The Long Journey Home

by Margaret Robison

  Chapter Five

  I

  1953

  DURING MY FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE AT FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY in Tallahassee, I had a crush on my housemother, Nina Lawrence, who was retired from serving in the navy. She was a short woman with prominent features, clear blue eyes, and prematurely snow-white hair. I did an oil portrait of her, which gave me an excuse to spend long hours in her apartment, looking at her, being with her. She had a friend, a younger housemother in a nearby dorm, and the three of us often walked downhill from FSU to downtown Tallahassee for dinner. One evening, just before I knocked on Miss Lawrence’s partially opened door, I paused, for the two women were talking about me. Miss Lawrence was saying to her friend that she was concerned that my being with her so often might cause someone on the university staff to think that we were having a lesbian relationship. She actually used the word lesbian. But there was nothing hysterical in her tone, just a calm concern. I called her name, knocked, and opened the door all at once. I didn’t want to eavesdrop on her any more than I already unintentionally had. Both women greeted me warmly, and we set off for downtown together.

  One night a group of us girls had a couple of drinks and someone reported us to the dean of women. Miss Lawrence didn’t appear especially upset about it; she knew me well enough to know that I was no serious drinker, but she was concerned about the state of crisis it threw me into. I was upset because the dean would notify my parents, as was customary with any serious infraction of the rules. They’d be told I’d been reported for drinking and that I’d be confined to the campus and would have my dating privileges taken away for two weeks.

  My upset must have been evident as I sat across the desk from the dean. “Margaret,” she said in a warm, accepting voice. “Don’t make this larger than it is. You’ve not committed a crime, you’ve broken a college rule.” I was grateful for her support, but she didn’t know my mother and how hysterical she got about anything I did that went against her own rules. I often thought that she’d expressed the same upset when she found out that I’d smoked a cigarette that she would have expressed if I’d told her I was pregnant. And my drinking? To imagine her response made me feel frantic. I asked the dean when she was going to send the letter. I wanted to tell my parents myself before they got it. She assured me that she’d wait for a week before sending it.

  Relieved, I went back to the dormitory to begin to think about what I’d write to my parents. “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill,” Miss Lawrence had advised, and invited me and her fellow housemother for dinner in town that night.

  For two days I thought of the letter, then finally sat down at my typewriter and wrote it. “Dear Mother and Daddy,” I wrote. “I am very tired of living on the pedestal on which you’ve placed me ever since I was a little girl. It’s very lonely up here.” Then I told them about the night that I had something to drink and how I was now confined to the campus for two weeks. The only male I was permitted to see was my father. I also told them that they would soon be getting a letter from the dean of women telling them this. “All my life,” I continued, “I’ve been searching, longing for unconditional love. I need that unconditional love from you. I need it now. As of this letter I’ve climbed down from your pedestal. I love you both deeply, but I can no longer live the life you have demanded of me.”

  Without taking the letter from my typewriter, I reread it. I felt good about it, but I wanted to let my emotions cool a little before signing and mailing it. I walked to a coffee shop across the street from the campus and had my usual cream-cheese-and-olive sandwich and a Coke. Then I smoked a cigarette before walking back to my room.

  The door stood open. Mother was sitting at my desk. She’d taken the letter from the typewriter and was reading it and crying. In all the months I’d been at FSU, Mother had never once come to see me unannounced. My safe place was no longer safe. Here, I’d thought, I could write anything I wanted to write without worrying about Mother reading it and getting upset. Here I could be myself without Mother’s judgment. Now here she was in my room, reading and sobbing.

  “I saw that the letter was addressed to me,” she said in an almost apologetic way. “I had some errands in Tallahassee. I’d thought …” Her voice trailed off. Then she sniffled, wiped her nose with a Kleenex from her purse, and dropped it into my wastebasket. “I need to be going now,” she said, then folded the letter and put it into her bag. I followed her out the door and down the stairs.

