I have never met anyone on my father’s side of the family. All that I know about them is courtesy of my great-uncle Harper. Unlike the Burch branch of our family, no tragic event had wiped the Hammericks from the face of the earth. The tragedy here was my father. Thomas had come home to North Carolina, but he had brought too much of the world back with him. From where they stood, scattered about the four corners of Mecklenburg County in the towns of Charlotte, Cornelius, Pineville, and Mint Hill, the Hammerick clan closed ranks, leaving Thomas and the family that he had formed standing on the outside.
The first sign that Thomas Hammerick differed from his forefathers was his decision not to attend the law school at UNC Chapel Hill. For that part of his education, he not only stayed north of the Mason-Dixon line, but he went to Columbia, a school in the Yankee epicenter, that wasps’ nest known as New York City. The fear was that Thomas would bring a girl home with him. One of the Lawson brothers had gone to New York City to study law, and he came home with a “Jewess” for a wife. That event provided for many years’ worth of chatter and gossip. The young Mrs. Lawson, née Feldmann, insisted that her husband furnish her with two of everything for the kitchen. The young Mrs. Lawson made Mr. Lawson come home before sunset but only on Friday nights. The young Mrs. Lawson performed rituals with candles and foreign-language prayers. The now-much-older Mrs. Lawson was rumored to be haughty, lacking in social graces, and rarely seen outside of her own house.
When Thomas Hammerick returned to Charlotte alone, without altered taste in foods, scented letters, or any other visible signs of a foreign attachment, his family rewarded him with a brand-new 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air, which he uncharacteristically accepted. Except for the dining room full of wedding presents three and a half years later, which weren’t his alone to refuse, Thomas never took another gift from his family. By the time I came along, his motto was “A gift means that you didn’t earn it.” Thankfully it didn’t apply to his only child. As a father, he was generous. More or less. The “less” was because he never gave me what I wanted. He gave me only what he wanted me to have. I found this was often true with philanthropy and with love. The giver’s desire and fulfillment played an important role.
As was the case with his father and grandfather, Thomas was an only child. The quasi one-child policy within this branch of the Hammerick clan was regarded with suspicion in Mecklenburg County. It was as if the Hammerick men had stood on a street corner and announced through a bullhorn that they had lost the will to touch their wives after the first couple of tries. It also smacked of stinginess. A not-so-subtle effort to consolidate wealth, most people thought.
The second sign that Thomas had strayed from a clearly marked path was his decision not to join the family’s business. The Hammericks had made their money in cotton, which was another way of saying that they had made their money in slaves, but beginning with Graven’s generation the family’s income no longer had a direct connection to the land. Founded by Graven, the department store of Hammerick & Sons (the s showed that Graven was an optimist in his heart of hearts) was located in downtown Charlotte in a now-landmarked building, as it had been one of the first in the city to feature an electric elevator. Hammerick & Sons had to turn to a distant relation of the family to take over as the store’s general manager. But even that didn’t cause the family gates to shut on my father. Thomas was still in his family’s good graces because he hadn’t strayed very far. He had moved to Shelby in nearby Cleveland County and accepted a position with the law firm of Fletcher Burch, which weren’t the last names of two people but the full name of one man.
When he was alive, “Fletch” Burch had a reputation. That was all that was ever said about Fletch in polite company, and, according to Baby Harper, my grandparents Spartan and Glory Hammerick were very polite. They were also very well informed. They knew that the law firm of Fletcher Burch had been in the capable hands of his son-in-law, Walter Wendell Whatley, ever since Burch’s untimely death in a house fire. Through Spartan’s cronies within the Mecklenburg County Democratic Party, he knew that Walter Wendell was going to run for a judgeship and that he was going to win. Through Glory’s crones within the Charlotte Junior League, she knew that Walter Wendell and his wife, Iris, had an unmarried, pretty, blond daughter who was the same age as Thomas. Among the Hammericks, having a judge in the family was as good as having a minister. The Hammericks wanted to have an inside edge in both Heaven and Hell. The Hell that they feared was the one here on earth, a.k.a. any court of law. The Hammerick men, prior to Thomas, became lawyers not to practice law but to protect themselves from it. Unlike his father, Graven, Spartan was a pragmatist. If he had to choose between a judge and a minister, Spartan would rather have the judge on his side. Spartan knew that his odds, even without a minister, were better up in Heaven.
