by Barbara Hall
Fern became my mother. So that’s what we’ll call her from this point on.
Mama always said she married right away to get out of her house. I don’t know what that means; I don’t ask her. She was happy in her marriage at first. Gerard made a lot of money as a tobacco salesman, and it wasn’t long before they had a son, my much older brother, Gregory. Their style of high living calmed right down after that. Whereas they used to run around the Southeast, taking vacations and going to parties, Mama was forced to stay at home with Gregory. Her husband kept running around.
Not long after one of his “business” trips, Mama received a pair of shoes in the mail. A note accompanying the shoes said, “Mrs. Wyatt, you left these in the hotel room during your last stay.”
“They weren’t even my size,” Mama told me when she related the story. My sister and I used to laugh very hard at the tale and Mama laughed too, just to keep us company. But I could see she didn’t find it funny.
Mama moved out of her married home and back in with her parents. Only, they didn’t want her. My grandfather had spent his whole life trying to get the girls out of the house—damned if he was going to take the difficult one back in. My grandmother always sided with him. She said, “No way, Miss Sister, you made your bed, you’ve got to lie in it.”
It was 1952. Mama was all alone in the world with a little boy, barely four years old. She didn’t know how to cope. Grandma suggested that she move to Danville to find a job. They would look after Gregory until she situated herself. When she found herself a job and a husband, she could have her son back. My mother agreed. There was nothing else she could do.
“Looking back, I should have seen how it was going to go,” Mama used to say to me. “But I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t have anybody to teach me.”
She got all dreamy when she said things like that, as if she had somehow missed her own life.
She doesn’t talk about it much anymore. This was when I was little. These days she just sits and smokes and drinks iced tea and writes letters to Sandra in college. When she sees me it’s like she’s a little confused as to why I’m still around.
Don’t go feeling sorry for me—that’s not the point and I’ve done nothing to deserve it. I’m just telling you how it is in my family.
When my mother went off to Danville to look for that job, she was still young and beautiful and all full of hope. She had made a mistake but she hadn’t ruined her life. Ruining your life takes time and work and one wrong decision after another. She hadn’t done it yet, but she was on her way.
That’s where we leave our heroine, my mother, in a boardinghouse in Danville, working as a receptionist at a newspaper, and maybe for the first time in her life feeling strong, with a sense of purpose. But missing her son. Always missing him.
Now back to Union Grade. My father’s side.
The Pittmans of Union Grade.
My father’s family is from the town of Competition/ Union Grade as far back as anyone can remember. They actually lived in town, which meant there weren’t any wealthy landowners in sight. They were workers. They worked for wages, the men and the women alike. When there was no work, they were hungry. After the war, during Reconstruction, their situation was “no better than the Negroes,” my Grandma Lucille used to say. She was my father’s mother, the crazy one. The genuinely crazy one; we had to visit her in the psych ward when I was little. A guy with keys would come to let us in. She would sit in her room and wring her hands. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
They were no better off than the freed slaves, these workers, my father’s family, and that was a reality they just couldn’t get their heads around. Before the war they at least had someone to look down on. I’m telling you this because that’s how it was explained to me, not because any of it is justifiable. It’s just how my father was raised. On the lowest rung of the social order. Maybe you’ve heard of white trash as a joke, but back then it was a real thing. On the social scale, they were below the freed slaves. Which is why they were allowed to starve.
My grandfather, Russell Pittman, who was a decent, nondrinking man, struggled to keep the family’s head above water. All his brothers were drunks. Some of them had gone to jail. But he was going to keep his family respectable if it killed him.
He worked in various handyman jobs and eventually found his way to fairly steady work at a sawmill. His wife helped out by sewing for people. When the children were born, my father Clyde first, his sister Margaret second, my grandfather said no to Grandma Lucille working anymore. It was a pride issue, though they were nearly broke. A decent man in those days did not let the mother of his children work.
They got by. They were poor. The Depression came and some days they didn’t eat. Neighbors helped them out. My father’s memory of this time was so bleak he could hardly talk about it. He would never let us put popcorn on the Christmas tree because he said that was something born out of the Depression and it made him too sad. For the same reason we could never eat beans in my house—that was all they had sometimes growing up. He had a list of things like that. My mother was impatient about it. She couldn’t understand the trauma of poverty because she had never had to confront it. “My people always had money,” she would whisper to me.
My father’s memory of his life growing up was spotty and irregular. Sometimes he recalled pure happiness, simple things that made him giddy and sentimental. His parents were loving and pure, easy to understand. Hard work was rewarded and they all believed in God. He played sports and looked out for his sister, and in the evenings they sat around and told stories rather than watching television (which they didn’t have, obviously). Everything was elemental and no one pondered his purpose on earth. They just lived, from day to day, and it all worked. Sometimes he did recall and would remind me that it was nothing more than their “good reputation” that kept them from starving. His father taught him how to build things and how to garden, while his mother taught his sister Margaret how to cook and clean. They knew how to take care of themselves and each other.