  After a few steps she stopped and turned around. Her eyes were very red, but their glare was so intense that I felt I could almost lose my balance under the impact. I leaned against the wall. “How could you do this to me?” she wailed. “I’ve tried and I’ve tried, and this is what I get from you. What have I done to deserve this?”

  Her chest heaved with sobs. “I will never tell your father. I just don’t think he could bear it. No, he must never know.”

  I turned and went to my room, closing the door behind me.

  The next communication I received from home was a call from Daddy. He’d been to Atlanta on a shopping trip for the new dry-goods store that he was struggling to make successful. He said he had some gifts for me. He wanted to take me out to dinner. I knew Mother had told him about my being confined to the campus for drinking, though he said nothing about it.

  Our time together was festive. Even though he bought the clothes for me wholesale, I knew he’d spent far more than he could comfortably afford. First there was a beautifully cut black crêpe dress with a white collar exquisitely embroidered with white silk and tiny seed pearls. Then there was a pair of black leather Capezio pumps with wooden stacked heels. Last was a rust-colored suede sports jacket. It was the most extravagant thing he’d ever done for me.

  Daddy and I had a wonderfully good time together. I felt an unspoken bond between us. I didn’t want him to drink any more than I myself wanted to drink seriously. I’d seen the destructive effects of drinking firsthand in Uncle Frank. But ever since Mother had told me how she’d kept Daddy from having a beer by threatening to make me, a baby, drink whatever he drank, I’d resented her using me to manipulate him. That night I felt he was celebrating the fact that I had broken one of Mother’s rules, something he’d been unable to do because she’d made the stakes higher than he was willing to pay. I felt that we were co-conspirators. While Mother punitively withdrew from me in silence, Daddy moved closer and accepted my humanity.

  II

  My freshman year at FSU was my first and last. Edmund Lewandowski, the painting teacher I’d gone to FSU to study with, accepted the position as head of the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. I wanted to go with him, but Mother had no respect for art schools. She intended for me to have a college education. It didn’t occur to me that I had any right to oppose her. I applied for and got an art scholarship to the University of Georgia.

  Miss Lawrence was going to leave FSU also, but before leaving Tallahassee she took me on a vacation with her to Pensacola, then Saint Augustine, Florida. A week alone with Miss Lawrence: I was in heaven. In Pensacola, she pulled up to a coral-colored motel on the beach and rented a room with twin beds. Sleeping within feet of her and being with her all day and evening was more than I could ever have hoped for. It was a week of burning emotions and blazing sun, of long days on the beach, intense blue and turquoise water, and miles and miles of sand. I don’t remember a single meal. Why would I remember food when there was Miss Lawrence’s company to focus on hour after hour? Once, in Saint Augustine, I walked along a crumbling ruin of a stone wall by the water, and she reached up and took my hand in hers. Feeling her firm grip with my own, I could have walked for miles, my whole body trembling with the thrill of her touch.

  After our vacation, Miss Lawrence took me home to Cairo. Then she moved to Saint Augustine. She wrote me notes from time to time. From the University of Georgia I wrote to her that I was seriously involved with a boy and had plans for marriage. She wrote back that she was happy for me. I’ve no memory of
hearing from her after that. At some point she moved from Saint Augustine and I lost track of her altogether. In later years, I felt a longing to reunite with her, to tell her how much her love mattered to the love-starved girl I was, but I was never able to locate her.

  PART TWO

  The Beginning of Us

  Chapter Six

  I

  1954

  JOHN ROBISON AND I WERE SEATED NEXT TO EACH OTHER, IN ALPHABETICAL order, in among the two hundred students enrolled in Human Biology 101 at the University of Georgia in Athens. My first response to him was that he looked very young. That, and that he had beautiful hands and fine features. He told me later that he’d thought I had capable-looking hands, that he’d loved watching them as I took notes. He also said that he’d loved my face. The man seated to my left was a short, dark-haired veteran of the Korean War with a wedding band on his finger. The three of us introduced ourselves to one another before class began.

