MOTHER STOOD AT THE TOP OF THE LADDER, SCRAPING WALLPAPER OFF the living room walls with a putty knife. Uncle Frank’s wife, my Aunt Mary, came through the unlatched screen door without knocking.
She looked up at Mother.
“Louisa, I just want you to know that you’ll never have a house as nice as mine.” Mother looked down at Aunt Mary, who stood with her hands on her hips, a white leather handbag looped over one arm. She was dressed in a red-and-lavender polka-dotted dress and white sling-backed shoes. “I tell you this now so you get all such thoughts out of your head from the start,” Aunt Mary continued.
Mother—married three months and already six weeks pregnant with me—was wearing a sweat-drenched cotton housedress. Scraps and curls of wallpaper lay around the ladder. All afternoon she’d been soaking down the layers of old, stained paper and scraping them off; rose-colored stripes and rosebuds, formal bouquets and baskets of violets, bits and pieces of Richter family history were now strewn on the floor.
Aunt Mary was much older than Mother, who had married the youngest of the three sons in the Richter family. Daddy and Uncle Frank were partners in a produce business. With their sister Bama—her real name was Alabama Margarete—living miles away in Columbia, North Carolina, Aunt Mary was reigning matriarch, and according to Mother she intended to keep it that way.
Mother climbed down the ladder. “Why, Mary,” she said in what must have been that sweet tone of hers—ice water running just beneath the words—“a new house is the farthest thing from my mind. I’m just trying to get this dirty old place clean and decent before the baby comes.”
She offered Aunt Mary a glass of mint tea.
Aunt Mary declined. Hers was not a social call.
This was one of the first stories Mother told me, and she retold it again and again. This, and how Aunt Mary somehow manipulated herself into the delivery room to watch Mother’s manners and restraint dissolve into one scream after another as I wrestled my way out of her tortured body while lightning lit the sky and thunder rumbled like an angry god. “Your birth was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to me,” she repeatedly told me.
Mother was twenty-four years old when I was born.
She never stopped talking about what she referred to as the humiliation of Aunt Mary’s shocking invasion of her privacy. She claimed that the sight of my aunt’s face over my carriage was enough to send me into a fit of screaming. I don’t know if Aunt Mary actually scared me or if I picked up on Mother’s controlled but ever-present and powerful emotions. I have no memories at all of Aunt Mary in my infancy. Nevertheless, I grew up with Mother’s stories of her a part of me as surely as the genes that gave me green eyes and a prominent nose like my father’s.
Growing up I had a pleasant relationship with Aunt Mary until Uncle Frank died in a house fire in 1945 and Daddy and Aunt Mary had a dispute about the division of property and the business. After that Aunt Mary forbade her children to relate to us, though her son Peyton and I continued our friendship in secret and her daughter Roberta remained fond of Mother.
As an adult, on a trip back to my hometown—I believe it was in 1970—I decided to ignore the tension of the years and visit Aunt Mary. I phoned first, and her daughter-in-law said it would be fine for me to visit. Aunt Mary welcomed me warmly. She was lying in bed, smoking a cigarette. Holes from cigar and cigarette burns dotted her lavender satin comforter. Beside the bed a wicker clothes basket held a pile of paperback murder mysteries.
I bent down to hug her, and she opened her arms eagerly.
“I’m so glad to see you, Margaret. Here, sit on the bed beside me,” she said as if the past twenty-five years of silence and distance between us had never existed. And in a sense that’s true, for that brief visit seemed to erase the past as easily as my teachers had erased numbers and letters from the blackboards in the elementary school around the corner from her house.
Mother and Aunt Mary had a contentious relationship from the time Mother married Daddy until the evening Aunt Mary called her not long after my visit. Mother told me that the two of them talked for nearly two hours, finally making their peace. According to Mother, my aunt died shortly after hanging up the phone.
