“Oh,” said Aunt Lucy. “Oh, look, Katherine!” and they both looked at me and smiled in a way I didn’t understand.
Nor do I understand what compelled Aunt Lucy to leave me her love letters though I can imagine the cloud of emotions swirling about her when she received them. She was as quiet as my mother was out-spoken. Often ill—she had fevers of unknown origins and migraine headaches that lasted for days—fragile, prone to fluttering nervously about her house, Lucy was the weak sister, the youngest child, the one who needed protection, or so it seemed, but don’t people get cast into roles for the sake of others sometimes? There was Uncle George angered by everybody when his much younger wife died leaving him to spend his last years alone. Somebody had to suffer for it, so his sister Lucy was accused of stealing Jean’s emerald ring, a gross green thing nobody should have been able to lose. But it was lost, and Lucy stole it, or so Uncle George decided. When she found it winking its evil green eye next to the soap dish on the guest room sink at his house, he wouldn’t believe her.
“You had it all the time,” he said.
We had to reassure her repeatedly that we knew and had always known she was innocent.
Then Uncle Phillip added, “George has already collected the insurance money and doesn’t want to return it.”
Aunt Lucy let the accusations drift to forgetfulness I guess. The rest of us remembered George’s desire to blame her as a sign of his dotage, covering up, over-looking his cruelty in the way some families do when reality is too harsh. What did I really know about her? She married in 1928, earlier than Mother, and never went to college. She and Uncle Phillip had one child, my only first cousin, Fergus.
I decide to open the other letters according to the stamped postmarked dates. The writing paper is thin, torn from a tablet, the kind people use for telephone note pads now, and the folds in them are obviously worn from much refolding. Reading them I find a worried, passionate young man.
“They have parted us but they can’t divide our hearts. We have a space between us, some air, some ground. That’s all. I tell you. I tell myself. My daddy made me come down here. Every time I heard the train on the track, I made a promise to you. I’m coming back. I’m coming back.”
In other letters he urges her to pretend to agree with her parents so they’ll let her out of her room and tells her he’s found a job. In the next to last he says, “I guess when you wrote you were alright you meant they kept you in the house until they were sure you weren’t p.g. I wish you were. Then they would have to let us be together.”
Finally, obviously after an annulment, he writes, “We can marry again,” and he promises he’ll always love her.
In my hands I hold five letters standing for a marriage that lasted about a month. Aunt Lucy and Uncle Phillip were married for sixty years. He was seldom out of town without her, and if he had to leave on business, he never stayed away for more than a night or two. My grandmother commented frequently on Aunt Lucy’s continual refusal to travel with her anywhere.
“She can’t be pried away from Phillip,” she said. “Lucy must stay home and look after her husband.”
These apparent complaints, voiced in a mildly approving tone, were her chosen echoes of Victorian sentiments about female duty. Aunt Lucy, as waffling and timid as she may have seemed, secretly did as she pleased, or had at least once in her life.
She didn’t leave me her letters because she felt I needed advice about the follies of youth. I’ve been married and gone from Tennessee—except for brief return trips—over forty years myself. She wasn’t inclined to preachiness, another reason Jerry must have loved her. Refolding the limp paper carefully along its worn lines, I slide each sheet back in its envelope while considering the time I knew her best.
The year following my mother’s death when I was eighteen and beginning college at Vanderbilt, she’d stop by my apartment to see me late on Fridays after Uncle Phillip came home from work at a large insurance company downtown. Often he dropped her off—she didn’t drive—to go on an errand of his own then return exactly an hour later to wait through Aunt Lucy’s lingering good-byes. Slender, her hair prematurely gray, dressed in mauve or blue, she’d waft toward the door.
“I should be going,” she’d say, and in the next breath she’d add, “Oh, listen, Marianne—” All the steps to a new recipe would follow, or a reminder about something. Often she seemed to forget the most important news until she was leaving. One afternoon, standing at the front door while Uncle Phillip held onto the brim and turned his dark brown felt business hat in his hands, he reached for the doorknob with his free hand.
“Lucy! Can’t you talk to her about that later?”
“I guess I could just stay,” she said, “if Marianne will have me.” Her eyes held a gleam of rebellion, a small smile twitched at the corners of mouth.
