THIS INCIDENT OCCURRED IN September when a good-sized group of us, children and adults alike, about thirty in all, including staff, took a picnic hike up to Point Lookout on Balsam Mountain. These outings were much sought after by us all, dangled like carrots before us, the “prize” for the effort we had exerted, the progress we were supposedly making. I was surprised to find Robert in the group, since he was so notoriously resistant to the program. Yet there he was, too, in striped shorts paired incongruously with a white dress shirt, knobby knees and fragile legs ending in those high black socks and big brown boots. He carried a rustic walking stick with the bark still on it and wore a silly straw hat too small for his head. His forehead gleamed hugely, whitely, in the sun. His blue eyes swam behind his glasses. He looked like a crazy professor out for an afternoon nature hike. Suddenly I realized that this was a picture of exactly who he would probably become. The wide smile broke across his face when he saw me. Lily Ponder was right, I realized: he did like me. And I did like him, though I also hated him a little bit, too, for his weakness, his oddness, his frailty.
I liked others on the picnic trip, as well: Lily herself, for she had turned out to be wonderfully outspoken and acerbic, once she began to communicate; fat, flushed Virginia Day, who was calming down; and of course Miss Tippin, funny and odd as usual.
Mrs. Fitzgerald, always an enthusiastic participant in any sort of athletic activity, was a part of this group, too. I had not seen her for a while. Someone said that she had been on a family vacation trip to Virginia Beach, which might be why she appeared somewhat moodier and more distant than usual that afternoon as we all waited for the van. Patients generally did not do well when they went to visit their families, returning to us disheveled and nervous. Perhaps I should be thankful to have no family at all, I thought—though I didn’t really believe this, of course. Mrs. Fitzgerald stood apart from the rest of us, smoking and frowning and moving her mouth occasionally, as if she carried on a dialogue with herself.
FINALLY, THE VAN and several cars arrived, followed by a truck carrying our food and other supplies. It would travel by another road, up the back of the mountain, so that our picnic would be ready when we arrived. Mr. Axelrod, the head physical education teacher, was in charge of this outing, wearing his customary cowboy hat and sunglasses as he read our names off a clipboard and directed us into the cars. “Come on now, put that out! No smoking in the van.” He hustled the reluctant Mrs. Fitzgerald along. She got in last, up front with him. Robert went in one of the cars. I sat with Lily in the very back of the van, trying to ignore a new arrival, Melissa Handy, who sat weeping in the seat in front of us.
The wind from the open windows blew our hair about; it felt wonderful. Miss Phoebe Dean, the music teacher, came down the aisle passing out tangerines, a rare treat. Melissa Handy turned around and gave hers to us without explanation, then said, “Do you ever feel that there is another person, a different person, inside your body clawing at the inside of your head? Clawing to get out?”
“No,” said Lily.
“Bitch,” said Melissa.
We split her tangerine and ate it.
Miss Phoebe made us sing “The Old Gray Mare” and “Red River Valley,” her own operatic voice jumping and vaulting over ours. She was also the Christian Youth Director at a large church in downtown Asheville.
“Showoff.” Lily had an opinion about everything; I admired this.
Our van parked in a big lot at the foot of the mountain, which rose majestically into the clouds, far bigger than I had imagined when I had lain watching it from the window of my hospital room. A sign said RAINBOW TRAIL, which apparently began right there, disappearing into the trees.
“I think I’ll just wait right he-ah,” said a very Southern lady whose name I didn’t know.
“Not on your life!” said Mr. Axelrod. “Up and at ’em, that’s a girl!” He practically pushed her out of the van.
The lady turned to look at him, her eyes brimming over with tears. “I was the Maid of Cotton,” she said hopelessly.
Robert was poking about in the dirt with his stick.
“Who’s that?” Melissa Handy asked, pointing at him.
I didn’t answer, embarrassed to be his friend.
Mr. Axelrod put us into a line, then marched to the front of it. “We’re off!” he sang out, waving his red kerchief in the air.
