Every Day by the Sun

by Dean Faulkner Wells

  *Bill Styron once told me that he had a similar experience with Bennett Cerf in 1962 when they arrived in Memphis on the way to Pappy’s funeral. As the pair walked through the Memphis airport, Styron noticed heads turning and thought, “They couldn’t be looking at me!” And indeed they weren’t. Everyone, of course, was staring at Cerf, the celebrity panelist and occasional host of TV’s What’s My Line? Cerf breezed through the airport, Bill recalled with a smile, taking the attention for granted.

  *In 1993, I was invited to judge the International Imitation Hemingway Contest at Harry’s American Bar and Grill in Los Angeles. When Larry and I were brought in to meet the other judges, there sat Ray Bradbury. We were introduced. Not a flicker of recognition. After a second glass of wine I asked, “Did you by chance sail for England on the Liberté in June of ’fifty-seven?” He nodded and said, “Did you?” Silence. Embarrassed to be just as tongue-tied twenty-six years after our first meeting, I murmured, “Yes. Wasn’t it a lovely crossing?”

  IN THE FALL OF 1957, SANDRA AND I LIVED ON THE THIRD floor of the Pension des Bastions, located at 18 rue de Condole, across the street from the University of Geneva, where we had enrolled as lowly walk-in students. The university also housed the exclusive Ecole d’Interprêt. Our landlady, Madame von Steiger, was a White Russian who never went anywhere without her dog, a nasty little mutt named Fritz. Madame’s establishment had a citywide reputation for offering the best boardinghouse lunches anywhere. At precisely 11:30 a.m. five days a week, twenty-odd multinational regulars arrived and took their places at tables, always the same seats intermingled with us nine live-in boarders—a Swiss, a German, an Indian, a Scot, three Italians, and two Americans.

  The two young women who ran the kitchen served the soup course precisely at noon. The third-floor dining room was small and crowded but aside from the extraordinary food, it was a wonderful place to be, mainly because it was the only heated room in the building. (The city of Geneva didn’t turn on the steam-heating system until mid-October.) In the meantime we huddled around a small, potbellied iron stove until the soup was poured, then warmed our hands over the steaming bowls.

  Most of the regulars were students or instructors at L’Ecole d’Interprêt, and any given lunch sounded like a combination of the United Nations and the Tower of Babel with conversations in ten different tongues.

  When Sputnik was launched on October 4, we found out exactly where we stood with our fellow diners. Until that point, they had barely spoken to us. Now, in many different languages, only two of which we understood, we heard our country being ridiculed while Russia was hailed literally to the skies, lauded and celebrated. To a person the interpreters and instructors were thrilled that the Russians had been the first to conquer space.

  Embarrassed, Sandra and I skipped dessert. We were full of humble pie.

  A box of jonquils packed in dry ice arrived at the pension in March 1958. Miss Kate had picked them from her garden and shipped them by air. The minute I saw them I knew it was time to go home. I longed for a Mississippi spring of wisteria and fireflies, thunderstorms and gentle rains. My year-long European odyssey was over. I had sat for exams for only twelve hours of coursework, but I had skied Vevey and Innsbruck and Garmisch. Before leaving I made one more trip to Spain, my last chance to follow in Hemingway’s footsteps from La Casa Botin, his favorite restaurant in Madrid, to San Sebastián and Pamplona, where I toasted Papa from the wineskins and Pappy picked up the tab.

  A month later my flight from Orly landed midafternoon at La Guardia where I took a cab to 48 East Eighty-third Street to Cho Cho and Vicki’s town house. They welcomed me home in fine style: dinner at the Metropolitan Club, tickets to West Side Story, brunch or lunch at sidewalk cafés. When we ate in, Cho Cho’s Filipino cook served dinner. After a week of super-sophisticated welcome-home celebrations, I caught a flight to Memphis. Miss Kate and Wese met me at the airport and took me to Oxford. First I had to finish my degree as I had promised. I moved into Nannie’s front bedroom, enrolled in summer school at the University of Mississippi, and got a job at the university library. The last dime of my year-abroad money went for tuition. Nannie was good for room and board. This was all to the good since my job at the library paid eighteen dollars a week.

