“You know, I was born in a country where ‘lady’ is a title that a woman receives from her father or her husband. The word is always used with her name, as we use Miss and Mrs., so she is always instantly recognizable. When I first came to America, I was confused by the many definitions of ‘lady’ I heard. Everyone spoke of ladies but no one seemed to be able to explain what a lady is.
“I remained confused for many years, until one Easter when I met Mrs. Custis on her way to church. When I complimented her on her outfit, she said that although she bought a new dress every Easter, there was only one Easter outfit that she really wanted. I asked her what it was and she replied, ‘The Gospel armor.’”
The audience made a susserating sound of recognition, while in the loft, the choir mistress glanced at the organist and exchanged nods with him.
Herb went on. “When Mrs. Custis said that, I knew at long last what a lady was. In the words of the Spanish writer Cervantes, a lady is a woman who ‘is so resolved to be respected that she can make herself so even amidst an army of soldiers.’ That was surely Mrs. Custis. I know she will have her armor, and I know she will wear it well.”
He stepped from the pulpit and walked back down the aisle. Mr. Koustopolous wiped his eyes on his tie and the Misses Shields tore their last Kleenex in half so that each could blow her nose.
At a gesture from the minister, the mourners rose and the organist burst into the hymn that Herb had inspired.
Stand up, stand up, for Jesus
Stand in his strength alone
The arm of flesh will fail you
Ye dare not trust your own
Put on the Gospel armor
And watching unto prayer
Where duty calls, or danger
Be never wanting there
We left the church and got into the car. It was then that something happened I will never forget. Mama had only one gesture of affection and she rarely bestowed it, but she did now. Balling her fist, she gave Herb a slow-motion left hook to the jaw.
“You did good,” she said.
He smiled at her. It was the sweetest smile I ever saw on a human face. I don’t suppose I’ll ever figure those two out.
When we got back home from the cemetery, Granny said, “I never did like this house. I hate it now. I want to sell it and move back to the old place in Ballston.”
“What about Evelyn and Billy?” Mama asked.
“They can move back in with Aunt Nana.”
Herb and I exchanged glances. Only grief over Jensy could have made her give up her prize booty to the enemy so casually. Or perhaps Herb’s eulogy had expanded her view of what a lady was, so that she no longer had to feed off Evelyn’s femininity.
“And you,” Granny said, turning to me, “have got no business living by yourself like a fallen women when that great big house is just sitting over there waiting!”
I knew it was her way of asking me to live with them; she seemed to have aged ten years since Jensy died, and we were all silently but painfully aware that she did not have much time left. I had been wondering how I could broach the subject of moving in with them, but now she had done it for me in a way that salvaged my pride. Families composed of rugged individualists have to do things obliquely, and she knew it.
She sold the house, evicted Evelyn and Billy, and we moved into the old homestead. The first memorable event was the invitation Evelyn issued to Mama: “Oh, Louise, I’m so glad you’re back! I’ve been looking for somebody to have the Change of Life with, and you and I are exactly the same age!” I’ll leave you to imagine Mama’s reply.
Mama joined a local ladies’ bowling team and quickly became its star. Discovering that the families of her teammates attended the matches to cheer them on, she insisted that Herb and I show up, too, so the three of us began going to the alley every Tuesday night, with me at the wheel. I thought I would never be able to drive again, but I had no choice: he wouldn’t ride with her and she wouldn’t ride with him, so it was up to me to transport us. In this, at least, I struck a happy medium, turning in a driving performance that fell somewhere between Herb’s Last Post and Mama’s Light Brigade.
He and I made a strange sight at the alley; neither of us understood the game and he never went anywhere without a three-piece suit and tie. The trophy tournament was especially memorable, with pins flying up every which way as Mama threw one crashing, deafening strike after another. Her team won and she, now captain of it, was interviewed by a reporter from a local throwaway shopping news. When asked about her family, Mama turned around and pointed dramatically at the stands.
“See those eggheads sitting up there like two bumps on a log?” Whereupon everybody turned around and stared at Herb and me.
Granny lost another friend when Aunt Nana died a few days before Christmas. Despite their sometime feud they had been very close, and we all noticed a change in Granny afterwards. Though she refused to admit it, she could no longer be left alone, so Evelyn or Aunt Charlotte always stayed with her whenever we had to be away from the house.
At last the day came when she had to enter a nursing home. The Daughters had one they liked so much they, had virtually commandeered it, so we took her there. The rooms were what might be called almost-private, being separated by a plywood partition instead of a wall. This came in extremely handy, for Granny’s next-door neighbor was a Mrs. Benson, who had a thirty-year-old bachelor grandson named Fred.