“Jesus,” Lily said.
We watched as Mr. Axelrod’s hat and kerchief disappeared into the yawning green forest, followed by all the rest of us, Miss Tippin’s bouncing brown ponytail, Robert’s stupid hat, the bald pate of Mr. Pugh, the science and math teacher, the frizzy-headed Gould twins.
“I don’t want to do this,” Melissa said, pulling back.
“Nonsense!” Lily barked. She and I grabbed Melissa’s bony hands and off we went, all of us, on the Rainbow Trail. At first the path was broad and nearly level, emerging from the forest to cross a natural meadow filled with beautiful flowers. “Bee balm, goldenrod, daisies, milkweed,” intoned Mr. Pugh. All of these flowers were blooming as hard and as fast as they could, I realized, blooming their heads off because winter was on the way. They would die soon, all of them. It was autumn already, though they called it Indian Summer. I wondered why. I wondered if Indians had lived here, real Indians, on this mountain, walking up this trail where we were walking, putting their moccasins where my feet now trod. It made me feel important, even sort of holy, thinking this. The Rainbow Trail rose through giant pines, the mountain falling away on one side to a deep gorge where a loud creek came leaping down from ledge to ledge over enormous rocks.
“Snakeroot, yarrow, St. John’s wort,” said Mr. Pugh.
“That’s a remedy for depression,” Robert announced.
“Well pick us some then, honey,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said, and everybody laughed.
The piney smell was overwhelming now, brisk and healthy in my nose, making my eyes smart. It reminded me suddenly of getting off the train with Mrs. Hodges ages and ages ago. It was jarring to realize how different I felt now from that pale, thin little girl standing on the platform in the cold January wind, clutching a leather suitcase that wasn’t even her own. I could see her as if in an old photograph, like the photographs on the walls of that house in Metairie—someone I didn’t know.
A wooden bridge took us over the creek to a platform where we stood to observe the Rainbow Falls, a great sheet of water that plunged into a deep pool creating a spray of mist that turned all colors in the sun. We couldn’t talk or hear; the noise of the falls was deafening. We jumped back, too late to avoid the freezing spray that had already covered us, head to toe. This is me, I thought suddenly. I am alive, and I will remember this. I have, too. That moment, that diamond shaft of sunlight piercing the canopy of trees to shoot through the Rainbow Falls, our entire ragtag company jeweled and beautiful. Miss Phoebe made us sing “On Top of Old Smoky” as we continued up the mountain. “Now courting’s a pleasure, and parting is grief, but a false-hearted lover is worse than a thief!” Lily and Melissa and I sang at the top of our lungs, holding hands.
Robert and Mr. Pugh discussed nature versus nurture, endlessly.
At last we reached Point Lookout, our destination—not the top of the mountain, but a rocky bald overlook with a 180-degree view, the land below us a living quilt so pretty that it took our breath away. Sky was everywhere, boundless sky, with here and there a crow or eagle, weaving and dipping or soaring, borne up on the brilliant air. Blue upon blue, the mountains stretched into distance until finally they became a part of the sky. Here and there a steeple rose from the little quilted towns or communities below, or a thin line of smoke that soon disappeared. Fluffy white clouds sailed past, like a flock of sheep.
My chums and I drank dippers full of ice-cold water from a spring over by the tree line, then flung ourselves down, panting, on the smooth rocks still warm from the sun. Their heat filled my body with an indescribable sense of well-being.
“Look!” Lily cried, pointing up at the clouds. “That big one, right there—it’s an elephant!”
“I see a dragon,” Melissa called out.
I saw it, too, then; it reminded me of a float in the Mardi Gras parade, and I imagined my mother, riding atop and waving.
“Look, there’s the Buddha.” Robert was the only person who would have thought of this, but sure enough, there was the Buddha up in the sky, with his huge round stomach.
