THE GREATEST POSSIBLE threat to Estelle’s marriage never materialized at all, even though the lady in question was nearer to Rowan Oak than any other, because she loved both Aunt Estelle and Pappy too much to become involved.
The night that I first became aware of the attraction between Pappy and Miss Kate was at a dinner party at Rowan Oak. Aunt Estelle was in Virginia at the time. On this particular evening, Pappy’s guests included Wese and me, Tommy Barksdale, a classmate of mine whom Pappy found amusing and called “that redheaded boy,” and Jayne Coers, an attractive young widow on whom Pappy had a crush (he always called her “Miz Coers”), and Miss Kate. They were due at seven. Jayne arrived early. She and Pappy were alone in the library when I walked from the kitchen into the front parlor. I started to turn on a light. At that moment Pappy leaned down to kiss Jayne’s upturned face. Though he’d long had a crush on her, I think that was all it amounted to. Just then the front door opened silently. Miss Kate entered. She did not see me in the parlor. Instead, through the open door of the library, she could see Pappy and Jayne. I heard a slight gasp. She turned on her heel and left.
Suddenly I knew. Their trips to New York at the same time. Both of them staying at Pappy’s favorite hotel. The long horseback rides. Her interest in me. Taking me to New York with her on buying trips to Seventh Avenue. The gift tickets from Pappy to see Paul Newman in Sweet Bird of Youth. Tickets to the Met—again from Pappy. Shopping for me “off the models,” as it were. Europe. The two of them, Pappy and Miss Kate, shaping my life again and again and again.
I didn’t see the tears on her face but I could feel her crying.
Within five minutes there was a knock at the door. “See to it, Dean,” called Pappy. “It’s Kate, I’m sure.”
I opened the door. There she stood in her navy blue silk shantung and pearls, a red fox stole around her shoulders, its beady little eyes glaring at the world, a smile on her lovely face. She hugged me and walked into the library. She offered her cheek to Pappy and her left hand to Jayne. She dropped her fur on the back of her chair and settled in before the fire and said, “Bill, tell us what you think about …”
She could have won an Academy Award.
*Hawks premiered the film at Oxford’s Lyric Theatre, operated by Pappy’s cousin-in-law, Bob Williams. Seeing a chance to cash in, Williams raised ticket prices for the debut showing from a quarter to thirty-five cents. He advertised that the author would make an appearance and then got his wife, Sallie Murry, to beg her cousin to show up. The local audience was seated in the little theater, thrilled that the local boy had “made good.” Pappy reluctantly appeared. He walked down the aisle to the front. Williams introduced him to wild applause. Pappy faced the expectant audience and said, “This movie bears no relation to the story I wrote,” and walked out.
*I think Nannie would have agreed completely.
AFTER MUCH PLEADING, CAJOLING, AND BEGGING, AND WITH the unflagging support of Nannie and Miss Kate (who planned to be in Europe when I got there), Pappy agreed to send me abroad to study for a year. I had just begun the second semester as a junior at the University of Mississippi when Sandra told me that she and her mother and her brother, William, a handsome thirteen-year-old, would be leaving in April to join their father, an army colonel stationed in Augsburg, Germany.
The Baker family was like that. Here today, gone tomorrow. They weren’t like anybody else, but then neither were we. While they were in residence they lived in a two-story brick house next door to Rowan Oak on a three-acre lot with a pasture and a barn and the occasional horse. Miss Kate was an elegant woman, small, dark, and athletic with a beautiful figure. She was a gifted actress. Her stage name was Kathleen Burke. The Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger gave a rave review of her performance in the play The Front Page, on April 4, 1931.
“Time and again,” she said in an interview, “I have been asked by folk who know only the stage from the front whether actors and actresses really live and feel the parts they play. My reply has always been that I do not see how any one can properly act the role unless they actually live it, make themselves a part of it, whether it be a love scene, a dramatic moment, or even the deepest tragedy. Of course I live my part. I live the love scenes … and sometimes they affect me so deeply that I am back in my dressing room before I snap back into my normal self.” The photograph accompanying the article shows a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty. Miss Kate was on her way to stardom. In her early twenties, she had a major role in a play in Philadelphia. Bette Davis was her understudy. When Miss Kate’s father died before the play opened, she went home to Birmingham, Alabama, to care for her mother, never to return to the stage. Bette Davis went on to become, well, Bette Davis.
