Southern Gothic
I didn’t know how to handle it when she told me about the divorce. I knew I should be sad, but I wasn’t. I knew I should be angry at my father—he was deserting us!—but I wasn’t. I knew better than to say I was glad they were getting divorced, but that was how I felt. I had spent my childhood hating not knowing where my father was and hating trying to explain to people, especially other children, that sometimes he lived with us and sometimes he lived with his family in South Carolina. I hated having a father who didn’t have the same job all the time and sometimes had no job at all. I hated watching my mother cry and hated not being able to do anything about it. “You’re my brave little man,” she would say when I would hug her, but that never made me feel any better. If anything, it made me feel more useless, because, after all, this being brave, how hard was that? And if it wasn’t much, and it sure didn’t seem like much—just weathering the storm and not running away, but who had a choice at the age of eleven?—then what was I good for?
Where were we when she told me? It must have been that morning the deputy showed up to serve the divorce papers. We would have been home, cleaning the apartment, as always on a Saturday. Maybe I was watching cartoons. Maybe I had been practicing the piano. I know I was in the living room, because I answered the door.
All I know for sure is that sometime that morning, after the sheriff’s deputy had served his papers and gone away, my mother sat me down and gave her speech. She told me that the divorce was my father’s doing, not hers, and that she had tried very hard for a long time to fight the idea, but finally she had given up. “It takes two people to make a marriage work,” she said. “No one can say I didn’t try.” I was barely listening, because so far we were on well-traveled ground. I had heard that part of the speech enough to know it by heart. While she talked, I was thinking back to all the phone calls, all the tears behind the closed bedroom door. How long had this been going on? I had no idea when it all started. How had I missed that?
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I didn’t like her keeping secrets, not secrets like this one. I was mature, she had said so. I could handle it.
“I just want you to remember this: he left us. We didn’t leave him. I did everything I could.”
“I know.”
Reaching out clumsily, like someone groping for a light switch in the dark, she found my shoulders and drew me to her. As always, I was taken aback by the strength, the vivid, desperate energy she could put into a hug. I didn’t know what else to do but squeeze back.
“You’re all I’ve got now,” she said, sobbing into my chest, while I guiltily fought the impulse to pull away, to be somewhere else. We remained that way for what seemed like a long time. Maybe a minute went by, maybe less. I had time to become aware of the loud ticking of the clock beside her bed. Somewhere a car door slammed. I saw the sheer curtains moving in the slight breeze of a still-warm late-October morning. The smell of fresh tobacco filled the room—it was auction time, when the farmers brought their harvest to the big warehouses and the whole city smelled of tobacco. Once a tie—a sheaf of tobacco leaves wrapped tightly, fascialike, around their stalks by another leaf—had fallen off a truck into the street. I carried it home and hung it in my room, where its perfume had lingered for months before the tobacco lost its aroma and crumbled to powder on the floor. The smell reminded me of my father’s pouches of Sir Walter Raleigh left lying open on the living-room coffee table.
I wish I could remember more about my parents’ marriage and about exactly how it fell apart, but the scenes that replay in my head are like movie previews: scraps of scenes that only imply a story. I remember my father’s sitting alone on the sofa, hunched over a game of solitaire. I remember Mother at her card table, grading papers, paying bills. I remember her chastening him, nagging him. I have almost no memories of us all doing anything together for fun. Once, in Kershaw, all three of us went to the drive-in to see The Misfits, because it was Clark Gable’s last film. I remember Marilyn Monroe in the paddle-ball scene, and I remember them quarreling about whether to leave or stay when the movie wasn’t even half over (Mother won, we left and when we got home, Daddy took off in the car and didn’t come home for two days). In my most vivid memory of my childhood, I approach our apartment from the yard, staring through the screen door and then turning away when I hear them fight, hoping they didn’t see me. Sometimes I would walk all the way around the block just so I wouldn’t pass that open door and hear my mother calling me to come in. Most days, the last place I wanted to be was home.
