Landscapes of the Heart

by Elizabeth Spencer

  Carroll County is said to be the only county in the entire United States to boast of two senators in the U.S. Senate at one and the same time. These were Senator Money and Senator George. It must be something to keep proud of through the centuries.

  I never had the good fortune of knowing the original O. K. Gee, who died before my time, but all the Gees were, of course, part of the town’s social picture. They lived in fine houses and had a great many things no one else could afford. Mr. Ormand was the oldest, a thin friendly man with a bit of a beard, married to Miss Recie, who had been a Gillespie, her younger sisters best friends of my mother as a girl. There were sons, two tall, good-looking young men, Joe and Pete. I was in awe of them, unnecessarily, for they were invariably friendly, even if they had the air of not quite knowing who I was. The Ormand Gee house, off on a side road, was quite beautiful, and beautifully kept, with a low, deep-set veranda and flowering yard behind a white fence.

  The next in age I think was the Charlie Gee connection. Their house, like so many in Carrollton, was set in seclusion on a hill, the premises reached by a long flight of wooden steps up from the street, or if by car, through a wide, climbing drive. There were girls—the Charlie Gee girls—all attractive and popular, filled with small talk, wearing pretty clothes. They, too, had a tennis court down in back of their property, and interesting friends from their various colleges in Virginia or Missouri came to visit in the summer. Young men were powerfully in demand. My brother was often invited to glowing evenings. Once the occasion was to come up and see the night-blooming cereus, a mysterious plant that chose to open its wonderful white petals rarely, and then only at midnight. At other times there were lawn parties to celebrate a birthday or someone’s departure to Europe.

  The mother of the Charlie Gee tribe, Miss Nora Gee, a frail, taxed lady, was a Presbyterian (the Gees were all Episcopalians). She thus sometimes had the ladies’ auxiliary meeting at her house. Once I accompanied my mother there for some reason I forget, and two of the daughters, Margaret and Josephine, came in as refreshments were served. They sat down on the floor before the ladies and began to strum their banjos and sing foolish songs. They were wearing short pleated skirts with striped blouses. Banjos were all the rage during the Depression times, and I remember this, with its Fitzgerald-like link to what was “going on” on the outside, charming, assured, and fun.

  The third and youngest of the Gee brothers was Clint. His house was on one of the main streets. There were two older daughters, and two younger. Charlotte, the youngest, was a dark-headed little girl, rather popular in town for her friendly ways, though the family called her a “street angel,” always implying the rest of the phrase, “home devil.” They too used to have friends from out of town come to visit, and I remember the sight of their front porch on hot summer afternoons when I was driving by; invariably there were mysterious but interesting-looking strangers, a clutch of girls and young women, eternally drinking from iced glasses, talking and laughing, talking and laughing, through the endless hot afternoons back of the screens. They were great talkers, amusing, and never lacked for a story.

  At a certain point every afternoon they would all rise and pile in the family car and drive around town. Perhaps they always had an errand, but mainly it just seemed they took a certain route without really wanting anything. They went uptown (Carrollton) and downtown (North Carrollton), then returned home. Maybe they stopped in one drugstore or another for a purchase or a Coke. One day, talking incessantly, they reached home, but missed Charlotte. Only on studied reflection and after much discussion did they realize what had happened. As they were circling the town well, which stood in the center of the north town business street, one of the rear doors had flown open and Charlotte must have fallen out. Nobody had stopped talking long enough to miss her. The summer heat in those pre-air-conditioned days was hypnotic, and life proceeded in ritual fashion, like slow-motion movies, or underwater swimming.

  The Clint Gee daughter my age was named Cora Brown but called Coco. She later grew up to be a stunner with a fantastically beautiful figure and a languid, rather insolent manner. She inspired such lust among the young men far and wide that all sorts of stories about her were bandied about through the years.

  The older sisters took personal credit for her fabled legs, saying that she had them only because, wanting to amuse themselves somehow (those long hot afternoons), they had made her climb up doorframes with her bare feet braced against either side.