I’ve known the Bakers for as long as I can remember, but I don’t know when Miss Kate and Bill Baker were married or how or why she and her three children (Virginia, Sandra, and William) came to be in Oxford. She was well-read, well-bred, and far too sophisticated for this small town. She was a brilliant businesswoman who started her own clothing store at a time when most employed women worked for someone else. She was the boss and a very successful one.
She and “the Colonel” (nobody ever called him anything else—I don’t know what he was called before he was “the Colonel”) had what might be called a casual marriage. He was some years older, a career army man who had started out in the cavalry. He had been stationed all over the world. Miss Kate joined him when he was posted somewhere that she liked. They had spent two years in Japan shortly after WWII and several months at a post in Maryland. In between, Miss Kate and the children lived in Oxford and the Colonel popped in for visits. They were always exciting times since no one knew when to expect him. Once he arrived in a small airplane he had bought. When he landed he called Miss Kate to come pick him up at the airport. She was unaware that he knew how to fly. The Colonel was brusque but polite, a man of few words, an avid fisherman and poker player extraordinaire. Both Miss Kate and the Colonel were friends and neighbors of Pappy and Aunt Estelle—especially Miss Kate.
Pappy had been helping pay my way for years, but after my graduation from high school he became my sole source of support. He let Miss Kate and me convince him that if I went abroad with Sandra, it would not cost him any more than if I stayed at Ole Miss. When he consented—and I knew that when he said he would take care of the money it would be there—I began making plans for my first trip to Europe. I could never have imagined that I would wind up studying French at the University of Geneva that fall, or that when I deposited the check Pappy sent me, a Swiss bank president would invite me to have tea in his office, or that this distinguished, gray-haired gentleman would say, without a trace of embarrassment, that he was honored to hold a piece of paper with Pappy’s signature on it.
I signed up to study French that summer at Aubigny-sur-Nère, the hometown of my French professor’s wife, Ginette. Every year Dr. Strickland and Ginette chaperoned a study group in France. We were scheduled to sail on the Liberté June 11, 1957, at eleven thirty in the morning. I was deliriously happy.
Recently I found tucked away in a cubbyhole of Nannie’s secretary a packet containing my ticket on the Liberté, some Western Union telegrams wishing me bon voyage (my favorite is from Billy Ross Brown’s wife, Lynn: “Bring home a count for me!”), my Paris hotel bills, and a small, formal note in the unmistakable handwriting of Aunt Estelle addressed to:
Miss Dean Faulkner
Courtesy William Faulkner Esq.
The notepaper was engraved “Mrs. William Faulkner,” and the note read:
Dearest Dean,
Enclosed is a tiny going
away present for you.
I am happy over your
year in Europe for a most
deserving little girl, and wish
every good and wonderful thing
for you.
Write to us sometime when
you feel as though you want
to, never as a chore—
Give all t
he Bakers my
love—will miss Kate terribly
when I go back to Oxford.
Sort of envy Pappy getting to
see you before you sail!
Much love from me, and
always remember you are my
little girl too—
Aunt Estelle
Pappy will cash this for you.
The check was for a lovely one hundred dollars. Pappy cashed it for me in New York. The note itself is priceless.
Nannie saw me off in Oxford. I held up my key to her front door, while Wese backed the car out of the driveway, as a sign that I’d come home to her. Wese and I spent that night at the Peabody and I caught an early flight to New York the next morning with a classmate from Ole Miss. Her name was Jan. After takeoff, she lost her lunch in an air-sickness bag. I patted her head and looked steadily out the window, smiling inside, certain that I was a natural-born cosmopolite. Immunity to motion sickness was proof positive.