I also wish I could set down the events around my parents’ divorce with great detail, but what I remember is that deputy sheriff’s standing on the porch with the sun behind him and me thinking that my mother was going to be mortified about what the neighbors would say. Law officers did not serve papers on people like us. Divorce was something to read about in movie magazines.
It was shameful. “I took an oath before God when I married your father, and he did, too. I don’t know what’s happened to him, but I certainly don’t intend to go back on that.”
People talked a lot about nervous breakdowns when I was a child, or rather, they spoke of other people’s having nervous breakdowns. I never knew what they meant, and I could never get a satisfactory answer out of anyone when I asked. If I had been a little smarter, or a little more worldly-wise, it might have dawned on me that a nervous breakdown was taking place right under our own roof.
Until that morning when the sheriff’s deputy appeared on the front porch, I had believed my mother to be indomitable. The closest she ever came to breaking down in front of me were those nights when she paid bills, because we were always in the hole. I never thought of us as poor people, but I suppose we were. We never went on a vacation, except to visit relatives. Mother drove that used ‘52 Plymouth until 1968 and dressed me in hand-me-downs from a friend. The only things I remember our splurging on were dinners out and Charles Chips (potato chips that were delivered weekly to our door, like milk: you put the big empty can on the porch, and the Charles Chips guy came by and replaced it with a full can).
Schoolteachers in North Carolina were paid nine months out of the year. When they weren’t teaching, they didn’t draw a salary. So at the beginning of every summer, my mother went to the bank and borrowed enough for us to live on until school started in the fall (she couldn’t work in the summer because she was always going to summer school to upgrade her teacher’s certificate). Then she spent the next nine months paying the loan off. It was a lot like sharecropping, and it is a tribute to my mother’s frugality that at some point, after doing this for a decade or so, she got ahead. Until that happened, she sat at the dining-room table and wondered aloud how we were going to make it. She talked a lot about the poorhouse, and over time I manufactured a very detailed picture of this place, high on a treeless, windswept hill, surrounded by a weed-strewn yard, fenced off from the rutted road and towering all alone, its dark, unpainted siding sucking the light from the sky.
The divorce was something that my mother could neither triumph over nor banish. She was powerless. I wasn’t used to that, and it frightened me. I knew better than to let the fear show, that I had to be brave. That was all right. But inside I was worried, because in the past, there had always been a fix, some last-minute remedy. If life dealt you a bad hand, you did what you could with it. I had seen my mother tear the cartilage in her knee and recover. I’d seen her depressed about my father, but she assured me that things would get better and sometimes by sheer dint of will, she made it happen. Now, suddenly, she was as confused as I was.
Growing up in an apartment not much bigger than a boxing ring, where two people went at each other night after night, I became a hard little kid without even trying. I never knew my mother and father when they weren’t fighting. I never knew my mother not to worry. I never knew my father when he wasn’t being dragged dead drunk out of some SRO hotel. By the time I turned eight, one of my favorite pastimes was huntin
g for the half-empty wine and vodka bottles he stashed under the bed and behind the shoe trees and dirty laundry in the bottom of his closet. I took a lot of self-righteous glee in turning those bottles over to my mother. Now and then I’d uncover an unfinished bottle weeks after he’d gone away again. It was almost as good as having him back.
Part of me took a weird pride in knowing things that other kids knew nothing about. I was, in fact, furtively vain about my hard life. Long before I reached adolescence, adults were talking to me as if I were their equal, as if I knew things they knew. I liked that. At the same time, I longed for a happy ending, the movie ending, and when my mother insisted that such endings were possible, I was her raptest pupil. If you were just determined enough, she said, you could fix anything, which is arguably a defensible lie, like saying Santa is real, because at least the child feels better for a little while for having believed it, and there will be plenty of opportunity to find out otherwise. The trick is not to buy your own baloney. When my father told me I was now the “man of the house” the last time he went out the door, it took some of the sting out of his leaving. But I don’t think he ever believed it. Mother’s trouble was that when she told me there was nothing you couldn’t make right, she thought she was telling the truth.
