by Amy Conner
My tired ears perk up. I’ve heard at least this part of her story before. “You had a terrible cold. When you went to the infirmary, that’s when you two met.”
My mother smiles. “Your father was the handsomest man I’d ever seen that wasn’t in a picture show—tall and slender, with thick silver-gilt hair and perfect white teeth. When he smiled and shook my hand, his cool hand was clean, with long fingers and even, trimmed nails.
“ ‘I’m Dr. Banks,’ he said.
“ ‘You seem awfully young,’ I blurted, and then wanted to crawl under the examining table for being so forward.
“ ‘Third-year resident,’ Dr. Banks said. He was unwrapping a tongue depressor. ‘Doing a little moonlighting before I finish my last stint in pediatrics. You just might be the last grown-up head cold I treat before I’m up to my eyeballs in diaper rash and whooping cough. Now, let’s take a look at your throat.’ ”
My coffee cup’s empty, but I don’t move to get up and get another. “So it wasn’t love at first sight, the way Daddy used to tell it?”
My mother shakes her head. “Oh, no, Annie. You see, back in Lannette, I’d walk to school as the sun came up. I’d cross over the railroad tracks with the folks working the second shift, but then, even though it was out of my way, I used to turn and take North Street so I could get a glimpse of all the big, beautiful houses where the mill executives, the banker, the doctor, and the owner of the car dealership lived. Their houses were built of bricks or smooth plaster, surrounded by oak trees, dogwoods, and maples, boxwoods and English ivy, set high above the street on green hills with lawns tended by armies of yardmen. I’d walk up North Street in my cheap skirts and blouses, in the awful shoes my mother had sacrificed for me to have, and clutch my books to my chest while I imagined that one day I’d own a home like this one, or that one, dreaming of having a maid and a closet full of pretty clothes to wear. I dreamed of children—well-behaved children who’d go to good schools. I dreamed of the professional man I’d marry, a banker or a lawyer, or best of all a doctor. Oh, before the end of my visit to the infirmary that afternoon, I knew your father was the one I’d been dreaming of, the man who could be the door to that life. Lord, he’d hold the door open for me, and we’d walk through it together with me on his arm.”
This comes as less than the revelation I thought it was going to be, but inside I ache for the girl she was, longing for what she’d never had. My mother, however, smiles and goes on.
“The only problem,” she says, “was that Dr. Banks hadn’t acted like he was interested in me at all, except for having the worst head cold he’d ever treated. He even got out a fancy camera and took pictures of my red, swollen throat to show his department head.
“ ‘Take these pills,’ he said, ‘and if you don’t feel better in a couple of days, come back to see me. I’ll check you for strep.’
“I wasn’t about to give up, not when I’d just met the man of my dreams, and so I was looking my best when I went back to the infirmary two days later. That morning, I was wearing my favorite of Tess’s sweater collection—a cherry-red cashmere—and a fawn-colored wool pencil skirt, imitation lizard pumps, and had brushed my hair until it shone like black glass. My string of pearls could have passed for real unless you looked too closely. When Dr. Banks walked in the examining room, his eyes widened.
“ ‘You seem to be much improved, Miss O’Shaunessy,’ he said.
“ ‘Oh, but I’m not,’ I said earnestly. ‘My throat’s still scratchy.’ He seemed unconvinced, but once again, he shone a light down my no-longer-scratchy throat.
“ ‘Hmm.’ Dr. Banks’s eyes met mine, and at once I understood that he knew I was only pretending to be sick. He turned away and threw the tongue depressor into the wastebasket. ‘You’re doing fine,’ the man of my dreams said, sounding depressingly cheerful. ‘When you get back to your dorm tonight, gargle with warm salt water. That should fix you up.’ He smiled, but I shook my head in denial.
“ ‘Tonight? I can’t go back to my classes, not feeling like this.’ I fluttered my eyelashes, pouting like Tess did when she wanted a boy to sit up and take notice of her.
“Dr. Banks’s smile turned serious. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course you can’t. I’m taking you downtown to Tujague’s for dinner and then to the Joy for the double feature. You can have that salt-water gargle after I drive you home.’