Yes, you guessed it. She started matchmaking on her deathbed. Mrs. Benson being equally eager to see Fred married, they joined forces in this their final battle, aided by the thin partition between them. Like two countesses of Monte Cristo, two prisoners of Zenda, they devised a system of knocks to signal each other on Fred’s and my comings and goings. One knock meant, “I just sent her to the coffee shop,” and two meant, “He’s on his way.”
An aerodynamics engineer, Fred was the most colossal bore I have ever met, the John Glenn of the nursing home snack bar, whose measured, precise, mathematically perfect attempts to amuse me made Cheops look like a stand-up comic. I inadvertently encouraged him by laughing—at him—but incapable of discerning the difference, he soon believed himself to be the heir of Swift and Wilde. He told his grandmother I was charming, and she passed the intelligence along to mine.
“At last you’re learning how to build up a man’s ego,” Granny said happily.
She was convinced that my love life was launched. As things turned out, she was right. One day while I was sitting with her, she looked out the door and heaved a deep sigh.
“Look at those poor twisted women who love other women.”
“Where?”
“Across the hall,” she replied, gesturing weakly.
I peered into the room opposite and saw two women in their forties seated beside the bed of an old lady. Both were chic and soignée.
“The blond one is Mrs. Kincaid’s daughter. She told me all about it on the sun porch the other day. Her heart is just broken right in two. Ahhh! Thank the Lord I’ve been spared that.”
A nursing home is the best cult in town. If you can find one in which the Daughters are conducting guerilla theater and staging lie-ins, you can have anything you want, an-nee-thing. It was easy to devise errands to Mrs. Kincaid. Soon I was going to the coffee shop with the two women, and after a week or so they caught on. Arrangements were made for me to meet some of their friends.
Meanwhile, my first by-line story appeared in print. I had written it some months before and sent it to a men’s magazine under the pen name “Ruding Upton King.” When the complimentary copy arrived I showed it to Granny. Immensely pleased, she gazed at the name for several minutes and then adjusted her bifocals and began reading the story.
Suddenly her smile faded and she handed the magazine back to me.
“Your grandfather was a perfect gentleman.”
I was glad the story arrived when it did, because she went down rapidly in the next couple of weeks. I stayed with her all the time now. One night
while I sat with her, I happened to put my feet on the high frame of the hospital bed and let my skirt drop open. Weakly, Granny turned her head.
“Don’t sit like that,” she rasped.
Obediently, I assumed one of the demure positions she had taught me and took her hand, holding it while she drifted off to sleep. Her breathing was regular but as I watched her, an odd change seemed to come over her features. She had a round face and a small nose and mouth, but now, in some inexplicable way, the roundness and smallness were going from her. Suddenly I remembered the old saying I had heard all my life: You can always see the Indian blood in the end.
As I jumped up and leaned over her, her breathing stopped.
After the funeral, the family sat around our kitchen table drinking coffee and talking about her.
“How old was Aunt Lura?” asked Billy Bosworth.
“God only knows,” Uncle Botetourt sighed. “She lied to everybody about it.”
“That’s a lady’s privilege,” said Evelyn, “and Aunt Lura was a lady to her fingertips.”
“No, she wasn’t,” I said.
“Why, Florence! What a thing to say about your grandma!”
“She was something better than a lady, so was Jensy. They were viragoes.”
“What the hell is that?” asked Mama.
“The only V worth having,” I replied, smiling at Herb. My eyes filled as I remembered the night Bres defined the word for me. “A virago is a woman of great stature, strength and courage who is not feminine in the conventional ways.”
“Shit, that’s me!”
“The hell it is,” Uncle Botetourt grumbled. “You’re a slewfoot.”
“Shut your goddamn mouth! What the hell do you—”
“Oh, please don’t start!” Aunt Charlotte wailed, pressing her palms to her temples.
“Listen, Gottapot, you don’t know your ass from third base, but I run around with eggheads,” Mama said proudly. “I heard so much about John Quincy Shitass from Big Egghead that I finally read The Dynamite and the Virgin. Now here comes Little Egghead that swallowed the dictionary to tell me something I’ve always wanted to know. I knew there was something different about me, but it’s not because I’m a slewfoot, it’s because I’m a virago!”
She had it painted on her bowling ball.
“Like most exceptional women, Rosa was not entirely feminine.”
—The Duchess of Jermyn Street,
DAPHNE FIELDING
CONFESSIONS OF A FAILED SOUTHERN LADY. Copyright © 1985 by Florence King. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
eISBN 9781466816268
First eBook Edition : March 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, Florence.
Confessions of a failed Southern lady / by Florence King.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-05063-1
1. King, Florence—Biography. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Women—Southern States—Humor. I. Title.
PS3561.I4754Z463 1990
818’.5409-dc20
[B]
90-37299
CIP
Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Page 26