It was a nice, idealized vision, but it didn’t strike anyone he told as particularly true. My father was too tense, too worried, too tortured to have come from the family that he described. And he knew, as we all did, that my grandmother’s hold on sanity was not entirely secure. It never had been. She had been in and out of reality for as long as anyone could recall.
When my father was a mere eight years old, he had been out in the yard playing baseball when he started to get a little bit tired and achy. His mother called him in, sent him to bed, and then called the doctor. The doctor came (the only doctor in town who made house calls back then) and examined him and decided that he had rheumatic fever, one of those strange diseases of the heart common in those days. For an entire year after that, my father stayed in bed. Not in his room, mind you, in bed. An entire year. He read comic books and learned how to draw, but he did not leave his bed. As a result, he missed a lot of things, like learning how to swim or ride a bike. From that moment on, his mother watched him like a hawk. He was barely allowed to play with the other boys in town. When he was a teenager, he would attempt to go to the movies with his friends, but if it happened to thunder, his mother would suddenly appear at the theater and drag him back home.
“She was crazy,” my mother told me. “And she was determined to make him crazy, too.”
I tried to imagine it. The best, most permanent image I had of Grandma Lucille was of her sitting in her room in the locked quarters of the psych ward, wringing her hands and crying. I tried to imagine my father, my strong, tall father, trying to become a man under her watch. It was almost impossible to picture.
“Your grandpa was a good man,” Mama said, speaking of Grandpa Pittman, “but he wasn’t strong enough to override her. His first wife died on their honeymoon. He never got over her. He only married your grandmother because he didn’t know what else to do. He settled. But he was completely shut down, his whole life.”
You h
ad to take my mother’s assessment of the whole thing with a grain of salt. She never liked my grandma Lucille, and Lucille never entirely liked or trusted her. It wasn’t the woman she imagined her son marrying. If she had even been sane enough to imagine such a thing.
But before we get to that. Aunt Margaret did well in school and went to college and eventually met and married a man from Georgia and moved there. Before all that happened, though, a curious and life-altering thing happened to my father.
He had graduated from high school and was working at a gas station in town. He had grown tall and very handsome and he spent all the money he made on nice clothes. The girls loved him. He was living it up. He could see an entire future for himself, and why not? His life was turning easy, because of his job and his looks and his clothes. He hadn’t really established himself in Union Grade because that was a long, hard climb. He was from hunger and this was a town full of old money types, landowners and pre–Civil War gentility who still half expected to regain the respect of the rest of the world. They mainly aspired to this by closing ranks and refusing to let the likes of my father in. But he had a plan. He would work hard enough, dress well enough, be handsome enough, and perhaps marry well enough to rise up through the social heirarchy. He was just a poor boy in a rich place, but he could see a way in through his own talents, a tiny crack of light under the door, and he was heading for it. If nothing else, he was blessed by his own countenance, his own beauty. He was one of the pretty people—a random throw of the genetic dice, but one, he had learned, that wielded a certain amount of power.
Who knows what would have happened to my father if he had simply been allowed to pursue that course. Women loved him. Even the rich women. He courted them. He was a man about town. He had charm. Doors opened for him. But he was still poor and it was still going to be a struggle. He was prepared for it. He was ready to do battle. I can only imagine how he felt in those days. The same people who frowned on him and kept him out and saw him as a poor laborer were suddenly forced to confront him. He wanted in and he was not going to take no for an answer. I admire his spirit in that regard. I’m not sure if I would have had the kind of resolve that he did in those days.
Then he was drafted. It was 1951 and the Korean War was going full force. The notice came in the mail. He told me more than once, “It was like a nightmare when I opened that letter.” He was sitting in the kitchen, as he told it, and his mother said something like, “Tell them you’re too sick to go,” but he knew he wasn’t sick, knew he hadn’t actually had rheumatic fever, but was simply the victim of a nervous and crazy mother, and a lazy doctor. Maybe something about that made him want to go.
He went off to Colorado to boot camp. I’m not entirely sure what happened there. He trained for battle, that’s for sure. He told me enough about that. But then there was a test. Some kind of aptitude test. They found out a few things about my father. One was that he had an above-average IQ. The other was that he was particularly gifted in the area of language and radio skills. They sent him off to Alaska to be in a special part of the army.
This part he couldn’t tell me much about. “I’m not supposed to talk about it, even now,” he said to me sometimes. But Alaska was the best part of his life, he often said, and it was because he had been identified as special and smart and a cut above the rest of the guys who were being shipped off to Korea and were “dropping like flies.”
A couple of years ago, when I was helping him clean my Barbies and other toys out of the garage, he came across his army jacket from his Alaska days. It looked like a plain old army jacket, but with fur on the collar and a big embroidered image of a grizzly bear on the back. He glanced around as if we were possibly being observed and said, “I did special things in the war.”
