Nothing was ever the same after that.
The deepest truth I knew was that the relationship with Suzanne could never work, and in time I found the strength to turn away. Turning away from Suzanne was a major step toward being kinder to myself. I look back with sadness at the pain that some if not all of our children suffered during the years of the relationship that Suzanne and I loved, fought, worked, and struggled through. Yet, given who and where we were emotionally then, I see no other way we could have lived our lives.
There was always a place where Suzanne and I failed at understanding each other, and as frustrating as it was, it never canceled the love we felt.
Chapter Twenty-two
I
1985
I RECENTLY CAME ACROSS A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN 1985, ON MY FIRST trip back to Georgia since 1969. It was a simple snapshot of Mother and Mercer on a bridge of gray weathered boards that spanned a body of water in the Okefenokee Swamp. They’re crossing the bridge, their backs turned to me. They were walking away from me when I snapped their image with my camera.
How unexpectedly the significance of a thing can change. Mother and Mercer are crossing the weathered gray bridge, and now both of them are dead. Unprepared to see this image of my mother and brother walking away from me, I felt my heart plummet, then fill with emotion.
When Mother had asked me if there were special things I wanted to do while I was in Georgia visiting them, I mentioned going to the Okefenokee Swamp. From as far back as I could remember, I’d been fascinated by it, but I had never been there. Mother’s friend Vereen Bell had written a book about it titled Swamp Water before he went off to World War II and got killed. Every time we drove past his house in Thomasville, I thought about him drowned in his crashed plane in the Pacific Ocean, starving on a raft with the rest of the crew, or being eaten by sharks.
I was six years old in 1941 when the movie Swamp Water, starring Walter Brennan, Anne Baxter, and Dana Andrews, was released. It was terribly exciting to see a movie made from a book written by my own mother’s friend. It was also exciting to see a place in Georgia made into a Hollywood movie.
But the main reason I wanted to go to the Okefenokee was my intense fascination with the swamp itself, old and primitive, mysterious and wild, with its alligators, turtles, lizards, diamondback rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, black bears, bobcats, and great blue herons; its red-tailed hawks, ospreys, wild turkeys, woodpeckers, and egrets; and its abundance of fish, frogs, and crayfish.
Islands of peat bog gave rise to trees, shrubs, and grasses, the ground itself trembling underfoot. Indians gave it the name Okefenokee, meaning “Land of the Trembling Earth.” Indians who lived and died there as early as 2500 BC; Indians who shared the land and its abundance until de Soto came with his men, bringing with them diseases that killed the natives by the thousands. Finally, the last of the Seminoles were driven into Florida by soldiers. Now the Okefenokee holds its silent history in the roots and wood of its ancient trees.
Cypress trees still stand that were growing there when Dante was writing his Divine Comedy, Michelangelo was being born, and Hieronymus Bosch was painting Ship of Fools. The same cypress trees were sprouting roots and branches when Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn and Ivan the Terrible died in Russia. The same giant cypress trees were reaching toward the magnificent sky as my brothers and sister and I were born and grew up in South Georgia. I had always longed to see the Okefenokee, where wildness and the wonder of nature existed side by side, where the distant past and present were one.
As important as the Okefenokee was in my imagination, the thought of a trip there was eclipsed by the thought of seeing Mother. During my therapy with Dr. Turcotte I’d cut off my relationship with her. It was only after I’d terminated my relationship with him that I called her again. “Now you realize that I’ve loved you all your life,” she said. For all of Dr. Turcotte’s faults and his evaluation of Mother’s negative influence on my life, I couldn’t let him carry the full responsibility for my cutting her off. I blurted out: “Just because I’ve cut off my relationship with Dr. Turcotte does not mean that he alone was the problem between us, Mother.” I was afraid that I would slip back into old patterns of saying the things she wanted me to say and not expressing my true feelings. “There are still many things that we need to work on in our relationship.”
