by Debra Dean
Every family has its stories. In ours, my mother is always the star. She won Miss Baton Rouge 1949 for her rendition of that mockingbird-and-magnolias speech in Jezebel, the one where Bette Davis tells Henry Fonda that she’s in his blood, “just like the smell of fever mists in the bottoms.” Some talent scout met her and invited her out to Hollywood to do a screen test, but as she tells it, she gave all that up to be a wife and a mother. Still, she’s never lost her penchant for drama. One year she made us kids dress up in our costumes and dragged us out trick-or-treating on the morning of November first because she’d been too plastered to take us out the night before. At each door, she made a pious little speech about Lizann, her youngest, being sickly, and how she just couldn’t let the little ones wander around the neighborhood in the damp of evening. She has an uncanny ability to humiliate, to make you absolutely crazy with rage. Then comes the coy act, or the righteous anger, or her famous imitation of a martyred saint, whatever suits the occasion.
When our brother, Ted, brought Lydia home for the first time, the Queen persisted in calling her Mrs. Gardner. She kept it up all through cocktails and dinner, politely inquiring after the health of Lydia’s former in-laws and behaving for all the world as if she didn’t know that Lydia had been divorced for almost a year. Afterward, Ted pitched a fit, he really laid into her, but she was too cagey for him.
“Surely your friend doesn’t object to good manners.” This said with a hand fluttering to her bosom.
“You were deliberately embarrassing her, Mama, with all that talk about her wedding.”
“You weren’t there, Edward. It was ravishing. Ray Gardner was in the military, you know, so they had that lovely business with the crossed sabers.”
“You’re a shrew. You knew damn well that she divorced him. You read the notice to me yourself.”
“Well, my goodness, darling, I don’t commit everything I read in the papers to memory.”
It can get funny, so long as you’re not on the receiving end. But we all get on her bad side if we cross her.
So I’m still not sure why I promised Lizann I’d take part in this particular drama; I’d worked so hard to get away from them. I went up North for school, a move that was variously interpreted as an insult to the family, to the state of Louisiana, and to Tulane, Daddy’s alma mater. When I graduated, I stayed on in Boston and stumbled around for a while, waiting on tables. Every Sunday evening for almost a year, the phone would ring at eight o’clock. I’d grit my teeth like one of Pavlov’s dogs hearing a bell, but no matter how hard I tried to match her cordial tone, within ten minutes I’d be screeching into the receiver.
Of course, the last straw was my moving to New York to give the acting thing a go. Actually, her words were “the last nail in my coffin.” You might think she’d be pleased that I was so clearly trying to fulfill her fantasy. But there you’d be wrong. She didn’t want anyone to upstage her, least of all me. She needn’t have worried.
We had a big fight one night that culminated in her telling me that while I had many good qualities, an actress needs a certain sparkle that makes people sit up and take notice. I, in turn, let her know just what I thought of her long-cherished illusion that she herself had this sparkle.
“That so-called studio scout, he wasn’t dazzled by your talent, Mama. He wanted to get you in the sack. Jesus, it’s the oldest line in the book. ‘I could make you a star.’ Even I’ve heard that one, Mama, even dull little me.”
Daddy says that they played hide-and-seek with the key to the liquor cabinet for weeks after that phone call. I started spending Christmases and Thanksgivings with friends.
Sometimes guilt did get the better of me, but I always, but always, ended up being sorry. On every plane back to New York, I would swear up and down that this time I had learned my lesson. I guess whoever said that blood is thicker than water knew what they were talking about. I don’t know how else to explain going back one more time.
My flight got hung up in Atlanta for hours while they fiddled with a hitch in the landing gear. I sat hunched over the pamphlets Lizann had mailed me, checking my wristwatch and wishing like hell that they’d let us off the plane so I could have a drink and a cigarette. Between booking a last-minute dinner party and my meat supplier losing an order, I’d already missed the first two meetings at Serenity Lane. The way things were going, I might very well miss the final one. Just about the time I’d decided to get off the plane and catch a flight heading back to New York, the pilot’s voice crackled over the PA, the lights flickered, and the plane began to lumber forward. It was already dark by the time I landed in New Orleans.
