DECEMBER 29, 2009
FORTY-EIGHT YEARS AGO TODAY I MARRIED JUDGE JAMES NELSON Bloodworth of Decatur, Alabama, in the Presbyterian Church of Courtland, Alabama, underneath the forty-thousand-dollar stained glass window my father had given the church the year before.
I was wearing a blue silk suit which my aunt Louise Hitch Gilchrist had ironed for me that morning in my grandmother’s guest room. I was drinking champagne and so was she and so were my best friends, Allison and Anne Bailey. We were giddy by the time we left for the church in my father’s Cadillac.
I had spent the night before the wedding alone with my grandmother. I was sleeping in the iron double bed where she used to pretend to be the little people inside the radio telling their stories. “Let me out,” she would scream. “Get me out of here.”
It should have been a metaphor for the wedding that was about to take place. To make up for my drinking too much I was marrying the most respectable man in town. Except when I was drinking, I was respectable. Since I quit drinking forty years ago I have become almost entirely respectable and contemptuous of people who are not.
I don’t like excess. I’m a Scot. I hate waste. I like order. I like the world in which I grew up except for the problems caused by whiskey.
Before I went to bed the night before my wedding to the judge I went into my grandmother’s small orderly bedroom and knelt beside her bed and let her bless me and wish me a happy and useful life. “He is a good man,” she said. “Be kind to him.”
“I will,” I promised. “I’ll try as hard as I can.” I wanted to be a good wife and have an honorable life beside this fine man. He was forty-seven years old. I was twenty-four. He had been a major in the United States Army Judicial Corps. He had served all during the war and was in the army of occupation in the American sector of Germany for three years after the war.
He had been Phi Beta Kappa and Law Review at the University of Alabama School of Law. Later he would sit on the Alabama Supreme Court.
At the time of our marriage he was serving his second elected term as circuit judge of Madison County, Alabama.
I was a beautiful, rich, spoiled girl with two beautiful, small sons. They had hair the color of sunrise and wild black eyes and were powerful and strong and big for their ages. They were fearless and always in motion. I adored them as long as I didn’t have to take care of them by myself. I had left my husband and come home to live with my family because they had maids and babysitters and my parents adored my little boys because they were the only grandsons. There were a lot of granddaughters but my father and brothers didn’t want granddaughters. They wanted a dynasty and that required male children. They let me have or do anything I wanted as long as I kept having sons.
I loved my little boys. They were exactly what I had wanted except I didn’t want them when I was twenty years old and twenty-one. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted the big world. I wanted to finish college and go to New York City and work at a publishing company and publish poems and magazine articles. I didn’t want to spend my life taking care of small children.