I might just as well have been talking in ancient Greek. The whole concept of working on relationships was incomprehensible to her. Mother’s method of relating when hurt or when she disagreed with me was to withdraw in punitive silence. If I wrote something in a letter that she didn’t want to deal with, she simply wrote back without responding to whatever it was that I’d brought up. Her silence about my concerns had made me feel invisible.
When the boys were young, Chris said that our dog Cream sometimes acted like his grandmother, whom he called Amah. When something happened that displeased Cream, she turned her chin up and looked the other way. “Just like Amah,” Chris would say. “Just like Amah.”
After I terminated my relationship with Dr. Turcotte, I wrote Mother a letter inviting her to come up in October to see the fall leaves, a thing she’d often talked of doing once she retired from teaching. She refused my invitation, replying: “I told you I’d like to come and see the fall foliage if John and I still got along well.”
I was stunned. When she had first said that, I thought she meant it as an expression of her own lack of security, that she would come for a visit only if she felt herself not to be a nuisance to John. I’d not realized that the statement had been about her relationship with me as well. But now I understood that she was refusing to accept my invitation. During the years when she’d visited us, she spent most of her time with me, but now I saw more clearly than ever her great love of John, their casual way of bantering and the pleasure they both derived from it. She also respected him for his Ph.D., while Daddy had dropped out of college to join the army near the end of World War I. “Oh, Margaret,” she’d said in a tone that sounded almost prideful, “You and John make me think so of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.”
I had groaned inwardly, wondering if she had any idea what she was saying about us. I’d tried and failed too many times to gain her understanding and support. John’s abuse of me came in bed, long after Mother had gone to sleep. I knew Mother looked up to John, while she was puzzled by me. But that she so quickly rejected my invitation—and in such a hurtful way—left me in an inarticulate daze. I said a confused goodbye and hung up the phone. After regaining my composure I wrote a note asking if there wasn’t enough between the two of us to warrant a fall visit even though I was divorced from John and living alone.
She responded to my letter with silence. There was no more talk about her visiting me, but in time we were once again writing and talking with some ease. Later, I again invited her up. This time she replied: “I am an old woman now and too afraid to fly.” The next year I called and asked if she would like me to fly down for a visit. I was hoping to come to a place of resolution with her while we were both still alive. She sounded excited by the prospect of seeing me.
The night before my flight, I dreamed that Mother’s house caught fire.
The fire started out back in the bamboo that divided our property from that of Cousin Heinz. I knew that the fire was too huge to be stopped. I rushed into Mercer’s room to get my cigarettes, then went outside to stand with Mother and Mercer to watch the house burn. I felt relieved to have rescued my cigarettes. I knew that it would take some time before the house burned to ashes, and I would have been terribly upset to have no cigarettes as I stood watching the blaze.
Mercer’s room had been mine before it was his. I’d grown up in that room, had lain in my bed watching the moon rise over the bamboo, had painted at my easel that stood in one corner, had written at my desk between the two south windows, and stored my books in bookcases underneath the windows. Of course my cigarettes would have been in that room, his room now, with its large TV and stereo, and my
paintings on the wall. I hadn’t been in Georgia in sixteen years, since the year after Daddy’s death, and had seen neither Mercer nor Mother since Mercer’s brief visit in 1976. Now we were together again in my dream and the house was burning to the ground.
II
Journal entry, June 27, 1985: We are somewhere over the Carolinas. Except for landing in Newport, I’ve seen nothing at all of the country, only clouds. Have read several of the excerpts from a book titled Transformations that my friend Janice copied for me and brought when she came to dinner last night.
Freud’s and Jung’s mid-life crises especially interest me.
The plane is descending now, 15 minutes early and shakily, through rain clouds, making writing almost impossible. Temperature in Jacksonville: 88 degrees. Reminds me of the bumpy bus ride to Chulua, Mexico, and the shaky line of my pencil as I did pencil drawings of other passengers.
