EPILOGUE

I HAVE LEARNED that few people achieve their dreams. They try, fall short, and settle for what happens to them. Oddly, some become famous, more famous than they would have been if their dream had been realized. Some vanish, taking the easy road out, without realizing—or perhaps caring—that the easy road may be trouble for the people around them.

Still, the dream is always with them, like a birthmark hidden from sight. It is, I suppose, both the blessing and the curse God implanted in the human species when he set all of matter in motion.

If we did not have dreams, we would have no reason to wonder, or hope, or believe.

We would have no reason to care about who we are, rather than who we might have been.

THE PEOPLE WHO knew Lottie Lanier have said that as a child, I resembled her, but there is no photograph of her for me to see and I do not know if there is any truth in what I have been told.

I know only that she was my grandmother and that on November 19, 1910, she left her son—my father, Little Ben Lanier—with the stationmaster, Akers Crews, at the Jericho train station, and, supposedly, she was never again seen by anyone who had known her.

My father was reared by Margaret Phelps, his Gra-Ma, and mine also.

I have never found any evidence that my father ever searched for his mother, yet it does not surprise me. I think he had an understanding with her, even at the age of four. Not a said thing, but something that he carried in his genes as definable as blood type. His mother had given him the best life she could afford to give him, and then she had put him in hands that would lift him up at every stumble. It was those hands, the hands of his Gra-Ma, that he would remember and celebrate.

My father would attend the University of Georgia in the study of law, and in 1927, he would marry JoBeth Kingsley, the daughter of Spurgeon and Katherine Kingsley. I was born in 1929 and was named Foster Arthur Lanier. In 1951, my father succeeded Ben Phelps as president of Ledford-Phelps Clothiers, Incorporated. “He is not my son, but I have always believed he was as much a part of me as my soul,” Ben said of my father at the party given to make the announcement of my father’s new position. There was poignancy in the remarks. Ben and Sally Phelps had not been able to have children.

My father remained president of Ledford-Phelps Clothiers until 1973, when he sold the firm to a conglomerate from Chicago. It was a wise move by a wise man. He knew the small towns of America were withering, being replaced by malls the size of cities, and by strip shopping centers popping up like mushrooms in damp woods dirt. In 1974, he made a present of the original Ledford’s Dry Goods store to the city of Jericho for use as a library named in memory of Margaret Lowell Phelps, and he funded it with two million dollars.

When he was young my father did not search for his mother, but he had his mother’s nature. He was a caring person. He would die in 1986 at the age of eighty, only six months after the death of my mother. In the last week of his life, I asked him a question I had never asked: “Do you have any memory of your parents?” He looked at me curiously, waved his hand weakly in front of his face, as though brushing away a harmless insect. After a moment, he whispered, “No.” I knew that what he said was not the truth. I also knew he did not have enough words left in him to tell me what he knew, or felt, and that his answer was gently given.

And I think he understood I had already been told the stories.

It was Ben—Big Ben—who began to talk to me, after his retirement, of my grandmother. His Sally had died in 1953 of cancer, leaving him with the kind of loneliness healed only by talked-about memories.

He sold the estate he and Sally had built a few miles outside of Jericho and moved again into the home of his childhood, left vacant in 1952 by the death of his mother. For Ben, it was more home to him than any of the homes he and Sally had owned, and it was there that he began to think often of Lottie Lanier. When I would visit him—not from obligation, but because I liked him—he would sit on the porch swing and tell me stories of my grandmother he had never told anyone, always remarking how, as a baby, I had looked enough like her to make him step back in shock when he saw me.

Same eyes, Ben said. Same gold-honey color. Same look of sorrow, yet bright enough to take in things with wonder, and having the same way of gazing off as though something from another world seemed to be calling.

Ben said, “She did what she had to do, and so will you.”

And because of the stories Ben told me when I was young, I began to believe my grandmother was the something calling to me, and I had a need to find her.

WHEN HE FIRST began the stories of my grandmother, Ben told me he had tried to find her after his honeymoon with Sally. He traveled to Augusta, to River Road, and discovered an empty house. None of the neighbors knew what had happened to the three women and small boy who had lived there. One day, in November of 1910, they simply disappeared without a word. Maybe they had thrown themselves into the Savannah River, like trash from barrels, and the river had swallowed them, Ben was told. It was not an uncommon occurrence. The river was used as often as a preacher’s baptism to wash away pain.

Ben even returned to Beimer, Kentucky, in 1915. Henry Quick remembered him and went with him to the cabin where Foster and Lottie had lived. The cabin was empty, and the gravesite for my grandfather was overgrown. Ben and Henry Quick cleared it of the briars and weeds. Five years later, in 1920, Ben purchased the property and had the cabin expanded and modernized, and occasionally he and Sally would go there on vacation with Gra-Ma and my father, Little Ben, and, later, with me. I have always thought of it as a place of peace, and there are times when I have an inexplicable urge to go to my grandfather’s gravesite and sit in the grass and look at the tombstone Ben had erected. The tombstone reads:

FOSTER LANIER
1875–1910
BASEBALL PLAYER

He did not say it to me, but I believe Ben bought the cabin and kept my grandfather’s gravesite cleared because he thought my grandmother would eventually return there and find the place to her liking, and that one day he would drive up to the cabin and she would be standing on the porch, a smile in her honey-gold eyes.