Two notes were waiting for me when I arrived at my hotel in New York. One was from Pappy asking me to call when I checked in; the other was from my Ole Miss classmate and dear friend Bob Garrison, a brilliant classics scholar and member of the “Third Floor YMCA Gang,” who would be sailing with me on the Liberté. His message said to meet him at some coffeehouse in the Village at three o’clock. Off I went. When I got back to the hotel much, much later there were three telephone messages from Pappy. The last read, “When you come up for air, call your uncle or your grandmother will kill both of us.”
The night before I sailed, Pappy and Saxe Commins (“Mr. Saxe,” I called him) took Jan and me to dinner. I was absolutely enamored with myself. My idol that year was Françoise Sagan, author of Bonjour Tristesse. I wanted to be her. I had my hair cut like hers and had adopted an affinity for black. I wore a little black cotton sheath with tiny tucks from neckline to dropped waistband. With my black stockings and Capezios, I thought I looked stunning. As we walked down Park Avenue on our way to Pappy’s favorite restaurant (I wish to the good Lord I could remember which one) I began to notice heads turning. “This is it,” I thought. “I am the cutest thing to hit New York. Just wait till I get to Paris!”
Within one block reality set in. They were staring at my distinguished escort Pappy, who continued smiling and chatting, either oblivious or accustomed to the attention. Not since the film premiere of Intruder in the Dust had I realized who he was, a world-renowned author, but this was New York and there was no marquee with his name on it and these were complete strangers and we were a long way from home.*
The restaurant that Mr. Saxe and Pappy took us to was quiet, elegant, and very French, with red leather banquettes, gold sconces, and menus as big as I was, leather-bound with tassels. Pappy ordered escargots and several fine wines. The maître d’ and the sommelier were rarely far from our table. I don’t remember what we ate, but Mr. Saxe insisted that we order an entrée that we’d never eaten before. We had a very good time.
On the way back to our hotel Pappy and Mr. Saxe decided we must see Bennett Cerf’s private office at Random House, which was located in the Villard Houses at 451 Madison Avenue, between Fiftieth and Fifty-first streets. When we got there, we headed straight for Cerf’s famous bathroom. Nobody outside of Hollywood had a telephone in his bathroom! But there it was. Pappy immediately began pretending to dial numbers. This was the first time I’d seen him pantomime “black cord fever,” that momentary affliction that comes upon solitary folks late at night after a few drinks, when they want to talk to every old friend they ever had. I wondered if he’d ever succumbed to the real thing. Mr. Saxe tuned in a radio station that played dance music. Pappy gave up playing with the phone, climbed fully clothed into the tub, and watched as Mr. Saxe took turns waltzing Jan and me around the office. He was our own Fred Astaire. After each number, Pappy clapped along with the studio audience.
At midnight they hailed a cab for us outside the Random House building. Hugs, kisses on both cheeks, “Bon voyage!” over and over, and a last request from Pappy: “Dean, promise to send me a postcard as soon as you get to Paris. One with a picture of the Eiffel Tower.” Mr. Saxe added, “Send me one, too, with the Eiffel Tower.” Another hug. Another thank-you. Another good-bye. Pappy gave our driver the hotel address, paid him, and we were driven away. Our gentlemen of distinction stood on the sidewalk waving till we were out of sight.
We headed to the piers early the next morning. It was still dark. Cars had their lights on. Breathless with excitement we boarded the Liberté, a mammoth ship. Well-wishers packed the pier elbow to elbow. After checking into our room, we followed the other passengers to the upper deck. In spite of the chilly morning we wriggled to the outside railing for our last view of New York, noisy, dirty, exhilarating, and sad. Then I saw, standing side by side, hats in hand, Mr. Saxe and Pappy. They waved and blew kisses. They raised their hats as we sailed out of New York Harbor.
MIDCROSSING, I RECEIVED a note from Ray Bradbury. At the time I had a paperback copy of his October Country in my luggage, and I had recently read Fahrenheit 451. His note said that he and Mrs. Bradbury had been browsing through the passenger list and had seen my name and were curious as to a possible connection with William Faulkner. Would I join them for tea the following afternoon at four? I nearly fainted. “Tell them yes, thank you,” I said to the steward. He held out a tray with a notepad and pen. “If mademoiselle would write a response?” I scribbled an acceptance. When he left, my mind raced over the possibilities to get me out of this invitation. I could get sick. Jump ship. We could hit an iceberg. I could forget to go.