“Well, he didn’t try to kiss me good night after our first date, nor on our second, but by our third date I’d realized he was a little shy when he wasn’t wearing his white doctor’s coat, so I kissed him instead. I still don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t, but I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
“ ‘Hubba, hubba,’ Dr. Wade Banks said to me, his eyes wide. Then he kissed me back. Thoroughly.”
Her face is soft, almost dreamy with that memory, but then she looks at me and her gaze is sharp. “We were engaged four months later.”
I’ve never heard any of this. When Daddy talked about their meeting, he always made it sound as though he and my mother were wild about each other from the start. What bravery my mother had, risking everything to capture the man of her dreams. She was also, I realize, more than a little cold-blooded about it, and this makes me look at her with new eyes.
Coffee finished, we move to the living room, where it’s more comfortable. I curl up on the sofa with Troy, and my mother goes to the window, looking out at the afternoon.
“He asked me to marry him when we were parking in his Jaguar under the oaks in City Park,” she says, her expression faraway. “Your father had considered giving me a ring that had been his mother’s, but he said, ‘I want you to have your own, one that’s never belonged to anybody but you. Let’s go to Adler’s on Canal Street and you can pick it out.’ I was thrilled and more than a little scared of the high-wire act I had to perform now that we had wedding plans, but when I wasn’t studying or waiting for envious girls to call up and say Wade was waiting for me downstairs, I began to let myself think about floor plans and gardens, of my three beautiful children, my doctor husband. My dream was so close I could almost taste it.
“ ‘You want to watch out for his mother,’ Tess warned me one afternoon. We were lying on my bed, looking at her movie magazines together, leafing through the pages. ‘I’ll bet you a nickel she’s not going to be thrilled about her darling baby boy getting hitched.’ ”
My mother glances at me and raises a sardonic eyebrow. For sure, I can imagine Grandmother Banks blowing a gasket at the news. “Don’t I know about that!” I say, rolling my eyes.
My mother smiles grimly. “Well, at the time I didn’t. It was spring in New Orleans, the window was open, and the scent of jasmine and the trill of mockingbird song floated into our dorm room on the warm breeze. That morning was too pretty for me to worry about anything except where I was going to get the money to pay for a wedding gown.
“ ‘Why, I’m sure we’re going to get along famously,’ I said to Tess, feeling confident. ‘To hear Wade tell it, she’s an old-fashioned southern lady with loads of friends. She’s supposed to throw these great parties. In fact, Wade says she wants to meet me soon, that she’s going to give us an engagement party when we visit up there after he’s finished his residency.’
“Tess, wiser to the ways of the world of my dreams than I was, shook her head. ‘Still, Collie. That southern charm has teeth and claws. I bet she’s a mean old thing.’ ”
My mother sighs and turns away from the window. She walks back across the room to sit down beside me.
“When Tess said that, I wanted to put my hands over my ears,” she says. “In my mind, I could see Mother Banks greeting me on the porch of her mansion with a kiss, sliding her arm around my waist and telling me how thrilled she was that Wade and I had found each other. That’s why when the invitation came in the mail a week later, I felt no apprehension opening the heavy, cream-colored envelope, my name written on it in an exquisite cursive. Besides the handwritten invitation�
�which, according to Emily Post, was the living end in refinement—inside the envelope was a short note from Wade’s mother, asking me to come up to Jackson a day before the party so we could ‘get acquainted.’
“For three years, I’d managed on the money the church ladies always sent me, a hundred dollars a semester, and that had been enough so that I didn’t have to worry about having a job until summer vacation. It had been enough so that—if I was very careful—I could keep myself in decent clothes and have a little spending money. Tess, however, took one look at the invitation and told me there was nothing in my wardrobe that would pass muster with my future mother-in-law.
“ ‘Here,’ she said, throwing open the door to our closet. ‘Take anything you like. This dress would be fun for the party since I’m sure it’s not going to be a formal affair, probably just family and her intimate friends, and this suit’s perfect, I think, for when you meet the old cat.’ I tried the suit on, but Tess and I were only almost exactly the same size. This summer suit, made of a lovely peach silk poplin, was a bit tight across my bust and derriere. I turned and tried to look at myself from every angle in our mirror, tugging at the jacket and skirt.