Now the ride has become smoother, but still nothing is visible. Faint patterns appear on the landscape. They look like rivers and lakes, but the fog is thick.
“Ma’am, please put the tray in its upright position now,” the stewardess says, and I gather my papers.
Sharp descent and the land comes into view. Suddenly bright sunshine, then clouds again and lightning. We’re coming in over acres and acres of pinewoods.
On the ground.
I saw Mother and Mercer before they saw me. They stood at the gate, Mother talking to Mercer. Mother—who had equaled exactly my five feet seven and a half inches in height and had always been heavy—was now a thin old woman, shrunken by inches and with a slight hump on her back. As always, she was impeccably dressed.
Our embrace was almost formal, but Mother had never given or received warm, affectionate hugs. As she’d said to Daddy many years before: “Wyman, you know I never liked to be touched.” Embracing her, I was even more aware of how much she’d shrunk. Then Mercer and I hugged each other. He was balding, and the familiar sadness in his eyes had grown deeper.
Mother insisted that I sit in the front seat beside Mercer in the air-conditioned car. It was then that I realized that I had no makeup on at all and that I’d not worn lipstick in years. I wondered what changes in me Mother was noticing.
The South again. Mile after mile of flat land covered with pitch pine. This part of Georgia felt depressing to me. Daddy always called it “the jumping-off place.”
Mother and Mercer had made plans. We were to go not directly to Cairo but to a motel near the Okefenokee where we would spend the night, then go to the swamp the following day before driving to Cairo. I began to realize how very large this trip was to them, and that they had arranged it this way to get the Okefenokee “chore” behind them. I say “chore,” for listening to them talk, I was realizing more and more acutely that going beyond the parameters of the small town of Cairo was something rarely considered, much less accomplished.
I regretted having taken the special flight to Jacksonville rather than spending the extra time, energy, and money and flown to Atlanta, then Tallahassee. I’d thought it would be a pleasant thing for all of us to see Jacksonville again, but we didn’t see the city or beaches at all. It was clear that their aim was to get out of Jacksonville as quickly as possible. Mercer was nervous but drove safely and efficiently. Mother kept telling him how well he was doing, as if praising a child. Realizing that the trip to pick me up was a major challenge for both of them, I felt sad and regretful.
Soon I fell into my familiar role as the unconventional member of the family. We passed a trailer by the side of the road, a large sign beside it on which was painted an enormous palm of a hand, and beneath it the words: PALMS READ HERE.
“You went past so fast. I would have loved having a palm reading,” I said.
“Are you serious?” Mercer asked.
“Well, sort of,” I responded thoughtfully. I’d been kidding, but in truth I’d always wanted to see the inside of one of those trailers and experience what it was like to have a Gypsy read my fortune. Gypsies in trailers had been advertising their fortune-telling abilities since I was a child.
“I can stop and turn back, sister,” Mercer said quickly.
“Yes,” Mother added anxiously. “It would be no trouble at all.”
It upset me that they were so eager to please me. I would have felt more comfortable if Mercer or Mother had responded, “You would want to do such a thing!” Or “You never change, do you?” in a tone of familiar derision.
At the motel, Mother and I shared a room. After we changed into our robes and stretched out on our beds, Mercer came in, sat in a chair facing the beds, and lit a cigarette. He and Mother talked rapidly at me for hours. I smoked cigarette after cigarette. Their anxiety filled the room and my mind and body until I could no longer bear it. I went into the bathroom, changed into my swimsuit, and went out and swam laps in the motel pool. After I returned to the room, Mercer said good night to us and went to his room. Mother and I got dressed for bed and turned out the light. She was a tired, anxiety-riddled old woman. I felt like crying.
“Good night, Mother.”
“Good night, Margaret.”
The next morning after breakfast we went to the Okefenokee.
