew. Even before he saw Polly, she heard him crying, “I want my mama, I want my mama.” He meant Polly, and she took him right back home.
By the 1940s, aroun
d the time Mom met Daddy, Polly and Roy were warning Mom that if they couldn’t adopt Ronnie, they would have to let him go. “I tried to make her see that she was ruining him by not allowing him to be adopted,” Polly told me three years before her death at age ninety-four. “Just kept him all stirred up, all the time.”
Roy had gotten a better job—as a fireman at the Hercules Powder Company’s military ammunition plant at Radford, Virginia, not far from Blacksburg. He and Polly had the resources now to provide even more generously for Ronnie, maybe even send him to college. Yet they felt no certainty about him at all. If Mom was going to whisk Ronnie away, Polly wanted to get it over with. But at this point, Ronnie didn’t even know Adria was his mother.
* * *
ONE EVENING IN August 1941, while Buddy was napping, Mom strolled around Bridlespur with the farm manager’s daughter. On their return to the young woman’s cottage, a tall fellow was standing by a Willys coupe waiting for her brother to emerge.
Six-foot Early Lee Bishop, farmhand on another estate, possessed the droopy eyes, cleft chin, and hangdog handsomeness of actor Robert Mitchum. He was twenty-three, bashful, and better-spoken than your average hay-bale-slinging roughneck.
Mom, at twenty-five, older and more experienced, accepted his offer of a short ride to the McIntyres’ house. She felt an attraction right away. The next day, she couldn’t quit thinking about him. He began to write poetry for her. Daddy asked her to marry him that Christmas Eve.
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