  She was sent off fairly early on to an Episcopal academy for young ladies in Vicksburg, but later went to Ole Miss, where things really got started. I knew her best, however, when we were all in the same age group in Carrollton, and she was only another of the growing-up crowd.

  Once I was roller-skating uptown and started down the steep hill that sloped from the courthouse square toward the bridge. I saw Coco and a few other girls sitting at the foot of some wooden steps leading up to someone’s front yard. About at that point, I got scared, for I was going faster and faster and could not stop. I was not even halfway down the hill, which was growing more precipitous every second, and I had nothing to catch on to.

  I don’t know if I cried out to them or not, but Coco rose, also on skates, and, coming straight into my path, caught me. We both fell sprawling on the concrete walk, stood up bruised and breathless but not really hurt.

  It took nerve—even recklessness—to do such a thing, and I will always remember the sight of her getting up to help me, entering danger with a kind of careless air of not thinking about it twice. Years later, divorced, a working woman plagued for years by persistent back pain, which never left her and was apparently incurable, Coco took a pistol and shot herself through the head.

  The Ormand Gee house is still standing, but the Clint Gee house is gone, either burned or pulled down. The Charlie Gee house, now sold, was occupied for years by an elderly aunt, who lived there alone, keeping it for any who wished to come there. Miss Edith Erskine’s house is no more, though the wondrous yard now surrounds a new brick bungalow.

  One of the Eggleston ladies (known throughout their lives as the Eggleston girls) once brought a friend home to visit Carrollton. She went driving about, saying to the friend, “That’s where the So-and-so mansion was, but it’s torn down … up there, was So-and-so’s house but it burned …” After passing a long series of such nonexistent landmarks, Miss Eggleston concluded with a sigh, “I guess Carrollton is not really a place, it’s a state of mind.”

  Yet enough of the old remains to put the town on the national list of historic places, and a mini-pilgrimage of the Natchez sort is now held each year to attract those who want to come and see. Streets that had names only on the town survey maps—we never put up names of streets in my day at all, since everybody knew where the Spencers, the Watsons, the Gillespies, and the Prices lived—now are labeled with signs, and houses have acquired patrician names: Tanglewood and Helm Home and Cedar Hill and the like.

  A movie was made in Carrollton! One of William Faulkner’s books, The Reivers, was filmed as a vehicle for Steve McQueen, who played Boon Hogganbeck. It was really quite a good movie. When the advance crews came down to find places in Oxford, Mississippi, for shooting the background scenes and much of the early action, it was a disappointment to see that Oxford had become too large and developed and did not have enough of a county-seat look anymore. So in wandering around and inquiring, they found Carrollton, came there, and judged it the perfect casting for Faulkner’s Jefferson. The action of the book takes place in the early years of the century, and this is exactly when the clocks had stopped in Carrollton, forever.

  There was high excitement. All the ladies of every age fell madly in love with McQueen, who flirted with them daily. Many people got to be extras. It was Carrollton’s last big fling.

  I am told there has been some precaution in recent years over tornadoes. One of those could wipe out the town. Drills have been held—what to do in case—for fierce storms can blow up, can look bla
ck and terrible, like an avenging demon, can actually strike. Hallie Eggleston, after her retirement, alone in a beautiful house full of antique treasures, used to meet these emergencies by sitting under her massive dining-room table holding tightly to the mahogany table legs. When I picture that diminutive aging lady alone and frightened beneath the massive table, I don’t know whether it is funny or sad—perhaps both.

  For if Carrollton has a spirit for me, it is probably centered in the Egglestons. They were the town’s original Episcopalian family and lived next to the charming Grace Church. There were, in my earliest memory, only women in their house, for Mr. Sid Eggleston, a close friend of my grandfather’s, had died, and I do not remember him. But the grandmother, a tiny, almost silent lady with observant eyes, I do remember, also the mother, a small, humped person, a quick thinker at bridge games, which we were often invited to play there. She was well-read and had her own opinion on everything going.

