Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  Extending hospitality to the O’Connor family during a time of trouble was a natural response for Aunt Mary. According to O’Connor’s first cousin Dr. Peter Cline, “Sister would always add another room on when somebody got sick.” The other residents in the home at the time were all unmarried women. A blunt, formidable companion was her sister Katie, working as a mail order clerk in the post office. Nicknamed “Duchess” by her clever niece, Aunt Katie — often dressed in a long coat with a big fur collar — was recalled by Betty Boyd Love as bearing “a strong resemblance to the illustrator John Tenniel’s Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. She was a woman of vigorous appearance, vigorous language, and vigorous opinion.” A satiric portrait of both aunts, Mary and Katie, worthy of “My Relitives,” shows up in Aunts Bessie and Mattie of “The Partridge Festival”: “The two of them were on the front porch, one sitting, the other standing. . . . They were box-jawed old ladies who looked like George Washington with his wooden teeth in. They wore black suits with large ruffled jabots and had dead-white hair pulled back.” On the top floor of the Cline Mansion lived a third relative, the more diminutive Great-aunt Gertie Treanor, white-haired, less than five feet tall, who devoted hours to stitching muslin covers for St. Christopher medals on her little sewing machine.

  The interior of the Cline Mansion was as grand, and full of character lines, as its façade. Passing in the entrance hall under a cut-glass chandelier, guests to the home, or on a garden club tour, would walk into either a drawing room to the left, or a parlor to the right, where the Clines gathered in the evenings to recite the Rosary. Dominating the drawing room was a rosewood concert grand piano; on the Colonial mantel, silver candelabra were set on either side of a large, painted portrait of Katie Semmes as a three-year-old girl in a pretty blue dress. The parlor room, lit by a pair of crystal hurricane lamps, was a flickering vision of desks, chairs, and highly polished end tables, with a long portrait of a handsome cousin, John MacMahon. Following a visit to the virtually unchanged mansion in the midsixties, the scholar Josephine Hendin recorded her impression of many family pictures, hanging on walls and propped on tables, of “Infants, girls with sausage curls, and impressively mustachioed men.”

  A step down, behind the parlor, was a dark wood–paneled dining room, its mahogany banquet table set with family silver and porcelain, and lined by Jacobean chairs. Miss Mary presided here over groups of sixteen or eighteen for large midday dinners, with the children seated at two little tables under far bay windows. Everyone helped themselves to trays of biscuits, and platters of sweet potatoes and fried chicken, prepared and served by a staff of three or more black cooks and servants. “We’d have these big Sunday lunches,” remembers O’Connor’s first cousin Jack Tarleton. “Mary Cline would sit at the head of the table and tinkle that silver bell, and here would come this entourage of people from the kitchen serving everybody around this big table. She could play that role to the hilt.” Great-aunt Julia Cline was said by her son-in-law to have been “a speaking likeness” of the grandmother in O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Of a couple of reputed “alcoholic” uncles, Peter Cline says, “There were some oddballs in that family, too, but they kept them out of sight.”

  When Mary Flannery, still the only child living in a houseful of adults, left the main floor and climbed the central staircase that split forward and backward — called “good morning stairs” for the greetings exchanged on the middle landing — she found herself in a familiar world. While Sister and Duchess kept bedrooms on the first floor, and Aunt Gertie stayed in “the big room” on the east side of the cavernous second floor, her parents’ bedroom adjoined hers in a separate apartment on the west side. Here the teenage girl could shut the door and be alone in her long, narrow, high-ceilinged bedroom, once again overlooking a backyard — where she kept geese and her mother planted daffodils — as well as the formal boxwood gardens of the Old Governor’s Mansion. She spent countless hours on her stool at a high-legged clerk’s desk, drawing and writing. To further escape the bustle downstairs, she retreated to a vast attic room, full of trunks and chests (a garret much like the third floor in Savannah) and with a front gabled window that looked out over Greene Street to the cemetery beyond.

