“Grandpa pulled some money out of his pocket, ‘Here’s ten dollars. I’m going back the same way.’ He turned the mule around and rode through again, went on back to the farm I reckon.”
I saw him with the sun rising over the stubby green hills, a portly squire, his jacket rumpled, his face reddened, his watch chain strained against his belly. He was a little sleepy. He let the mule settle into a slow walk, then shook himself awake and trotted off into the countryside through the perpetual mist that surrounds mythical figures.
A LADIES’ MAN
Soon after we arrived at my grandmother’s house, I investigated Uncle George’s room with great curiosity. He had a brass bedstead, an unused fireplace and a small desk; however, the object that held my eyes was a picture of a pretty young lady seated before a vanity gazing into a mirror. Her hair, partially loose, was heaped on top of her head as women wore their hair in the early 1900s, as my grandmother might have worn hers at one time. Her face belonged to no one in particular. With her mop of hair and tumbling curls, her nicely shaped nose and rosebud lips, she was a conventional beauty, one that must have been repeated in advertisements often. As I stood in the door watching, the lady’s head together with the vanity mirror became a skull. I waited. Sun pierced the long windows, floorboards glistened, a breeze stirred the curtains. I stared at the skull. Would it change again? Could it become something else? I blinked, stepped back a bit, and looked at my own face in a small mirror on the opposite wall. The lady appeared at her vanity once more. Again I waited and watched till the skull emerged. I backed out of Uncle George’s room. Why didn’t I run screaming, the skull hanging behind me? At eight that picture was mysterious, magical even, despite living in the midst of WW II and having a soldier father.
Before retreating to grandmother’s house in Tennessee, Mother and I had lived in three houses and a hotel near my father’s post in California. I must have acquired some sense of territory since I left Uncle George’s room feeling vaguely guilty and, at the same time, fascinated. There were no other pictures around. Why did he have this one?
When I walked downstairs Grandmother met me at the bottom step. Small-framed, always fully corseted, and usually fully dressed, she had dark eyes, a Roman nose George had inherited, and a quick smile. Miss Kate was intensely certain about who she was and what she wanted. She was an Allen from Virginia, widow of a rascal she nevertheless respected. In her house she wanted order.
“You were in George’s room, weren’t you? Don’t go in there unless invited.”
She was a well-known rule maker. Grandchildren were absolutely forbidden to touch the ruined player piano at the farm, or any of her treasures in town. No matter how intrigued one might be by the cut glass top hat that lay upside down on a low table, or the porcelain parrot perched on the mantelpiece, not a finger could be laid on them. I itched to run my fingers over the parrot’s shiny green feathers and around the interior of the glass hat’s brim. Grandmother’s townhouse was littered with temptations. An untouchable spinning wheel, taller than I was, perched on the landing just waiting to be turned. On the front porch hung a wicker swing that could not be pushed too high. Doors were never to be slammed. No one save visitors could ring the front doorbell. Children couldn’t run in the house, nor could they lose their sweaters or gloves.
Uncle George ran over these petty restrictions as freely as he pleased. He slammed the front door, particularly when he was angry; he clattered up and downstairs whenever he wanted, sometimes bumping the spinning wheel. He forgot he’d left his hat on a newel post, his glasses on the dining room table, the paper under it.
“Spoiled,” said Mother. “George is spoiled to death.”
She was the youngest, Aunt Lucy was in the middle; George, the first-born, naturally became the rooster. As an only child, I took her judgement seriously. Distracted by worry about my father, the war, and the move back to Franklin in June, she had taken up Red Cross work and was busy most of the time at meetings, or on the phone, or seeing her friends.
I wanted to be at the farm dabbling in the creek, or riding the pony. But the second year of the war Uncle George sold his father’s farm, a child’s heaven made of haystacks, a creek, two ponies, chickens, a swing beneath a magnolia tree, and clover dotted lawns. When I asked Miss Kate why he sold it, she said, “George has no interest in farming.”
