Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir

by Florence King

  By the end of the baseball season Preston was in an advanced state of anxiety. The situation came to a head the night he escorted Mama and Granny to a dinner dance given by the Daughters, at which Granny was scheduled to play the Statue of Liberty in a patriotic tableau.

  It was a dressy affair that required all the things tomboys hate, like armpit-length white gloves, so Preston was counting on Mama to be in a bad mood. She was, but there was nothing she could do about it. The hall was crammed with Daughters, and like all Southern girls in the presence of formidable dowagers, she was forced completely out of character. She could not very well bellow threats about running over him while all the old ladies were telling her how sweet she looked, so the abasement Preston craved continued to elude him. He lasted through dinner, but finally the specter of a gentle Mama proved too much for him. Murmuring his excuses, he drifted away. Some moments later when the dancing began he was nowhere to be found.

  “Where’s that nice boy?” bayed one of the Daughters, and it traveled around the herd. Soon the question was on every wrinkled lip as the dowagers rubbernecked the ballroom, speculating to each other and commiserating with Mama about what a shame it was that she had to miss the grand march.

  “I’ll split his scalp open!” roared Mr. Hunt. But for once, Preston had anticipated his father’s desires and beaten him, as it were, to the punch. He was found unconscious in a men’s room stall, a shattered bourbon bottle beside him, his stiff white shirtfront saturated with whiskey and blood. Evidently he had slipped while chugalugging and struck his head on the toilet seat. His scalp was split open.

  An ambulance came and took him to the hospital.

  “Do you want to go to him, Louise?” asked Granny.

  Her question turned on the Daughters. Eyes burning with the morbid eroticism of old ladies, they urged Mama to take up a vigil at Preston’s bedside.

  “A sick man falls in love mighty fast,” said one brightly.

  “Men don’t care about hugging and kissing,” said another. “They just want somebody to take care of them.”

  “Catch a man when he’s flat on his back and he’s yours forever,” advised a third.

  It was the penis-washing school of femininity. As Mama tried to dream up an excuse they would swallow, a strange voice spoke.

  “I say, I found this on the men’s room floor. It must have fallen out of that chap’s pocket.”

  Turning, she saw a tall wiry man in his early thirties with dark red hair the color of black cherries. There was a trombone mouthpiece sticking out of the breast pocket of his tuxedo. He held a cigarette case.

  “Oh, yes,” said Granny. “That’s Preston’s. We’ll keep it for him.”

  He handed it to her and was about to turn away when one of the Daughters gazed intently into his face and clawed at his sleeve with her brown-spotted hand.

  “Are you here tonight?” she asked.

  “I believe so, madam.”

  Her egrette danced on her palsied head as she peered closer.

  “Have I seen you?”

  “That’s for you to say, madam.”

  “But I must know you,” she quavered. “I’ve never met anyone I didn’t know.”

  “I’m in the band, madam, my name is Herbert King.”

  “Oh, the band! Then you’re not here.” Her head shook harder as she cocked it in the direction of the ballroom and listened carefully. A look of alarm spread over her face.

  “But the band isn’t playing!” she cried reedily.

  “We’re on a break, madam.”

  “What did you break? I declare, this night is star-crossed.”

  Before it could get worse, they were interrupted by ruffles and flourishes from the Ballston Fife and Drum Corps.

  “Oh, Law!” Granny exclaimed. “It’s time for the tableau. I’ve got to get into my costume.”

  She and the other Daughters bustled off. My parents were alone together. After a stealthy look around, Herb took a flask from his pocket and poured gin into Mama’s punch cup, then served himself a straight shot in the little silver cap. They stood sipping together on the edge of the ballroom as the patriotic tableau began.

  As the fifes struck up a shrill rendition of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” Granny sailed in, draped in cheesecloth and dignity, a tinfoil-wrapped flashlight in her left hand and a hastily covered 1933 Sears catalogue in the crook of her right arm. Raising the light on high, she began.

  “Give me your tard, your poah …”

  “Who’s that old bat?” Herb whispered.

  “My mother.”

