9

Polly and Roy

Ronnie’s faith in Polly Hall is unmistakable here. His combed hair and clothes show her attentiveness.

I was growing ever more curious about Ronnie as Mom lived out her final years, but I held off serious research. I didn’t want to torment her with puzzling details I might uncover. I’d be too captivated with them to keep them to myself.

But in 1999, when Mom was eighty-three, my local newspaper in Roanoke carried a story about the Linkous family. I knew from Mom that Ronnie’s foster mother, Polly, was born a Linkous. I called a family member mentioned in the article, and soon I was on the phone with Polly’s sister. Polly was in a nursing home, but at ninety-one, she was still sharp. It was now or never. I had to see her.

Ronnie had been dead almost eight years. He’d described to me how happy he’d been with Polly and Roy. He was sixteen months old when he went to live with them. He believed they were his parents. As soon as he could talk, he called them Mother and Daddy.

On a drizzly January afternoon, I found Polly in a wheelchair off a long hallway at Meadowbrook Nursing Home, between Roanoke and her hometown of Blacksburg. Like most white people of advanced age, Polly’s pigment had faded long before. Ivory skin, wispy white hair, she was as translucent as a window sheer flapping in the breeze. Her eyes, however, were startling pops of blue.

“Polly?”

Her eyes searched for me. I took her hand.

“I’m Mary Carter Bishop. Ronnie Overstreet’s sister.” She let this sink in, then squeezed my fingers. “Oh, my goodness. How is Ronnie?”

I told her he had died. She fell quiet. “I’m so sorry.”

I’d brought pictures, but Polly was mostly blind. She couldn’t see Ronnie in middle age. Nor could she see how much I looked like him. She strained to hear me. Wax clogged her ears. With her lower teeth and gums collapsing, her little chin rose almost to her mouth.

But when I sat close and directed my questions straight into her better ear, she remembered everything. I visited her four times. Even so many years later, she remained mystified about Mom’s behavior toward Ronnie. “It was hard to understand. I felt so sorry for her.”

* * *

POLLY AND ROY began looking for a child soon after witnessing friends’ overjoyed adoption of a little girl. Somebody heard that a social worker had a homeless baby boy. “We said, well, we’d be happy with a little boy.” The social worker came to interview them straightaway and in just a day or two, she returned with Ronnie in her arms. It was Christmas, and Ronnie was the best present Polly and Roy ever had.

Because he’d been confined so much during infancy, Ronnie’s muscular development was delayed, but soon after arriving at Polly and Roy’s, where he could stretch, crawl, and kick to his heart’s content, Ronnie began to walk.

For the next five years, by all accounts, he was a contented child. Pictures show him dressed up, grinning behind a big, round birthday cake, surrounded by toys, and scrunching his face in laughter while petting a dog. In my favorite, he stands atop a porch railing, Polly holding him safely around his torso. One of his arms curves familiarly around her neck while the other touches her arm.

Polly’s brothers ran three small stores in the New River Valley, forty miles west of Roanoke. Not long after taking Ronnie, Polly and Roy moved to Blacksburg so Roy could work for Polly’s brothers and their new family could be embraced by the whole Linkous clan—aunts, uncles, elders, and more cousins than Ronnie could count. Polly had eight brothers and sisters, and a mob of nieces and nephews.

One Christmas when Ronnie was around four, Polly and Roy lined up a spectacular holiday for him. Too excited to wait, they woke him up at two o’clock Christmas morning and announced that Santa had come. Ronnie raced downstairs to find a Lionel electric train chugging along its tracks and a pile of other presents. It had snowed overnight, so later on, Roy put chains on the car and off they rode to Polly’s parents’ farm at Merrimac, a coal-mining community on the other side of Blacksburg. Ronnie and all the Linkous grandkids feasted on candy, oranges, nuts, and everything a kid could want. Grandpa Linkous gave him a hand-carved wooden dancing man and the most-prized part of the dinner rabbit, the back.

Ronnie did well in his first year at Blacksburg Elementary. He took piano lessons and voice lessons. Those years were the pinnacle of his childhood. He felt loved and wanted.

People had told me Polly was a rigid fundamentalist Baptist who thought her Episcopalian and Presbyterian relatives were going to hell because they didn’t adhere strictly enough to the Scriptures. Maybe she’d mellowed in old age, but she was nothing but sensitive and kind when I was with her. She’d had polio as a child and suffered sickly bouts with arthritis and other ailments throughout her life. Frail Polly may not have been the hardiest or the warmest of mother figures, but she could give Ronnie what Mom could not: her unwavering attention.