  The school where she was hastily enrolled was quite unlike either St. Vincent’s or Sacred Heart. First known as Peabody Model School when it was founded in 1891, Peabody Elementary was a lab school for practice teachers from the education department of Georgia State College for Women. Many of their supervising professors had studied at Teacher’s College at Columbia, testing ground for the liberal pedagogy of John Dewey, so the favored methods were eclectic and experimental. Mary Flannery’s classroom was on the second floor in the middle of a series of “Choo-Choo” buildings, connected by overhead walkways, on the main college campus. As of 1935, a new principal, Mildred English, an educator with a national reputation, made sure that all of her pupils were taught and graded not only in Reading, Social Studies, Science, and Arithmetic, but also in Arts, Health Activities, and Social Attitudes and Habits.

  Though she had been in class for only two months when the year ended, her instructor, Martha Phifer, filed a full report card, including a special note: “Mary Flannery needs to work on her spelling this summer.” Otherwise she was rated satisfactory in most areas: “Speaks distinctly with well-pitched voice”; “Contributes information to group”; “Enjoys singing with the group”; “Has good posture.” Responding to a survey, Mrs. O’Connor answered with snappy honesty about her daughter. To the question “Approximate time spent on home work?” she answered, “Very little.” To “Does he have any home responsibilities?” the answer was “No.” To “Does he prefer being alone rather than with others?”: “Occasionally enjoys others.” She listed as her daughter’s only physical defect “Error in vision.”

  Mary Flannery’s only friend in Milledgeville in the seventh grade was Mary Virginia Harrison, the daughter of the postmaster Ben Harrison and her mother’s friend Gussie Harrison. Their match was made by the mothers. “Her mother handpicked her few friends in Milledgeville,” recalls Jack Tarleton. Mary Virginia was an unlikely choice for the newcomer. While Mary Flannery was chronically shy, on the tall side for her age, gawky, and wearing glasses akin to her character Mary Flemming’s “gold-rimmed spectacles,” Mary Virginia was strikingly pretty, vivacious, and didn’t like being alone for a minute. Yet the girls clicked. Mary Flannery remade the Merriweather Club into a secret society for two, with its own official flower, the dandelion. She designed a pin for her friend inspired by the colors of a pet parrot, and together the girls memorized the signs for Burma Shave along the highway to Macon, where they visited their dentist.

  Staying, otherwise, mostly to herself, O’Connor expressed her inner life through her birds. “I remember sitting on the swing on the front porch of Greene Street, and Flannery walking by with this little bantam on a leash, and that is really my first memory of her,” says her first cousin Frances Florencourt. Naming a pet quail “Amelia Earhart,” following the pilot’s disappearance over the Pacific in the summer of 1937, she startled a teacher and other girls on a field trip in nearby Nesbit Woods when she shouted, of her missing bird, “Oh, I’ve found Amelia Earhart! I’ve found Amelia Earhart!” Fellow Girl Scout Regina Sullivan has recalled one of her chickens with the middle name of her uncle Herbert Aloysius Cline, in Atlanta: “She would bring Aloysius to Scout meetings and he was dressed in little gray shorts, a little white shirt, a jacket, and a red bow. He just walked around us as we had our troop meeting.” As O’Connor explained in “The King of the Birds”: “I could sew in a fashion and I began to make clothes for chickens.”

  During the summers the Cline Mansion grew livelier with the annual visits of Aunt Agnes and her four daughters — distant models for the two visiting Catholic schoolgirl (second) cousins of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” Agnes Cline had met her husband, Frank Florencourt, a signal designer for Central of Georgia Railroad, in Savannah, where
she and Regina moved after high school. In 1924, the Florencourts even lived briefly with the O’Connors in their Charlton Street town house, before the birth of their first daughter. Having moved up North, near Boston, Agnes, who spoke with a Southern accent her entire life, brought her daughters to Georgia each summer for refreshment in their heritage. Greatly amplified for weeks at a time by these four girls — Margaret, Louise, Catherine, and Frances — the large Cline household sometimes included, as well, Cousins Betty and Peter Cline, from Atlanta, and Frank Cline, from Louisiana.

  “They played better,” remembers Peabody classmate Charlotte Conn Ferris, of the Florencourt girls. “Being in a family of four they knew better how to interact with other children.” Elizabeth Shreve Ryan recalls, “I was always interested in listening to them because we didn’t hear many Northern people speak. It was like listening to a foreign language.” Mary Flannery mostly sat on the porch with the two oldest sisters, while the littler ones played in the yard. “I think the times I saw her talk the most was when the cousins were visiting,” said Kitty Smith Kellam. “You didn’t hear her laugh very often except when they were there. They would sit on that porch and rock all day long and I used to think how horrible that would be — just watching the world go by and rocking.” Peter Cline says, “We had a running Monopoly game set up on the landing, and Mary Flannery was very much a part of it. She was a very sweet girl, very funny, with a keen wit.”