My father dated DeAnne Whatley for three years before they were married, and my great-uncle Harper’s camera was on him from day one. Thomas walking up to the door of the green-shuttered colonial. Thomas standing in the backyard by the dogwood tree with a cigarette in his hand. Thomas sitting inside of his new Bel Air with the windows rolled up. This here was the confession. Because this wasn’t how young men posed with their new cars. They stood next to them. They leaned their hips against the doors. They touched the hoods. The photograph of Thomas neatly tucked inside of that two-toned, red and white sedan made it look more like a flashy coffin than a car.
If he weren’t my father, I would say that Thomas Hammerick was a calculating man for dating the boss’s daughter. Though technically, he didn’t ask DeAnne out until Walter Wendell had left the firm to become Judge Whatley. Six months after my father joined the firm of Fletcher Burch, Walter Wendell handed the managing partnership over to Carson Powell, the man who one day would have a granddaughter named Kelly. The courthouse in Shelby, visible from the front windows of Fletcher Burch’s firm, had enough Corinthian columns and domes to strike awe and inspire trepidation in those who entered it. Located in the town’s main square in order to remind us of the centrality of the Law in our everyday lives, the courthouse was surrounded by century-old water oak trees. On the afternoon that Walter Wendell strolled from one side of the street to the other for his swearing-in, he stopped by Thomas’s office and invited him to the house on Piedmont Street for dinner. So, in fact, it was Walter Wendell who asked Thomas out on the first date.
Baby Harper was thirty-three years old when Thomas Hammerick pulled up to the green-shuttered colonial in his red and white Bel Air. My great-uncle already owned the Greek Revival by then, but he came over to Iris and Walter Wendell’s house for dinner on most nights because Iris always had someone new cooking in the kitchen. Baby Harper liked the variety. He said it was like going to a different restaurant every couple of months. These cooks usually left once they had told Iris where she could shove their biscuits to keep them nice and warm.
My great-uncle told me that my father was handsome. That made me blush. I was twelve years old when I began to ask Baby Harper about the mysterious coupling of Thomas and DeAnne. I was just beginning to see my father as a person and a man. I stared hard at the photographs that my great-uncle was showing me, and I tried to imagine how that young man had become my father. That young man had dipped himself again and again into melted wax and was now unrecognizable underneath the accumulated layers. That young man had taken his eyes out and replaced them with a pair of thick glasses. That young man had lost his head of hair. I must have looked disappointed because Baby Harper said, “It’s all right, Linda Vista. Your father, he had his moment in the sun.”
There were three years’ worth of photographs of Thomas Hammerick standing, sitting, and eating meals at the Whatleys’. There was also a set of candidgraphs from this period tucked into the back of one of the H.E.B.’s. Shoes were the recurring theme. Baby Harper had moved away from the blurry mid-strides of his youth. His taste had matured to close-ups of shoelaces untied. It was easy to recognize my father’s shoes in these images. Leather wing ti
ps, dark brown. When I was younger, the perforated pattern on the toe caps of my father’s shoes made me think of the tops of Ritz crackers, and later those same tiny holes made me think of constellations in the night sky. Through the years, the only thing that had changed about my father’s footwear was that he tied a more secure knot. When he passed away, in his closet were four pairs of shoes, exactly the same. The left heels were worn along the outside edge, and the right toes had a deep crease across them. DeAnne gave them to my great-uncle Harper because he wore the same size.