As Mother was stepping from the dock into the boat for a ride up one of the canals, I reached out my hand to steady her. She jerked back angrily and told me that she was perfectly capable of getting into the boat without my help. Then she sat down beside me.
“Mother,” I explained, “you must have forgotten that I was with you that time we were going to the backyard to pick blueberries and you fell down those steep back steps and hurt yourself so badly.”
I was in my early teens when that had happened and was terrified to see Mother lying on the ground, unable to get up and crying out in pain. I’d rushed inside and phoned Daddy to come home. Then I ran out and sat beside Mother, wiping her forehead with a damp washcloth until Daddy and the doctor arrived. Mother had damaged her sciatic nerve and was in bed and on heavy dosages of painkillers for weeks.
“Then there was that Fourth of July when you fell from the top bench of the bleachers at the Amherst High School athletic field, and bounced down every bench to the ground. I was scared to death.” Somehow she’d escaped injury altogether that time, but the incident had triggered my memory and again I was shaken.
“I guess I didn’t realize how upset you’d been by those falls.”
“I guess you didn’t,” I responded, and the boatman pushed the boat from the dock and we were on our way.
III
It had been sixteen years since I’d been down Cairo’s North Broad Street. Trees and shrubs had grown large and lush and covered many details of the houses, making them look unfamiliar. Other houses had been torn down or remodeled as office buildings. I turned my face away from Mercer and Mother so they couldn’t see me crying. I had no desire to upset them. My feelings had always been too much for Mother. But my feelings were what I had. I no longer had husband or house. John Elder visited rarely, and Chris had moved to San Francisco. My relationship with Suzanne as I’d known it was over.
Despite my losses, I felt a stronger sense of self-confidence than I’d ever felt before. I’d faced Dr. Turcotte and the Northampton Police Department. While the assistant district attorney had been watching for me to break under the pressure of Dr. Turcotte, I’d grown stronger instead. Through my work with children and teachers in elementary schools, I’d discovered my power as a leader and teacher in new ways. Yes, I could bear to come back to Cairo, could bear seeing Mother and Mercer. I could even bear to take this ride down North Broad Street. But not without tears.
Mercer turned into the driveway and parked. Mother and I got out and walked to the house, Mercer following us inside carrying my luggage. Mother insisted that I use her room while she used the small bedroom that Bubba and I shared before Mercer’s birth. I declined her offer. “The middle room will be fine, really fine. It would make me feel bad to displace you.”
I stood, lo
oking around the living room. The wood gleamed. Bright light poured through the newly washed windows. How hard Mother must have worked in preparation for my visit. I noticed several new chairs and a new coffee table in the living room. Then Mother wanted to show me her room. She was proud of its changes and additions. It looked more like a sitting room than a bedroom. The bed had no head- or footboard, and had a new, blue tailored quilted bedspread. At the foot of the bed stood a teak coffee table on which she’d arranged sand and seashells around a wood carving of a sandpiper. She’d added more bookcases, and a Danish-modern tan leather reading chair with a matching footstool stood in place of the old wicker rocker in which she’d rocked Harriet.
Then I looked up to see the oil painting I’d done of Mercer from memory the first year I was in college. I’d missed him so. How clearly my longing had brought his features back to memory. It wasn’t until he was middle-aged that he told me how upset he’d been at my leaving home and how much he’d missed me. We’d expressed so little overt affection in our family.
The three of us went to the breakfast room, the room where we had always sat to talk as well as to eat. The breakfast bar had been replaced by a handsome old round walnut table with matching chairs that Mother had refinished. Between the table and the door to the dining room were three low Danish-modern chairs, leather straps woven over walnut frames, and several small tables and lamps. Ashtrays were everywhere. On the wall hung an old barn board on which I’d painted several ears of Indian corn, a watercolor of a clay owl I’d bought in Mexico, a plaster replica of the Aztec calendar I’d bought at the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, and rows of coffee mugs hanging on a wooden mug holder.
The Long Journey Home Page 29