Polly’s kin were farmers and gardeners. On birthdays and summer holidays, tables were set out in the yard at Polly’s parents’ house and loaded with ham biscuits, fried chicken, butter beans, and homemade ice cream. Ronnie had a pony to ride, vast lands to wander, and dozens of Linkous playmates.

Whenever she could, Mom visited Ronnie at Polly’s house. She’d accompany Polly and Roy when they drove him to Moneta to visit Grandpa Emmett and Miss Belle. Ronnie was their first grandchild.

For the rest of her life, Mom had only good things to say about Polly and Roy. She would be forever grateful to them. They had embraced little Ronnie when she could not. She warned them, though, that she’d want him back if she ever found a husband.

Early on, Polly and Roy were urging Mom to let them adopt him. Unless they did, they had to run every little decision past her. They wanted to truly be his parents. Mom kept putting them off. But the years were slipping by and she was still single. Polly and Roy grew impatient.

At one point, Polly and Mom arranged for Ronnie to move to another foster home where he would have brothers and sisters. The two women agreed that a larger family might be good for him. Quickly, however, they saw that the mother was favoring her biological children. One night when Polly and Mom knew the woman would bring Ronnie to a church service, they went there unannounced to observe. The woman had laid Ronnie on a pew. Even before he saw Polly, she heard him crying, “I want my mama, I want my mama.” He meant Polly, and she took him right back home.

By the 1940s, around the time Mom met Daddy, Polly and Roy were warning Mom that if they couldn’t adopt Ronnie, they would have to let him go. “I tried to make her see that she was ruining him by not allowing him to be adopted,” Polly told me three years before her death at age ninety-four. “Just kept him all stirred up, all the time.”

Roy had gotten a better job—as a fireman at the Hercules Powder Company’s military ammunition plant at Radford, Virginia, not far from Blacksburg. He and Polly had the resources now to provide even more generously for Ronnie, maybe even send him to college. Yet they felt no certainty about him at all. If Mom was going to whisk Ronnie away, Polly wanted to get it over with. But at this point, Ronnie didn’t even know Adria was his mother.

* * *

ONE EVENING IN August 1941, while Buddy was napping, Mom strolled around Bridlespur with the farm manager’s daughter. On their return to the young woman’s cottage, a tall fellow was standing by a Willys coupe waiting for her brother to emerge.

Six-foot Early Lee Bishop, farmhand on another estate, possessed the droopy eyes, cleft chin, and hangdog handsomeness of actor Robert Mitchum. He was twenty-three, bashful, and better-spoken than your average hay-bale-slinging roughneck.

Mom, at twenty-five, older and more experienced, accepted his offer of a short ride to the McIntyres’ house. She felt an attraction right away. The next day, she couldn’t quit thinking about him. He began to write poetry for her. Daddy asked her to marry him that Christmas Eve.

World War II was about to begin, but Daddy was ineligible for the draft and ashamed of that. As a boy, he’d taken a wild ride on a pig that bucked him off in hard barnyard clutter. His shattered right elbow would never let him fully straighten his arm again, and scoliosis shaped his backbone into a question mark. Since he was the youngest of seven children and the last remaining as siblings moved away, it fell to him in his teens to support his mother and his father, blinded now by chemicals he’d sprayed for years in apple and peach orchards. Daddy had dropped out of school. He confided to Mom that he’d always felt inadequate. His mother told him often that he was clumsy and less skilled at physical labor than his brothers. Mom’s affectionate care of Buddy spoke to Daddy’s needy soul. He came right out and asked Mom to give him the mothering he’d never had, which, coincidentally, Mom had so little of herself.

Here was a nice man who could make her a respectable married woman. He could provide a home for her and for Ronnie. But that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

* * *

ALL OF A sudden right after Christmas, piercing through the haze of Mom’s new love, she received terrifying news: Polly and Roy were giving Ronnie back to her. Mom panicked.

Polly and Roy were at their wits’ end. Polly told me they’d rather have buried Ronnie than given him up, but that’s what they had to do. They’d been warning Mom for months that this day was coming.

But Mom couldn’t very well bring Ronnie to Keswick. She was still living at the McIntyres’, still caring for Buddy, then three, as well as getting ready to care for his baby brother. She had no home for Ronnie. Besides, nobody in Keswick even knew she had a son. How would she explain who he was? And who would care for him while she looked after the McIntyre boys?