  Pappy came home from Virginia for a month’s visit, primarily to check on Nannie. We had several grand reunions welcoming me back. Pappy picked me up at Nannie’s in his new jeep and drove me to Rowan Oak. The motor was noisy and we had to talk loudly to be heard. “Tell me about Europe,” he said as he drove.

  I thought for a moment and drew one memory out of a year’s experiences. “I saw Bus Stop in German with English subtitles. I wish you could have heard Marilyn Monroe say—”

  “Guten Tag?” he interrupted, and we both laughed. Then he said, “And?”

  “I fell in love with an Italian in Rome. I may marry him.”

  “And you’ll live in Italy!” He seemed shocked. I didn’t reply, having no intentions of marrying the boy. I didn’t know why I said it. “Marry Italians for love,” he said, “and marry Americans for money. Did you meet his mother?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, you should have! You’ll be a long way from home.” I digested this in silence. I was glad to be back in Mississippi and frankly it unnerved me to think about going back to Europe so soon, much less getting married. Pappy made a hand signal and turned onto Garfield. “What happened to your German young man, the one you wrote us about? The one who spoke no English.”

  “Well, we had to communicate in French. So I ended up speaking French with a German accent and he spoke it with a southern American accent. It was pretty bad. Besides, his mama didn’t like me.”

  He shifted gears with a grin. “Well, neither will your Italian’s.” I gave him a shifty little look and we burst out laughing. I was glad I had made him laugh.

  Pappy was staying by himself at Rowan Oak and took me to dinner at least once a week. I was his logical (only) companion readily available. We usually went to the Mansion, an antebellum house converted into a restaurant by Aubrey Seay, popular with townsfolk and students alike and just up the street from Nannie’s.

  The steaks and the shrimp rémoulade were good, but the best thing about the Mansion, where Ole Miss students were concerned, was the jukebox, though this machine had been the bane of my existence when I was a coed. To show his respect for Pappy, who hated background music, Seay would unplug the jukebox the moment he entered the restaurant. When I was a freshman and sophomore, I went in with Pappy hoping and praying that I wouldn’t see anybody I knew. I felt that every young person in the place hated me. All those quarters.

  Pappy could never open the cellophane-wrapped packets of crackers. I started out hoping he wouldn’t notice them or that he wouldn’t want any with his salad, or that if he did he would locate the little red “pull tab” and be able to open a packet by himself. None of this ever happened. Inevitably, he wound up at war with his crackers, twisting and turning the cellophane, becoming more frustrated by the second until Whamm! Down came his fist smashing the crackers to smithereens. I stared at the table as other diners glanced at us and Pappy muttered about “the innate perversity of inanimate objects.”

  He looked healthy and happy that summer, but the same was not true of Nannie. She was eighty-seven and had suffered a series of little strokes that had left her blind in one eye. She still made her own meals, however. Breakfast consisted of intentionally burned toast cut into three slices, no butter or jelly. She still ate at her dining room table, silver sugar bowl and cream pitcher in place even though she never took milk or cream or sugar with her coffee.

  She was mobile and as stubborn as ever. She had always paced the house—walking off nervous energy. But now she passed from room to room like a caged animal, anxious and distracted. She played double solitaire for hours on end sitting at the dining room table by herself, chomping on bits of ice that she crushed with a hammer. With her dowager’s hump and black eye patch,
she didn’t look exactly like everyone else’s grandmother. A pirate’s dagger on her belt would not have seemed un toward.

  Pappy told me that the reason for this particular visit was that once again Nannie had fired the nurse-companion he had hired to live with her. He was determined that she not live alone due to her age and fragility, but he couldn’t count on me to stay put. Nannie was equally determined that she live exactly the way she pleased—alone. This was the third “nice lady” Pappy had hired and Nannie had fired as soon as he left for Virginia. What a battle of wills.

  “Have you forgotten, Billy,” she said, “the difference between being lonely and being alone?”