I was a nervous wreck. Ray Bradbury was the first major writer I had ever met (Pappy didn’t count, because he was Pappy), and I felt sure I’d make a complete ass of myself if I opened my mouth. What was I to say to him? I had inherited a crippling shyness from the Faulkners. We are natural-born “back-row sitters.”
At four the next day I knocked on the door of their first-class stateroom. I wore my favorite navy waffle piqué sheath. It usually made me feel confident and grown up. This time, it didn’t help at all. My knees were knocking when Mr. Bradbury opened the door, introduced me to his wife, and offered me a chair.
“Tea?”
“No, thank you, sir.”
“Something else? Coffee? A soft drink?”
“No, thank you.” Silence.
“Well, Miss Faulkner, do you know your famous namesake?”
“Yes, sir, he’s my uncle.” Silence.
“Wonderful. How is he?”
“Fine.” Silence.
“Is this your first sail?”
“Yes.” Silence.
And so it went for an endless fifteen or twenty minutes, desperate attempts at conversation from them, monosyllabic replies from me. When I moaned, “I have to go now,” there were no demurrals.*
THE LIBERTÉ DOCKED at Dover. I stayed up all night waiting for my first glimpse of the white cliffs. The next day we took a boat train to Paris and a taxi to the Hotel Cambon, a small hotel just off the rue de Rivoli, close to the Place de l’Opéra and the American Express building.
There was a kiosk next to the hotel. I bought two garish postcards of the Eiffel Tower. I took them into the hotel bar, sat at the counter, and spoke my first words in French: “Puis-je avoir une biere, s’il vous plaît.” The bartender served me with the slightest of condescending smiles. I wrote my postcards at the bar.
Fifty years later a Faulkner collector sent me a page from a catalog listing books and memorabilia from Pappy’s personal library at Rowan Oak. Found in a copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov was “a color postcard of the Eiffel Tower addressed to William Faulkner from Dean [Faulkner], postmarked Paris, June 19, 1957.” The postcard reads,
Dear Pappy,
Here’s your postcard—I love Paris! The trip over was grand—wonderful people, food—landed in Le Havre yesterday & came to Paris by train. Went to Notre Dame today & am going back tomorrow & probably the next.
> Thank you sir. Dean.
Why didn’t I sign the postcard “With Love, Dean”?
Bob Garrison came to my hotel late the next day. All smiles, he said, “I have a surprise.” We hailed a cab and he told the driver our destination. I couldn’t understand what Bob said. Neither could the driver at first. Finally the man nodded and we were off. He pulled up in front of an old theater with a brightly lit marquee. A long line of people stood at the ticket office. Bob had bought tickets in advance. He herded me through the double doors and into the lobby. With its black-and-white tiled floor and French doors it reminded me of the Lyric Theatre in Oxford. I stopped to read a poster with pictures of the cast in the play we were about to see.
“Requiem pour une Nonne”
de
William Faulkner
Adaptation par Albert Camus
I could hardly believe it. I hugged Bob and we walked down the long aisle to our seats: very close to third row center.
When the heavy gold curtains parted, I gasped. There was Rowan Oak, a replica so exact that I could almost smell the cedars.
The play was splendid. The actress who played Nancy Mannigoe looked like Chrissie’s daughter; Temple Drake looked like Cho Cho. I knew the story well enough to be caught up in the drama in spite of my bad French.
I was stunned. The performance ended to uproarious applause, and I actually staggered as we left the theater, overcome with emotions I didn’t know I had: the joy of seeing a place I loved and knew so well, the pride of knowing this had been created by a man I loved and knew so well, the astonishment that Rowan Oak had come to Paris. It was exquisitely perfect, an act of magic. I felt as if I were in two places at once, two places an ocean apart. It was my Pappy’s world and—because he made me a part of it—mine.
Every Day by the Sun Page 18