8

On Her Own

On Ronnie’s birthday, Mom dressed him up and parted his hair before shooting his picture, probably in the yard at the home for unwed mothers.

Worry, along with a young woman’s heady optimism, thrashed within my mother late in the summer of 1936. Her and Ronnie’s year at the Crittenton Home was up. It was time for them to leave and make room for the next wave of mothers and babies. She was twenty and Ronnie was one.

With a list of hiring services for domestic workers in her pocket, Mom brought Ronnie to Roanoke, the only city of any size in the rockier, poorer, more mountainous western half of Virginia. It was a good place to start over.

Set in a green valley where the Alleghenies sidle up to the Blue Ridge, Roanoke was close enough to country to feel like home but teeming with people hard at work at the Norfolk and Western Railway and the world’s largest rayon plant, American Viscose, known to locals as the “silk mill.” Families streamed to fairs and movie houses and variety shows Mom had never heard about in little Moneta. Among all those strangers, Mom could get a fresh start.

She was free from the prying eyes of the strict matrons back at Crittenton, free from Moneta’s judgments of her as that fallen Overstreet girl, and thank God almighty, free at last from Miss Belle. But times were tough, the Great Depression was at rock bottom, and my mother knew no one in Roanoke.

I never learned where they stayed at first, maybe in a boardinghouse, maybe at the Salvation Army. In her initial jobs, she cooked and cleaned in homes. Then she hooked up with a Roanoke agency that, for a fee, connected her with people needing practical nurses to care for new mothers and their babies and for people dying at home. In those years, women stayed in the hospital for a week after giving birth, then were on bed rest for days at home. Any family who could afford it hired a girl like Adria Overstreet to come take care of the mother and baby. But for Mom, there was no child care and very little temporary housing or other help.

All my life with her, whenever any complications, whether medical or financial, were mentioned concerning a newborn, Mom would say reassuringly, “Every baby brings its own welcome.” But there was no welcome for Mom and Ronnie.

Someone who knew Mom told me that without anyone to care for Ronnie while she was on a job, Mom took him with her to a customer’s home. She needed to leave Ronnie and go across the house to do her work, so she pinned him in his diaper to a bed so that he wouldn’t roll onto the floor. She must not have been able to hear him wherever she was on the property, but his shrieks of frustration alarmed the residents. Someone alerted the authorities about this unmarried girl and her suffering baby.

Late in her life, I asked Mom what happened. “Did you really pin him to a bed in his diaper?” “No!” she replied angrily, frowning at me. She knew who’d told me, and she knew that person wasn’t likely to have manufactured something as bizarre as pinning a baby to a bed. Her voice grew quiet as she thought back to 1936. “I don’t know. Maybe I did.” Then her voice became softer yet. “I don’t remember much about back then.”

A “field visitor,” an early type of social worker, took charge of Ronnie. In her late twenties, with a flapper’s wavy brunette bob, the woman quickly lined up a childless couple to be his foster parents, and Mom was relieved. She long kept in touch with the social worker, who sent the gift of a high-chair pad when I was born years later.

* * *

ROY HALL WORKED on a Roanoke County dairy farm. He and his wife, Mellie Beal Linkous Hall, a former schoolteacher known as Polly, lived in a tenant house there. They were older than Mom. Roy was around thirty-six; Polly, about twenty-eight. They were unable to have biological children. Ronnie had a cold the day the social worker took him to the Halls. Adria had to go to work and didn’t meet the couple immediately. She worried about him all day, but when she met Polly and Roy, she knew Ronnie was in good hands.

Mom rented a room in a twenties bungalow in Roanoke County, just two miles from Ronnie. On days off, Mom walked those miles through farmland to visit Ronnie at Polly and Roy’s. She often brought along her Brownie and snapped many pictures of Ronnie. In one taken in winter, Roy, wearing a suit and a fedora, stands in a yard holding little Ronnie as Polly, appearing rigid in dark church clothes, looks on. “Polly, Ronald and Roy,” Mom wrote in the photo’s top margin. At the bottom, she penned two words with quotation marks around them for emphasis: “Our baby.”

From an early age, Mom was an eager picture taker. She carefully preserved thousands of photographs in albums and boxes. In all that trove, I never found a single one of her and Ronnie together. Not once, it seemed, did she hand that Brownie to someone and say, “Here, take one of us.”

A procession of boyfriends from that period slouch through her photo books: big old boys in gaudy ties, awkward Sunday suits, farmer’s tans, and white socks. Their faces are weathered; their hair, Vitalis slick. As she photographed them, they leered lustfully back at the leggy girl behind the camera.

During her workdays, she was getting a peek at how the other half lived. In Roanoke’s West End, she cared for the baby of a grocer who was on the Roanoke City Council. Then a well-to-do Jewish family of scrap-metal dealers needed Mom’s help with a newborn son, the care of his mother, and the last days of an elder. Mom was with the old woman when she died. The Methodist girl watched transfixed as the family kept shiva. They turned mirrors to the wall and buried the old lady without makeup, in a casket never open to view. It was all so different from Moneta, where people defied death with pancake makeup on the corpse, cheeks with clown-like circles of rouge, and lines of wailing mourners filing by open coffins. In 1938, that family recommended her to the McIntyres. Mom expected a short-term hire, like all the others, but she was hoping for more.

