20

Walking with Them

Ronnie must have been around twelve in this snapshot our mother took in the side yard of our tenant house on Bridlespur Farm.

There were many things Ronnie never knew about Mom, things I learned about only after he died: The diaper-pinning incident that flung him into the foster care system, for instance. Polly and Roy’s crusade to adopt him. The years of squabbling between Mom and Polly over his care. The constant guilt-inflicting push from the orphanage head for Mom to reclaim Ronnie, which probably snuffed out Polly’s chances of adoption. The pressure on Mom from wealthy Keswick landowners to rein Ronnie in, and Mom’s fears that we’d all be thrown off the farm. I know now that she sent him to the asylum to protect me and to preserve our home. As her sheltered child, I can say her choice remains a horror to me and must have been for her.

I think often of an incident at my folks’ house in Charlottesville. Outside their kitchen door was a roofed patio where Mom and Daddy stored mops, brooms, and gardening tools. Mom kept terra-cotta flowerpots there in a rusted tool cabinet. She opened its creaky door one spring to discover a mouse cringing beside her worm-sized offspring. “Mary Carter, that mouse’s eyes said, ‘Please don’t hurt my baby.’” Mom closed the cabinet, found something else to plant her begonias in, and restored their peace. That mouse’s eyes stayed with my hyper-maternal mom for years, and she told the story many times. What I might have read as sheer fear, Mom saw as one mother’s appeal to another. The role of mother was holy to Mom. After the death of her mother, the women of the Hicks family brought her up almost as an add-on to their own large broods. Those strong, warmhearted women remained her models for mothering all her life. The fact that Ronnie got so little of her must have ground into Mom. In the Adria Bishop Code of Conduct, she had committed the ultimate sin: She had failed to love her own child.

* * *

AMONG THE PHOTOS of Ronnie I find most ironic is one that Mom took in our side yard when he was about twelve. The leaves are off the trees, and Ronnie’s wearing his signature ball cap, plaid wool jacket, and surprisingly, jodhpurs, the riding pants that in the 1940s version flared dramatically at the hips. Ronnie dressed in hunting clothes mostly. But he must have found these horsey pants, probably ripped or stained, in a horse barn’s trash, or maybe one of his better-off buddies gave him their hand-me-downs. He looks comical in his mountain boy duds with those fancy pants.

The picture led me to think about the role Ronnie played in my folks’ acute sense of abasement in Keswick. They were self-conscious there anyway, surrounded as they were by such affluent neighbors. The unspoken rule was that servant families were to be exceptionally cautious and servile. To act otherwise was to break a tradition stretching back centuries. Ronnie flaunted all the wrong qualities for Keswick. His irreverent spying and thieving pricked my folks’ separate roots of self-contempt. He was a rebel amid a compliant workforce, as well as a daily reminder of Mom’s girlish transgression. It must have been odd to see him walking along the narrow highway, a skinny, raggedy kid with his thumb out, heading into town for a caddying shift. All Daddy’s fellow farmhands and everybody we knew from church, store, and school traveled that highway. I can hear what they must have said as they steered past Ronnie and twisted their necks for a closer look: Isn’t that boy some kin to Adria Bishop? Why’s she let him roam around like that?

As he wandered Keswick’s estates doing his mischief, Ronnie was that fly dancing around on the ox horn. He was a child trying to provoke the unfeeling cartilage of his blood kin. He was trying to win his mother’s admiration, but in all the wrong ways. Mama, look at me! Don’t you see how clever and resourceful I am? How strong I am? Mama, please reach out to me! Okay, well, the heck with you; I’ll show you. I’ll make my own money. I’ll build my own house. I’ll buy my own food. I’ll show you that I’ll be fine without you. I don’t need you at all.

* * *

LOVE ALWAYS HAS its enemies, even in the best of circumstances. Predators are poised to pounce in an instant of inattention. With Ronnie, both the boy and the man, each time the prospect of tender attachment came back around toward him, some weak-kneed person, some coldhearted somebody, some kind of fear, some kind of shame, some sort of rigid religiosity, some economic or emotional poverty, or Ronnie’s own self-defeating distrust would rise up and drive it away. All those foes of good-heartedness succeeded in killing Ronnie. Foremost among them was our family affliction, a thorough habit of shame and self-hatred.

His story was one of love interrupted. His closest people turned that tap of benevolence on and off so many times, Ronnie became disillusioned and decided to stick to himself. In his aloneness, with no one paying attention, he was pulled down by an illness that ended his life prematurely. In the end, I would disappoint him too, like everybody else.