There were other stories Mother told me about the four years we lived in The Old Home Place before Granddaddy died and we moved to the new house up the street. She told me Daddy was often away on business trips, leaving her alone with Granddaddy and me, and Bubba, my first brother, the new baby who kept her awake with his earaches. One night, when especially tired, she picked him up from the crib in the dark and—missing the rocking chair altogether—fell down hard on the floor beside it. “I just broke down and cried and cried,” she said each time she told the story, and each time my own eyes filled with tears. Mother seemed so fragile that I wanted to protect her.
She also told me about the way Daddy always put Granddaddy before her. “He made me sit in the backseat of the car while that old man sat up front with him. Even when I was pregnant.” And she told me that after Granddaddy died Daddy kissed the glass over his photograph every day before leaving for work and the first thing on coming home. There was also the framed eight-by-ten photograph of Uncle Frank that stood on a table in the living room of our new house after Uncle Frank was killed in the fire. I would walk away from the picture, then turn around quickly to see if those eyes were still watching me. They always were. They followed me all around the room. I swallowed my fear and told no one.
I don’t remember when or how she managed it without Daddy’s resistance, but I was relieved when Mother took Uncle Frank’s photograph, along with the large-framed photograph of my Aunt Bama’s house in Columbia, and buried them under the bedsheets and blankets in the linen closet.
Mother had married into a more eccentric family than she’d realized. I suspect that Daddy had married into a more conservative family than he’d realized. Both had little tolerance of the other’s parents and siblings. Grandmother Ledford’s voice at our front door was enough to send my father, her son-in-law, fleeing through the back door to his car, and then to the safety of the produce warehouse.
Mother too had difficulty with Grandmother Ledford. Though in her later years she referred to her mother—at that point long dead—as a wonderful person, the tension between the two of them when I was young, until Grandmother’s death when I was fifteen, was thick and constant. Mother felt Grandmother to be cold and domineering, and closer to her other daughters. As the fourth daughter in a family with no sons, Mother felt unwanted. She told me how, when she was a young child, Grandmother would sometimes rock her in a rocker on the front porch in the evening. Packs of wild dogs skirted the town, howling. When Mother fussed and wouldn’t settle down to sleep quickly enough, Grandmother would threaten: “Hush! If you don’t go to sleep, I’ll feed you to those dogs.”
Mother was also upset about Uncle Frank’s cursing and drinking, and Aunt Bama’s intrusion into her life. She did more than complain about the occasional beer that Daddy drank at a drive-in restaurant. My birth finally gave her adequate ammunition to fight this rare indulgence. The three of us were together when Daddy reached for the beer he’d ordered. Mother announced firmly: “If you take one sip of that alcohol, I’ll give it to the baby as well. I intend to make the baby drink whatever you drink.”
Her voice filled with pride. “That was the end of your father’s drinking.”
Then there was Fanny McClure. Fanny had a long, thick neck and dark wavy hair that spilled down her back. To me she always looked like a merry-go-round horse. My cousin Peyton told me that Fanny had been determined to capture Daddy for her own until Mother came into the picture and altogether eliminated what—if any—chance Fanny ever had. Nevertheless, according to Peyton, for several years after my parents’ marriage, Fanny devoted many Sunday afternoons to riding back and forth in front of their house in her dark green Chevrolet sedan. Uncle Charlie, Daddy’s middle brother, offered to take Fanny off Daddy’s hands. He not only did that, he married her as well. Mother never mentioned anything about Fanny chasing Daddy. I don’t know if she was even aware of it. But she did tell me that for some reason Fanny didn’t like her and had once tried to run her down with her car when Mother was crossing the street from Mizell’s Drugs to Roddenbery Hardware Store. But these things happened after Granddaddy died, after we moved into the new house up the street.
