Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  proved to be too close to the noisy traffic circle at Five Points Road for the delicate sleeper, he had the huge house placed on rollers and moved to a quieter location behind St. Mary’s Episcopal Church.

  But even there he found no rest, and in 1902 he retreated further into the countryside, purchasing a handsome Greek revival antebellum home known as Arlington. Thirty-seven years before, just twelve days before Robert E. Lee’s surrender, the downstairs library of this home had been used by the Union Gen. James H. Wilson to draw up plans for the destruction of the nearby Oxmoor and Irondale furnaces.

  This depiction by artist Max Heldman suggests that the house, then owned by Judge William Mudd, was commandeered by Wilson, and the caption below it asserts that Wilson’s men “rolled the barrels of peach and apple brandy from among the cobwebs into the light of day,” delightedly polishing them off.

  However, a little research reveals a fact generally suppressed in accounts of Wilson’s raid, which is that Arlington’s owner, Judge Mudd, was a Union sympathizer. In fact, upon their arrival, Wilson and his men found the doors to Arlington thrown open to them and the hospitality gracious, but because Judge Mudd was a teetotaler I’m betting the brandy did not flow as described. Still, Mudd’s Union complicity goes a long way toward explaining why Arlington was spared the grievous destruction Wilson’s Raiders subsequently wrought on the surrounding communities.

  It was not spared from ruin for long, however; almost immediately after the war Arlington fell on hard times. Having changed hands several times, its original 475 acres were whittled by subdivision down to 33. By the time my great-grandfather purchased it for the not insubstantial sum of $12,300 (more than $300,000 in today’s dollars), it had been hard-used as a boardinghouse for fourteen years, then, sitting empty, had fallen into the poignant ruin of neglect.

  With a solicitude verging on tenderness, Robert Munger dedicated himself to renovating this fallen beauty.

  This took some doing, and letters from his foreman, Ed Norton, provide a depressingly predictable account of the rotted sills in the windows, failed column bases, the necessary steel beams for the listing portico, extensive lengths of copper guttering to replace the rusted drainage system, and the dire condition of the oak flooring damaged by heavy boots, including those of the Union soldiers.

  In time, Norton got the basic structure stabilized and went to work on the details, tearing off the crumbling plaster from the lathing, running pipes for indoor plumbing, and replacing gaslights with electric fixtures. He reopened the fireplaces, and he and Munger figured out a way to send steam heat to the house through underground pipes from a boiler in an outbuilding. (This system is, in fact, close to the one we have here on the farm, although we, more primitively than the Mungers, use wood to fire the boiler.) Once the place was lit and heated, Mary jumped in, hanging curtains ceiling to floor, unpacking the Wedgwood china, polishing up the extensive silver services, and installing an enormous, multipaneled dining table for the family meals.

  I’m not sure who is the most imposing of the three figures in this image of the finished living room.

  The grounds required extensive improvements, and Munger hired the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted to design and plant a gracious pecan grove, the still-impressive remnants of which I walked through in 2011.

  He leveled ground and built tennis courts…

  and dammed a nearby creek, excavating a pond for swimming.

  Then, dusting off the rollers he had used for the Mirabeau Swanson house, Munger moved two buildings to Arlington from across the road. The first he converted into a sun parlor and living quarters for the house servants. The second he made into a multicar garage.

  Wait. A multicar garage in 1902?

  Yes, a garage… because, in addition to his business, family, philanthropic, church, and community-related pursuits, Robert Munger’s real passion was the wheel.

  It started with bicycles.

  Bicycling was, of course, a popular pastime at the turn of the century and central to a whole quasi-scientific cult of physical and moral health, but for Munger it was much more than that. He was big on sports in general: he and his family rode horses, played tennis, swam, hiked, and even boxed.

  How he managed this I do not know, but, before they reached the age of two, Munger made sure every one of his children knew how to ride a bike. The child in the lower left of this picture, appearing to chat amiably with her older sibling as she pedals along,

  is Margaret Munger, at eighteen months old.