  The Eggleston girls were three in number: Sara, Frances, and Hallie. All were appropriately courted but evidently hard to win, as only Sara married and lived away with a Delta planter. Frances taught grammar school in Greenwood with considerable success, winning a national prize.

  Hallie—known as Baby Hallie or simply Ballie—taught Latin in several small colleges but gave it up for a librarian’s degree. She was a small, efficient presence in the Ole Miss library for many years. The boys praised her neat legs and charming smile. She retired home to Carrollton and was finally the only remaining Eggleston there.

  Their humor and interest in life, their cultivated, reliable presence, their beautiful taste, made of them a sort of essence of all our town was meant to be. Others might scatter or go over to wild erratic behavior—drinking, adultery, murder, and madness were not unknown—but the quiet core life was being lived without questioning by the Egglestons.

  Something surprising the Eggleston girls liked to tell about occurred during the Depression. Certain land speculators in Florida were advertising free trips to anyone interested in buying property in any one of a number of locales. The Eggleston girls volunteered as among those avidly interested in the area and got to travel all over Florida, stopping wherever they proposed to explore, looking for prospective homesites. They had no intention whatsoever of buying property, but thought nothing of saying so, daring fate that one time for the sake of a free trip.

  16

  THE POET

  CARROLLTON should have had a great poet. It almost did.

  Lawrence Olson was a distant cousin. He lived up the street from us in an antebellum house in the classic style, two-story with a portico and tall white columns. His father was often absent. His mother, Cousin Wanda, was there, and for a few years of my childhood, his grandmother, the formidable Cousin Frieda.

  Frieda Liddell was from a German family, residents of New Orleans since the early nineteenth century. She had met young Dr. Liddell when he was studying medicine in that city. I remember an old lady with a strong opinionated voice, sitting in a corner with a spread over her knees. She was wearing a frilly white cap on her gray curls.

  All summer long Lawrence came down to our house to play, and in winter when he was home from school in Greenwood (he was driven there daily by a family friend who worked there), he was often at our house. He was only four years older than I, and though we sometimes quarreled, I think I took him as almost a brother, at any rate, as someone always present. For many years it was no surprise to walk into the living room and find Lawrence seated there, reading or writing something, having come in without notice. He was known to be “smart,” and he had to pay for every form of “difference” in Carrollton, just as I had. His mother, also a music teacher, was thought of as having an intellectual bent, a reader of various books, who “kept up” with outer things.

  Because of being named for his father, he was at first called Junior Olson. I think he began to despise it early on. It was as if Carrollton had put a brand on him with that name before he could say anything about it. He took the stouthearted course of refusing to answer when called Junior. He finally won. But I think many in Carrollton probably still call him that, being every bit as stubborn as he, no matter to them that the name was his own.

  Summer after summer, winter after winter, Lawrence was a constant presence, telling us about things we hadn’t heard of. He was musical and used to bang out Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus” on our old rosewood piano. He one night sat before the fire and recounted the entire story of Hugo’s Les Misçrables. It had recently been made into a movie we were all interested to see. He talked well, in a rich descriptive way. Stories should be told by firelight. He knew how to pronounce French names. He brought with him a window into a wider world, and I loved listening to him.

  For several summers, J.J., Charles, and Leila (the Holman children), Eloise Lee, Lawrence, and I formed a stamp club. We all collected stamps and owned albums to paste them in with tiny glued hinges, careful not to tear. We had books that evaluated separate issues and catalogs for ordering. We swapped. “My two Camaroons for your seven-cent Washington. Is there a watermark?” These were the languid afternoons.

  Another time, during an eclipse, we got up on the roof out the window of our attic and studied the majestic solar process through pieces of smoked glass. Up there we also had a chemistry set, ordered, I think, from Sears Roebuck. It would color litmus paper blue and pink according to what mixtures were used, and made angry concoctions in test tubes with drops of various acids. We could make salt.