It was into The Old Home Place, the wood-framed house that Granddaddy had built, that Mother—who by her own account was immature, naïve, and timid—moved after marrying Daddy, bringing her clothes and her few treasured books. She looked forward to a life of financial plenty after all the penny-pinching necessary in her father’s family, one of the most respected families in town but one lacking in financial abundance. The reason, Mother always explained with pride, was because her father, Mercer Ledford, was one of the rare honest lawyers. He also served as state senator and later as state treasurer; national senators and representatives were his friends. As a child, Mother was impressed that Senator Russell wore silk pajamas when he stayed overnight with the family. As an adult, Mother, who hated asking favors of anyone, called Senator Russell and reminded him that she was Mercer Ledford’s daughter when she asked him for help in bringing my brother Mercer back to the States after he became psychotic while serving on a ship stationed off the coast of Vietnam. Senator Russell responded immediately and had a helicopter pick my brother up and take him to the Philippines, then to Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Mother spoke with adoration about her father, but she told me only a few stories about him. One is how he gave her sister Curtis a dollar for every A she made in math, while he gave Mother a dollar for every time she passed math. She also told me how he sometimes bought ice cream for his daughters on his evening walks home from his courthouse office, during which he stopped to say hello to so many friends along the way that he often arrived home with the ice cream melting, cones gone soft in his large hands.
Because he never learned to drive, Mother at thirteen began to drive him around the county for his law practice. She took great pride in that role and was grateful for the time they spent together. He worked to send all four of his daughters to college and lived to see them all become teachers. He died from a heart attack the year before Mother’s marriage.
Mother had suffered another loss, but a loss she acknowledged aloud only after Daddy’s death. While her father was serving as state treasurer, she became involved with the son of an ambassador from Brazil. She said that her father had given the relationship his blessing, but shortly after her father’s death, the young man was killed in an automobile accident.
Other than the fact that she was glad Daddy’s family had money, Mother said little about her feelings toward him before they married. It was Daddy who told me how he dressed mornings in suit, tie, and spats and sat at the window watching until he saw Mother walking past his house on her way to teach Latin classes in the high school across town. He would rush out the front door and offer to drive her to school. This daily ritual continued for some time before he dared to ask her out on a date.
Daddy played the piano by ear. Although he couldn’t read a note of music, he composed a love song to Mother and had a musician write the notes down for him. When she went to New Orleans to summer school at Tulane, he arranged with her host and hostess to take her to a nightclub where the band played the song dedicated to her. Her father and boyfriend dead, Mother finally accepted Daddy’s romantic overtures.
They were married on New Year’s Day, 1935. And though they fought often and bitterly as I was growing up, Mother and Daddy ended many of their days walking hand in hand through the flower gardens. And they spent most Sunday mornings of my childhood in bed rubbing each other’s feet.
I remember the house when it was white and the steps held you up when you stood on them. The porch columns were white, solid, and straight. The kitchen cabinets glistened buttery yellow, and the linoleum glowed with wax. The furniture was dusted and polished, the paper on the walls new. But the floors in every room were slanted like a ship tossed at sea, and cracks crisscrossed the ceilings and traveled from wall to wall like roads on maps of places I’d never been.
Mother, Daddy, and I lived with Granddaddy in the The Old Home Place, where Daddy, his two brothers, and his three sisters were born and grew up. It was there, sixty-eight years later, that Daddy died. By that time, his sister Bama had inherited the house. She did little to take care of the place. After several renters defaced the house before moving on, she let it stand vacant for years. Kudzu vines took over what had been Mother’s flower beds and covered the abandoned heart-shaped fish pool she had dug from the hard earth.
After Uncle Earnest died, Aunt Bama and their son, Earnest Junior—who must have been in his forties by then—stayed in the house with their parakeet when they came down from Columbia, North Carolina, several times a year. The usual pretense for their visits had something to do with house repairs, but Bama’s real reason was to visit Daddy and check up on, and criticize, Mother. Though Aunt Bama was the only family member left with wealth, instead of staying in a hotel she, Earnest Junior, and the bird always stayed in the living room of The Old Home Place, where they’d set up army cots for sleeping and hang sheets over the windows for privacy.
It must have been on one of those cots that Daddy died. Mother told me he’d been complaining of being cold all that evening and that he’d said he wished his sister hadn’t come that weekend. Mother said that he fed the birds before briefly visiting my brother Wyman and his wife, Anne. Then he went to see Aunt Bama and Earnest Junior in The Old Home Place.
Within the hour Earnest Junior was banging on Mother’s locked door yelling, “Uncle Wyman’s dead, Aunt Louisa! Uncle Wyman’s dead!”