  It was a bad start but the gin helped. After the tableau Mama introduced him to Granny and he offered to drive them home. Granny accepted, charmed by his accent and the nationality it proclaimed. Like all Daughters in their secret hearts, she was such an anglophile that she would have accepted a ride from Jack the Ripper.

  They piled into Herb’s roadster; Mama in front holding the trombone and clarinet and Granny ensconced in the rumble seat looking like Queen Victoria presiding at a durbar.

  She got the shock of her life when she invited him to dinner the following Sunday. He knew nothing about his ancestors and seemed less than awestruck when she told him about hers. Alarmed, she showed him my grandfather’s framed copy of the Lancashire Assize Rolls of 1246 containing the name “Griffin del Ruding,” but all he did was smile politely. Gazing around at the documents and charts that lined the walls of her parlor, he said he felt as if he were in the British Museum, and Granny, whose idea of wit lay somewhere between blackface vaudeville and slippery banana peels, took it as a compliment.

  He did, however, expound on the subject of his immediate family because it gave him a golden opportunity to pull Granny’s leg. Arranging his face in a deadpan mask, he told her the sad tale of the Kings: his father, a longshoreman on the Limehouse docks, crushed to death under a bale of machine parts; his mother, dying of the drink in Whitechapel Hospital; his brother Harry, fallen at Ypres and buried in Flanders Fields.

  This much was true, but when he got to his sister Daisy he gilded the lily.

  “She was a good sort, our Daisy was, but she ran afoul of a heartless seducer. Left her in the family way, he did. After that she took to the streets. Every night she walked up and down, up and down, up and down …”

  “The poor child!” Granny cried.

  “Oh, no mum, she did quite well for herself. She had fifty yards between the station and the church.”

  Evelyn fell madly in love with him at first sight. Used to effortless conquests, she simply sat down across from him, smiled her exaltée smile, and waited for him to turn to jelly. She met with Herbish impassivity. Challenged by his unflagging disinterest, she started chasing him. When she learned that he liked to attend the National Geographic Society’s Sunday night lectures, she got one of her devoted beaux to drive her into Washington so she could stalk her elusive prey.

  Herb entered the lobby and found her perched like an epileptic hummingbird on a stone flower urn. There was nothing to do but invite her to join him. Unfortunately, that night’s offering was a slide lecture called “Insects of South America.”

  They went into the lecture hall and took seats on folding wooden chairs. Evelyn’s poppy eyes widened. “These are the kind of chairs they have in funeral parlors,” she whimpered. As the room filled up with entomologists, she looked around warily. “These people depress me. They look like they’re a hundred and thirty if they’re a day.” She fidgeted and kicked her foot back and forth until the first slide came on.

  “The Amazon beetle,” intoned the lecturer.

  “Oh, my Lord! Why didn’t somebody step on it instead of taking its picture? They ought to cut that old jungle down! I bet they brought back some bug eggs on those old pictures. I itch. Don’t you itch? I swear, something’s crawling on me. When people go to those old foreign countries they always find things in their clothes afterwards. I bet something crawled in the camera when they weren’t looking—there’s
something down the back of my dress!”

  The audience was composed of dusty emeritus professor types whose misogyny was easily stirred. Amid barks of “Get that woman out of here!” Herb led the shaking, sobbing Evelyn outside. As he stood on 16th Street wondering what to do with her, her beau drove up and helped her into the car.

  She did not return home that night. Around three A.M. Granny received a phone call from Ellicott City, Maryland, one of the elopement towns of the Upper South. It was Evelyn announcing her marriage to the boy who had helped her stalk Herb. Having caught her in a weak moment, he had begged her to marry him and she, busily scratching, had said yes.