  Out in the swing one afternoon we told scary stories. Lawrence had culled a humdinger from a book of pieces collected by Alexander Woollcott. One was called “Moonlight Sonata,” about a man who as a guest in a spooky English country house saw by moonlight what looked to be someone playing a violin, but turned out instead to be a madman plucking the hairs from the head of the cook, whom he had murdered and decapitated. I was so frightened by this macabre image that I stayed awake at night shuddering to remember it.

  Cursed (or blessed) with a visual imagination, I found it impossible to throw off an image anyone had powerfully evoked. Scary movies were a threat, boogeyman tales and lightning storms made me quake. At night I was afraid to venture into the yard with its long slopes and dense shadows of shrubs and trees that were friendly by day, but who knew what life they assumed as they turned black by moonlight?

  Space, too, was frightening. I used to lie and look up at the infinite reach of the night sky full of stars, some looking near, others far. There was no end to it, no end! My very self seemed to be following my vision, outward, outward forever! This seemed so incredible as to be paralyzing, yet everybody lived calmly with that knowledge, day by day.

  Lawrence’s stories, related in the manner of a composed piece of writing, brought home to me, among other effects, the power of words to connect not only to the known and possible, but to the unknown, the improbable, the mysteries. Others of our club told stories too, I suppose, but I don’t remember them as well.

  But he had bad times. Other children tormented him by making him say that he was one-fourth German. Being German was a stigma, World War I having been too recent in the past. He was scarcely of a temperament to fight, but he would do it, only to lose and be held to the ground until he was made to say some foolish thing. He was high-strung, intelligent, and at times, in spite of his shyness, touchingly affectionate.

  Most of all, he wrote poetry!

  My aunt Katie Lou, home from teaching, expressed an interest, and he would bring long passages down for her to read. In her presence (and mine, of course) he would read aloud from his Swinburne-like verses: “The moon is a vessel of nectar / The stars are a cluster of pearls,” and so forth.

  An only child, often lonely, he needed our company. His father worked for the state extension service and was seldom at home. There were stories about drinking. His mother was pleased to have him play with other children, especially my brother and me, as we were kin and known to be “nice.” She and my mother had be
en in the same crowd as girls. They both had been members of the Sans Souci Club.

  Lawrence eventually went off to Ole Miss, where his poetry began to grow and find publication here and there. He went abroad one summer, having himself organized a small band to play in the third-class lounge of a liner. He told us very little about France, except that at one point in Paris his portfolio of music had been stolen and he had first to wheedle sheet music out of the French entertainers, then labor at translating the words into English. But he was leaving us by then, a handsome boy, brown-haired, with deep dimples and a charming smile.

  It would have been a natural thing for him and me to grow closer, and though we went out to picture shows and over to Greenwood a number of times, we seemed, as we grew up, intolerably shy with each other. I was in awe of his intellect and found it difficult to think of anything to say he would not find hopelessly dumb. I remember one night he began to talk to me about William Faulkner. I had heard him mentioned before, but always as someone to be ashamed of, a writer who “raked up dirt.” Lawrence told me my ideas were wrong and that Faulkner would be known someday as a great writer. He discussed Phil Stone, the lawyer in Oxford who was Faulkner’s mentor in his younger days, and how Stone had been able to point Faulkner toward subject matter he could use in his writing.

  Lawrence eventually left us entirely. I think he may have loved the family, certainly my mother, and I believe he had real affection for me. But he hated Carrollton attitudes. He would go to church with us: we were always to stop in the car and pick him up for Sunday school, a small boy running down the long steps to the street in plus fours and knee-length argyle socks—clothes no one else wore. Once we were on a program together at a young people’s meeting. Lawrence read a short article cut from a church pamphlet, and on the way home he tore it over and over into confetti-size bits, which he tossed out the car window. That gesture said what he felt.