I HAD TROUBLE BELIEVING that Dixie had never been to college, for she seemed to know everything about everything, not only painting but books, too. She and Richard Overholser fell into long literary conversations whenever we went over to their house for dinner. I especially remember one Saturday night when I was helping Claudia clear the dishes while he and Dixie discussed existentialism, “a philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of each individual in a universe that doesn’t give a damn,” as Richard explained it to me. I had never heard of it. “So each person is solely responsible for giving his own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely,” he finished up.
“But what about God?” asked I, the product of all those nuns.
“He doesn’t exist,” Richard proclaimed. “It’s all up to you girls.”
“That’s sort of what Hemingway is saying, isn’t he?” Dixie said.
“Well, yes. An even better reading choice would be Albert Camus.”
“Albert who?” Dixie had her pencil out.
“C-A-M-U-S. And look here, Dixie,” he added in his emphatic Northern way, “why not enroll in some college courses when you get back to Georgia? You’d enjoy them. Be damn good for you, too, I’ll wager.”
“Now Richard, you know that’s not allowed, we’re not supposed to get involved here—” Claudia tossed over her shoulder as she headed back to the kitchen.
“Well, why not?” He pounded on the table. “This is a brilliant woman, why shouldn’t she go to college? For God’s sake!”
“Oh no,” Dixie said quickly. “Frank wouldn’t like it.” I perked up; she never, ever mentioned her husband’s name. “A, there’s no college back home, for miles and miles around. I’d have to drive all the way down to Tallahassee, a day’s trip. Assuming he’d let me drive at all. Assuming he’d let me spend the night. And B, you do know that’s not the purpose of therapy at Highland, don’t you? That’s not why he sent me up here. I am being ‘reeducated, retrained’ . . .” Though she used the mimicking voice, her smile was sweet and resigned.
“Retrained for what?” Richard pushed back his chair.
“For marriage, I guess,” she said. “I wasn’t very good at it before.”
Richard picked up the serving plates and abruptly left the table. “You know what I think of all that,” he called back over his shoulder.
“Well . . .” Dixie said calmly, vacantly, playing with her hair as she looked away, into some distance we couldn’t see.
I sank down at the table beside her.
Claudia came back in to join us. “Why not sign up for a correspondence course, then, honey? I know they have them at Goddard College, where I went to school—I can find out for you. You would enjoy it, and then perhaps you wouldn’t be so bored by the routine at home. I am sure that your husband wants you to be happy, doesn’t he?”
“Lord! He’s such a busy man, that’s the furtherest thing from his mind!” Dixie laughed and shook her head no, vehemently. Again, the flash of skin, the bald patch at the temple. “He just wants me to shut up and quit being sick and do what I’m supposed to and quit bothering everybody. I don’t know what we would have done if it hadn’t been for his mother, that’s Big Mama, to take over for me. Now don’t get me wrong. Frank loves me, he really does, or he sure wouldn’t have put up with me all this time. He just wants me to calm down and be satisfied. That’s what I want, too. I’m sick of myself!” The rueful smile.
Back in the kitchen Richard Overholser was washing the dishes, singing “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” at the top of his lungs.
“But changes can be made in a marriage, you know,” Claudia suggested carefully, leaning across the table to take Dixie’s hand. “Old roles can change. Even little things can help a lot. How old are your children now?” she asked, completely jolting me, for Dixie had never once, in our month-long friendship, even mentioned their existence.
“Margaret Ann is seven and Lissa is six.” Tears stood in the violet eyes. “I miss them so much,” she said.
OVER THE FOLLOWING weeks, Dixie’s story came out in bursts and whispers, which I shall attempt to piece together here. I was very surprised to learn that she had not grown up in circumstances such as she clearly enjoyed today. In fact her mother, Daisy Belle, came from a family of sharecroppers in rural Georgia, and her own tragic past had determined the whole family’s life—in my opinion.
“Oh, she never stopped telling it!” Dixie cried, stamping her foot. “She used to go on and on—it was like she just couldn’t stop.”
“Well, what was it?” Of course I asked.