* * *

WHEN MY MOTHER arrived at Hobby Horse—by city bus or driven by the McIntyres’ chauffeur—she would have come up the long wooded drive to the house. This wonderland of Old South high living was like nothing she had ever seen.

Bells of grazing goats jingled in the thick forest below the house. Pastures, berry patches, and apple orchards were set off in the hilly distance. Just outside the house lay a formal English-style garden. Nano McIntyre had engaged a landscape designer to plant more than a hundred English boxwoods and to create ornate iron gates, a serpentine brick wall, red brick walkways, a goldfish pond with lily pads, and a wishing well surrounded by a tall, basketlike metal enclosure.

When Mom stepped inside the house, her eyes must have widened all the more: ten-foot ceilings, shiny oak floors, intricate wainscoting, Persian rugs, ticking grandfather clocks, and gleaming antiques. The living room alone measured six hundred square feet. The place felt more like a hotel than a home.

The staff took her to the kitchen and showed her how a needle on a clocklike device on the wall informed servants which room one of the McIntyres was buzzing from for service. The house was run by a black workforce—a cook, maid, chauffeur, and gardener/handyman. At least one horse trainer, a white man, and often a stable boy were outside with the horses. With Mom, the staff numbered seven.

The rest of the workers lived in their own homes or in the servants’ quarters in the backyard. Mom slept next to Buddy’s crib upstairs in the main house. The cook, who’d moved with her chauffeur husband from Cleveland with the elder McIntyres, whipped up lobster Newburg and cheese soufflés, the first fancy food Mom had tasted. Mom and the cook listened to gospel music on the kitchen radio Sunday mornings. Years ago, I called another of the McIntyre chauffeurs. When he went off to World War II, Mom wrote to him every week until his return.

Nano, missing her daughter, who had died in childbirth, must have seen something that touched her in Mom. Nano’s granddad had owned a hotel in Ohio. She hadn’t grown up impoverished, but neither had she been born into the kind of wealth Dompy had built for them. Right away, in October 1938, Nano and Mom bonded in their love for baby Buddy. Nano became like a mother to Mom, and Mom became like a mother to Buddy.

He was different from lean, platinum-haired Ronnie. Buddy was plump, cherubic, with large brown eyes, red ringlets, and a houseful of people showering him with affection. While Adria had struggled to dress Ronnie in secondhand shirts and booties, Buddy came swathed in hand-knitted sweaters and the finest down-filled bedding New York had to offer. Buddy didn’t make her feel guilty. This was babyhood done up right.

The earliest pictures I have of Mom and Buddy are soon after Buddy’s late-October birth. Those black-and-white photographs are so tiny, I long overlooked the moment of wonder captured there. A bit of window, shutter, and dentil molding in one picture tell me that Mom and Buddy are almost certainly on the lawn at Hobby Horse. The grass has not yet turned brown and only a few leaves lie on the lawn. Frost has not yet come.

Mom is kneeling beside Buddy, who is dozing within downy light-colored bedding in a low baby buggy. Mom’s wearing a warm-looking coat. A silk scarf is tied around her hair and under her chin. Her tender gaze at Buddy and her softly cupped hand resting on the edge of the buggy lend reverence to the scene.

Circumstances prevented Mom from caring for her own child, whose face reminded her of the man who disgraced her. And yet here she was, paid to love Buddy, who looked nothing like her and was three years younger than Ronnie. Her crisp white uniform and white shoes announced to the world that she was the professional nanny attached to this baby. She could love Buddy publicly, wholeheartedly, with pride.

Anne and Buddy Sr. were itching to move into their new Keswick house, designed by an architect who’d worked on restorations at Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg. It was taking a while.

As winter turned to spring at Hobby Horse, Mom settled into the cushioned window seat on the wide stair landing each afternoon as Buddy napped. While she read magazines in the sun, song sparrows caroled high in the forest. This wait was fine with Mom. She was swept up in a movie-like set of glamour. Forget hauling water. Forget tobacco worms and a hickish old stepmother. Mom felt like a queen. She didn’t tell anyone about Ronnie. With him safe and far away, she was aiming for a more honorable life for herself, and just maybe, Ronnie could eventually be part of it.

* * *

EARLY IN THE forties, Mom and the McIntyres finally moved to Bridlespur Farm. Rich people weren’t just here and there in Keswick as they were in Roanoke. Keswick crawled with them. Mom had entered a deeper culture of prosperity. The new house—ten bedrooms, nine baths, eight fireplaces—was larger and more opulent than any place she’d seen.

Pushing Buddy in his baby carriage, Mom began to explore the farm’s 332 acres. The two of them would pet the towering horses’ velvety noses and peer inside the bustling milk house. They checked out the small tenant house and the larger, more weathered one, empty then, at the far end of the place. Some days Mom pushed Buddy all the way to the foot of the mountains, where farm owners from a century before were buried in a small cemetery, their slaves in unmarked graves nearby.

Mom and Buddy described those early years at Bridlespur as a languid, lovely time. The McIntyres had dinner promptly at seven o’clock. Afterward, on dark winter nights, Mom and Buddy would watch from a window as a lantern’s glow slowly approached from the direction of the distant, wooded settlement where a young kitchen servant lived. Her husband was coming across the fields to walk her home. After she’d wiped the last dish, the couple and their spot of golden light slowly disappeared back into the darkness.

Ronnie, Mom’s secret boy, was receding from the forefront of her mind. But not for long.