She stated it as a matter of fact the same way she said, “My son doesn’t like squash.” Actually she had no interest in farming herself and looked on farm life as drudgery. Living ought not to be bound by an annual round of seasons dying and renewing. Nature she preferred to view from a distance, not to profit from, not to touch or tame. The more money her husband made from farming, the more she lived in town in the house he built for her. George, after Grandpa’s early death, moved in with Miss Kate.
I sat on the swing, summer sprawling before me. Mother would eventually take me swimming or out for a riding lesson at Marguerite Dufour’s farm. They had won prizes at horse shows when they were girls. Miss Kate would let me walk downtown with her, make me go to church with her on Sunday, or one of her friends might come by. Someone would have to go to the grocery sometime. I preferred the drugstore where I could spend the fat fifty-cent pieces Uncle George sometimes gave me. He’d produce one off-handedly in passing, so I barely had time to thank him. I usually spent them on comic books, those trashy joys Mother wouldn’t buy me. The rack was at the end of the toiletries counter where grandmother was busy with purchases of primary needs such as headache powders and special shampoos for Uncle George. Prematurely gray, he was vain about his hair that waved back from a widow’s peak on his forehead. Mother promised I would have friends when school opened in the fall. In the meantime I read and planted a victory garden so late nothing came up. When overcome by boredom, I took a walk or crept back upstairs to marvel at Uncle George’s magic picture.
I had to make up my own bed. Grandmother’s cook Maggie did little housework, but she made up George’s bed for him on Fridays. During the rest of the week I began to realize, he wasn’t often there. I asked my mother where he slept.
She laughed. “He’s out tomcatting.” Then, checking herself as grown-ups did when they said too much, added, “He has to stay away a lot … business, I suppose.”
Uncle George sold real estate, usually farms, at auctions. He also acted as auctioneer for people’s household goods. But none of these sales were held at night. As far as Mother was concerned, the question was closed. All I knew was tomcats roamed, and Uncle George had strayed earlier when he married a dark-eyed heiress called Lula. Nobody in the family ever knew her well. She was mean, everyone said, but I didn’t know in what way. No one discussed Uncle George’s parting from Aunt Lula. He seldom took the blame for anything.
My own wanderings were confined. I’d never even been inside his office on the square. During that interminable summer, out of anything else to do, I walked downtown by myself and strolled in to see him.
“Marianne, does your mother know where you are?”
He stood up behind his desk, an enormous almost black rectangle that seemed to grow larger as I approached it.
“I told her I was going out.” That’s what he usually said.
Before I could say more, he was dialing.
“Go straight home.”
He seemed to be alarmed, but why? Downtown Franklin was only six blocks from Grandmother’s house, a distance safe enough to be almost as well known as the street we lived on.
“Why do I have to go home?” I rocked in a chair with women’s heads supporting the arms and followed their carved curls with my fingers. I rather liked Uncle George’s office. It was high ceilinged and cool. Light fell in from a north window making the glass eyes of a stuffed owl shine. Beneath his feathered breast, his claws clutched a sign: BE WISE. BUY MOORE. Stacks of official looking papers littered a long, dark table on the far side of the desk. His phone was a different model from Grandmother’s. Perhaps he would let me use it someti
me.
“Little girls don’t belong in offices.”
I rocked forward, hit the floor with both feet, left the chair rolling too and fro, and shut the door emphatically when I marched out. It wasn’t quite a slam, just a decided shove that left Uncle George alone in his office and me outside in the reception room where there was no receptionist.
Heaps of paper surrounded me. Uncle George’s desk and table had over-flowed until the clutter washed almost to the front door. I’d been trained to clean up after myself. Why couldn’t he? I ran through his mess, down the steps, and across the square where the Confederate veteran’s statue stood on a column above four cannons, one pointing toward each corner. I’d been taken to see the house where five Confederate generals were laid out dead after the Battle of Franklin during another war too distant in the middle of World War II to matter much. The statue was simply there, had always been there. What mattered was news on the radio, newspaper headlines over pictures of planes soaring and battleships at sea, letters from my father.