“Lucy!” His voice hardened. For the first time I heard weariness mixed with contempt. It was as if he wanted to say, “Stop being a fool!”
She blinked rapidly.
Caught between them, bewildered by her answer, I didn’t know how to respond, then I heard myself insisting she stay when I truly wanted her to go quietly as usual. We seemed to be locked together next to the door. “Phillip has another side,” my mother had once mentioned. “He’ll surprise you sometime.” Now her comment wavered in my mind. Until that afternoon, I’d never seen anything but his kindness. Most of the time he called her, “Dear.”
“Oh, Phillip, I was only—” She looked at me and smiled as if we’d always agreed that was simply his manner.
The spell was broken. Brisk, organized as usual, Uncle Phillip opened the door, and she sidled out. I stood watching them through my second story windows while the early winter darkness closed in. In the clear bowl of light in this valley in northern New Mexico, I still see the wispy gray light beginning to blacken on that other day. I don’t know why the memory of that incident is so strong. Perhaps, at that time, I was constantly having to discover things I didn’t want to know. I was lonely, especially on weekends, so I began going to their house.
Small, red brick as many houses in the neighborhood were, with four white posts framing the front door, it had a huge backyard. When I walked out, Aunt Lucy was usually bent over or kneeling in one of her beds. She’d rise slowly, dust her hands off against her hips, catch my arm and say, “Oh, I thought you’d never get here. Look at these peonies.” Or iris, or tulips, or hyacinths, or roses. Whatever she was working on demanded complete attention and often, I began to see, exasperation.
Her garden, a mass of reds, purples, yellows, the vibrant colors she never wore, seemed to reward her care, yet it was the one place I heard her voice her anger. “Oh, those wretched roses!” she’d lament, “Oh, those old iris!” as if she were truly disgusted with them. And if I praised her roses, she’d mutter, “They’re only Cherokees. Everybody’s got them.”
But no one in the neighborhood had them so flagrantly blooming, tumbling over a wall and into a ditch on the other side.
Uncle Phillip had a prim garden patch in the area set aside for him below the rose covered wall. The ruffled edges of his lettuce, spiky onion tops, fronds of carrots might waver in the breeze, but each kept its orderly line while Aunt Lucy’s flowers rioted above them.
Gradually, when I began to see them more often, I noticed Uncle Phillip often spoke to my aunt as if she were a child while she, anxious and gentle, her eyes downcast, her hands clasped in her lap, sat listening to the rebuke, but I sensed feelings strung taut between them. Did her rebellions go underground and remain unspoken only to surface in violent colors and roses that ran amuck. I liked to believe this was so. I wanted to think some glowing need was there perhaps because I detested hearing her scolded for small faults—leaving a spade outside overnight, making herself late somewhere by dithering about the kitchen, or worrying too much about Fergus. When Uncle Phillip corrected her, I had to check my own desire to protest. “Oh, leave her alone!” I wanted to tell him and couldn’t
. Perhaps that hidden need was only my own. I had no real knowledge of married people’s lives. Were most marriages full of clashes behind bedroom doors? I could barely imagine Aunt Lucy losing her temper, and I couldn’t see her walking out of the house. But what if she got angry at Uncle Phillip, so angry she turned up at my door? She didn’t even know how to drive. A cab … after a sleepless night, she’d call a cab, and when I got home from school, there she’d be. What would I do with her? I’d have to ask her in.
She’d sit in my living room. I’d bring her tea.
“I told him—” She spoke slowly, and repeated herself as usual. “I told him he was a goose.” She dabbed at her eyes with one of her white flower embroidered handkerchiefs.
I waited thinking Uncle Phillip had never resembled a goose. To me, with his mustache and short frame, he looked more like a Scottie dog.
“I couldn’t…. Oh, Marianne, I couldn’t help it. He said I was “acting like a rabbit.”
Uncle Phillip’s comparison was more apt, especially since crying had turned her nose pink and she did have a whole set of fidgets. Just then she’d twisted her white embroidered handkerchief into a tiny wet coil.
I would remain calm and try to comfort her until Uncle Phillip called and came to retrieve her. That’s how that small domestic drama would play out. There would be no great upheaval. The goose would drive the rabbit home, and their lives would continue.