In the official photographs from “the courting years,” as my great-uncle called them, DeAnne and Thomas never touched. Here was another confession. DeAnne always looked at Thomas and never at the camera. She was twenty-five years old, the same age as her beau, but she looked a decade older than he. Our family, my great-uncle told me, was afraid that DeAnne’s “window” was about to close.
Now when I think about this euphemism, this aperture of feminine viability, I think of Rapunzel locked in her tall tower, staring down at the world, waiting for the plea that one day would change her life.
DeAnne had graduated from Gardner-Webb Baptist College and was working two days a week in the alumni office. Iris thought it would be a good way for her daughter to meet eligible men, but the only men DeAnne met there were those old enough to donate large sums of money to their alma mater. One by one, June after June, DeAnne’s friends married the sons of these men and were now into their second pregnancies. On her days off, DeAnne went to visit these new mothers in their houses and hold their babies. When she looked at Thomas, that must have been what she saw. When Thomas looked straight ahead into the camera, he saw a small dark hole.
The other details of their courtship were lost to me because they were lost to my great-uncle Harper. When Thomas and DeAnne began driving off in the Bel Air right after dinner, not even waiting for the dessert, there was nothing that Baby Harper could do but have another cup of coffee. My great-uncle must have felt a lot of things sitting there nursing that second cup that he knew would keep him awake, pacing the halls of his Greek Revival. One of them was this. Baby Harper was anticipating the one-word epithet that Iris would spit at all of us before she died. As Thomas drove DeAnne along a moonlit road, never pushing past twenty-five miles per hour in a vehicle built for speed, DeAnne was thinking of the same two syllables. As Iris climbed into the four-poster bed that her parents had shared, like their fiery deaths, she said a prayer that she and Walter Wendell would never suffer its biting cold, alone.
When Thomas asked for DeAnne’s hand in marriage, he and Walter Wendell were in the living room of the green-shuttered colonial. Baby Harper was in the dining room. Baby Harper overheard Walter Wendell say, “Counselor, I was going to have you disbarred if you’d waited a day longer!” There was laughter, and then there was a hush as Walter Wendell got right down to business. His daughter, DeAnne, was going to make it possible for him to keep the promise that he had made when he too had joined the family.
Like Thomas, Walter Wendell had joined the firm of Fletcher Burch first, though it didn’t take him three years to marry the boss’s daughter. He married Iris in three months. Fletch Burch had called him “Whirlwind Walter” while slapping him repeatedly on the back on the day of the wedding. Everyone knew that young Walter Wendell, bridegroom, was also now the firm’s newest partner. Fletch’s management philosophy was simple. Family first. No one had predicted that in a matter of days Whirlwind Walter would again earn his name.
Walter Wendell knew that Fletch understood ambition. Fletch, however, also believed in a man keeping his word. Walter Wendell handing over the law firm, if only temporarily, to a non-family steward wasn’t part of the bargain that Fletch had made with his son-in-law. If only more than a cupful of his ashes had been found, Fletch would have turned over in his grave, knocked a hole through the side panel of his coffin, and headed straight for the courthouse to drag Walter Wendell off the bench. There were probably enough ashes to make a fist, though, and Walter Wendell had dreamed about that fist coming down on his head, a gavel demanding justice.
My father must have known what he was getting himself into. A partnership at Fletcher Burch was like a brand-new Bel Air. He hadn’t earned it. Thomas must have known that DeAnne was the key, and, as was true of all keys, she could open doors and lock them shut.