Aunt Maybelle and Uncle Duke were waiting at the airport. Duke grabbed the overnight bag out of my hand as I stepped into the terminal and ushered me through the sparse crowd around the gate to where my aunt sat in the waiting area. He said, “Does this look like our Victoria to you? I’m not at all sure, it’s been so long. I just grabbed the prettiest young lady comin’ down the ramp.”
Maybelle grasped my hand in hers and began to tear up. “Well, we’re just so happy to see you, Victoria. We’re just so glad. I don’t know what in the world—” She broke off, sniffling, and clicked open a patent leather handbag, searching for a hankie. “Your father, poor dear, he’ll be so happy. He wanted to come here himself, but he didn’t want Ellen to…. All this sneakin’ around. It makes me feel like a traitor, I swear.”
Duke broke in, chuckling. “You still charging them Yankees eighteen dollars for a plate of gumbo and greens?” This is another family joke. I started teaching myself to cook back when I was about thirteen and the Queen took to napping through the late afternoons. By the time she’d come downstairs to collect the sherry that Daddy rationed out to her each evening at cocktail hour, she’d already be too stupefied to put together a meal. I never was a fancy cook, but I loved tying an apron around my waist and feeding people. The catering business started out as a sideline, something to tide me over between acting jobs, but when the Cajun rage hit New York, I became sort of a small-time Colonel Sanders. I provide the local color, a trumped-up version of Southern hospitality, and my Grandmother Wilene’s recipes for cornbread and bourbon pie.
The meeting at the clinic had already started by the time we arrived. Ted was in the middle of reciting something, but when the three of us slipped in he stammered to a halt. A dumpling-faced man with blond wisps of hair combed across his scalp smiled and waved us into empty chairs near the door. Everyone else in the room I knew: Daddy, Lydia, Lizann, and my mother’s friend, Winnie.
“Ted, that was just fine. We’ll pick this up again in a minute, after we get Torrie here oriented a little. Torrie”—the man shifted his smile to me—“my name is Henry Bujone, and I’m going to be assisting in this intervention. I understand that you had a difficult time getting down here. But you’re here now, and that’s going to mean so much to your loved one.” Henry’s voice rolled like molasses, the long steady drawl of a preacher. “Lizann here tells me you used to be an actress. Might I have seen you in anything?”
“You might have.” I left it at that. I don’t know why, but I took an instant dislike to the man.
“Well, then.” He cleared his throat and resumed, “We’re just doing a little role-playing here. Kind of like a rehearsal for what we’re gonna say tomorrow. Everyone here has made a list of specific events and times when the dependent’s drinking has impacted on their lives. Did you get a chance to read the literature?”
I nodded, trying hard to keep my own smile from cracking into a smirk. No one who’d met the Queen Mother even once would call her dependent. Imperious, manipulative, and phony, yes, but not dependent.
“Well, if you have any questions, you feel free to speak right up. Let’s see, Ted, you were telling your mother about the time she dropped your little boy. Why don’t you tell her how that made you feel?”
Ted scrutinized the sheet of yellow legal paper in his lap.
“It made me scared and, well, kinda an
gry. I know she didn’t mean to, but…”
“Tell it to her, Ted.”
My brother cleared his throat and turned to Winnie. She, in turn, pursed her lips and glared at him, in a passable imitation of the Queen. What followed resembled the worst of the soaps: bad actors sitting around on a living room set and rehashing family traumas. You know, like “Tiffany, how could you leave Rock lying in that hospital bed dying of cancer, and run off to Monte Carlo with his best friend, Stone?” I sat there like a housewife riveted to the tube, worse really, since I already knew most of the plot turns. The Queen Mother would smash up the Lincoln in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly and then throw a hissy fit because her husband wouldn’t sue the guy she’d backed into. Lizann would be too embarrassed to bring her friends home because one time they’d found her mother passed out on the front lawn, and she’d had to lie and say the Queen was sunbathing.