Our bond was new and tentative. I became a voyeur of this fascinating brother-self. He was me if I’d been deprived of the love that shaped me. But studying someone is not closeness. Studying a subject means that you hold them apart, and except for the months when Ronnie was most unwell, when I felt genuine hope for his future, I maintained a certain distance from him. I didn’t reveal much of myself to him. We’d traveled in such different circles that I didn’t think he’d relate to my thinking, my joys, my politics. He never asked much about me because more than anything, he needed to be heard.

At first I was fixated on the crust that acromegaly had hardened on him, as well as the crust of his profanity, racism, anger, and disappointment. I wanted to see the undefended Ronnie, the one behind his crusts, and I wanted to see Mom behind hers too. But neither of them opened up to me entirely about what thoughts punished them in the dark nights as they lay sleepless in their beds. What they were dealing with remained unresolved within them and between them.

Ronnie preferred to stay sarcastic and jocular with me, a guy who was way too cool for any school. He was a lofty tree, lower limbs hacked off, trunk toughened by his seasons, upper branches wide and bushy, laughing in the sun, smirking down on the rest of us, and secretly wishing he could be a part of the contented lives he imagined most other people had. As he said, he should have been president of that bank. He should have had that home and that loving wife.

* * *

AS I WRITE these final painful paragraphs, I see Mom’s and Ronnie’s very similar faces blown up large in my memory. Their eyes, noses, and facial bones were so much alike, even after his features had been exaggerated by disease. I see the way each of them looked at me in their woundedness, in their grumpiness. The way each of them, in the end, laid many of their secrets before me. The way Mom seemed to hate for me to learn what brought her down. The way Ronnie hoped I might bring him some final sisterly comradeship, unimagined by him for so long. The way it hurt for them to watch me wrestling with the histories they’d hidden away. I was their precious Mary Carter, the girl they called Pie, the one they long had shielded from their misfortunes, the one ultimately spared their drama. What could sheltered little Pie do for them at this late stage?

If Mom and Ronnie had ever talked, they might better have seen events from the other’s point of view, but in their day and among conservative small-town dwellers like them, folks tended not to talk candidly about anything that really mattered, especially lifelong hurts. No, they were stuck: He felt more vulnerable than ever from the transformation of his face and body, and he couldn’t risk being with Mom anyway for fear she’d hurt him all over again, even unintentionally. She did try to connect with him and to help him—she showed up at the barbershop that lipstick-tapping time a few months before he died, and she wrote earnest letters to him as his death approached—but he was too sick and too apprehensive to respond. As for Mom, her guilt concerning Ronnie kept accruing over the years, especially after he went into the hospital. Yet she couldn’t bear to share it with even her most compassionate friends, so she never found any relief. He was the shadow over her life, as she was over his, and I wasn’t the one to bring them together.

* * *

I WAS CAUGHT between these two tall, miserable people all my life. Even before I knew who Ronnie was, I sensed something was deeply wrong with my mother. I saw early on that she was distressed, and it frightened and threatened me in a primal way that defies language. To see your parent suffering is to feel the chill of precariousness, to know that although you might have it good right now, although the lights are burning bright and the family table is bountiful at the moment, it all could fall apart.

* * *

ONE OF THE most disheartening realizations about this story came to me late in thinking about it. For years I’d talked with dozens of people who’d known Ronnie—barbershop customers, a girlfriend, landlady Max, and friends stretching from boyhood to the end of his life. Not one of them knew who his mother was. Finally, it dawned on me: Ronnie kept Mom’s secret all his life. It had been nearly fifty years since she harshly directed him, “Don’t you ever call me Mama,” and he never did.

* * *

REMINDERS OF MOM, Daddy, and Ronnie surround me now at our house on a quiet Roanoke cul-de-sac. I keep my office pens in Daddy’s metal cream cup from the milk house. His aluminum milk bucket holds our rolled-up place mats. Hanging in the bedroom is Mom’s wide-brimmed straw gardening hat, rigged with an old cloth belt of hers that once tied it around her chin. Each winter our hats and gloves curl up together in Granddaddy Bishop’s wooden apple basket. We eat at a round table made from century-old boards Daddy salvaged from a long-demolished Bridlespur barn.

The beam of Ronnie’s chrome-plated Eveready flashlight darts around our backyard nightly, signaling for our dog, Sparkle, to come in at bedtime. I trim Dan’s beard with Ronnie’s barbering shears, and when we eat fontina cheese, we think of the hillbilly boy who peeked over the fence.