  The following week Herb asked Mama out to dinner. I don’t know how much his choice was influenced by his bout with Evelyn’s full-throttle femininity, but for whatever reason, they started courting. It was a peculiar courtship. They never had a normal Saturday night date like other couples because that was Herb’s big work night. They never went dancing; it would have been a busman’s holiday for him, and Mama hated to dance. The one baseball game they attended produced a conversation that anticipated Abbott and Costello by ten years, and the bassoon concert left Mama with permanent psychological scars. Herb drank but he didn’t smoke; Mama smoked but she didn’t drink, so they could not enjoy Repeal. Both liked to take drives in the country but he wouldn’t go over thirty and she wouldn’t go under sixty, so they could not occupy the same car without giving each other nervous prostration. There was nothing to do except keep on eating dinner, so that’s what they did.

  What they talked about over their dinner dates is unimaginable because they had absolutely nothing in common. Both had left school at fifteen but Mama quit because she hated school, while Herb’s termination was decided for him by the rigid caste system of Edwardian England. Mama never read a book; Herb was a compulsive reader who had educated himself with a library card. Mama hated to be alone; Herb had so many inner resources he could have committed folie à deux all by himself. Had he been shipwrecked on a desert island he would have become, like the Birdman of Alcatraz, a self-taught expert in natural history.

  They were alike in only one way, and perhaps it was the thing that drew them together. Neither of them had turned out the way they were supposed to. Herb was a product of the East End slums, the son of a slattern who played the piano in a pub for free gin, yet he was a gentleman and a scholar. Mama was a ninth-generation Virginian, the daughter of a relentless memsahib, yet she shrugged off every tenet of Southern womanhood and turned the air blue every time she opened her mouth.

  My parents were sui generis: they had invented themselves.

  Granny was overjoyed by the marriage. Every practicality dear to the hearts of mothers melted in the glow of Herb’s sun, which happened to be the one that never set. He was English. It was all she cared about, all she talked about. It dropped, like the quality of mercy, into every conversation she had; the butcher, the baker, the Daughters, the Dames, and the hobo who begged old clothes all heard about “my son-in-law, he’s English, you know.”

  That Herb’s free-lance income varied, that he worked in an unstable and sometimes unsavory field, that he occasionally hired out as a bartender, that he would never have a pension, that he was, in fact, technically unemployed, mattered not. An Englishman was Granny’s version of a doctor.

  »two«

  BEING a great believer in roots, Granny wanted them to live with her in Ballston, but Herb needed to be near the big downtown hotels and clubs, so they moved to northwest Washington and set up housekeeping in a two-room apartment on Park Road, conveniently located around the corner from the 11th and Monroe streetcar line.

  The building was a former townhouse whose owner had been ruined in 1929; unable to afford an architect or a contractor, he had converted the place himself, evidently while still in shock. Mama and Herb had a triangular foyer with the front door on the hypotenuse, an L-shaped kitchen with nothing in the windowless short leg, and a Tudor priest’s hole in the bathroom that led to a back porch where Mama kept a wringer washer. To do the laundry, she had to get down on all fours and push the basket through ahead of her. The only convenient feature was a hall that ran down one whole side of the unit, making it possible to reach any room without going through any other. When Herb got home from work at two or three in the morning he could get to the bathroom or kitchen without going through the bedroom and disturbing Mama, who was a morning person. He read until sunrise and went to bed around the time she got up.

  Her idea of breakfast was coffee and cigarettes, so Herb cooked his own bacon and eggs. Her other specialties, culled in bridal haste from Depression-era newspapers, were mock chicken salad, which involved a can of tuna fish; and mock salmon loaf, which involved a can of tuna fish and a bottle of pink vegetable coloring. When Herb, oblique as always, suggested a mockless Friday, she fixed him a hot dog.

  She got pregnant shortly before their first anniversary. The news brought Granny to Park Road on wingèd Enna Jettick feet.

  “I was worried about you being alone at night, what with the hours Mr. King keeps,” she said as she sailed in, “so I decided to come and stay with you until the baby is born.”

  Great believers in roots are seldom great believers in luggage. Granny had never owned a suitcase and looked down on people who did, calling them “gallivanters.” Hooked over her wrist was an old Lansburgh’s shopping bag containing a couple of extra housedresses, six pairs of pink rayon drawers (XL), six pairs of orangy service-weight stockings, an extra set of Shapely Stout corsets, and a curling iron that had to be heated on the stove.