She reached out to Nano. Mom saw her often, in Keswick, Roanoke, and Florida, and she maintained a daughterly trust in her. Nano, a member of Roanoke’s historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, calmed Mom and offered to use her influence to get six-year-old Ronnie into an Episcopal orphanage, Boys’ Home in Covington, Virginia, coincidentally just a few miles from where he was conceived.

Nano promised Mom confidentiality, even from her own son and daughter-in-law. They eventually found out, but an early note in Ronnie’s Boys’ Home file cautioned that Mom didn’t want her employers to know about Ronnie.

Daddy didn’t know either for the first three months he dated Mom. Finally, with great trepidation, she revealed her secret. “I told him everything,” she wrote in her diary, twice underlining those four words. The next day’s entry: “Even tho I know I’ve done right, I just don’t know what I will do if early don’t still love me.” Another two days, and they went out again. “Date tonight with early he paid—he still wants to see me.”

Ronnie told me that soon after, in early 1942, Mom showed up at his Blacksburg home and snatched him away from Polly. He was still in the first grade. In her diary the day before, Mom made no mention of Ronnie. She said only that she was heading west by train to see her brother. Boys’ Home records show that she removed Ronnie from Polly’s the next day. Mom and Ronnie boarded a bus for Covington, where they caught a cab out to the mountainous orphanage.

The home admitted Ronnie at 6:30 p.m. At six years old, he was already four foot four. He weighed sixty pounds. He told me that Mom sat him down on his cot in a cottage, announced that she, not Polly, was his mother, and left him there as she jumped back into the taxi for her long journey home to Keswick. I hate to think she’d treat her own child so coldly, but she must have felt cornered. Here she was poised to finally gain respectability when this boy reappears and threatens it all.

Ronnie remembered it as the worst day of his life. In photos, he went from a carefree, contented-looking boy to an apprehensive waif.

* * *

WITH RONNIE TUCKED away, Mom, now twenty-six, went on with her life. She switched her watch to “war time,” or daylight saving time. She traveled with Buddy and his family to South Carolina. She read Gone with the Wind. She went to movies with Daddy, listened to Guy Lombardo on the radio, and planned her springtime wedding. She received her first wedding gift, a white satin nightie, from Nano. In 450 diary entries over two years, Mom mentioned Ronnie only four times—the first time as “R.,” then as “Ronald.” How had she gone from “sweetest thing on earth” to barely mentioning him?

She and Daddy married in April 1942, exactly nine months after they met. Mom felt too stained by her unwed pregnancy to buy herself a white dress, so she picked out a blue suit with a little hat topped with silk roses, violets, and gardenias. At the ceremony in a minister’s home, Daddy was in a gray suit with black-and-white wing tips. Nano sent a necklace of milky blue moonstones for Mom’s trousseau, and later a fat check.

Over the next two weeks, Mom and Daddy hopped from friend to friend and kin to kin on a poor man’s honeymoon. The Hicks family in Moneta treated them to lunches and suppers. Nano hosted them in the guest quarters at Hobby Horse. From Daddy’s eldest brother’s house in Northern Virginia, they visited Washington, D.C., and the Endless Caverns in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Midway through their honeymoon, they met Polly and drove out to the Covington orphanage with her to see Ronnie. I have one photograph, likely taken by Mom that day. Early is in his wedding suit, rumpled from all the traveling. Mom wanted to show him off to the people at Boys’ Home.

My father wears a slight smile as he peers toward the camera. He stands beside Ronnie. The two, not touching, have their backs to the exterior wall of a building. Ronnie, in light-colored shorts and shirt, squints without smiling at the woman behind the lens. His arms hang close to his sides, his thin legs tight together in a soldier-like stance.

Within days, Adria headed back to work at the McIntyre house. Nano paid for a year’s board for Ronnie at Boys’ Home. Mom agreed to send a $16.67 money order each month for his incidental needs. Daddy moved back in with his parents. He and Mom didn’t have enough money to set up housekeeping together, but soon after, Mom began making payments for a bed big enough for them to share some nights in the maid’s quarters.

She used a Zenith Radio Nurse, an early baby monitor, so she could hurry across the house to Buddy’s nursery when he cried in the night. When the monitor was in the shop and other times when he was scared or lonely, Buddy slept on the couch in Mom’s tiny sitting room.

By the summer of 1942, trouble was brewing again with Polly. She missed Ronnie and regretted letting him go. Two months after Mom and Daddy married, Polly retrieved him for a while from Boys’ Home. Once he returned to the orphanage, Polly kept writing to Mom, complaining about the place. I suspect she was also asking why Mom hadn’t taken him home with her. After all, Mom had promised that once she married, she and Ronnie would be reunited. Why wasn’t that happening?