  Nannie had also lost a great deal more of her hearing since that Sunday twenty years before when she had walked out of the Methodist church muttering to herself about the new minister who “whispered” while he preached. “I’ll not waste my time on man or god who won’t speak up.”* She never went back. She never wore a hearing aid either, even after the day Pappy and I took her for a checkup and, as we sat in Dr. Holley’s crowded waiting room, she announced to the world at large, singling out some poor child: “Billy, isn’t that the ugliest little girl you ever saw?” He stared at the Field and Stream in his lap. “Dean, isn’t that the ugliest …”

  Late one summer afternoon as we sat in her room, Nannie turned to Pappy and said, “Billy, do you think there is a heaven?” Pappy said something like, “I don’t know, Mother.” Nannie: “Well, if there is, I know those robes will be too long, flapping all around my ankles, and if your father is there, I don’t want to see him.”

  “Believe me, Mother,” Pappy said, “you won’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  “I want to go wherever Conrad and Shakespeare are,” she said.

  Pappy chuckled. “And V.K.”

  Nannie laughed. Pappy’s “V. K. Ratliff” was her favorite character from Yoknapatawpha County. The day Pappy created V.K. he hurried to Nannie’s and told her. From then on they treated the sewing machine salesman like an old family friend. Nannie never tired of hearing about V.K. and Pappy never tired of the telling. How bad could hell be if V.K. was there? After a while Pappy went on to observe that most people died of boredom. “I’m bored enough and tired enough,” Nannie said.

  He glanced up. “I won’t let you die on me.” Before she could reply, he changed the subject to the latest whodunit they had read.

  I spent that summer trying to decide what to do with the rest of my life. I had graduated in August with a double major in English and French, a minor in history and a WSI (water safety instructor), which meant I was qualified to teach swimming lessons in French should there be any demand. Pappy had teased me all summer long about my majors and minors, and my being “splendidly” (his word) qualified to do nothing. I needed a three-hour elective to graduate, so my last course at Ole Miss was pottery making.

  Pappy was relentless. “All those hours so you’ll learn how to throw an ugly pot on a wheel, which you couldn’t give away to your own grandmother.” But he smiled when he said it.

  Once when we were having dinner at a restaurant in Oxford, I noticed a college girl laughing and talking loudly. “Look at her,” I whispered to Pappy. “She’s had too much to drink and is making a fool of herself.” He leveled that dark gaze that could turn you to ice and said, “Don’t be supercilious.” I didn’t know what that meant but it couldn’t be good. When I got home that night, the first thing I did was look up supercilious in the dictionary. Then I looked in the mirror to see if I could raise my eyebrow. Then I swore to myself not to be guilty of such arrogance again.

  Pappy insisted that I would make Nannie happy by participating in graduation exercises. So in August I donned cap and gown and lined up outside the university’s Fulton Chapel with the small summer-school graduating class of 1958. It was a rainy afternoon and the chapel was barely half full. As I filed inside with my classmates I could see the chancellor waiting on stage to present our diplomas. I felt too old to be marching in time to “Pomp and Circumstance.” Then I noticed two figures, third row center, rising solemnly, so close together they seemed joined at the hip. They stood as straight and tall as they could in the classic European manner of honoring university graduates. The only ones standing, they remained on their feet the entire ceremony. Everyone was staring. I hoped in vain—I prayed—that nobody in the auditorium recognized them.

  As a graduation gift, Pappy assured me of a job at Random House—starting in the mail room or even lower, as befitted a thrower of bad pots—but I wanted to be just like every other woman in her twenties in the 1950s: married and living happily ever after. There were notable exceptions, no doubt, in Mississippi in the 1950s. I just wasn’t one of them.

  Underneath this flippant attitude was a desperate young woman who had lived her entire twenty-two years dependent upon, not the kindness of strangers, but the kindness of family members who took care of her financially and emotionally because they felt a moral obligation to do so, not because they had no choice. Nothing as uncomplicated and pure as a father and daughter, he with a blood bond to care for her until she entered an age when she was old enough to take care of herself or find someone else to do it. Very few women in those days looked forward to careers. I was far too full of self-doubt to think I could do anything on my own—certainly not earn a living. I had all the drive and self-confidence, ambition and get-up-and-go of a marshmallow.