I sat watching in fascinated horror as my entire family aired their dirty laundry in front of Henry, weeping and telling Winnie, Queen for a day, how much they loved her, how concerned they were for her welfare.
Daddy was the hardest to watch, though. When his turn came, his voice was so low and gravelly I could hardly make out the words. He told Winnie that he would love her till the day he died, but that he had packed two suitcases, one for each of them, and that if she didn’t use hers, he would take his and go home with his son. A few tears pooled in the leathery folds under his eyes. Daddy hadn’t cried since they shot Jack Kennedy in Dallas. He’d always been a proud man.
“Torrie, is there anything you’d like to say to your mother? I know you don’t have your list made up yet, but if there’s some particular incident that comes to mind, you might want to have a trial run tonight.”
I wanted to choke the little weasel. I wanted to go home.
“I think I’d rather wait, but thank you, Mr. Bujone.” I gave him my best beauty pageant smile.
I sat up half that night in Ted’s study, trying to finish the list ol’ Henry outlined for me after the meeting.
“First, we need to just shower her with love,” he had said. “The alcoholic is so guilty, they think no one could possibly love them. She needs to hear that y’all are here because you care for her. Just write whatever is in your heart. The rest I call data. Choose a few incidents when her drinking has affected you. Specific times and dates, if you can remember them.”
The data part was fairly easy, once I got past the idea that I was actually supposed to say everything I was writing. Once I got past that, I swear it was like a dam burst. That’s the wonderful thing about writing, I suppose: there’s no one there to talk back to you.
I hunched over the little desk in the corner of Ted’s pine-paneled study, filling up page after page with bad memories. I heard Lydia go upstairs, and later Ted stopped at the door to tell me that they’d made up the bed in the guest room and the pink towels in the bathroom were for me. I blew him a kiss and turned back to my list of the Queen’s transgressions. All the mornings that she was too hungover to get out of bed, and I fixed Lizann her lunches and dressed her for school. The times she borrowed my allowance for booze or made me tell Daddy that I needed five dollars for a movie ticket. I could write a book on the Queen Mother. Damn near did.
The opening part was what hung me up. It had been easily twenty years since I’d told the Queen I loved her. It never came up. Even the words on paper looked unconvincing. I stayed up until three in the morning, writing “I love you, Mother” and reading it back, crumpling up the paper and starting over, trying to find words that didn’t sound phony when I said them out loud. I turned off the desk lamp and carried my pad and pen over to the sofa. I sat in the dark, watching the moonlight fall in opal slats through the venetian blinds, and rehearsed my greeting card sentiments.
Early the next morning, Lydia was tapping on the door of the study. I’d spent a wretched night on the sofa and felt as shaky and surly as if I had a hangover. This was decidedly not the case—Ted and Lydia didn’t keep a drop in the house, not even for guests. Lydia stuck her head into the room and apologized for waking me, but we had to leave in an hour. Muffins and coffee were out in the breakfast room whenever I was ready.
I pulled myself up on the sofa and flicked on the end table lamp. A pool of light fell on the pad of lined paper. Except for a few crossed-out lines, the top sheet was blank. To hell with her, I thought. Why else would I be here if I didn’t love her?
Daddy’s law office is on the fifth floor of the old Mercantile Building downtown. I don’t think he has more than five or ten clients nowadays, but he goes down to the office every weekday, dressed in his gray worsted suit, French cuffs, and bow tie. He used to talk about retiring to the Gulf Coast, but he never has, nor do I imagine he will if he can help it. He needs the hours away from her, a little peace between the storms.
Lizann and Henry had dragged extra chairs from the secretary’s room next door and hauled the old leather chesterfield back against the wooden file cabinets to make room. The windows behind Daddy’s desk were steamed over and streaked with rain, and the room was heavy with that cottony silence peculiar to office buildings on the weekend. As each person filed in, Winnie and then Duke and Maybelle, there was a brief spasm of chatter and then a sinking quiet.