“Oh, yeah?” I asked.
He nodded and put a finger to his lips. He went to another box and pulled a machine out and put it down in front of me. It looked like a kind of adding machine, except there were strange, unrecognizable keys on it. He said, “Do you know what this is?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s a code machine.”
“What kind of code?”
He said, “That’s what I did in the war. I was a codebreaker.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Don’t tell anyone that I told you. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“Okay,” I said.
I didn’t have any desire to talk about it. By then I already knew things about him. Many things I wasn’t supposed to talk about. But the code machine gave me a clue as to how it all happened. How I ended up where I am now, writing this letter to you.
He said, “They wanted me to stay in the army. They promised me a future. But I didn’t want it. I just wanted to come back home and have a normal life.”
“Come back home to be with his mama,” my mother would say, on the odd occasions when his lost career in the military was being discussed. “He could be a colonel or a general by now. But he couldn’t leave his mama.”
“It’s true what your mother says,” he told me, that night we were cleaning out the garage. “I should have pursued my career, but I was afraid. Afraid that my mother needed me. I should have been braver than that.”
I didn’t know how to get in the middle of it. I didn’t know how to intervene. It all seemed a long, long way from me. I had no idea it was the whole reason why my life had turned upside down.
After two years being a codebreaker in Alaska, my father was honorably discharged from the army and he came back home. He knocked on the door of his childhood home in the middle of the night. He told me how shocked he was when his parents came to the door. They were old, he said. He left them looking one way, and he came back to find them looking another, with gray hair and sagging faces. They hugged him and fixed him something to eat, but the whole night he was in shock. Shocked to be out of the army, shocked to have old parents, shocked to be back in Union Grade with no clear idea of who he was or what he was supposed to do.
For a long time after that, he didn’t know how to get his life back together. When he was in the army, he was somebody. He was important. He did special, important work but he couldn’t talk about it. He had been sworn to secrecy, even after he left the army. He was looked down upon, he said, because he hadn’t seen combat. There were guys from his town, guys he’d played basketball with in high school, who had either died or come home with limbs missing or other debilitating injuries. They glared at him as if he’d done nothing special, as if he’d gotten a free pass. He couldn’t even tell them; he couldn’t tell anyone what he’d done. He was prohibited from explaining that his work was the most special work of all. He’d gone to Alaska because he was smarter and better. But upon his return, he was treated as if he’d simply found the coward’s way out.
He didn’t know what to do. For a long time, he just hung around town and went riding with his friends, looking for girls. Eventually he got a job in the local bank as a teller. He put his time in during the day, but in the evenings he went partying with his friends. There were girls, a lot of them. He was allowed to wear his uniform for a few months after service, but eventually he had to hang it up and then he really was no one at all.
The frustration festered inside of him. He had gone places and seen things. He had been in Alaska, where he learned to cross-country ski, where he learned to drive a jeep on ice, where he learned all the rules of defending against frostbite. Because he was in Intelligence, he learned other things, too, aside from radio skills. He learned how to build bombs and how to defuse them. He learned to start fires and put them out. He learned how to kill a man with his bare hands. He learned how to survive in the wilderness. He learned how to shoot a gun in the dark with gloves on. The list went on. He knew things that he would never be able to use in Union Grade. Still they treated him like a poor laborer, when he knew in his heart he was a specially skilled soldier.
Time passed and he began to think about getting married. He was getting nowhere in
Union Grade. Being a bank teller brought in a steady wage, and it helped him support his parents, with whom he was still living, but it did nothing to carve out his special niche, the one he felt he had earned during his time in the army. He was still being treated like a rube, like a no one, because he couldn’t speak of his special skills. It drove him to distraction. Maybe marrying the right woman would earn him his rightful place. Maybe that was what he needed.
Perhaps all these things had been in his mind the night he met my mother in a bowling alley in Danville. He was out with friends. They met up with some other people. My mother was among them. She had a job as a receptionist for the local newspaper then. She was probably feeling secure and powerful. When I was a little girl I asked my father why he married my mother. He said, “Because I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. And I still think so.”
Even as a little girl, I knew that wasn’t a good reason to marry someone.
But it was his reason.
Of their meeting, my mother only said, “I thought he was stuck-up.”
Apparently, they circled around each other for a while, and then he finally asked her out and they went out and the romance started.
In my mind, he had on his uniform when he first saw her. I like it that way. She saw this handsome soldier. It can’t be true—at least a year had passed since he had gotten out of the service. But I remember what my mother always said: “He was just out of the army and he was so handsome.”
So these two beautiful people found each other in their beautiful clothes and something inside both of them clicked. Maybe they each saw their imagined future. I know my mother saw the man who could take care of her and help her get her son back. My father probably saw a difficult and lovely woman who would never bore him. Maybe he even saw, at last, the woman who would help him break away from his mother. Whatever forces aligned on that night, these two people saw a potential way out, and they lunged at it.