  While Edward O’Connor remained “the invisible man” to many children and young people in the neighborhood who never met him, he did visit during the summer. He would not have stayed away long from the daughter who was the single great joy and consolation in his life. “I remember sitting on the front porch at Greene Street in the middle of the day,” says Frances Florencourt. “They had a big dinner at noonday, and afterwards they would sit in these big white chairs on the front porch and slap mosquitoes and fan themselves. I was sitting in Edward O’Connor’s lap. He was playing that game, ‘I got your nose’ with me. I’d giggle. Then I said, ‘No, I’ve got your nose,’ and I pulled hard at his nose. I think I really must have really hurt him. He didn’t look at all sick at that time. Though I wonder how much a six- or seven-year-old could really perceive.”

  A regular summertime destination for all of these cousins was Sorrel Farm, later called Andalusia, the 550-acre working dairy farm owned by their uncle, Dr. Bernard Cline, from Atlanta, and named for the sorrel-colored horses he kept there. Off Eatonton Road, two miles outside town, the former Stovall Place plantation was their pastoral playground, complete with white farmhouse, cow barn, horse stables, milk shed, fishing ponds, and fields for riding. One of Dr. Cline’s hobbies was raising prizewinning show horses, including Rocky Barrymore and Jim Dandy, a Tennessee walker. “To this day I have bowlegs and I think it was from riding horses all over that farm when I was seven,” says Jack Tarleton. The girl cousins, dressed alike in brown jodhpurs, pale yellow shirts, and shiny brown boots, rode Shetland ponies they named Shirley Temple, Devonshire Duke, Lady Luck, or Brownie. A snippet of home-movie color footage exists of Mary Flannery, in jodhpurs as well, looking quite assured in the saddle.

  Yet she never simply became one of the gang of girls. She often held back, or acted in an off-putting manner. She would give inexperienced riders “wild horses” and then “laugh if you fell off,” complained Loretta Feuger Hoynes, a childhood friend from Savannah. Like the three little bullies in “The River,” she got a kick out of luring unsuspecting victims into a pigpen. Lucia Bonn Corse remembered being a guest at a summer party given for the Florencourt cousins during which “Mary Flannery spent the evening in a corner by herself.” One Milledgeville resident has recalled that her own mother once invited the visiting Florencourt cousins to enjoy a fresh harvest of black cherries. While the girls were off riding horses, Mary Flannery, an “obligatory” guest, sat unhappily on the back porch spitting out cherry pits while muttering, “I didn’t want to come.”

  EDWARD O’CONNOR DID eventually secure a short-term home for his family on the outskirts of Atlanta in the Peachtree Heights neighborhood of Buckhead, still a small town of ten thousand residents, with upscale housing developments interspersed among its wooded areas. The rental at 2525 Potomac Avenue, quite a change from the Cline Mansion, was a one-story brown-frame foursquare, built in 1920. Like most of the homes in the planned “garden suburb” of curved streets, lush landscaping, and mature willow trees, the square bungalow fit a type of quintessential American construction provided by mail-order companies such as Aladdin and Sears, Roebuck, including complete plans and materials, and money-back offers of a dollar for each knot found in the lumber. In choosing the modest home on hilly ground, Ed O’Connor would have been aware of an appealing feature for his daughter: its porch fronted over the duck pond of the community park.

  By moving to Buckhead, the O’Connors were also moving closer to other members of the Cline and O’Connor clans. Just a mile and a half away in Peachtree Park, another suburban development from the twenties, lived Regina’s brother, the real estate agent Herbert Aloysius Cline, his wife, Edward O’Connor’s sister Nan, and their two children, Peter and Betty, the regular summertime visitors to Milledgeville. Also in Peachtree Park, three blocks south of the Clines, was John Tarleton, an auditor at a building supply company, married to Regina’s sister Helen Cleo Cline, and their horseback-riding son, Jack. Of the divvying up of this matriarchal world, O’Connor later explained to a friend that her mother had three main sisters, “Miss Mary, Miss Cleo, and Miss Agnes. Miss Cleo’s domain is Atlanta and Miss Agnes’ Boston.”