“It really was awful,” Dixie said. “Mama was real good in school, and just beautiful, the most beautiful girl in the county”—this part was no surprise to me—“so she got picked to be Homecoming Queen, and then Miss Magnolia at a contest over in Waycross, and that’s when she started running around with a banker’s son named Lynwood Small, staying out all night drinking and whatnot. He even gave her his grandmother’s ring, right before he drove his car through the guardrail of a bridge over the Tar River. The car hit some kind of a big concrete post before it sank.
“Somehow he only broke his arm, but Mama’s beautiful face was completely destroyed. She ended up with one eye a whole lot lower than the other one, so she was always staring off to the side, and she got this big, jagged white scar which ran from her hairline down to her chin. She broke her back, too, so she always had a limp. Lynwood Small took back his grandmother’s ring, and then Mama’s reputation was completely ruined in that town, according to her. When she finally got out of the hospital, she was real different, real serious. She took a room in a boardinghouse in town and became a seamstress. She joined the Methodist Church, where she met my sweet daddy, Dudley Stovall, who was a lot older, and he married her. He worked for the power company.”
“And then what?” I asked.
“And then all they did was work, I reckon, with a little time out to have me and my little sister, Estelle. That’s when we moved into a bigger brick house with a patio and a garage. Mama used to say it was perfect in every way. She made all the draperies and the upholstery herself. She turned the front parlor into a sewing room, with her big Singer right there on its own table and swatches of material to choose from and this raised platform where her ladies turned around and around real slow, like ladies in a music box, while Mama knelt at their feet to pin up their skirts for hemming. She used to keep the straight pins in her mouth. I had to do the cooking while she worked. Daddy used to try to get her to stop working so hard, but she wouldn’t, because she said we had to have all the advantages. We had to take piano lessons and dance lessons, we had to have braces—I even had to take elocution! I think Mama got all these ideas from her ladies.
“ ‘Look at them! My little dolls!’ she used to say when we ran out the door in our matching clothes, which she made, which were always perfect. I guess she was living vicariously through all this, but she never would go out to any kind of public meetings or events at our schools.”
“But how did you and your sister feel about all this?” I asked her.
Dixie grinned at me. “Estelle rebelled the minute she was old enough, but I kept on going. Maybe this is awful, but I was glad to get out of there! So I kept on going to everything. When they offered me a scholarship to Dover Academy in Atlanta, I took it and went, even though Daddy had a lot of misgivings about it. Then I won the scholarship to Agnes Scott, and that’s when I got invited —after a lot of interviews, I’ll tell you—to make my debut at the Gone With the Wind Ball. It was because of my girlfriends at Dover. Mama was tickled to death. She stayed up night after night sewing those ruffles onto the skirt of my ball gown. Finally Daddy just exploded. I remember him saying, ‘My God, Daisy, this thing has gone far enough. It will break us!’ ”
But nothing could stop it by then, the great rolling ball of Mary Margaret’s social success, which left her jealous sister and her awestruck family behind. With her new nickname, “Dixie,” she traveled from debut to debut of her girlfriends, house party to house party, taken up by the girls and their families, courted by their brothers and their friends. Now part of a vast network that seemed to cover the whole South, Dixie was way too busy for college.
Nothing could stop it except for Dixie herself, who got unaccountably pregnant by somebody’s older brother in a boathouse while attending a wedding in Sea Island, Georgia. “I’m not sorry, either!” she insisted. “I’ve never been sorry. I swear, that was the most important night of my life. And it was the most magical, too. I was wearing this long baby-blue satin sheath dress with spaghetti straps and a little bolero jacket, made by Mama, of course, and a camellia in my hair. That camellia used to be my trademark. Two boys at this dance claimed to be in love with me, so I was dancing with first one, then the other. I remember they had this hot Negro band from Macon, it was all so much fun . . .”
Finally Dixie had to slip outside and catch her breath. She walked down the crushed shell path into the garden, away from the white-columned mansion, and sat down on a wrought-iron bench looking back at it, the whole mansion fairly pulsing with music, each window lit, with the flitting forms of the dancers inside. Suddenly it seemed like a stage set to her, like the way they had decorated the outside of Loew’s Grand Theatre to make it look like a plantation for the Gone With the Wind Ball. It seemed fake, all of it, and suddenly Dixie felt fake, too, and very separate from the house and the party and everything else in the world, sitting on her curlicue bench in the moonlight. She had a headache from drinking Champagne, and her face hurt from smiling so much.
“Smoke?” A thin boy with long black hair emerged from the shrubbery, not dressed for the occasion.