I walked home with my mind on the jeep ride his orderly had taken me on before we left California. Mother waited for me on the porch.
“I just wondered where Uncle George went everyday.”
“What did you expect, Marianne?”
“I don’t know.”
Mother sighed. “I’m sure George’s office is just an ordinary office.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure. Except for the doctor’s which I didn’t remember well, I’d never seen an office before. They were places where men went.
That July my father was killed at Saint Lo after the D-Day invasion. They buried him in France. Our lives continued in a strange, stunned way. My mother’s grief was so intense she became fearful about sending me to school. I missed my father. I knew I would have to go on missing him forever. Everything we did, every plan my mother made was based on his return. She roamed our side of the house at night as if it was a wilderness and the way through the rooms, an unknown path. I would feel her standing by my bedside, but I’d be over-powered by sleep before I could acknowledge her. One night I got up, followed her back to her room and to her bed. I’d slept with her the first week after we heard about my father. This time I simply led her by the hand. She got in bed. I slept with her again. That was the last time.
Finally I was allowed to go to enter the third grade. A girl who lived up the street and I became best friends. Teachers were kind, everyone was kind. Miss Kate hung a gold star in the living room’s street window.
Uncle George’s way of helping Mother was to take her, Miss Kate, and me on drives. Never mind about the gas. If he ran out of coupons, he knew a man who had more. Uncle George always knew “a man” who had whatever he wanted. We drove down every road leading out of town, crossed every stream around Franklin. Miss Kate carried on about the scenery. Mother stared out the front window toward the low hills where early in the fall orange, red and yellow patches flamed among the green; she said little.
When school was out, and I was ten, we moved to Nashville. My curiosity faded about Uncle George’s office, his whereabouts at night, his room, his strange picture.
“He got it at one of his own auctions. George has peculiar tastes,” Mother said when I finally asked about it.
I could tell by her tone she disapproved.
We visited my grandmother infrequently. Miss Kate was more inclined to visit us, although her arthritis didn’t allow her to climb the stairs to our second story apartment often. My mother saw her whenever she went to Franklin to ride horseback with Marguerite.
Uncle George, judged 4-F at the war’s beginning, kept serving his country his own way by continuing his business and looking after Miss Kate’s rental property. Mother, after our long period of mourning, began confiding in me.
“I suppose you know George is involved with Marguerite.”
By then I knew she meant Uncle George spent his nights in Marguerite’s bed.
“Is he going to marry her?”
“I doubt it. Your grandmother is against it.”
Marguerite had been around, according to Mother, longer than George’s other women. When I was nine she had given a birthday party for me. Marguerite’s party was on a grander scale than any I’d ever known, especially during the war. Other people hardly made cakes because of sugar rationing; Marguerite’s cook Ada provided a three-layer chocolate cake with my name written in white on it. She served it where I sat at the head of a long dining table with a bell hidden underneath the carpet to call the cook. My only problem was that children, dying to press it, had to be fended off by my equally hidden kicks. Marguerite’s house, a large old one with white pillars and a long paved brick front porch, was near enough to Franklin for Uncle George to get there quickly. There was a small bar downstairs near the pantry, a larger one upstairs. I’d never seen a bar inside or out of a house. The upstairs one had three tall stools and on one wall, a Mexican sombrero. I climbed on one of the stools, put my elbows on the bar’s shiny surface, and studied the sombrero. Multi-colored straw, its colors looped in bands spiraling bright green, yellow, purple, pink to a conical top. What would it look like on someone’s head?
“Nobody would wear that hat,” said Mother.
I also liked Marguerite’s canopied guest bed, the balcony over-looking the porch, a library walled with books, and Ada’s family who lived nearby. Her husband farmed the place and their children, Doug and Emily, and I took turns swinging each other in a big hammock between two trees in the front yard. They were the only black children my age I had ever been around in a casual, friendly way. Everything seemed easy at that house. I was in favor of Marguerite. How could Grandmother keep Uncle George from marrying her?