  All three families attended the same church, and sent their children to the same public school. Although Regina and her sister Cleo had a testy relationship, Jack Tarleton recalls that “My mother and I went once or twice to the O’Connors’ house on Potomac Avenue to see them, or to pick them up.” He remembers a party at the time at the Tarleton home at 3061 Piedmont Road: “Flannery was there, and the Florencourt cousins. They were all dressed in hoop skirts. Sometime during the afternoon, Flannery got caught outside on the porch and couldn’t get in. So she simply went through the little window, hoop skirt and all. I was a little boy, standing there watching her. She was going to get into that house one way or another. Convention didn’t mean anything to her.”

  Christ the King Cathedral was a three-block walk from the O’Connors’ home. Dedicated in January 1939 as a sister church to St. John the Baptist in Savannah, marking the cohering of a Savannah-Atlanta diocese, this Gothic Revival cathedral, built of Indiana limestone, stood on four acres on Peachtree Road that had belonged a few years earlier to the Ku Klux Klan. The shadow history of Buckhead throughout the twenties and early thirties included lots of Klan activity. The Buckhead robe factory pumped millions of dollars into the city’s economy, attracting such firms as Coca-Cola and Studebaker to advertise in the Klan newspaper. Christ the King was actually built on the site of the Klan’s former national headquarters, the antebellum “Imperial Palace.” As Jews and Catholics had both been targets of the Klan, the foreclosure of the property by a Jewish banker, and its subsequent sale to the Catholic Church, was a bit of revenge.

  During the academic year 1939–40, Mary Flannery was enrolled at North Fulton High School, a segregated public school built in 1932 to serve the white children on this expanding edge of northern Atlanta. Designed by the neoclassicist architect Philip Trammell Schutze, North Fulton was a quintessential high school, a classical Georgian Revival brick building, trimmed in white wood, with towering Ionic pillars, through which more than a thousand students and nearly fifty teachers passed daily. “Mary Flannery and I were there at the same time,” recalls Dr. Peter Cline, “but not in the same classes. You could be in the same grade, and take the same courses, but have different teachers. It was a relatively large school. . . . I used to walk to North Fulton every day. People didn’t have two cars back then. It was still the Depression.” Also at North Fulton, unknown to her, was O’Connor’s futu
re poet friend James Dickey, then a football player.

  Every bit as progressive as Peabody, North Fulton’s up-to-date layout included twenty-three classrooms, two lecture halls, seven science labs, an auditorium, cafeteria, gym, armory, shooting gallery, the newly opened W. F. Dykes Stadium, named for the school’s first principal, and an industrial arts building with house-drawing, electrical, and woodworking studios. Of the young girl’s uneasy reaction to this cutting-edge display case of learning, her friend Caroline Gordon later reported, “She once described her early education to me as a vacillation between the convent school and what she called ‘the life of Riley.’ The nuns whom she had for teachers in Savannah stressed discipline, as nuns do. The ‘progressive’ schools which she attended in Atlanta and later in Milledgeville offered an eclecticism which the convent-bred child evidently found bewildering.”

  The local patriarch of the Cline family was Dr. Bernard Cline, presiding in Atlanta as Aunt Mary did in Milledgeville. At holiday dinners at the Cline Mansion, Uncle Bernard would sit across from Aunt Mary in the place of his deceased father. A single gentleman, tall and handsome, nearly sixty, with fine silver hair, light blue eyes, and a dignified bearing, he was an ear, nose, and throat specialist, a graduate of Emory Medical School, with further medical studies in New York City and Vienna. “Our uncle Bernard footed the bills for a lot of things,” explains Dr. Peter Cline. Uncle Bernard’s best friend was Louis Cline, his affable, low-key, younger brother. While Mary Flannery was in school in Atlanta, Uncle Louis was selling used cars, perhaps giving her a special angle on Haze Motes’s purchase of his old Essex at Slade’s used-car lot in Wise Blood. “He’s never mentioned my father to me,” she later wrote, of Louis, to Betty Hester. “If he did, he’d say something like, ‘He was a nice fellow,’ and wag his head.”