  So passionate was Munger about his family’s two-wheeled adventures that all the children had special biking outfits

  and bikes for the littlest children were custom-made, often in Europe.

  I found no indication that his wife, Mary, who seems an even more unlikely bike rider than an eighteen-month-old, participated in this sport, but Robert Munger was often seen biking around Birmingham, dressed in a coat, tie, and hat, with his eight children, in order of size, pedaling behind him.

  So it’s easy to imagine the allure of the automobile for my two-wheeling great-grandfather when the first cars became commercially available at the turn of the century. Munger took his family with him from Birmingham to New York to buy their first car, a Winton, in 1902. The morning he took possession of it, he proudly took them all out for a little spin… to Philadelphia.

  It took twelve hours.

  Delighted, they motored back to New York and the next day headed out to Boston, twice as far. This trip, however, was not so much fun. They got a flat halfway there and discovered they had no jack. Ever the problem solver, Munger made a fulcrum of rocks and, grabbing up a rail from the side of the road, jammed one end under the car. He then placed his substantial wife at the far end while he and the boys repaired the tube. After this, he always carried a jack and a pick and shovel to smooth out the roads.

  The inconvenience and the mess did not deter Munger, and the next year he bought three more cars: a 14-horsepower Packard, a 24-horsepower Packard, and a 1903 Winton. In short order, as motoring replaced bicycling as the primary family activity, the outfits became more extravagant and even the cars were decorated on occasion.

  Not taking any chances on being incommoded if a chain broke or a tire was punctured,

  Munger prudently insisted upon a horse-and-buggy backup that traveled a discreet distance behind the car parade.

  Thus protected from breakdowns and loaded with picnic baskets, the family would head out of Birmingham in a caravan to a farm that Munger had purchased about nine miles out of town. Those nine miles took half a day to cover because, as his children reported many years later, each time they met a farmer on the road the whole line of cars had to stop. The chary horses were coaxed around the silent cars, and the curious children and adults were obliged a look at the cooling engines. Many Birminghamians reported that these encounters provided them their first automobile ride.

  Apparently, four cars weren’t enough, because the next summer, in July 1904, Munger and much of his family sailed to London, staying at the Midland Grand Hotel while the arrangements were finalized to purchase one more car, a French Panhard et Levassor. (Upon reflection, I realize that this may be the origin of my own family’s long bedevilment by foreign cars—for example, after each unpatchable puncture the tires for this Panhard had to be imported from France. Because of its curious lack of a generator, the foreign-made battery would frequently run down, and Munger, in a risky maneuver, would insert platinum tubes into the combustion chambers and heat them with a blowtorch to fire the gas charge. Wouldn’t a Ford have been simpler? This exasperated rhetorical question has echoed down the generations, right into my own.)

  When the new car was delivered to the front of the hotel it caused such a commotion that police had to be called to control the crowds. Once the family got past the hullabaloo at the hotel steps, they began a 2,000-mile tour through England, Belgium, France, and Switzerland.

  Apparently, everything went fine until, crossing
the Alps into Switzerland, the brakes overheated and failed.

  Without panicking, Munger put the car in the lowest gear and alternated between using the compression of the engine and the hot brakes to reduce the speed. But, wouldn’t you know, in the nonconforming Panhard, the brake and clutch pedal had a peculiar relationship, and, unlike with most cars, using a lower gear ratio did not slow it. Consequently, as the Panhard gathered speed, Munger had no choice but to run the new car cattywompus into the side of the mountain.

  All cars of that era were designed with a wooden door at the back of the car for entering the rear seating area, rather than doors on the side. The rear door had an interior seat hinged on it, and, once the door was closed, the seat was lowered for the unlucky occupant. Apparently on that particular day Mary had drawn the short straw and was sitting in the rear door seat when the Panhard hit the mountain and spun around, jamming the back door and trapping her in the car.

  A rather large woman even in her youth, Mary in her later years had become even more ample, and it took most of the day to release her from the back of the car. The contemporaneous report from her son was that she was not at all amused.