  Herb bought a rollaway bed for the living room and adapted to her presence with awesome nonchalance. Their mutual preference for the formal mode of address elevated the situation to an eerily civilized plane. Going into a kitchen filled with the smell of scorched hair to find a two-hundred-pound mother-in-law in a cloud of steam, he merely said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Ruding,” to which Granny graciously replied, “Good afternoon, Mr. King.”

  To everyone’s benefit she took over the cooking. Ever solicitous of male comfort and well-being, she fixed all of Herb’s favorite dishes: boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes, boiled brussels sprouts, and boeuf à l’anglaise, or boiled beef. When he happened to mention that he liked grilled kidneys for breakfast, she put on her hat and went immediately to the store to buy some. In exotic moods she fixed her two gourmet specialties, chili and shrimp curry, omitting the chili powder and the curry powder respectively. Her explanation: “We don’t need any foreigners around here.” Herb agreed: “There’s nothing like good plain food.”

  He gained ten needed pounds and the marriage gained a needed buffer. Being home in the daytime had thrown him together with Mama in a Garden of Eden intimacy that neither was equipped to handle. They had never known what to do with themselves in tandem and now there was the problem of entertaining a pregnant tomboy. Washington was full of interesting things to do and Herb had a nose for finding obscure free exhibits and lectures, but Mama would have none of it. The Smithsonian bored her, the Library of Congress was too quiet, and the National Gallery was full of dumb pictures. It was their courtship all over again, with the sobering addition of an embryonic tie-that-binds, so Granny arrived just in time. Now Herb could go off by himself during the day without feeling guilty. He left the apartment after his noon breakfast and threw himself into the most innocent pastimes in the history of husbands. The time slugs on his reading-room slips were his bond.

  Mama spent the day eating for two, smoking for six, and listening to Granny’s obstetrical lectures. It was the tiny garments subdivision of “delicate down below.” Descriptions of dilating one, two, three, four fingers; the tragedy of poor Alice Langley who dilated four fingers and stayed that way (“Her husband started chasing other women”); stretch marks, varicose veins, calcium deficiency (“a tooth for every baby”), tubal pregnancies, breeched presentations, ten-month babies that never got born, babies strangled by the cord, the woman who deliver
ed placenta previa, and the woman who delivered a watery mole.

  The stygian serial acquired another raconteuse when Granny ran into Jensy Custis on 14th Street. Jensy was a black woman who used to work for Granny in Ballston. Now she was living in Washington and doing free-lance cleaning, so Granny hired her to clean the Park Road place one day a week.

  When Jensy saw Mama’s swollen ankles, she let out her “OOOOEEEE!” of fright.

  “You got de dropsy, babe?” she asked ominously.

  Before Mama could reply, Jensy launched into a story about the time her midwife-mother had officiated at the birth of a sixteen-pound monster born with an exposed backbone, webbed feet, and its face on top of its head.

  “Jensy, you remember the watery mole, don’t you?” asked Granny.

  “Oh, yes’m, I sho does,” Jensy said with a nostalgic sigh. “I cleaned fo’ dat lady’s sister fo’ years.”

  “What’s a watery mole?” asked Mama.

  “It’s a baby that never becomes a baby,” Granny explained. “The doctor called it a ‘human deliquescence.’ It’s just lumps of slime held together by stringy bands that would have been the bones and muscles.” She shook her head in wonder. “It was the only one ever born in Virginia.”

  “Ain’t been one lak it befo’ or since.”

  They were like two good ole boys eulogizing a favorite hunting dog.

  Granny and Jensy belonged to the babies-are-women’s -business school of obstetrics, whose first rule was “Throw out the men and get to work.” When Mama said she was planning to have the baby in a hospital, they recoiled in horror.

  Jensy, a font of puritanism, sucked in her lip and gave Mama a look of heartbroken disillusionment.

  “Is dis my sweet pure chile I hear talkin’ ’bout goin’ to a hospittle? Miss Louise, you doan want mens messin’ wid you at a time lak dat, does you?”