“Sure,” Dixie said.
In the flare of the match, Dixie saw his big beaky nose, his twitchy mouth, and the dark, serious eyes behind his gold-framed glasses, glasses like an old man would wear. “Thanks,” she said. Then she said, “I know who you are.” It was Genevieve’s older brother Duncan, the brilliant one, now attending graduate school at Harvard.
“I know who you are, too.” He smiled a long slow smile at her. “You’re the lucky one, aren’t you?”
“Am I?” She thought about this.
“Want to walk down and see the water?”
“Sure,” Dixie said, suddenly wanting to do this more than anything, leaving the path to follow Duncan down to the glittery, slapping water filled with stars. She ran forward to stand at the edge of it and he stood just behind her.
“ ‘The sea is calm tonight, the tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits; on the French coast the light gleams and is gone,’ ” he recited.
“ ‘The cliffs of England stand, glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night air!’ ” Dixie finished the verse, and then he put his arms around her and squeezed her tight, and then he turned her around and kissed her full on the lips, not a groping, sloppy kiss such as she allowed her beaux, but a solid, real kiss. She opened her mouth to him.
“Come on,” he said, taking her hand and walking her along the edge of the beach to the old boathouse, where a beautiful wooden motorboat named Miss Dolly’s Folly rocked in its slip and the upstairs loft contained only a mattress pulled right up to the huge triangular window propped wide open, looking out over the harbor. Duncan drew her down upon it.
“You like English poetry, then,” he said to her, and Dixie said, “Oh yes,” telling him her favorites, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” She went on and on, she just couldn’t believe herself. He nodded gravely, fiddling with the spaghetti straps on her shoulders. He had majored in English literature himself; in fact he would be leaving for England in a few days, headed for the Lake District and then for Oxford, where he would study for the next two years, soon to be joined by a woman from Boston, his lover. His family didn’t know this part. “And you’re going where, to school?” he asked.
“Agnes Scott,” she said, “but not right now. I’ve put it off a year.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t put it off.” He turned her around to face him. “You’re not like these others.” He took the camellia out of her hair, carefully, then laid her back against the mattress where she forgot in an instant everything her mother had always told her about leading them on, then making them stop—always making them stop—and hanging on to your most precious possession. Suddenly she didn’t care about that anymore, and she was not sorry then, or later when they watched the moon set, dropping down like a glowing opal into the water, the most beautiful thing Dixie had ever seen, or at least noticed.
At one point he drew back a bit, to look into her face. “You are protected, of course,” he said.
“Of course,” she said, not having a clue what he meant.
IT WAS HER sister Estelle who broke the news, coming into the bathroom to stand silently while Dixie, on her knees, retched into the toilet, not even caring that her long dark hair trailed down into the horrible water.
“Oh my God,” Estelle said flatly. “Oh my God.” Then, “You’re pregnant, Mary Margaret, I’m going to tell Mama!” almost crowing as she ran off, her bare feet slapping down the hall.
“Mary Margaret Stovall, I just can’t believe you would do this to me!” Dixie’s mother dragged her head up out of the toilet and slapped her face, laying her flat out on the bathroom floor, sobbing.
“What?” Dixie remembers asking. “Do what to you?”
“This baby!” her mother shrieked. “You cannot have this baby!”
A Lysol douche followed, right there on the bathroom floor, with Estelle holding her down. When that didn’t seem to work, Daisy Belle pushed her into the car for a trip out into the county to visit an old black woman who poked and prodded and then patted Dixie on the head and said, “Yes, girl. You go on home and have this child and love it to pieces. That’s all you can do, that’s what I’m telling you. This child gone be a blessing in the world.” Whereupon Daisy Belle started to shriek again. The scar stood out white in her red face. “Drunk!” she screamed. “Whore!” Dixie had to drive back home, with Estelle giggling in the backseat.
Dixie wouldn’t tell them, then or later, not ever, who the father was. She could not say why exactly, except that seemed to be the one thing she might keep out of this whole experience, the secret of the father, and the sound of the little waves, and the moonset over the water.
So instead of Agnes Scott, she went to the Florence Crittendon Home outside Columbus. Her parents made her duck down in the backseat as they drove out of town, and no one said a word. They smoked cigarettes on the long ride, all three of them. It was nearly dark by the time they turned down a long unmarked drive that led to a tall Gothic building with heavy pointed doors, like church doors.