  So how cosmically coincident is it that later that week on the boat crossing back to London, Robert Munger happened to meet a buggy and car chassis designer? Naturally, he asked this Mr. Mullinax, a Frenchman, to help him remedy what was clearly bad automotive design. There on the bobbing boat, drawing on paper pressed down hard against the Channel winds, the two men designed a car chassis with side-entrance doors to the rear seat and a body made of steel rather than wood.

  Once the designs were finalized, Munger bought a second Panhard and had the car shipped to London, where the original body was stripped off and the new, steel Munger/Mullinax-designed side-door body was attached to the chassis. When it was complete, the refitted Panhard was sent to New York City, where it was exhibited at the Waldorf so that American manufacturers could see and study the innovations.

  Nothing in my research indicates that Munger patented this idea or realized any financial gain from it, but I suspect that the promise of a safer vehicle for his family, and the families of the future, was enough for the already abundantly wealthy man.

  In an ironic twist, as he drove the new Panhard out of New York City after the Waldorf display, Robert Munger was given a speeding ticket by a New York City policeman on a bicycle.

  Fifty-eight years later, it was a Florida policeman in a black Chevrolet who tried his damnedest to continue the tradition of ticketing car-crazy Mungers. Only this time, in the 1960s, it was my lead-footed father the cop was pursuing. He and I had driven to Florida to a car race, where Daddy had thought it important for me to shake the hand of some dashing British driver, Stirling Moss or Graham Hill, I forget now.

  It’s true that taking a daughter to a car race was unusual, but one thing in our family was for sure: this Robert Munger’s daughter wasn’t going to be a milquetoast driver. Daddy had no patience, for example, with my mother’s automotive timidity. She hadn’t gotten her license until she was thirty-six and had never quite mastered the accelerator-clutch relationship. No, his daughter was going to know how to accelerate through corners, correct an incipient drift, downshift using toe and heel, and make an emergency stop, the one we practiced the most.

  Driving lessons with Daddy were excruciating. We’d head out after dinner from our rural home, and without fail he would direct me toward Sellers Avenue, the street where the cool town kids hung out on the tree-shaded front yards. When we turned onto Sellers, he’d tell me to downshift and accelerate well past the speed limit. Then, as we roared toward the cluster of my school peers, he’d shout “EMERGENCY STOP!” and expect me to slam on the brakes with force appropriate to avoid hitting a caroming toddler.

  I had no choice in this: if I didn’t do it correctly, he wouldn’t let me drive. I so passionately wanted to get my permit, which back then you could do at age fourteen, that I was willing to suffer the ridicule of the kids I most wanted to be my friends. Each time he yelled, I stomped the brake into the floorboards of the car, which screeched to a smoking halt while the hula hoops dropped to the ankles of my dumbfounded, yearned-for friends. Then while they watched, I would coax the gas back into the recalcitrant and famously tetchy carburetor of the time, and we would lurch up Sellers toward the Clover Creamery and his next demonic test.

  The trip to Florida happened long before I even had my learner’s permit, and we made it in his brand-new car, a creamy white Aston Martin DB-4. He had picked it up in England along with an orange marmalade appeasement for my irate mother and a blue Pringle cashmere sweater for me that was so soft it invited my grade school teachers to pet me like an animal.

  The purchase of the Aston caused a significant disruption in my parents’ marriage, which a friend once likened to a building in which a crucial foundation stone was really two powerful magnets with the wrong ends pressed together, the marital edifice held together by the pressure of the surrounding brickwork: the family, the land. My frugal mother objected to the expense, the ostentation, and the unilateral nature of the purchase, and my father’s response to her upset was to ignore it. When my mother pressed home to him the financial consequences of buying such a car, his solution was to noisily replace the two measured ounces of good whiskey he drank every evening with tall glasses of weak iced tea. By his arithmetic if he did that for the rest of his statistically probable life, he would pay for his half of the car. My mother gave up.

