Don't You Ever

by Mary Carter Bishop

  Before I left, I handed him a business card so he’d have my phone number. He placed it delicately in front of his 1930s cash register and smiled at it. My sister is a reporter at the biggest paper around.

  I patted him on the back. He did not respond. Hugging him seemed out of line. The stiffness of his back told me this was a man who hadn’t been hugged much.

  As I left, he called out, “If you need anything, you know where you can find me.”

  I walked to my car, out of sight, and I wept.

  Later on, I called Mom to let her know I’d gone to see him. I didn’t tell her much of what he said. She warned me to go slow. “Be careful. He might be putting on a good front.”

  The year before, she and Daddy had gone to a reunion of her Moneta School classmates. Her thick silver-blue hair set in high waves, she’d worn her most upright, upscale outfit, a pink linen suit with a silky off-white blouse and pearls. She was nervous; friends would be there, but also people she hadn’t seen in fifty years. She sat primly on a folding chair, her stockinged knees squeezed tight together. Old friends came by and hugged her, and she thought for a while that it was a good thing she’d come. But on reading her name tag, one of the other women had walked wordlessly away, and another regarded her with a frosty eye and had little to say. “They turned up their nose at me,” Mom confessed to me later, her jaw twitching in a fight against tears. Maybe all of them were awkward. Maybe she imagined the contempt for which she was primed. But it didn’t matter. My perfect-posture, courageous, seventy-year-old mama went there in hopes of packing away her disgrace, only to have it refreshed. She was still that frightened, humiliated, pregnant girl, Adria Overstreet.

  13

  We Get Acquainted

  Ronnie turned thirty-six in 1971.

  That year, I wrote “See Ronnie” in my datebook more than sixteen times. But I didn’t go. On my 1988 calendar, I wrote his name in capital letters, with stars. I still didn’t go.

  I was busy, and it was hard to hear about my tenderhearted mother being so cruel to him.

  My guilt mounted, and finally I started seeing him again. I went to the barbershop four more times over the next year or so. As soon as I came through the door, he’d launch into a rambling gush of story fragments and observations. He jumped from subject to subject—local pizza joints to British royalty, Vinton politics to camera lenses. He lectured me. He’d saved up insights to share with me. He was desperate to talk.

  He threw college-boy words at me—“elitist,” “fatalist,” “utopia”—and urged me to study fifteenth-century English history as he had. Only then could I fully comprehend Virginia’s pompous past. Yet his knowledge about all that seemed spotty, like a quilt missing squares. Not surprising for an eighth-grade dropout whose early schooling kept being interrupted. Still, he possessed an eager mind.

  He’d visited the graves of our grandparents in country cemeteries. He’d researched the blue-blooded owners of Keswick’s oldest farms. Studying the backgrounds of people from his past helped him figure out where he fit in. “That’s how I found myself,” he said with pride, to underscore that he had put himself in context, and nobody had helped him.

  He didn’t come right out and say it, but I could tell he was proud of me. He’d been following my newspaper stories. I’d won national awards and was a Pulitzer finalist for a series about how exterminators were poisoning and defrauding people. “You’re the only one of us who’s amounted to anything,” he told me between haircuts. Sad as that statement was, at least he considered himself to be in the family “us.” Every time I saw him, I wanted to cry, but not in front of him. To do that would make me more a part of his life than I was comfortable with, at least not yet.

  I did what I’d learned to do as a journalist: I listened. By then, I’d been a reporter more than twenty years. I’d written about colorful strangers of all sorts in several states and cities. Ronnie was the greatest enigma of them all.

  He’d lived in Virginia all his life, yet he didn’t sound all that Southern. He boomed on and on in a cynical Godfather patois. Everything was a caper. Everybody was on the make. Men were jokers, cats, and bozos. Women were sirens if they were good-looking, squaws if they weren’t. Ronnie didn’t drive his car. He wheeled his unit.

  Then one day he told me that in his first barbering job, the immigrant businessmen nearby mentored him. They were from Northern cities. They became the fathers he needed; they left their imprint on him, I could hear it.