“ ‘Hmm. Wear this blouse.’ Tess pulled a white linen blouse with a floppy bow from the closet. ‘You can leave the jacket unbuttoned.’ ”
Remembering how beautifully my mother has dressed since I was a child, I can just see her in her borrowed finery. “I bet you were lovely,” I say loyally, but she shakes her head.
“Oh, no, Annie. Two weeks later, when Wade and I walked up the wide front steps of the Banks mansion, that suit felt all wrong. Worse, when his mother rolled out onto the columned porch in her wheelchair, I could see reflected in her eyes a calculation that left me wanting. She smiled a faint smile, leaving me with no illusions. We were not going to have that moment I’d dreamed of.
“She dangled a diamond-ring-bedecked hand in greeting. ‘Colleen, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard so much about you from Wade, why, I feel like I know you already. You’re exactly as I’ve pictured you. Tell me everything about yourself.’
“Inside, I was cursing my damp palms as I took her hand, but your father must have only heard his mother being kind to a young girl, her beloved only son’s fiancée, because he smiled and kissed the iron-haired woman in the wheelchair on the cheek.
“ ‘Now, Mother—hold off. Collie needs to come in and sit down, have a glass of Easter Mae’s iced tea before she gives you the lowdown. It was a long drive up from New Orleans.’ He squeezed her shoulder and then went out to the Jaguar to bring in our luggage. It was a sweet, disarming thing for him to have said, but old Mrs. Banks’s eyes were flat and assessing, just like a cat’s before it decides if it’s going to eat that mouse or just play with it a while. Without saying a word, her narrow glance at Tess’s peach suit informed me that she knew I was dressed in someone else’s clothes, that I was an imposter.
“Face to face with a nightmare, I almost ran down the walk to the Jaguar, where Wade was unloading my poor old suitcase, to that wonderful car in which we’d shared kisses in front of my dorm. I wanted to ask him to take me back to New Orleans, but I knew he’d be mystified, maybe even think I was crazy because his mother hadn’t said a thing to me that could be construed as anything other than a kindly interest, a warm southern welcome for the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who’d managed to snare her son with trashy, underhanded wiles.
“But even though I was afraid, I knew that I couldn’t let her do that to me. The dream was within my grasp if only I had the nerve to reach out and grab it. I forced myself to smile at her.
“ ‘Thank you for inviting me,’ I murmured. ‘It’s so nice to meet you at last, too. Wade and I are so happy.’ Mrs. Banks lifted an eyebrow, as if to acknowledge that the battle had been joined.
“ ‘Come in, do.’ She turned her wheelchair around on the red tiles of the porch with a shrill shriek of rubber tires, turning her back on me. I hastened to hold the front door open for her. She didn’t say thank you, and by dinner that evening, I knew what I was in for. Mrs. Banks had interrogated me mercilessly all afternoon—all under the guise of ‘getting to know you, honey’—until I felt as gray and tired as the mill creek behind our old house in Lannette. Thank the Lord we weren’t just the three of us when we sat down in her gloomy, high-ceilinged dining room, where those old family portraits seemed to gaze disdainfully down at the interloper in their house. Thank goodness Aunt Too-Tai joined us, having driven up from the farm down near Meridian. Her suit was a heavy tweed, an odd choice for May.”
I smile, thinking of how Aunt Too-Tai must have appeared to my mother back then. I know that suit: she still has it. “I bet she was great.”
“Oh, of course.” My mother continues. “In fact, she was much the same as she is now. ‘Collie!’ Too-Tai said in a booming, happy voice, her handshake as strong as a man’s. ‘It’s a great pleasure.’ Wire-thin, gray-haired, and as tall as Wade, she towered over her thin-smiling older sister enthroned in her wheelchair at the head of the table. She said to me, ‘You’re pretty as a speckled pup, girl. Glad to know you.’
“Throughout dinner with its five courses, from consommé to chess pie, Too-Tai told us funny anecdotes about her life on the ‘home place’ while the silent maid served us all. Her friendliness was a bulwark against Mrs. Banks’s constant, sweet hostility offered like poisonous bonbons on a pretty dish. Oh, and thank goodness for Emily Post, too. Before I’d devoured her book, all those forks and spoons would’ve looked like a silver tiger trap to me. I felt myself beginning to relax, to think that perhaps I was going to win my way through this war, and then Wade’s mother casually mentioned that the help would be starting preparations for the party at six the next morning.
