2

Losing the Mother I Thought I Knew

Mom at about sixteen.

After Ronnie was gone, we stuffed the awkwardness about him back under the family floorboards. Mom lived fourteen years more, and tensions surrounding Ronnie’s life troubled our relationship to the end.

I’d press her gently for information on her first pregnancy and her on-again, off-again times with Ronnie. My curiosity irritated her, but sometimes she’d offer up a tiny detail, like how baby Ronnie had a cold the day the social worker took him to his foster parents and how Mom worried about him all that day while she worked. I’d tuck scraps of their story into my journal.

After his death, I learned he left no will. His medical debts far exceeded his savings and his tiny bit of life insurance. Someone needed to sell his cars, guns, and barber chairs and to distribute those assets to his creditors. Arthritis and early signs of dementia made it impossible for Mom, at seventy-five, to do it. It would have been too emotionally painful for her anyway, and besides, she lived a hundred miles away and didn’t drive. I lived just across a mountain valley from Ronnie’s place. I could do it, and I wanted to.

* * *

LATER THAT YEAR, I went to Mom’s town and drove her to a notary public at her bank so that she, as Ronnie’s next of kin, could legally transfer the estate job to me. “I am the mother of Ronnie Lee Overstreet . . .” Mom handwrote on her engraved stationery. It was the first time she said it straight out, on paper.

She was nervous as we headed to the bank. Might the notary know her? Might her carefully kept secret seep out into her longtime home of Charlottesville, Virginia?

The notary was a stranger. Mom was safe. Wrinkles in her brow smoothed away as I drove her home.

* * *

IN 2002, SHE and Daddy moved to my street in Roanoke, Virginia, two hours from Charlottesville. My father died of emphysema eight months later.

The following year, at eighty-eight, Mom broke a hip. Her arthritic knees stymied her rehab. She was stuck in a nursing home because she couldn’t get out of bed and stand on her own.

She rarely mentioned Ronnie by name, but I knew she was thinking about him. Out of the blue, she lamented to me that she was no good, that she had sinned, that she was unforgivable. Nothing I said eased her mind. Was she grieving over how Ronnie’s life had gone? Or was she still stuck on the fact that she wasn’t married when she had him? Maybe it was the simple fact of Ronnie’s existence that hounded her. It was hard to tell.

I wrote a letter, marked “confidential,” and left it at the office of her compassionate new minister. I told him that Mom had been bearing a shameful lie nearly all her life and shared her secret with no one. I told him what I knew about Ronnie. Unable to distract herself with much of anything, Mom was finally alone with her terrible sense of unworthiness. She was fretting over her very soul.

One day when I was out, the minister came to Mom’s room and prayed with her. Without letting on that he knew her secret, he did his best to shore up her faith in God’s forgiveness. No end date on it; nobody was ever disqualified, no matter what. A few weeks later, on an early spring afternoon in 2005, her heart very slowly stopped beating. She died nice and easy.

* * *

OF ALL THE virtues in Mom’s value system, “pretty,” which she pronounced “priddy,” was close to the very top. So, the day after she dies, I arrange the prettiest two-city send-off she could have imagined.

* * *

THE MORNING IS mild, with the smells of warming earth swirling all around us as my husband and I drive over the Blue Ridge Mountains for Mom’s church funeral and her burial in the cemetery on the mountainside near Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. I’m wearing the blue moonstone necklace my mother wore on her wedding day.

The three years I looked after her have been hard. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t bring her peace. I couldn’t make her happy with herself.

All that heaviness weighs on me, yet the funeral turns out to be a lighthearted homecoming. Mom’s friends, nieces, nephews, former coworkers—they’re all there. The prettiest flower arrangement, in fuchsia, orange, and gold, is from the rich boy she raised as a nursemaid on his parents’ country estate. Two ministers celebrate her life, along with Daddy’s, that sunny day. One of them draws a comic hoot from the crowd when he says that Daddy, a die-hard Democrat, is the only person he ever knew who voted for Michael Dukakis.

Just as with Ronnie’s service, nobody mentions the single greatest burden of my mother and my brother—her shame over having had him out of wedlock. It wouldn’t be appropriate to bring it up, of course. Most of the funeral crowd has no clue about Ronnie or, when it comes right down to it, any of my mother’s private concerns.

* * *

BY THE TIME Mom dies, most of her closest friends are gone, so I don’t hesitate to list Ronnie in her obituary in Charlottesville’s newspaper, the Daily Progress.

A few minutes before the funeral in the chapel of Mom’s longtime church, Anna, daughter of one of Mom’s dearest, departed friends, motions for me to come to her in the front pew.

“Mary Carter,” she whispers, her voice full of concern as I bend my head to hers, “there was an error in the obituary. It says she had a son. Adria didn’t have a son.”