  “I think the Democrats are going to nominate Jesse Jackson,” I announced to him cheerfully one day in 1988. Jackson was patching together a coalition of blacks, whites, poor, rich, Northerners, Southerners, gays. I believed he could be elected. Ronnie hooted. “You kidding me? That’s Mickey Mouse eating blackberries.” That was my favorite comeback of his to anything he thought idealistic mush. It meant, “You’re dwelling in Cartoonland, kid. The world ain’t all that good.”

  He embraced cynicism and irreverence instead, and whenever I’d say something that rang that chime—like what a lousy job the media were doing covering the campaign—he’d snicker with glee and slowly nod his head.

  * * *

  IN THE YEARS when I was reconnecting with Ronnie, I ran a gantlet between him and Mom—fact-checking with her what he’d tell me and running back to him to learn more. As a sister and a daughter, I was careful—those two were wary of each other; their memories tapped a soul-close vein. Deep down, however, I remained a nosy reporter. I wanted to know every crumb of their story.

  Each time I was with Ronnie, I felt worse for him and more confused about our mother. For the most part, she corroborated his accounts of events they’d shared. Each inquiry, though, seemed to ping against the lead wall she’d erected in her mind to keep from thinking about him. Each inquiry was a small shaming by her chosen child.

  But what was I going to do? Once I got to know Ronnie, I couldn’t turn away. I had a right to know what had happened to my brother.

  * * *

  ON THANKSGIVING DAY 1988 at my folks’ house in Charlottesville, Mom surprised me by phoning Ronnie out of the blue to invite him to lunch. It was late in the morning. The turkey was roasting in the oven; the potatoes were boiling in the saucepan. Ronnie lived two hours away. This was not a sincere invitation.

  The young niece of Ronnie’s landlady answered the phone in Vinton. She hollered up the stairs to Ronnie that a woman named Adria—Mom spelled it out—was inviting him to lunch. He shouted back that he was going hunting—probably not a sincere reply either. Ronnie’s hunting expeditions started way before dawn. Mom hung up the phone, grumbling in the clumsy anger of the guilt-ridden.

  At Christmas that year, Ronnie reported that she’d been writing to him. Around then, Virginia lawmakers, propelled by my reporting, were preparing massive reform to regulate pesticides. Still, her focus on me chafed Ronnie. “It’s ‘Mary Carter this’ and ‘Mary Carter that.’ She don’t give a damn about me.”

  His feelings about her were tangled and mercurial. I couldn’t predict his attitude on any given day. He admired her, yet he blamed her for everything wrong in his life, and I was beginning to agree with him there. I didn’t talk much about her to him. My relationship with her was so drastically different. No need to rub his nose in it.

  He was unwavering, however, in his contempt for Daddy. I’d heard his recollections of Daddy not treating him right. And yet Daddy had defended Ronnie to that social worker at Western State. But Ronnie didn’t know that, and I didn’t either at that point. It didn’t matter. I knew it was easier for Ronnie to heap blame on Daddy than to spew all his hatred at his own mother.

  Somewhere under Ronnie’s protective bramble of furious language, I thought I detected a kind heart. I wondered if I could fight my way through his armor and get to know that side of him. With each visit, I was beginning to put the people, places, and events of his life in chronological order.

  * * *

  IN AUGUST 1953, he’d stepped off a bus onto th
e hustle-bustle streets of downtown Roanoke. The state institutions that held him for ten months had turned him loose. They lined up a job for him. No more shock treatments. No more heavy metal doors clanging behind him. His asthma disappeared once he got away from Mom, and now the world lay before him. He had a comb in his pocket and a trade certified right there on his barber school diploma.

  He’d graduated from the thousand-hour, six-month-long barbering course just down the road from Western State at the state-run Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center in Fishersville, Virginia. It certified him in haircutting, shaving, shampooing, scalp treatments, massaging, barbering science, barbering ethics, and barbershop management. The day after graduation, he turned eighteen. I don’t know if my folks went to the ceremony, if there even was one, or if Ronnie came home that weekend. I’d just turned eight, and I don’t remember. But days after his birthday, the state put him on that bus for Roanoke.

  “I thought I’d hit the jackpot when I stepped out there on Jefferson Street and saw all those buses and trains, and all those fancy-dressed people.” He’d landed a job at the epicenter of little Roanoke.