The divorce changed things that much: the troubles that she had endured throughout her marriage were not, as she had always imagined, fixable, because there was no marriage left to fix. The worst thing was, Mother had so fiercely denied the possibility of divorce for so long that she had come to think of that impossibility as a fact. So when it finally happened, she had no defense against it, and she all but collapsed. All that kept her going was her reflexive forward momentum. That, along with an unquestioning faith in divine providence, got her through somehow. But after the marriage ended, she was never the same. The buoyancy and bravado acquired a tinny, almost hysterical tone. As the years passed, she grew brittle, almost ossified, and her conversation came to sound like the rote pronouncements of a mechanical doll. She did not die that morning the deputy appeared. She just stopped living. She never remarried, never even went on a date. And while I don’t know that she ever allowed herself to believe that my father would return to her, she never stopped talking about him as though he were in the next room, or just out for cigarettes.
All the adults on both sides of our family agreed on one point: my mother and father had no business getting married in the first place. I learned all that later, though. At the time, no one in the family talked about any of this. No one ever took me aside and tried to explain the situation. They didn’t want to live in a world where such things happened, and they were happier pretending that world didn’t exist. At night, I’d sit at my desk with the door shut and literally pull my hair out. I was eleven and I had a bald spot. No one said a word about that either.
Mother and I never stopped going to the movies, but once I became a teenager, we went less frequently and with more apprehension and with less anticipation. As movies became more explicitly violent and sexual, the opportunities for embarrassment never stopped multiplying. We went to see The Graduate. When the stripper with the tassels on her nipples began tormenting Elaine Robinson, we both wanted to crawl under our seats, Mother because she was mortified by what she was seeing on the screen and I because I was watching it with my mother. But it wasn’t merely the sex or the violence that separated us. I didn’t understand it then, but she and I were watching movies with different expectations. Movies fed my imagination. They were my way out of the narrow world I grew up in. (It is a marker of their importance in my life that I can remember precisely the theaters in which I saw every movie until I was an adult.) I watched them like a detective, searching for clues as to how people behaved. Normal people, I should say, because it had gradually become clear to me that my mother, father, aunt and uncle were all, in their various ways, oddballs. I went to see people who weren’t like me and to watch stories that differed from mine. Mother went to see people of whom she could approve. She judged the characters in a film as harshly as she judged people in real life. It didn’t matter if they committed adultery or used bad grammar—either way, they were trash. I was taught to hold myself above people who wore loud clothes, chewed with their mouths open or said ain’t or I and her. This was a matter of class, not wealth. We never had any money, but that never kept my mother from looking down her nose at people who didn’t talk like she did or who hadn’t inherited the family’s Haviland china. The first time I ever heard the phrase “shabby genteel,” I didn’t need a translation. I knew exactly what it meant. It meant us.
Long before I went off to college, Mother stopped going to the movies at all, preferring to stay home with her television, where she could watch the same characters week after week, good people who behaved predictably, who were, as she put it, “like family.” The last time we had a good time together at the movies sticks in my mind because we laughed about it for years—it was our one shared joke. The movie, weirdly enough, was Reflections in a Golden Eye, the John Huston film based on a novel by Carson McCullers and starring, ironically, Elizabeth Taylor.
We saw it at the Visulite, an old theater in Charlotte that was the closest thing to an art movie theater in the two Carolinas for many years. I’d read the novel and wanted to see what the movie was like. I’d read everything by McCullers at that point, because she was a Southern writer, and I was plowing through everything by Southerners that I could lay my hands on. I don’t remember liking her stuff all that much, but I was curious, and it was something to do to get us out of the house at my aunt and uncle’s, which seemed to shrink after we’d been there for a day or two.
This was one of many misguided moments where I took unwitting members of my family to hideously inappropriate movies for the simple reason that I needed a ride. (Hauling my uncle the Presbyterian preacher to see Blow-Up was by far the most memorable of these misadventures.) For once I took the precaution of warning my mother that there might be some steamy scenes. What I probably told her was that it was “Southern Gothic,” a phrase I’d picked up from the backs of my Faulkner paperbacks without knowing what it meant. Both of us were more than a little taken aback once the movie got underway.