  But I felt pretty sure I could find a husband, even though at the time nobody had proposed marriage.

  Before summer’s end I had found a willing candidate. I’d known him for four years, but in all that time we’d scarcely spent thirty days together. After a brief long-distance courtship we were engaged. Aunt Estelle and Pappy planned an announcement party in the east garden at Rowan Oak in late August 1958. My future in-laws were due to arrive midafternoon the day of the party.

  I should have known the gods of marriage were up to something. As the time approached, Pappy sat in a rocking chair on the front gallery smoking a Salem cigarette, flicking ashes over the banister.

  “Sir,” I said from behind his chair, addressing the top of his head, “they’ll be here in just a minute.”

  “So?”

  “Well, sir, I sort of thought you might want … might think about … changing your clothes.”

  No answer.

  “Uh, Pappy, maybe just your pants?”

  He turned his face to mine. “What’s wrong with these?”

  He wore a faded blue wrinkled work shirt frayed at collar and cuffs, muddy brogans with no socks, and a pair of khakis cut off above his knees. The fabric had unraveled so that long fuzzy strings of knotted thread hung down his calves. Before I could reply we heard a car turn into the driveway. I willed myself to vanish into thin air.

  He stood, put out his cigarette, stashed the filter in a pocket, squared his shoulders, and walked the few steps to the porte cochere. When the car stopped he opened the door for my future mother-in-law with the flourish of a valet at the Ritz and helped her out. I think she was too shocked to faint.

  In spite of this inauspicious welcome by Pappy, Aunt Estelle had done everything to make the party successful. She had handwritten the invitations, planned the dinner, seen to the decorations—large tables with eight place settings and white candles aglow on white linen tablecloths with garlands of pink rosebuds draped to the hems, barely touching the grass. Everything was perfect. The weather was unseasonably cool, and the sounds of the University of Mississippi band rehearsing in the football stadium drifted through Bailey’s Woods in muted stereo: “Dixie” inexplicably followed by Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” My husband-to-be should have felt some premonition—if not about the music, then surely when Pappy called us to the east gallery to stand with him as he proposed a toast. I don’t remember his exact words but the gist was that my most outstanding character trait was loyalty—unrelenting and unmitigated whether deserved or not. It should have spooked my fiancé but Pa
ppy’s allure was too strong.

  Before Aunt Estelle returned to Charlottesville, she and I made several trousseau shopping trips to Memphis, spending Pappy’s money with abandon and having a fine time doing it.* She was recognized in every store. Hello, Mrs. Faulkner. Let me find the manager. In minutes he or she would appear. It’s so good to see you, Mrs. Faulkner. We have a wonderful new line of short coats in your colors.… “Today, we’re shopping for my niece,” Aunt Estelle said. “She will be married in November.” We never had to wait to be waited on.

  We spent hours watching models showing suits, cocktail dresses, daytime wear (this was the ’50s), kid gloves in short, medium, and opera length with buttons at the wrists, and hats, heels, and handbags to match every costume. Our decisions were lengthy and very pleasant as we sipped coffee. We got to know each other very well on these excursions. Just the two of us.

  Aunt Estelle could be an entertaining raconteur with a cutting sense of humor. One afternoon in the shoe department of Goldsmith’s, as I took off my heels, rubbing my aching toes and complaining in a whisper how my feet hurt, she corrected my use of the plural. “A lady’s foot hurts, Dean, perhaps from dancing the night away or turning an ankle as she is helped down from a carriage, but both of them never hurt at the same time,” she said. “Remember, there is only one glass slipper.”

  When the bridesmaid dress model appeared in a royal blue brocade satin cocktail dress with fitted waist, scoop neckline, and three-quarter-length sleeves, I said quickly—before she reached where we were sitting—“That’s fine. We need four in these sizes …” and I reeled off the dress sizes of my bridesmaids. Aunt Estelle looked at me in astonishment. She knew how much I hated royal blue. Not only can I not wear the color, which makes me look jaundiced, it’s best that I not be in the same room with someone who does. That’s when she knew that the marriage meant nothing to me. She gave me a sympathetic smile. “I think I understand,” she said. “I have been there myself.”