One of the matrons opened the door. She was large, mannish, and grave. It all happened very fast. Her father handed the matron an envelope, and the matron shook hands with him. Dixie’s father kissed her on the cheek, while her mother sobbed into a handkerchief. Then they were gone. The matron pointed down at Dixie’s small suitcase, and Dixie picked it up.
“Come on, then,” the matron said.
“I don’t want to stay here,” Dixie said.
“You should have thought of that earlier then, shouldn’t you, dear? Instead of opening up your legs to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who came around. But at least you have made the right choice now, at least you will be giving your baby to good people, decent people who want it, who will love it and take care of it since there is no way you could ever provide for it yourself,” the matron said in a voice that was neither mean nor nice. “Too late now,” the matron said.
Dixie followed her up two flights of stairs, dark woodwork everywhere, to the third floor dormitory where the girls slept four to a room. Finally they stopped before room number 303; through the cracked door, Dixie could see three girls moving about within.
The matron put a restraining hand on Dixie’s arm. “Wait. Pick a name for yourself,” she said.
“What?” Surely Dixie had heard wrong.
“A name. Everyone assumes another name here. You’ll be glad about this later. No one will ever know who you were—it will be as though this dark chapter never happened in your life. You may choose your new name now.”
“Annabelle Lee,” Dixie said immediately.
“Oh. Ha, ha. A little joke, I see. We shall go with Anna, then,” the matron said, pushing the door open to clap her hands and announce, “Girls! This is your new roommate, Anna.” They gave Dixie a cautious greeting, then a real welcome when the matron had left, closing the door behind her.
All the girls had to do chores, such as washing dishes, cleaning, and helping in the kitchen, Dixie’s permanent job as soon as they realized she knew how to cook. “Biscuits,” she said. “They all loved my biscuits, I had to get up at the crack of dawn to make them.”
“Wasn’t that hard?” I asked. “Didn’t you mind?”
“No.” She shook her dark curls. “I didn’t care. I was just so glad to be away from home, away from Mama and Estelle. I didn’t want to be Mary Margaret anymore. And I was sick of being Dixie, too—I didn’t even realize that until I left.”
So Dixie liked being Anna, who was nobody, measuring out the flour and the buttermilk in that great big shadowy kitchen at dawn. She taught the other girls to fox-trot and waltz, all of them laughing at how hard this was because of their big stomachs, and helped them with their schoolwork, for she was far beyond them all. Some could scarcely read, and these became Dixie’s special challenge. To her surprise, she liked being pregnant, too, feeling her stomach stretch and pull, feeling the swell of her breasts.
“The first time he kicked, I got so excited I almost died,” she told me. “I used to lie awake with my hands on my stomach so I could feel him moving around in there, which filled me with the strangest, strongest feeling. It was like a deep, deep joy. The baby still didn’t seem exactly real to me, but he made me feel real.”
When Dixie’s water broke (in the kitchen of the Florence Crittendon Home, while she was making biscuits) they rushed her to the hospital and then shaved her and gave her an enema, which was a horrible shock. Nobody had told her anything about having the baby, what it would be like. By then the pain was so bad, she asked the nurse for something to take, but while the nurse was gone the baby started coming, and then they were wheeling her out of that little room. into the delivery room with its big blinding lights in her eyes. When Dixie woke up, she had already had the baby, a boy they said, and he was already gone.
A social worker came in and said, “Here, sign this paper. It’s your choice—do you want to see your baby or not? We advise against it.” Dixie said no and signed the paper giving him up to his adoptive parents, giving up all rights. And the social worker said, ”Good. That’s the best. Your parents will be coming for you in a few days.”
But then Dixie cheated. In the middle of the night, she walked out to the baby room and saw him. A young nurse was giving him a bottle, right in front of the window. Then an old nurse noticed Dixie, and went into the baby room and whispered something to the young nurse, who looked up and then on some impulse held the baby straight out to Dixie, right on the other side of the glass, so that she could see him up close, his long head, his funny squashed nose, and dark fuzzy hair. Then the old nurse grabbed the baby up and whisked him away to the back of the baby room where he turned red and started crying and then Dixie couldn’t see him anymore.