I chose a chair wedged between the desk and a glass-fronted bookcase, and pretended to study the cracked leather spines of old law books and the parchment diplomas on the wall. On Daddy’s desk was a silver framed portrait. It was of the Queen Mother on their wedding day, an enormous floral bouquet obscuring her gown, and the thick folds of a satin train arranged in a fan around her ankles. She stood erect and gazed solemnly past the photographer, in the formal style of the day. I remembered this photograph from my childhood; it had seemed to me the absolute height of elegance. Our mother frequently told us that she had named her children after royalty: Victoria, Edward, and Elizabeth. I had come up with the confused notion that my name ensured I would grow up to be as magnificent as the woman in the photograph. But then, I’d been a foolish, dreamy child: I had also believed in Santa Claus until well past my eighth birthday.
Down the hall, the elevator bell rang. Eight pairs of eyes riveted on the door. The window air conditioner coughed and rattled away, the only noise in the room. I strained to hear the clicking of the Queen’s pumps, the false pitch of Daddy’s voice as they approached. The thick, chicoried coffee I’d drunk for breakfast lurched through my blood, pinging like electricity in my stomach. I wanted to crawl under the desk.
The woman who came through that door was no longer magnificent. In the six years since I’d last seen her, she seemed to have visibly shrunk. Except for her pouching belly, all the flesh had withered off her, and she looked as scrawny and pitiful as a newborn chicken. Clearly, she had believed this to be a special occasion of some sort: she had worn a ruffled organdy dress, and her pinkish hair was tortured into vapory little puffs above her scalp, the work of some demon hairdresser.
There was a moment then, just a second, when I couldn’t believe that this woman had ever tyrannized me, that I had ever thought my life depended on getting away from her. She seemed too fragile and pathetic to hurt a fly.
She froze just inside the door, her vague eyes sharpening with horror, and then she composed a wary smile.
“What, in the name of heaven, is going on here? Thomas, I believe you have some explaining to do.” Her eyes flitted to Henry, and then to me, and she edged back a step.
“Are we all going to Biloxi?”
Henry rose from his chair, introduced himself, and explained that he was a counselor who’d been called in by her family. Her family had some things they wanted to say to her, and he wanted her promise that she would listen to us all before she responded. Her smile fell away and she lifted her chin, staring at some point above his head.
“Anything my family has to say to me, they could certainly say without calling a meeting.” Her voice wavered.
“I’d like you to p
romise to listen to them.”
There was a long silence.
“Why, of course.” She lowered herself into the chair that Daddy held for her, holding her eyes to that same invisible spot.
I only remember snatches of what was said, but it was excruciating to watch. When I was a child, Tootie once took me to a revival meeting at the state fairgrounds. It was truly a terrifying experience, waves of people springing to their feet and singing out feverish confessions, weeping and wailing like a pack of lunatics. I remember feeling like I was being drowned, my lungs filling up with other people’s tears.
My family are lapsed Episcopalians and not practiced in such ritual displays of emotion, but for amateurs, they put on quite a show. Lizann stumbled over her lines; Maybelle cried in jagged fits and starts; Duke squirmed and twitched like a dog plagued with fleas. Daddy, looking like a man sentenced to die, paced a slow circle behind his wife, plucking at his chin and wiping his eyes.
Throughout, the Queen Mother perched rigidly in her chair and stared off into space, not betraying for a minute that she was aware of the bedlam surrounding her. It was unnerving, as I’m sure she intended it to be. Excepting an occasional flinch, she held herself as still and dignified as the portrait on Daddy’s desk.
When my turn came around, I stared at the pad in my hands, covered with the angry words of the previous night. She’d heard it all before, every last sniveling complaint. I wondered how, after all these years, we had thought that a confrontation was going to get us anywhere. One more go around the block wasn’t going to make a difference.