The action took place on an Army base in the South. Marlon Brando played a repressed homosexual colonel married to Elizabeth Taylor, who played a spoiled Southern Army brat who taunted his manhood at every opportunity while openly pursuing an affair with a neighboring officer, played by Brian Keith, who was married to the sickly Julie Harris. Highlights of this tortured marriage included a scene where Taylor takes off all her clothes and throws each item in Brando’s face before marching up the stairs buck naked. Mercifully, the scene where Julie Harris cut off her nipples with garden shears took place offscreen. But it got worse. Brando developed a crush on an enlisted man, played by Robert Forster, and began surreptitiously following him around the base after coming upon the soldier naked in the woods riding a horse bareback. In another scene, Brando tries to ride his wife’s spirited horse, loses control and winds up cut and bruised and weeping on the ground. Homosexuality was so taboo in the South in the sixties that I don’t think my mother or I knew what to make of any of this, but we both dimly understood that something shameful was taking place on the screen. Long before the halfway point, my mother was tut-tutting loudly.
The theater was all but empty for the matinee. There were maybe a dozen people, including us, in the audience, and we all sat there in some sort of collective trance while this overheated trauma unfolded across the enormous screen. After a while, you could hear people murmuring. But no one got up and left. It was as though we were so mesmerized by all the weird stuff we were seeing that we couldn’t move. After a while, all I could think about was what might be coming next. Racking my brains for the plot elements of the book, I tried to steel myself for any surprises, and I watched every scene with a mounting dread.
And then one of our fellow patrons came to our rescue. He was sitting almost d
irectly behind us, and he’d been muttering to his companion off and on for about half an hour before the scene where Brando fell off the horse. When the soldier appears, naked again, and leads the horse away while Brando lies there sobbing, the guy behind us let out a little whoop and exclaimed, “By God, there’s something in this movie for everybody!”
And All the Days of Methuselah Were Nine Hundred and Sixty and Nine Years
My mother was right. Everything was changing. But I could never decide if we were dashing forward to a new life or falling back in full retreat. In the space of a year, starting when I was twelve, my parents divorced, we changed apartments and churches, and I enrolled in yet another new school for sixth grade. We were starting over, my mother and I, and this time it was just the two of us. As soon as he was divorced, my father had remarried and started another family; in a few years we would be reunited, but thereafter it was only for a day here and a weekend there, longdistance love—he was like a pleasant ghost with visitation rights, rights that, curiously, were canceled almost as soon as he died some thirty years later. My aunt and uncle were gone as well. They had moved again, this time from Lexington to Charlotte, which meant we couldn’t just throw the parakeet cage in the backseat of the car and make a thirty-minute drive to see them whenever we felt like it. Now it was a trip of more than two hours, and we saw them only at holidays and in the summer.
The church in Charlotte would be Uncle Tom’s last pastorate, and even at twelve, I knew enough to know that he was coming down in the world. The church in Lexington had been about half the size of the church in Winston-Salem, and this new church seemed about as big as a living room—in the vastness of Charlotte, a metropolis with a quarter of a million people, it seemed even more impossibly tiny, like the world’s largest dollhouse church. Every time we entered the doors, I felt embarrassed for my uncle. No one else in the family remarked on this, but I think my mother felt like I did, because I noticed that she made up excuses not to attend services on Sunday if she could help it. Usually we were packed and on the road home by the time Sunday school would have convened. And missing church was something that my mother did not do. These moves from church to church, each one like a nesting doll to the one before, were explained to me in church language: my uncle had received a new calling. This meant that another church had sent a committee to observe my uncle and then prayed about it and decided that God had meant for the preacher to come to their church. It never sounded like the preacher had much say, and so I constantly had visions of my uncle’s being whisked away by another church, whose committee could descend at any time and sit in secret in the back pew.
Little Boy Blues Page 16