ORVILLE WRIGHT WAS THE FIRST AMERICAN MAN TO FLY. HIS older brother Wilbur was the second. Together they entered history as “the Wright brothers,” equal and two-headed. In the privacy of their sibling rivalry, alone and always one-sided, Wilbur never forgot that Orville was the first to raise himself off the ground and touch it down again with all his limbs intact. The brothers knew that their true achievement wasn’t flight but flight accompanied by a safe landing. Icarus flew. It was how he descended that determined why his story was told and retold. Icarus flew. That was what the brothers said to each other by way of a prayer, and as a reminder that flying wasn’t their only goal. Wilbur, till the day he died, would look into Orville’s eyes, which reminded him of his own and of the North Carolina sky, and see there a speck of gray, a plane lifting into the clear blue. When Orville blinked, this reminded Wilbur that the first flight was only twelve seconds long. Between the two of them, there were four successful attempts that day. The last one and the longest in duration belonged to Wilbur: fifty-nine seconds. An appreciable difference that, once their identities became factually entwined, was often overlooked and forgotten. Wilbur flew. He wrote it on a piece of paper and placed it inside his shoe. He did it to assert his personhood and to document the singularity of his achievement. Wilbur flew.
I first read about the Wright brothers in the pages of North Carolina, and from that moment on I have liked Wilbur better. I cross-stitched his two-word declaration of independence onto a handkerchief that I made in my sixth-grade home economics class. I used periwinkle floss and dotted the i with a star. I received a C-minus for my efforts. My stitches were uneven, and the cursive f looked more like a b. I had intended the handkerchief as a Christmas gift for Kelly. I kept it instead.
From second to eighth grade, Wade and I shared the same school bus stop, located at the front of his house by a SLOW CHILDREN sign. We were the only kids who lived on Oak Street. Irony, thankfully, came late to us. We were lucky in that way. On cold fall mornings Wade’s mom would send him out with two paper cups of hot cocoa, the kind with the very small marshmallows included in the mix, so tiny that they threw off our sense of perspective. Looking down at these floating white dots, we felt like giants. The first time Wade handed me a cup, he said, “My momchocolatemilk says this is for youcannedgreenbeans.” After that, the handoffs were silent. What more was there to say? Cup, cocoa, giants, wait, cold, bus, school. All the important things between us were already established and understood. I didn’t need another word, and he, being a boy, didn’t know that words were necessary. We left the empty cups at the base of the street sign and climbed aboard the bus, and by the time we were dropped off in the afternoon the cups were gone.
On colder winter mornings, Wade’s mom drove us to school. DeAnne never offered, and my father would have disapproved if he had known. What was he paying taxes for if his daughter was being shuttled to school in a private vehicle? If he was in a joking mood (most people didn’t know that my father had a sense of humor), he would have said, “ … in a private Episcopalian vehicle?” Wade’s mom would have laughed at that. She laughed a lot. She laughed a lot with Wade. In the mornings, when he opened the front door of the faded-red-T-shirt house, I would hear her. That was even better than the cocoa.
Wade’s sense of humor, like my father’s, was dry and difficult to detect. That was how I knew that his mom would have laughed at a line like “Episcopalian vehicle.” There was an absurdist quality about it—that anyone would use “Episcopalian” to modify a car—that she would have appreciated. Also, in light of what became of her, I think she would have enjoyed the critique, tucked in between those two wo
rds, of a small town’s proclivity for parceling differences, big and small.
The first time that her son and I had what could be called a conversation, I was the initiator. It was the first day of sixth grade, and Wade and I were, as usual, waiting for the school bus. Wade must have wanted to ride his new ten-speed bike to school instead. He was looking up at the familiar street sign. He looked amused and disgusted at the same time. Irony, an avenging angel, had visited him. Wade’s hands were shoved into the front pockets of his jeans. His T-shirt said ASTEROIDS in yellow letters, edged in a ring of red, both colors primary and bold. I was thinking about how an additional s could really change the meaning of this word. I was thinking about Kelly writing K+W all over her new binders and notebooks. I looked down at the sidewalk, and then my words came out softly, barely audible. I knew because Wade asked, “Huh?”
I repeated my question, looking up not at his face but at the center of his T-shirt. I meant my question to be comprehensive. I wanted to know what his mom was laughing about that morning, and I wanted to know what she had been laughing about for the past five years.
Bitter in the Mouth Page 6