“I don’t think he really wants to marry. Besides … Marguerite drinks, and she’s Catholic. Your grandmother is Church of Christ, don’t forget.”
I didn’t understand the Protestant-Catholic clash, but I knew Miss Kate was a great believer in her own form of religion. And I did understand drink. Both my grandfather and my father drank. The way Mother weighted the word, I knew she wasn’t talking about cocktails before dinner or party drinking; she meant that Marguerite got drunk on some uncertain personal schedule. And no one could change her. Mother and Miss Kate took a fatal attitude toward alcoholism—they never used the word. Miss Kate would take a glass of sherry, and Mother enjoyed an occasional drink. Getting drunk was reserved for men and, I supposed, a few women like Marguerite.
Even when the war was over, the Red Cross wanted Mother to leave town to make speeches; there was a lot of refugee work to be done. I was sent to spend a week with Marguerite. One afternoon she sat out on the front porch, Tom Collins in hand, watching the rainfall. It was a summer when rain drizzled steadily for days.
We rocked in two vast chairs. There were four others, just as large, on the porch. Marguerite frequented springs, those spas where people drank and also soaked in curative waters. Afterward they rocked in the same sort of chairs on hotel porches. Miss Kate, who liked the hot baths at various springs for her arthritis, had taken me with her to one.
Marguerite leaned over and put her glass down on the brick floor. Her eyes were dark and deeply lined. Her hair was dark also except for gray streaks in front. Though the same age, she looked a lot older than my mother.
“You see this ring, Marianne?”
“Yes.” Fire shone through its milky surface.
“It’s an opal. George gave it to me. When I die, it will be yours.”
I liked rings, but the idea of someone dying and leaving something to me made the pit of my stomach shrink. I said, “You’re not going to … to…. ”
“Everybody dies sometime.” She picked up her glass.
I escaped to the kitchen to make fudge.
Ada took it over when I gave up trying to beat it by hand. “This won’t set. Maybe it’s not cooked enough. Maybe it’s the weather.”
In the wide hall where a grand piano marked the end of the circular staircase,
we could hear the notes of a melody I didn’t know. The doors to the bar near the pantry were pulled open and, in a few minutes, banged shut. Marguerite walked into the kitchen.
“You want some fudge?” I offered her a gooey pan full.
“Oh, God! No!” She thrust her hand out to push the pan away. Chocolate splattered on the floor.
Marguerite laughed, wheeled around, and almost fell going out the door.
Ada’s hand touched my shoulder. “She be all right. She’s going to bed soon.”
I looked over at the bright brown globs of chocolate on the polished floor. “Oh, Ada, I’m sorry.”
“Well, come on,” she said. She handed me a spatula and grabbed another one herself. “It never was going to set anyway.”
Ada fed me supper and left for her house in the twilight. I wanted to go with her. It was so quiet in the house, so empty even though I knew Marguerite was in her room. The place seemed full of echoes and odd noises, creaking sounds, water gurgling, wind sighing through shutters. By the time dark fell, the soft rain had given way to a storm which the canopied bed’s ceiling and side curtains couldn’t shut out. Rolls of thunder woke me. I sat up clutching a pillow. Marguerite didn’t come to check on me. There was no one to call. Uneasy dread made me certain I had outstayed my welcome, and I had to be there three more days. Mother was still in Memphis. My grandmother had gone to visit someone. Where was Uncle George?
He turned up the next day. I couldn’t see him though I could hear his voice in the next room. I tiptoed to the hall and caught sight of him standing in front of the fireplace where blue dragons curled around two huge Chinese porcelain vases on either side of the hearth near his trousers. The sun shone outside. Drops still slid down the dining room windows, but Uncle George’s accusing voice was a dry wind rasping through Marguerite’s house.
Where We Are Now Page 5