A “hate to break it to you” look emerges on my face, and Anna lifts her head in surprise. “Did she?”

I’m standing five feet from the open casket, where Mom is laid out in the last piece of clothing she purchased, a white silk jacket embroidered with pink and turquoise butterflies. I nod to Anna.

Anna digests this, then asks, “My mom knew, right?”

Anna’s mother was as understanding as anyone Mom ever came across. She radiated empathy. If she’d learned Mom’s secret, she would have embraced Mom all the more. But I shake my head. No, she never knew.

* * *

A DOZEN DAYS after the funeral, I dream that I’m standing downhill from a just-felled tree when it begins to roll. It’s too big for me to jump over and too long for me to run around.

* * *

BACK HOME, I began to sift through the things Mom and Daddy had brought to the little house down the street from us. Mom couldn’t bear to throw much away, so from their old house I’d carted Grandma’s cast-iron lard-soap-making tub and Daddy’s grain-musty burlap feed bags. I’d boxed up drawers full of paper scraps and little keepsakes that, though she didn’t often look at them, gave my mother great comfort. Now I was opening them up again. Many days, I sat cross-legged on the floor by Mom’s living room recliner. Her curly silver hairs drifted from boxes and fell to the carpet as I sorted through it all.

I found notes from her throughout. “The little hat I wore when we were married 1942,” she wrote on a torn piece of envelope placed over the flattened hat of silk flowers.

“Mary Carters [sic] baby clothes” was on an index card atop a pink-and-blue blanket, embroidered little dresses, flannel gowns, and white leather baby shoes.

“The white hat with roses I wore when Mary Carter finished college” was attached to another squashed hat.

“Buttons for Daddy’s Harris Tweed sports coat,” she’d written on a paper scrap in an envelope with the leather buttons, as if she meant the note for me. She’d been so proud she could buy him such a classy jacket.

I kissed the old church bulletins and magazine clippings about African violets as I dropped them into the recycling box.

Just as Ronnie had done, Mom wrote her new address and phone number on stray paper napkins, receipts, and business cards. Uprooted from Charlottesville, she needed to be ready when somebody called and wanted to know where she was. She wasn’t always sure.

Crying out from the piles of hand-copied recipes and bus trip brochures and yellowed, perfectly ironed white linen napkins was what she wanted most for everyone to know: Adria Bishop tried to be good. She was a responsible woman. She was well behaved, an upstanding citizen.

I recognized this demonstrative clutter from somewhere else. Ronnie left behind a similarly intentional mess. Among the Hardee’s wrappers, I had found receipts for laundered towels for shaving customers long in their graves, dealer sales slips for a long line of used cars, and tax scribblings from the mid-twentieth century.

But I was determined to push behind these facades. In my mother and my brother, I’d witnessed a connected misery. They were entwined in a dark and irresolvable way. They could neither be close nor break free of each other. They were anxious and self-doubting, in much the same way. I wanted to know what happened to them all those years ago, why they’d wandered off from each other.

I needed to know why my mother had let Ronnie suffer when I had it so good. I wanted to be able to fully love her again, and to understand what it had meant to me, always sensing her shame and only recently learning clues to its origins.

I began to track my mother’s history and Ronnie’s. He kept everything. She kept everything. I kept what they kept, and I was a reporter. I dug into the poverty of Mom’s upbringing and the extreme wealth of the place where she had come to work as a young woman, the old plantation where I’d grown up as a servant’s child and where she and Ronnie lived together the longest. The landed gentry there played a role in Ronnie’s story, and I researched the individuals who sent him off to his final institution.

I raced to interview elderly people who knew Mom or Ronnie. I mined thirty years of my journals and indexed the thousands of pieces of their stories. I pulled together documents from the orphanage, the reform school, and the mental hospital that all had detained Ronnie.

He never knew his father’s name. I found that name long after Ronnie and Mom were gone, and I went looking for the man.

This book grew from a decades-long effort to shine light on the darkest corners of my family’s life, to dwell in the contradictions of the relationship between my mother and her secret son. The story of my mother and my brother, and the private shame they shared, is also the tale of the cruel world that shaped them. Their story sheds light on the difficult, punishing mores of the American South in the twentieth century. In these pages, I consider our lives and the society that made us who we all were. I did my best to move beyond the whisperings and the lies and the expectations of a culture I cannot condone, yet it haunts me still. I am left to tell the story in all its complexity.

* * *

WITH A MAGNIFYING lens one afternoon, I was studying photographs from Mom’s first months with baby Ronnie. For her camera, she posed him on blankets in the grass and on chairs out in a yard. From one album, I pried a small picture of Ronnie at almost five months old. He’s on a wooden bench outside in a sweater, diaper, and leather booties. He’s squinting in the sun.

On the back of the picture she’d written, “Sweetest thing on earth.”