  The professor walked up the steps to the platform at the front of the room. He was a short, stocky man with clipped black hair that stood straight up. As he talked, he paced, or rocked back and forth on his heels, and waved his arms wildly, making me think of a frisky Scottie dog. Standing before the blackboard, he told us his name, a long name almost impossible to pronounce. After saying it, he told us that many of his students simply spelled his name this way—turning the piece of chalk sideways in his hands, he wrote in large, wide letters: S.O.B.

  Then he began his first lecture.

  John and I left the class together, talking about our wild and witty professor. When we came to the parking lot, he asked if he could drive me back to my dorm. He opened the door of his car for me, and I climbed in. On the way to the dorm he invited me to go with him to a local drive-in for a glass of iced tea.

  We sat in the car and talked for hours about philosophy and religion. I’d taken an introductory philosophy course my freshman year at FSU and had spent much of that year discussing philosophical issues with other students from the class. While John had taken no philosophy courses, his intention was to be a Presbyterian minister, and many of the philosophical and theological issues that we were interested in were closely related. I liked his quick mind and articulate speech. And I’d never met a boy with whom conversation came so easily.

  After that first meeting, both of us broke our prearranged dates for the following weekend, and neither of us ever dated anyone else. What if John had taken out Nancy Larkin with her long blond hair? What if I’d gone out with Tom Watson? Futile questions. The first letter of our last names, and the fact that we were seated next to each other in Human Biology 101, decided the course of both our lives.

  John and I spent every available minute together. Mornings we ate at a university coffee shop, while “Sixteen Tons” or “Rock Around the Clock” blared from the jukebox. In the small room filled with cigarette smoke thick as fog, we ate glazed donuts, drank coffee, and talked. Then we were off to classes, he to Greek or comparative religion, I to French or a class called Art in the Dark, where we sat at long tables in the dark, drawing from slides of large, simple, black shapes on a white background that flashed for seconds on the enormous screen in front of us.

  In the evenings John and I ate at Tony’s, a small restaurant in downtown Athens. We ate lots of spaghetti and meatballs and told each other about our families. He told me about how his parents had run off together and gotten married when his mother was sixteen and his father seventeen. With a profound sense of nostalgia he told me how much he loved summers spent with his grandparents in Chickamauga, Georgia. He told me about going with his grandfather to his drugstore, or out to his farm, where he raised racehorses, and how sad he felt to leave his grandparents in the fall to go back to his parents in Athens, where his father was a student at the same university we ourselves now attended.

  I told him I was from Cairo, a dusty little town in South Georgia—two blocks of stores, a movie theater, post office, courthouse, cotton gin, and jail, the kind of town you’d never stop in unless you needed to go to the filling station or—like me—grew up in and had to go home to visit. I told him about my father’s failed business and his failing health. I told him about my sister, Harriet, and about how my mother’s life was almost totally devoted to taking care of her. I told him about my sister’s spastic clenched fists and her seizures.

  One night, John nervously announced that he had something to tell me and asked me to go with him to a more private place. I couldn’t imagine what dreaded secret he was about to disclose. We were silent as he drove to the outskirts of town, pulled off the road, and parked in the dark under a bridge. Then, his voice thick with shame, he told me that his father was a heavy drinker and had been a heavy drinker since John could remember. He told me about the many times his father was late picking him up at his military school in Atlanta. As a young boy, he’d waited alone until almost dark before his father would finally arrive, often drunk, to drive him home. He also described how his father had kicked him in the ribs when he was a little boy trying to protect his mother from his father’s violence.

  After telling me these things, John turned his face from me and looked rigidly ahead into the night as if he was afraid that I might reject him, as if I might find him unworthy because of his father.