My mother’s life had been too short, but it was lively. She had work, friends, parties. She’d given speeches, raised funds, traveled before her plane crashed. Aunt Lucy kept to Uncle Phillip’s side, her house, her walled garden, her family.
I usually sat in the kitchen while she finished cooking Sunday’s dinner. She favored fresh vegetables, and made certain dishes I would always consider southern—puff pastry shell filled with sweetbreads in a cream sauce, stuffed yellow crook neck squash, snapped green Kentucky Wonder beans simmered with bits of country ham, corn scraped off the cob and sautéed with butter, egg bread baked in a blackened iron skillet and served lavishly covered with sliced chicken breast in mushroom sauce. “Lady cooking,” Fergus categorized her food. Though she knew how to cook them, turnip greens and fried chicken were seldom prepared, nor did she favor cakes. Aunt Lucy made pies of any fruit in season—blackberry, apple, peach. To these she later added chocolate meringue and chiffon pies of almost every flavor. “Mama’s cloud pies,” Fergus called them when we were children. Uncle Phillip and I devoured ours happily. Her pastry was light, and when I praised it, she laughed and told me my mother had taught her how to make it.
“Mother used to tell Katherine, ‘You make the crust. Let little Lucy make the filling.’ Because I was the youngest, I got the easiest job. Katherine got so tired of being the one who made the crust she showed me how.”
One afternoon Aunt Lucy gave me a lesson in piecrust making including the intricacies of latticing and edging. The instructions Mother gave me had been desultory, and I hadn’t been particularly interested, but Aunt Lucy’s dexterity, the way she twisted the dough to form a lattice and placed her fingers to pinch a scalloped edge made it look like a minor art form. From one of her mother’s cooks, she’d learned how to make fanciful variations—twisted lattices, elaborately cutout flowers, curling spirals.
In my other life at school, I lived in a dense whirl of classes, study, committee work. There were causes to champion, speakers to invite, publicity to be done. And there were boys. By the end of my junior year, there was one boy, Marshall. Aunt Lucy who listened well and wasn’t inclined to reprove, became my confidant.
She knew everything about Marshall from the color of his eyes—hazel—to the rough outline of his life which I collected as I learned it bit by bit. His family had moved West from Tennessee to Texas after the Civil War while mine had remained rooted in the South.
“Oh, honey!” She had a light, high voice. “Oh, just think … if you married him, you’d leave here!” Her eyes shone happily. Aunt Lucy, having gone as far as California when Uncle Phillip’s company transferred them there, loved the idea of moving. I liked the idea myself, but I was in love which made my judgment suspect. I wanted to marry, but what if, for unknown reasons, Marshall and I later discovered we couldn’t bear each other? I’d been in love before, and I knew the reverse side—despair, sometimes dislike, and finally indifference. The strength of love was the greatest uncertainty in my life. In Aunt Lucy’s estimation though, my possibilities were expanded far beyond her kitchen counter where she was showing me how to weave long strands of pastry under and over each other, her wedding rings shining on the window sill, her thin fingers, moving quickly.
One afternoon while we were standing in front of the sink, she said, “You know, don’t you, I married before meeting your Uncle Phillip—When I was sixteen, I ran off with a boy.”
I was watching her so closely a glass slid through my hands splashing back in the soapy water.
“We married in Columbia and went to Chattanooga.”
I dipped the glasses one by one, as quietly as possible into fresh rinse water. Glancing sideways, I waited.
“Me and Jerry Jenkins. They lived two houses up from us in Franklin.”
The glasses lay in shimmering rows in the hot water. I lifted them out and turned them upside down on a dry cup towel. For a moment I stared out the window over the sink. There was nothing much to see, just a driveway, the red brick wall of the house next door, and one bare tree.
Aunt Lucy picked up a glass and began polishing it. “Jerry was Brother Jenkin’s son, Mother’s preacher’s son.” She said in a matter-of-fact tone. Stepping away from me, she placed the glass in the cupboard.
I went on washing cups and saucers, plates, and at last the silverware, an unchanging progression my grandmother had passed on to her daughters, and in turn to me. This was the way we did dishes. Aunt Lucy wiped the silverware. Each knife, fork, spoon rang against the others as she dropped them one by one in the partitioned drawer.