* * *

AT BOYS’ HOME, Ronnie harvested corn, milked cows, and did all the farmwork the other boys did. “He had a melancholy look about him,” remembered a classmate, who swam in a creek with Ronnie. “Something used to bother him, but I never knew what. Seemed to be thinking about something more distant.”

The orphanage began as an outdoor Sunday school to teach mountain children to read, and it grew into a boarding school for homeless or troubled boys. The boys butchered hogs, canned tomatoes, and produced their own beef, chicken, eggs, fruits, and vegetables.

Polly soon began campaigning to get Ronnie back for good. At first, Mom wrote to the home’s superintendent, Dr. E. Reinhold Rogers, that it would be all right with her if Ronnie returned to Polly. She added, however, that she and Daddy hoped to have Ronnie with them soon. “Since my husband’s father is going blind, both his father and mother depend on him so we aren’t able to have a home of our own yet.”

It was then that Ronnie’s fate teetered most precariously. Over Ronnie’s more than two years at Boys’ Home, correspondence between Mom and Rogers revealed their growing alliance against Polly. They chafed at her charges that Mom didn’t want him and that the home was neglecting him. They shared the view that Polly had spoiled Ronnie. His housemother reported that he couldn’t put on his shoes or wash his face.

The next year, when Ronnie was breaking rules, Rogers pressed Mom to take him as soon as she could: “Perhaps his chief need is for his mother’s care . . .” Rogers was pushing Mom’s guilt button.

She quickly replied,

I wish it was so I could take him, it would make me happier than anything I could possibly do. As soon as we can have a home of our own we intend to take him. My husbands [sic] mother and father both depend on him, and his father is blind—that is why I have to work and why I can’t take Ronald. It would never work out if Ronald and I tried to live with his [Daddy’s] parents, even if he made enough money to care for us all. As you know a farmer makes very little. I feel like you may think that I don’t want Ronald, but it is the one thing I look forward to most of all. My husband is very fond of him too. I hope you see what I mean. I’d never feel right to leave an old couple with no way of making a living, and at the same time I want to have Ronald with me.

Mom moved into the Bishops’ tenant house more than a mile from Bridlespur, but there again, there was no room for Ronnie. She nursed my grandmother as she lay dying of cancer. I doubt my grandparents ever knew that their new daughter-in-law had a son.

Rogers gave Ronnie, then eight, a Stanford-Binet personality and intelligence test and concluded that Ronnie was shy and inclined to distrust his own abilities. His intelligence quotient measured somewhat above average at 106.

In the spring of 1944, nearly two years after they married, Mom and Daddy, the new farm manager, moved into the isolated tenant house where they would spend the next thirty-seven years.

The farm already felt like home to Daddy. An uncle had managed the farm for other owners. Daddy earned money for his first bicycle by thinning peaches there when he was thirteen. The tenant house had turned gray as old paint peeled away. The front porch was rotten in places. But Mom at last had a place for Ronnie.

“Ronald seems to be happy and glad to be home,” Mom proudly reported in a letter to Boys’ Home after she and Daddy retrieved him.

At first, Ronnie told me, Mom and Daddy were pretty good to him. Being out of the orphanage was a huge relief. But Mom still wasn’t claiming him as her son. She told people he was her cousin.

By then she was trying to have Daddy’s child. She told me that in her first years with Daddy, she was vigilant with her diaphragm. She didn’t want to get pregnant until long after—really long after—their wedding. The arithmetic must convince even a simpleton: Yep, no doubt about it, Adria Bishop was married when she conceived. Daddy wanted six children; Mom thought they could only afford one.

Not long after Ronnie arrived and the math was good for her to put her birth control away, Mom suffered a miscarriage. I doubt that Ronnie, then only eight or nine, was aware she’d been pregnant, but Mom was bound to have been gloomy. Daddy wanted her to have his child, and she had failed. She often told me how she was about to flush the fetus down the toilet when Daddy fished it out and buried it in a shoebox in the backyard.

Right after Ronnie’s ninth birthday, Mom enrolled him in Cismont School. She was required to submit his Boys’ Home records to county school officials. She took the risk that some of them would figure out that Ronnie wasn’t really her cousin.

As she sent him off to school that fall, Ronnie told me, she grabbed him by the arm, bent down, and whispered through clenched teeth, “Don’t you ever call me Mama.”