Ben died of complications from a recurrence of rheumatic fever in 1958. He was seventy-two years old. I lived at the time in New York, working as a travel writer for a magazine called Places, a publication for people with wanderlust and money, taking excursions to romantic islands and cities, most of them making up for lost dreams. I was often among them, using my profession as an excuse. I had dreamed of being an attorney, as was my father, someone engaged in the noble combat of right and wrong. I learned the combat was not so noble and that right and wrong usually wore the same face. I did not have a tolerance for compromise. Words about far-off places were easier to handle than argument.

Yet, I think I had always been waiting for the call about Ben. It came from my mother: “Come home,” she said simply. “Ben’s dying.”

The last time I saw him, Ben said to me in his death-whisper, “My Sally’s with me.” He smiled at the thought, then added, “And Lottie.” He wiggled his head on the pillow and a small, glad laugh applauded in his chest. “Did I tell you about the catch I made when I was a boy?” he wheezed. He blinked tears, then closed his eyes. Two hours later, he stopped breathing.

IN 1992, AFTER retiring and returning to live in the Phelps home, which Ben had willed to me, I discovered the journals of Sally Ledford Phelps in the archives of the Margaret Lowell Phelps Library during a renovation. In reading the journals, I found the first real evidence that would lead me to my grandmother. It was in an entry written by Sally two weeks after her wedding.

Today, I talked with Mother Phelps about the depression my father is in. She told me she thought it had something to do with Lottie’s disappearance….

I began to look into the life of Arthur Ledford.

AFTER HIS WIFE, Alice, died of pneumonia in 1912, Arthur began to travel extensively as Ledford-Phelps Clothiers expanded—first into the city of Commerce and then into Gainesville and then, with surprising rapidity, into dozens of small towns in the Southeast, from Louisiana to Virginia. He was often gone for weeks, immersed in his work, and when he returned, he always seemed exhausted and reclusive, as recorded by Sally in her journal. Her words were words of worry.

Then, in 1914, Sally wrote a note of relief:

Today my father returned unexpected from Charleston, South Carolina, and I have never seen him so flush with happiness and energy. I don’t know what happened, and I won’t ask. Maybe he found a good place for a new store, or maybe the city of Charleston agrees with him, with his old dream of being a sailor and with all of the ships to watch from the harbor. I just hope it continues.

I do not believe Arthur Ledford found ships to watch in Charleston.

I believe he found Lottie Lanier.

By accident, I think.

I think that one day he was on a Charleston street, perhaps near the waterfront, walking with his gaze downcast to the pavement, as was his habit according to Ben, and a woman stepped out of a shop and paused, and he politely tipped his hand to his hat as he stepped around her, and when he glanced up he was looking into a face he could not forget.

I think he stood paralyzed, unable to say her name. And I think that my grandmother smiled with sudden joy and that she embraced him without regard for the curious stares of onlookers. And I think that night, in the elegant suite of the finest hotel in Charleston, they made love that was not hampered by conditions. And for almost twenty years, they were together.

I have no proof of any of this, other than the records that Arthur Ledford maintained a residence in Charleston and in Jericho until 1934. All I have written of the relationship between Arthur Ledford and Lottie Lanier is from my wishes for them.

Yet, I believe Arthur Ledford did love her, and that she loved him, and that they remained secretive about their relationship because they did not want to cause ripples across serene waters.

I do know this as a fact, as recorded in Sally’s journal:

In 1933, Arthur Ledford had the body of a woman shipped from Charleston to Jericho for burial in the Ledford family plot, beside the spot reserved for his own body. The coffin was not opened. The gravesite ceremony was brief, attended only by Arthur and Ben and Sally and, at Arthur’s request, by Gra-Ma and by my father and mother. I, too, was there, according to the entry in Sally’s journal, though I have no memory of it. I was four years old, the same age as my father when my grandmother left him with Akers Crews.

The woman entombed was identified as an unmarried cousin Arthur Ledford had supported for many years, a gracious, dignified lady, and he had thought it only proper that her interment have a few witnesses. I do not believe that anyone asked questions. To do so would have been inconsiderate. Besides, the philanthropy of Arthur Ledford was well known. He had provided for numerous members of his extended family since the death of his wife. There were begging letters and canceled checks in his files to prove it.

Still, only one rested beside him after his death in 1947.

Chiseled into her tombstone was:

AUGUSTA LEDFORD
1887–1933
ANGEL OF THE LONESOME
HOME AT LAST

I do not know why Ben, or my father, or Sally, or Gra-Ma, never told me about Augusta Ledford, for I believe that all of them knew, without asking, who she was.

Perhaps it was because they were Southerners, conditioned to silence about such matters of tender subterfuge.

Or perhaps it was their way of honoring Arthur Ledford.

And my grandmother.

And perhaps they believed that because I resembled her—had the far-off look—I would have to search for her in order to find myself.

I think that is true. Two of my prized possessions are Ben’s baseball glove and the baseball uniform my grandfather last wore in Augusta. They are displayed in a large glass case in the Margaret Lowell Phelps Library, and when I look at them, I know I belong to both joy and despair.

We all learn the most remarkable lessons in the strangest ways.

Once, in a small bookstore in Greenwich Village, I read these words on one of those greeting cards intended as a light-strobe of wisdom:

Some people wander the world
Only to discover
They have always been
In walking distance
Of themselves.

I am one of those people.