  With a population of ninety-two thousand and at its all-time industrial peak, Roanoke was a three-ring circus to a restless young man. It put on a giant fair his first week there. Roanoke had seven movie theaters and more drive-ins than that. It had eateries crammed into every corner, a good public library, record stores, cute secretaries streaming by at lunchtime—Ronnie was in the catbird seat.

  Europeans first called the place Big Lick for the salt marshes that conveniently drew game for them to shoot. Sodium, iron, calcium, and other nutrients in those natural “licks” strengthened animals’ bones and muscles. Roanoke eventually became a manufacturing hub when railroads developed the very same trails blazed to the salty waters first by mastodons, then bison, then native people, then white settlers.

  Roanoke, though a small city, was an urban oasis in the vast rural swath that is the western half of Virginia. Heading east to west across the state in the 1950s, after the capital of Richmond, you had to drive hundreds of miles to Louisville, Kentucky, to find a city bigger and livelier than Roanoke.

  * * *

  RONNIE’S BARBERING TEACHERS had shipped him off to work at the long-standing four-seat American Barber Shop at the corner of Jefferson Street and Campbell Avenue, Roanoke’s busiest intersection. Western State didn’t officially discharge Ronnie from the hospital until March 1954 when it declared him “improved.” The Roanoke job must have been granted on only a trial basis, but Ronnie stuck. He was at the American more than three years.

  Though he was draft bait, he never served in the military. In October 1953, weeks after he turned eighteen and clenched that first job, the Selective Service System sent a postcard to Ronnie’s rented room. The card provided him with a ten-digit identification number for the draft and directed him to notify the local draft board whenever he moved, which was often. The United States had signed an armistice that ended the Korean War slightly more than two months earlier, in late July. Either Ronnie slipped by—too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam—or his stay in a mental hospital and his electroshock there rendered him ineligible.

  Fatherless Ronnie suddenly was surrounded by men of several ethnicities eager to advise the scrawny teenager on clothes, cars, money, and women. Jewish pawnbrokers, Lebanese sandwich makers, Greek hot dog vendors, Scots-Irish pool hustlers with their custom-made cue sticks—they all reached out to the solitary boy. A blend of their New York accents mixed with some Southernness—I heard it in Ronnie’s voice when I finally got to know him.

  A Jewish clothier with a store near the barbershop snappily outfitted Ronnie in corduroy sport coats and sharply creased gabardine slacks. Ronnie dated the daughters of downtown merchants and bragged to me that he was invited “to all the best dances.”

  Police took advantage of greenhorn Ronnie. “One cop liked his little nip, so I went to the liquor store for him. . . . They all got their haircuts free, and you had to buy their tickets to the Policemen’s Ball.” Some leaned on him to be a snitch. “I didn’t care too much for that.”

  He still called himself Slim, a nickname coined by the boys back at Miller School. Ronnie Overstreet was that poor bastard kid. Slim Overstreet, now, he was a man about town.

  Without a car at first, he rented a room a ten-minute walk from the barbershop. The widow of a railroad machinist charged him five dollars a month for a spare room in her house. Ronnie could sit up in bed and look out across a park to the grand Tudor-style Hotel Roanoke a half mile away on the other side of the railroad tracks.

  Downtown Roanoke teemed with thousands of male heads crying for regular trims. Offices in every direction from Ronnie’s shop held insurance men, lawyers, railway clerks, coal dealers, telegraph operators, stockbrokers, accountants, tailors, tobacconists, real estate brokers, watch repairmen, doctors, dentists, jewelers, bankers, elevator repairmen, and shoe salesmen.

  His first weekly paycheck was $35.60. After he paid for his room and for food, he had plenty of money left. “Went in the sock”—his savings. A grilled ham and cheese was $1.05 at People’s Drug. He’d wolf down two. He spread his meals around town, strategically making new friends and customers. In turn, the short-order cooks, spying his thin frame, ladled on extra gravy.

  In the spring of 1954, the barbershop’s shoeshine guy tipped Ronnie off to a three-year-old colt running in the Belmont Stakes. The odds were fourteen to one. Ronnie went to the bookie upstairs in the pool hall and placed a week’s wages on High Gun. The horse won. Thirty years later, Ronnie still was savoring the memory of his good fortune. “I left out of the pool hall that day with a grocery sack full of money.”