  It was very dark; there was just a sliver of a moon overhead. I looked at him. “Oh, John,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Then we were in each other’s arms, John feeling the relief of acceptance, me imagining the vulnerable little boy trying to protect himself from blow after blow of his father’s terrible shoes.

  One evening shortly before Thanksgiving I sat on a couch in the dorm lounge, listening to a new song on the TV: “Teach Me Tonight.” I was waiting for John to pick me up for a date but was completely absorbed in listening to every word of the song when John arrived.

  “I’m listening to this new song, ‘Teach Me Tonight,’ ” I said when he arrived. “I love it.”

  John ignored my statement. “Let’s go now,” he said impatiently.

  “After this one song.”

  “I have something to tell you,” he insisted.

  “In a minute, John. Just a minute.”

  Teach me tonight.

  It was raining as we ran to his car. I expected him to drive us someplace, but the key dangled from the ignition while he took something from his pants pocket. Nervously, he cleared his throat as he fumbled with it.

  The rain grew harder, beating down on the roof.

  “I’d like you to wear my fraternity pin,” he said. He’d just gotten it that day. In college at that time, being pinned was the first step toward becoming engaged.

  “I’d love to wear your fraternity pin, John,” I said softly.

  John leaned over and pinned it on my sweater. His hands trembled as he struggled with the tiny clasp while trying to not touch my breast.

  “I love you, John,” I whispered. But for some reason I couldn’t understand, I cried as I said it, the hard rain plastering fall leaves all over the windshield.

  II

  I still have the photograph that I took one day of our shadows side by side and stretched out long before us on an asphalt highway near Athens. Though I didn’t realize it consciously then, that picture captured the fact that the relationship would bring out the shadow sides of both our personalities. The road in the photograph stretched out as far as we could see, disappearing in the distance where the hills of North Georgia rose.

  Our conversations were often about our families. John said that I was the first person he’d been able to really talk to since his Grandfather Elder died of a heart attack when he was twelve. Since that time he’d been lonely for a real emotional connection. When he kept telling me that he didn’t know how he could live without me, I felt both flattered and uncomfortable. Something about him felt immature, even though he was a few months older than I was, had held summer jobs for many years, had had his fling with drinking in high school, had dated
several girls before meeting me, and was already student minister to two small rural churches near Athens.

  A minister. I was pinned to a ministerial student. As an adolescent girl in the Southern Baptist Church, I’d often fantasized about becoming a missionary myself. Girls could be missionaries, not ministers. But I had to dismiss my fantasy because I was already as addicted to cigarettes as my father was. As long as I continued to smoke, I felt unworthy of being a missionary. I’d tried to give it up many times. Then I’d give in and reach for another cigarette, sucking the smoke deep into my lungs and exhaling with a sense of great relief and miserable failure.

  I was not good enough to be a missionary.

  Now there was John, who didn’t smoke or drink, and who didn’t even say the word damn. John, who stood in the pulpit Sundays preaching like he was a young Billy Graham. John, who would soon begin to insist that I stop smoking. Aside from the fact that I was strongly addicted to nicotine, my smoking became a focus for the power struggle beginning between us.

  John was intensely jealous of my absorption in painting and drawing. His jealousy came at a time when my confidence in my art had been greatly diminished. At FSU my freshman year, Edmund Lewandowski, the head of the art department, had expressed great faith in my work. “Margaret,” he’d said. “You and I are both reaching for the highest star, and we’ll both get there.”

  Unlike Professor Lewandowski, who had been my consistent inspiration, I saw Lamar Dodd, head of Georgia’s art department, only once. That was when I showed him a portfolio of my paintings and he gave me a scholarship. I didn’t talk with him again after that interview. At Georgia I got no special attention. While Art in the Dark trained both my eyes and my hand, it gave nothing to my spirit. And I didn’t know a single other art student well enough to go out for coffee with and talk about art. I ached for FSU, but everyone who’d really mattered to me had also left.