“Poor Jerry—Imagine naming a child Jeremiah in this day and age. He was as afraid of his father as I was of my mother. Somehow we were bold together, two fears to make one courage maybe.” The plates rattled as she placed them in the shelves. “We couldn’t in the end—We tried, but we couldn’t go against them. Papa and Brother Jenkins came down and brought us home. I’d sent Mother a wire. I didn’t want her to worry. Chattanooga was written at the top of it. I didn’t think about that. There weren’t many hotels in Chattanooga at the time, and Jerry registered under his own name. They found us pretty soon. It was just as well. We were nearly broke.”
In the living room where he generally fell asleep after dinner on Sundays, I could hear the intermittent bumblebee buzz of Uncle Phillip’s snore.
Aunt Lucy leaned against the counter watching me. “Marianne, we were ready to come back. Jerry looked through the want ads in the news and decided he might get a paper route. I read them, and all I was suited to do was to be someone’s maid. We were still children, two run-away children.”
She returned to Franklin, and Jerry was sent away to live with relatives, an aunt and uncle in Atlanta. Her father and his had the marriage annulled quickly. A few months later his father moved to another church. Aunt Lucy and Jerry grew apart. She met Uncle Philip.
“Did he know about Jerry?”
“Oh, he knew there had been someone.”
She appeared resigned then. It might have been easier for her, in the long run, to do as my mother had advised. Now, still holding Jerry’s letters in my lap, I see she couldn’t forget him. I have been appointed, I suppose, in place of a daughter, to keep his letters although her exact motives remain as mysterious as love itself. Until now I’ve never read anyone else’s love letters. The ones I received, I burned before I married. I remember some of their writers, but my old passions have become as hazy as smoke rising.
As for Uncle Philip’s insistence that he hadn’t read these letters, I don’t believe him. He’s read them else why is he
vowing he didn’t? The fact that Aunt Lucy kept them may have hurt. Obviously, since he waited so long to send them, he may not want to talk to anyone about them—me least of all. The Moore family had so many secrets, told so many stories. I’ve always depended on him for corroboration. I take a chance and phone him.
When I eased the conversation around to the letters he’s sent, all he would say was, “Oh, Lucy’s little secret. She had to have one, didn’t she.”
If he was angry or if finding them had added to his grief, he hid it from me, and why not. Her foolishness was his secret too. I believe now that Uncle Philip chose Aunt Lucy, in all probability, for the same reason Jerry did; he adored her frailty.
“Lucy, do sit down,” he would order when she stood to give some other person her seat. “Lucy, you must rest this afternoon! He’d tell her after she spent a morning weeding her garden. “Youall go on. I’ll bring Lucy later,” he would direct anyone else going to see someone who was ill, visiting relatives in the hospital, or on their way to a funeral. Perhaps cutting the time short was his way of sparing her. The only difficult visits she made were trips to see her mother in the nursing home. Uncle Phillip must have taken her; she never did learn how to drive, nor did she ever learn the least thing about managing money. Uncle Phillip did all the household accounting. I used to think she merely exchanged her parents’ house for his restraints. But her role suited her nature, which allowed her to love two men at once, quietly remembering one and marrying another.
WHERE WE ARE NOW
We have a seven-week-old filly who’s an orphan. She hasn’t eaten since her mother died five days ago of a twisted gut. The baby won’t take a bottle with a goat’s or calf’s nipple on it. Yesterday I tried squirting mare’s milk substitute into her mouth with a kitchen baster. It trickled out all over me and the stable floor. On one of the stall’s rails Marsh has hung black plastic buckets just large enough for a foal’s head, each of them filled with different food—foal pellets, oatmeal mixed with corn meal, some other strange mixture. Her mother was a gentle ten-year-old Marsh called Belle. We thought her temperament had passed down to this foal as it has to others; now we aren’t sure. The grief of horses is unpredictable and worrying. They can’t stand being alone long. We’re keeping this foal stabled with a mare in the stall next to her. Right now a mother substitute won’t suffice. First she has to eat.
Where We Are Now Page 16