Earnest Junior had been reading the book of Revelations aloud, he told Mother, when Daddy just fell back dead. At breakfast on the day of the funeral, I was about to ask Earnest Junior what verses he’d been reading and why, when he leaned over me and began stroking the satin binding of my robe with his fingers. Then he gave me that creepy look that had always made me feel uncomfortable. I got up and moved across the room. I’ve said nothing to him since. The last news I heard about him was that he was in federal prison someplace in the South.
Earnest Junior was always peculiar, and his parents’ behavior toward him was equally so. One family story went that when he was a little boy in public school, Aunt Bama would go each day at recess to stand and peer at him through the schoolyard fence until the bell called the children back into the building. Even as an adult, Earnest Junior wasn’t allowed out of his parents’ sight. A trip out to their car to retrieve a sweater or suitcase required an entire family expedition. And once, when I was very young, I heard that he’d escaped their surveillance for a matter of minutes and ended up in South America.
Around the time he was twelve or thirteen, Earnest Junior did something so terrible that it drove the family to move from Spartanburg to Columbia. Mother said that once Uncle Earnest was about to tell her what doctors at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore had said after examining Earnest Junior, but Aunt Bama burst into the kitchen at that moment and screamed that he was to never say anything to anyone about Earnest Junior again. I suspect Daddy knew the whole story but wasn’t about to reveal to me any more about Earnest Junior than he would reveal about his and Aunt Bama’s other sisters, Bessie and Kate.
My cousin Peyton, Uncle Frank’s younger son, claimed that his father and mine used to wash their hands after reading letters from Bessie and Kate, both of whom had been in the insane asylum in Milledgeville. One had died there; the other got out and married. When I asked Daddy for more information about these women who were my close blood kin, he would just shift his eyes from mine and refuse to answer. Daddy and Uncle Frank had basically disowned those two sisters.
But Earnest Junior couldn’t be dismissed with a quick shift of Daddy’s eyes. He was too physically and persistently present. For some years after we moved from The Old Home Place to the new house up the street, Aunt Bama, Uncle Earnest, and Earnest Junior would come to visit and stay in the large room that had been built for Granddaddy, who was dead by then. In time, our family grew larger and took over the guest room, making it necessary for Aunt Bama’s family to rent a room at a motel at the edge of town when they visited.
It was a great relief to Mother to have my aunt out of the house for good as an overnight guest. Still, Aunt Bama and her family continued to have some Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners with us, as well as other dinners on their all-too-frequent trips to Georgia. Aunt Bama continued to fuss about Daddy’s mishandling of money, incessant smoking, and constant complaining about being at death’s door while refusing to go to a doctor.
“Someday, Wyman, you’re going to drop dead!” she’d scream shrilly again and again. And he did, of course, still smoking cigarettes, and with a heart so enlarged that you could sometimes hear it pumping if you were quiet enough.
Aunt Bama was also full of complaints about Mother’s cooking. “This Jell-O has a peculiar taste to it,” she would say, poking tentatively with a fork prong at a quivering lime-green blob. Or she would push her almost empty plate away, announcing: “I can’t eat any more of this food, Louisa. Something’s just not right about it.” Livid, Mother would do everything she could do to pretend that my aunt wasn’t there in her dining room at all, that the irritation was nothing more than a gnat that had slipped in through a snag in a window screen.
Daddy tried to ignore both women, dumping so much catsup on his food that his plate looked like a miniature replica of one of the bloodiest battles in the Civil War. With Aunt Bama present, Daddy knew that Mother wouldn’t let her manners go and scream at him with her usual “You ruin everything I cook by pouring catsup on it, Wyman! Absolutely everything!”
Earnest Junior loved Mother’s cooking and ate helping after helping. Well satiated after one dinner of baked ham, sweet potato soufflé, and green peas in white sauce, he pushed his chair back from the table and announced with a rare sparkle in his eyes: “When Mama and Daddy die I’m going to be as rich as a king.”
“When your Daddy and I die all our money is going to foreign missions. That’s stated in our wills,” Aunt Bama said severely, glaring across the table at her son. “The Lord will take care of you, Earnest Junior.”