When Dixie’s parents came for her, she started telling them what the baby had looked like, but her mother said, “Hush. You never had a baby. That never happened. You went off to college, but then you got tuberculosis, and so you have been staying with your aunt Julia, in Thomasville, to recuperate. In fact you are still recuperating. We are going there now.”
Dixie had never met her father’s younger sister, since Daisy Belle had always refused to have anything to do with his family. Julia, a plump, blowsy blonde, handed Dixie a glass of whisky the minute her parents left. “Well, you’ve been through hell, haven’t you, honey?” she said. “I know all about it, believe me. You can stay here as long as you need to. First thing you’d better do is lie down.”
When Dixie began to feel better, she didn’t want to go back home. So Julia got her a job at the candy counter up at the front of the dime store where Julia herself worked in the office; she had been the proprietor’s mistress for twelve years. Here Dixie thrived, talking to everybody who came in the store, especially the boys from the nearby military academy who came in droves to buy her candied orange slices and nonpareils. Soon she was out every night with one or another, “dancing up a storm, and drinking . . . Lord! Seems like I was drunk half the time. I didn’t care. I didn’t care what I did, I didn’t care about anything. And Julia didn’t care, either. She was a drinker herself. Her Mr. Gordy was sneaking in and out all the time, Ernie Gordy, I got used to him. Hell, I liked him! Mr. Gordy was real nice.”
Some of the cadets were nice boys, and some were not nice boys, and one of these had tried to do something bad to her one night and she had jumped out of his car in a clearing in the woods and he had roared off, furious, and that’s when she met Frank Calhoun, who came along and stopped his car and was such a gentleman. He never even asked her what she was doing out there barefooted on that road in the middle of the night, wearing a party dress. A light rain had just begun to fall. He got out of the car and took off his seersucker jacket and put it around her shoulders before settling her into the passenger seat and asking her where she needed to go.
Frank Calhoun had been a soldier himself, it turned out, stationed in San Francisco, but then his father had died suddenly of a heart attack and he had been released from the navy and sent back home to run the farm. “And I’m still here,” he said, smiling at Dixie, who was desperately trying to sober up enough to take all this in. She liked what she could see of him, the big square pleasant face in the dashboard lights. “Where is the farm?” she asked, and he said, “Here. Right outside of town here,” and when she asked, “Is it a big farm?” he just grinned at her. “Yep,” he said. He drove her back to Julia’s, then got out and went around the car to open the door and hold an umbrella for her in the rain, which was pouring down like crazy by then, but this didn’t matter because Dixie was a mess anyway, and all of a sudden she was crying so hard she couldn’t see. Frank Calhoun was the perfect gentleman, escorting her up on the porch to the front door.
“Are you going to be all right now, Missy?” He lifted her chin to look into her eyes in the porch light.
She swallowed, tasting gin. “Yes. But nobody has ever been so nice to me.”
He grinned, touching the tip of her nose. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Which turned out to be completely true. Frank Calhoun was the nicest young man in the world, capable and calm, running El Destino, his family’s plantation, which covered 400 acres and contained his embittered mother, who became furious when Frank dropped his childhood sweetheart, Raynelle, on the spot and married Dixie who came from trash whether she had actually made her debut at the Gone with the Wind Ball or not. Big Mama Calhoun turned out to be the only person in the world who didn’t like Dixie on sight, and she never liked her, not even in the early years when Dixie was trying so hard and learned to ride the horses that Frank loved and joined the Junior Woman’s Club and served on committees and gave big parties and had such a hard time with her first pregnancy, toxemia, that she had to be on bed rest the last three months. Dixie felt like an impostor in this life, and she always felt like Big Mama knew that she was an impostor.
But nobody knew her secret except Frank, who loved her to distraction anyway, and always called her “Missy,” and adored the little girls, too, riding first Margaret and then Lissa everywhere on his horse with him. Soon they both had little ponies of their own. Dixie had all the household help in the world. But none of that mattered. And somehow, having children of her own didn’t matter, either. Somehow, that made it worse. Dixie knew what she had done, and she knew that she didn’t deserve Frank, or her beautiful daughters, or her wonderful life. She was not worthy of any of it. She suffered from migraine headaches, colitis, and neuralgia. She stopped riding, she stopped seeing friends.
And then came the day when she just couldn’t get out of bed.