“ ‘We’ve a lot to do to pull this place together,’ she remarked. ‘The flowers, the food, the folding chairs. My friends are helping me out with a few things, but Easter Mae and her cousin Methyl Ivory are going to have to get started at the crack of dawn if we’re to be ready to receive by three.’
“Wade groaned. ‘This isn’t going to be one of your crushes, is it, Mother? You said it was going to be a small party.’
“His mother shrugged and rolled her eyes, a picture of helpless charm. ‘Oh, Wade—you know how it is. Once I invited one family, I had to invite all the families. I’m afraid it’s going to be rather a big do.’ Her eyes slid over to mine, and I was startled to realize that, while she sounded like she was composed and pleasantly anticipating the next afternoon’s party, in reality she was more than a little apprehensive.
“Of course she was. Whether I held up to scrutiny or not was going to be her problem, too. If I was trapped, then so was Mrs. Banks because by then I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. You may find it hard to believe, but there was a hard little part of me willing to cut up just so she’d be disgraced along with me. It wouldn’t be hard. I could talk like a hick, gobble the tea sandwiches, and pretend to be ignorant, but that part was the mill girl, the lint-head, the one who resented the fine folks living on top of the hills of Lannette and everyone just like them. I squashed that part of me flat. I couldn’t bear the thought of being a laughingstock even if it would embarrass this cold woman, not when I’d fought so hard for my place at this table.
“We finished dinner after much discussion of the party—the food, the flowers, who was coming and who had sent their regrets—and then Mrs. Banks kissed Wade, gave Too-Tai a pointed reminder that she needed a new dress, and rolled her chair into her elevator to go upstairs to bed. At the foot of the grand staircase, Wade and I shared a quick embrace before he went to stay in the garçonnière at the back of the gardens.
“ ‘You’re not worried, are you? Why, you’re going to be fine, sweetheart,’ he murmured in my ear. I laid my head on his shoulder and wondered. Before I went to bed in the most intimidating of the guest bedrooms, I unpacked the dress that Tess had loaned me and realized that it, like the suit, was all wrong. The poppy-pri
nted silk sheath was too bright, too daring, and a little too tight for this immense, gloomy old house, with its servants and family silver. As you might imagine, I didn’t sleep well, dreaming of appearing on stage without having learned my lines, wearing the wrong costume—or, worse, no costume at all.
“After a restless night, early the next morning I awoke to the sounds of the rental men delivering the folding chairs, and I sat up in the big half-tester bed in a panic until I came to the grim realization that there was nothing I could do about anything, none of it. I wanted to throw the covers over my head and never come out from under them.
“But then a knock on the door startled me. ‘Come in,’ I said.
“Too-Tai poked her gray head into the room, wearing the same old tweed suit from the night before. ‘Gracious,’ she said. ‘I’m always up early, but this is more noise than a baling machine in high gear. Listen, Isabelle’s going to put Wade to work as soon as he has a cup of coffee. Why don’t you get dressed? We’ll have some breakfast and get out of here. I can show you around Jackson.’
“I couldn’t imagine anything I wanted more. A couple of hours later, we were driving around the town in Too-Tai’s brand-new black Chevrolet. ‘I usually bring the truck,’ she confided. ‘But this time Isabelle swore she’d turn me away if I didn’t wear my good duds and drive the car. Since I was dying to meet you, I’ve had to behave myself.’ I giggled at that.
“Too-Tai glanced at me. ‘It’s good to hear you laugh,’ she said. ‘I was beginning to wonder if you knew how. Tell you what. Let’s go do a little shopping. I’ve only got the one suit, and Isabelle’s laid down the law—I have to wear a dress. I don’t own a dress, and Maison-Dit has got loads of ’em.’ I was too embarrassed to say that I hated shopping when I had no money to buy anything, so we found ourselves at Maison-Dit, being waited on hand and foot by Dolly, Aunt Too-Tai’s saleswoman.”