“The Lord, my foot,” Mother snorted when the two of us rehashed the dinnertime conversation privately later. “She means the law.”
Then once again she expressed her frustration with Aunt Bama for not telling her more about Earnest Junior’s condition. Mother felt it unfair, since she, by far the youngest of the whole bunch, would probably be left to deal with him. In a way, that’s exactly what happened. In her old age, when Earnest Junior called Mother collect from a prison, or some other place when he was an escapee on the run, she always accepted his calls. She said it made her feel safer to know where he was. She grimly referred to him as “my inheritance from your father.”
But it was Earnest Junior who ended up inheriting The Old Home Place.
I have few memories of Daddy during the first four years of my life. While we lived there he was either at the warehouse supervising the workers or traveling in the northern states drumming up trade for his and Uncle Frank’s lucrative produce business. I do remember his striking image when, like Uncle Frank, he dressed up in his white linen suit on special occasions, pausing at the garden during rose season to snap off a red rosebud for his coat lapel.
Granddaddy is a giant in my first memory of him. I am sitting on the floor, looking up and up into his teasing face under his straight dark hair. The whole house was filled with his presence, his voice, and his smell, a mixture of talcum powder and cologne, both of which he used liberally because he never bathed. He just splashed a little water on himself like Daddy did and depended on the toiletries to do the rest. But Granddaddy never smelled bad, unless you didn’t like the aroma of Prince Albert pipe tobacco that clung to everything he wore and permeated his skin. I loved its smell because his pipe, and the smell of it, were part of him, and he was as much a welcome part of my world as the sun, the pecan orchard, and the flower garden in the backyard with its row after row of blossoms.
I think of Granddaddy in a dark, pin-striped gabardine suit. Even at breakfast he wore a suit. After breakfast he’d sit on the front porch in one of the high-backed rocking chairs, cross his legs, and smoke his pipe. After a while Daddy would come out of the house and ask, “Are you ready to go to work, Daddy?” Granddaddy would get up and go with him, though he hadn’t worked in years.
Mostly I remember Granddaddy, still dressed in his pajamas, on mornings when I went to his room to play with him. I always gave him the baby doll whose glass eyes shut with a clanking sound and whose wooden head was covered with brown, carved curls. I pretended to give him the baby doll because she was best, but the real reason was that I loved my brown bear more.
Our play together was a daily ritual. Mother told me that Granddaddy was “a nice old man, but senile.” Lucille Williams, the African American woman who worked for my family from the time I was three months old, called him a “friendly old fellow.” “His mind had been out of order for so long,” she told me several years ago, “that they treated him like a little child.” Whatever the condition of Granddaddy’s mind, his heart and mine were of one accord in the early morning when the baby doll and the brown bear played together among the rumpled bedclothes.
Then one morning, when I was three years and nine months old, Granddaddy wasn’t in his room waiting for me. His bed had been stripped down to the mattress, and the smell of him was hardly there at all. Baby doll and brown bear dangled useless from my hands.
Later Mother held me in her arms in the living room as she stood over Granddaddy’s casket. Granddaddy looked odd and artificial, with his lips painted, rouge on his cheeks, and his mouth stitched into an expression I’d never seen before. Daddy had been mostly absent from my early childhood, and Mother had been distracted and distant. Only Granddaddy had been warm and welcoming, and he’d died and hadn’t taken me with him. More than half of my world was gone.
“You shouldn’t show him to her,” Daddy wailed to Mother. Daddy sat in a straight chair by the secretary, pressing his bald head hard against its dark wood, sobbing. When Mother put me down on the floor, I ran out of the living room and out the back door. Just across the fence, my friend June was playing in her yard. “June!” I called. “June! I have a dead Granddaddy in the living room!”
Lucille came and stood at the back-door screen. She’d mistaken my announcement to June as bragging, not the hysteria it was.
“Shame on you, Margaret Richter!” she yelled. “Shame on you!”
I fastened my eyes on the pecan grove, while I felt my heart heavy in my chest and mockingbirds called from the trees.