  He went car shopping. The first used-car dealer called him a hayseed, so Ronnie moved on. At the next place, he discovered a ’49 Buick, a preacher’s car, jet-black, spotless. He paid $1,300 for it, most of his winnings. “A cigarette had never been smoked in it, and along comes Slim.” Now, not only could Ronnie peer out his bedroom window and admire Roanoke’s finest hotel, he could look down on the street and see his very own car. He washed it weekly and faithfully changed its oil.

  As he stood on the corner outside the barbershop during a break one day, old tycoon J.J. McIntyre cruised by. Ronnie’s boyhood pal Buddy McIntyre, a teenager by then, couldn’t get his granddad to stop. For years after, Ronnie relished the memory of Buddy, ecstatic to see his old friend, waving like mad and leaning halfway out the window of “that goddamned Mercury.” Ronnie’s new roots in Roanoke were not only fattening him up and making him smile but also healing old wounds.

  * * *

  THE BARBERSHOP WAS the scene of one of the most dramatic events in Ronnie’s life. I heard two versions.

  As Ronnie recalled, it was around lunchtime when a thin brown-haired man slipped into his chair for a cut. Within seconds, Ronnie realized he was intimately familiar with that head. He glanced in the mirror and saw the long face of his foster father, Roy Hall. Ronnie hadn’t seen Polly and Roy for more than ten years, not since he left Boys’ Home.

  In an undated letter I found in Ronnie’s file at the orphanage, Polly wrote, “My dear little boy, guess you think I am not going to ever answer your sweet letter but it has been so hot and everything that I just haven’t felt like writing. I surely hope you are being extra nice so you can come over next week for your vacation. Please try to be good and not get any bars,” which were Boys’ Home’s version of demerits. She signed off, “Love always, Mother.”

  Ronnie often left Boys’ Home to spend holidays back in Blacksburg with Polly and Roy. But once he checked out of the orphanage at age eight and joined Mom at Bridlespur, Polly and Roy decided to butt out and to let Ronnie settle in with her. Little did they know how badly that was going.

  Ronnie thought for years about reconnecting with Polly and Roy. But he was afraid. He never understood why he had to leave them in the first place. Had he done something wrong? Had they stopped loving him? He
had no idea that they’d begged Mom for years to let them adopt him.

  As Ronnie scissored Roy’s hair, Roy began to chat about this and that. Ronnie, so tall now that Roy didn’t recognize him, was about to pop with excitement. Finally, Ronnie casually remarked, “Didn’t you have a little blond-headed boy years ago?” Roy blanched and asked, “Hey, yeah. How’d you know that?” To which Ronnie replied, “Because you’re talking to him.”

  Roy leapt up and wrapped Ronnie in his arms. After a minute, Roy wagged his finger at Ronnie, just like he was his little boy all over again. Now, you wait right here, okay? I’m going to go get Polly. Don’t you go anywhere! Roy sped the fifty miles home and was back with Polly by two o’clock. There was so much hugging and kissing that the whole barbershop was celebrating with them. So, as Ronnie recalled fondly, “There was nothing to do but take the rest of the day off.”

  Polly’s memory was that Ronnie had cut the hair of a friend of Roy’s who told Roy about this young Roanoke barber named Ronnie who knew all about Roy. “Roy came home. He was all upset. He told me, ‘We’re going to Roanoke tomorrow.’” She rode along and they were all reunited at the barbershop.

  Regardless of how exactly it happened, that day reassured Ronnie of Polly and Roy’s affections, and if he had any lingering doubts, they were dispatched the following Sunday, when Polly’s whole family welcomed him back into their fold. The clan put on a feast and mounted a banner out front: “Welcome home, Ronnie.” He found old pictures of himself in every room of Polly and Roy’s house, and a fat album of his childhood photos set out on a table. It was one of the happiest days of his life.

  For the next five years, Ronnie drove his Buick to Blacksburg most weekends. He wasn’t much of a churchgoing fellow, but for Polly and Roy’s sake he tagged along with them to services. Ronnie’s father figures back in Roanoke had advised him to find his girlfriends in church, not bars. “Church,” they’d counseled him, “is where you’ll find the clean girls.”