  The Florida races were hot and boring, and we stayed in a motor court that Humbert Humbert would have found too squalid. Each evening Daddy would rummage in his plaid suitcase and, from underneath the tin of tooth powder, bring out a flat, clear-glass bottle labeled conspicuously in his blockiest handwriting “HAIR TONIC.” He would then pour himself a few brown ounces of the “tonic” in the motel’s calcium-crusted glass and we’d sit out on the concrete slab breathing in the heavy scent of the citrus blooms and watching the lizards skitter around in the underbrush. Recently I found prints from the roll of film he shot while we were there and among them is not one image of anything but distant cars, blurry with heat and speed, racing around the track.

  Nothing of me, of us, of the lizards, or the sleazy motel—not even one of me shaking the hand of whichever Brit it was on the rainbow-hued, oil-slick tarmac, all of which, in the patchy way of memory, I can remember. This offers further evidence that my theory about photographs stealing or, at the least, diminishing memories might be correct; those moments with their fragmentary but vivid details and smells and tastes are available to me because there are no photographic images of them. The only thing I can’t particularly remember is the cars speeding by.

  As we ourselves were speeding back from the races in the Aston Martin, my father noticed a Florida state trooper in the rearview mirror, the half-moon light on the roof of his car flashing crimson. Naturally, he floored it.

  The power of the acceleration flattened me to the seat, but I didn’t let on what a thrill this gave me. Staring impassively straight ahead, I could see out of the corner of my eye a drop of sweat hover at the tip of my father’s intent, pointy nose as the needle went deep into the red part on the speedometer, pegging at 140, the limit. He went faster.

  The minute he crossed the state line into Georgia, my father slowed, watching the mirror until the trooper hove into view, his panting Chevy shimmering in the heat coming off the pavement. Pulling to the side of the road, Daddy casually reached down with his left hand to pop open the bonnet, climbed out, and had a long, companionable visit with the trooper while they admired the six-inline cylinders under the hood. After a time, they shook hands; the trooper replaced his hat and returned to his jurisdiction. We continued home, hightailing it through the Georgia pine forests, my heart heavy with the secret of my father’s impish illegality that I was instructed to keep from my mother.

  Sometime later my car-challenged mother, mistaking reverse for first gear, gunned the Jeep into t
he rear of the Aston Martin and then doubly insulted it by insisting on having it repainted a Wedgwood blue that reminded her of their wedding china. On those days when he let me practice driving the Aston, the pleasure of the red leather seats, the throaty roar of the engine, the extraordinary handling through the corners, and the shiny wood veneer of the dash were diminished, heart-sinkingly, when I looked out across the now-blue bonnet.

  Here again, you can’t tell me that genes don’t matter. The elder Robert Munger sent his car passion sprinting along the DNA pathways, tossing the baton over the head of his relatively car-indifferent son (my grandfather Collett Henry) into my father’s uplifted, eager hand and then into mine, similarly receptive.

  It was not just the car thing: Daddy was such a perfect replica of his grandfather that he hardly needed that lackluster genetic vehicle, his father, Collett Henry. In every respect—appearance, intelligence, rectitude, compassion, imagination, and drive—Daddy was a veritable clone of his grandfather, another example of the Immaculate Re-Conception, however reproductively impossible.

  There were two unique and formative things that he didn’t get from his grandfather: his passion for art and his lifelong fascination with death.

  Those were sui generis.

  18

  Leaving Dallas

  Nothing about my father’s privileged Dallas childhood would seem likely to have instilled in him this obsessive “death thing,” as my perplexed mother used to call it. In fact, his was about as idyllic a childhood as any boy ever had.

  Remember that page of sums that Robert Munger I wrote out, listing the inheritance for each child? You might have noticed that Collett Henry, his firstborn son, my father’s father, appeared to get more cash than any of the others, $83,600 (a bit more than a million dollars today). Remember also the Ormond Beach letter in which Robert Munger stated that the other three sons didn’t deserve to inherit much, being unfamiliar with the concept of W-O-R-K?