Chapter 31

Central Virginia

June 1997

Virginia would not have been more thrilled if Robert had taken her to Washington and introduced her to the president. Probably less so. The Waltons, the 1970s television program chronicling the life of a family in bucolic 1930s rural Virginia, was her all time favorite. She never missed a weekly episode during its original broadcast, and she still watched it nearly every day in reruns. Now she and Robert stood looking at the set of the program’s farmhouse kitchen, in which many of the title family’s joys and struggles had unfolded.

“It looks just like it does on the show!” she said.

“Well, yes,” Robert replied. He was delighted to see her enjoying the day so much. “It’s the set. They brought it here from California and reassembled it.” They were in Sharkey, a village strung along a forested ridge south of Charlottesville, Virginia. The family on which the program was based had lived there, and the old elementary school converted into a museum of the show.

Surrounded by the gold, orange and red autumn foliage, Robert and Virginia strolled down the blacktop road to see the actual farmhouse. Virginia was a little disappointed that it did not look like the one on television, but she was excited to hear that descendants of the real family still lived there.

At the general store / souvenir shop, Robert bought her a light blue “Walton’s Mountain” T-shirt. Virginia insisted on wearing it out of the store, and she was beaming as they got back into the car. “Thank you, Robby,” she said and squeezed his hand. Hers was plump, with crinkly skin like a lizard’s. Robert generally loathed when people called him the diminutive of his name, but he liked it when Virginia did.

He was in graduate school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, five years after that late afternoon in April on Last Stand Hill with Jack. Brenda and Tom had brought his grandmother to visit for three days. Over the years since his abrupt departure from their house, Robert and his parents had managed to establish a more or less manageable framework for a relationship. As long as they steered clear of any substantive issue, and did not spend too much time together, it worked. They avoided confrontation. No psychologist would call it particularly healthy, but it was the best they could cobble together on their own.

“Why do you like The Waltons so much, Granny?” Robert asked her as they drove back to Charlottesville. He and his sister always called her “Mommaw” when they were children, a particularly Appalachian appellation. But Robert started calling her “Granny” as a joke a couple years before, and it had become their term of endearment.

“I reckon because it reminds me a little of what it was like at home, before my mom died,” his grandmother said. “And what I wish it could’ve always been.”

Her mother was killed in a car accident when Virginia was six. On one side of a black line in Virginia’s memory lived those idyllic times of her early childhood on the southern West Virginia farm when she chased butterflies and waded in the brook beside the rambling clapboard house and felt her mother’s love. On the other side stretched the wretched years after her father remarried to a woman who despised her stepdaughter’s presence.

The clouds which accumulated over Virginia after her mother’s death rarely, and only briefly, dissipated over the decades that followed. Her life with Sam was so burdened that the moments of joy with Brenda and her grandchildren were like January sunlight in Lapland: merely a slight brightening on the horizon before the quick return to darkness.

But Sam died the summer before this visit with Robert, and Virginia felt as if the hard lifetime between her mother’s death and Sam’s had been a long, bad dream. Every new day seemed a marvel to her, and the few people whom she knew well—Sam never permitted her much of a social life when he was alive—were astounded by how she blossomed.

While Sam was alive, she rarely spoke unless spoken to. Now, Virginia volunteered opinions and observations about nearly everything. Her frequently dour and pained demeanor became expansive and cheerful. All her life, Virginia was gaunt. With each passing month now, she grew more jollily rotund. She felt guilty about feeling so well, but not overly so. Sam had reaped what he had sowed.

“Why didn’t your dad do more to make your stepmother less difficult?” Robert asked. His grandmother never talked about her childhood, unless pressed, and even then she offered only crumbs. The older he got, the more he wanted to know her better. Robert felt closer to Virginia than any other person, but he knew little other than the surface details of her story and virtually nothing of her inner life.

“Oh, I don’t know, Robby,” she said. Virginia looked distantly out the side window of the car. It was easier to pry open a live oyster than to loosen her tongue. “It’s just how he was,” she said without turning away from the window, “and how she was.” Virginia continued to gaze absently at the colorful passing trees. “I loved my dad, though. I still miss him.”

Several years before, Robert had driven her down to the West Virginia coalfields where she grew up, to put flowers on her parents’ graves. Virginia had not been there for twenty years. After an hour of traversing gravel tracks barely wider than the car—out one to its dead end, back to the two-lane blacktopped road, up the next, and back down again—they found the little cemetery on a bare hillside at the edge of the woods. It sat behind a cluster of the decaying former coal company houses that were scattered along the narrow, serpentine valley.

The cemetery was typical of the extended-family graveyards in that part of the country, overgrown and abandoned. Several of the tombstones had tumbled prone. Decades of weather-erosion had rendered at least half unreadable. Still, the sunny patch of ground in the peace and quiet of the countryside was not a bad spot for one’s eternal rest.

Virginia walked straight to her parents’ graves. Once they located the cemetery, she seemed to know every plot. Robert helped her jab the green metal legs of the plastic flower arrangements into the mossy ground, and then they stood in silence looking at the graves. As usual, his grandmother did not volunteer any of her thoughts. Robert did not inquire. “Okay, Robby. Let’s go,” she had said abruptly after two or three minutes, and they had returned to the car and driven the two hours north to Huntington.

After Walton’s Mountain, Robert and Virginia visited Monticello— Thomas Jefferson’s neoclassical mountaintop manse overlooking Charlottesville—and then they ate dinner at his favorite restaurant in the town. She insisted on paying despite his protestations. They returned to his apartment, and Robert prepared the fold-out sofa bed for her. He had tried to talk Virginia into taking his bed, but she absolutely refused.

“Do you need anything else, Granny?” Robert asked as she settled under the blanket.

“Just a kiss goodnight,” Virginia said.

He leaned over and kissed her dry cheek. It was slack with age. “I had a very nice day with you, Granny.”

“Oh, me too, Robby. Thank you,” she said and patted his forearm.

It is strange, Robert thought as he lay in bed recalling their day, that they were related only by law and love. He never longed for his biological grandmother, Julia Ribas, nor wondered how she might have been in Virginia’s place, had she kept Brenda and lived to old age. But he did often wish to know more about her and about their lost relatives in Spain.

Not long after he moved to Charlottesville for graduate school, Robert had gotten the address of his great-uncle Luis’ daughter who had visited Spain thirty years before and met some of the cousins there. He wrote to her, telling her he wanted to try to contact them, but she did not reply. When he asked his great-aunt Pilar about it, she said: “Oh, she’s a strange one, Robert. She never visits or calls, and I don’t really have any contact with her.” A frustrating dead end, he thought again as he drifted off to sleep.