The staff built a fire and lit it, while Henry and Johnson, two black men who worked in the kitchen, unpacked the food. Suddenly I was starving, but we all had to wait while Miss Phoebe, who loved to pray, said a long blessing, and then Mr. Axelrod said he wanted to say a blessing, too, which was: “Good food, good meat, praise God, let’s eat!” Everybody laughed and finally we got to open our boxes of cold fried chicken, deviled eggs, and ham biscuits. For dessert, we were instructed upon the making of “some-mores,” which required us to toast marshmallows on long sticks prepared and handed out by Mr. Axelrod, then put the marshmallows all hot and gooey into a graham cracker sandwich containing a Hershey bar. These were indescribably delicious—even more so since Dr. Carroll was usually quite strict about our dietary restrictions, with very little sugar allowed.
Miss Phoebe sang “Shenandoah” and then the lady from Memphis did “Hardhearted Hannah (the Vamp of Savannah),” belting it out like a nightclub singer. I liked that one better.
Robert, who had wandered away from the fire, came back with his hat off, all squashed up in his hands. “For you,” he said, holding it out to me.
“Whatcha got?” asked Mr. Axelrod, drawing near, but Robert looked only at me.
“Open it,” he said, and I did, very slowly, after straightening the brim. A beautiful orange and black butterfly fluttered out into our midst.
“Monarch,” announced Mr. Pugh definitively.
“Danaus plexippus,” Robert said. “One of the few insects capable of making a transatlantic crossing.”
“Good-bye, good-bye,” I screamed with my chums, watching my butterfly flicker out across the bald then shoot straight up into the air until it was lost in the sky.
“Atypical behavior,” Mr. Pugh muttered.
“Thank you,” I said directly to Robert, who ducked his head and stumbled away.
“What next?” Miss Tippin smiled, watching him go.
It grew chilly up there as the afternoon wore on, winding down. We drew close around the fire, lounging on the old blankets they had brought for us. People were dozing off. It was an unusual time, a precious time for us all. Then Johnson began to move about purposefully, putting things back in the truck. Henry stirred up the fire and put a big pot of coffee on a grate directly above it.
“Better wake up!” Mr. Axelrod clapped his hands. “Time to get going! It’ll get dark before you know it.”
This seemed odd, as the bald was still bathed in sunshine. Henry and Johnson poured hot black coffee into tin cups and handed them all around, to us as well as the adults. The strong, acrid coffee almost burned my tongue, but it was wonderful. I held my cup out for more, as did Mrs. Fitzgerald, now seated beside me in the great circle around the fire.
“Evalina?” Suddenly Robert was standing behind me. He leaned over and thrust his hat, crushed again, into my lap.
“Oh, brother,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald.
Everyone looked on while I opened the hat slowly to reveal a wet green lizard, iridescent in the sunshine as it twisted and turned, breathtakingly beautiful. “Oooh!” we all gasped as one. It was the loveliest gift I have ever received, then or now, though Lily, on my left, was afraid of it, scrambling to get away.
But Mrs. Fitzgerald muttered, “Stupid, stupid.” She grabbed the hat from my hands and flung it into the fire.
It was gone in an instant as new yellow flames leaped up to engulf the straw. Pandemonium ensued—several people screaming, others running away from the fire into the woods with staff members in pursuit. Robert and I stayed right where we were, eyes fixed upon the fire. So did Mrs. Fitzgerald. When all traces of hat and lizard were gone, I turned to find Mrs. Fitzgerald staring intently, almost hungrily, into the flames.
“I don’t understand why everybody is so upset,” she said petulantly. “It didn’t hurt it. Salamanders live in fire, don’t you know anything?”
“That is not true,” Robert said. “That is only a legend, a myth. This was a real salamander, genus Plethodontidae, and you have killed it.”
“It is true, you little idiot,” she snapped at him, darkening.
“How do you know it, then?” Lily asked.
Mrs. Fitzgerald turned to face us. “I am a salamander,” she said. “I have lived in the fire for years, yet here I am.” She held out her tanned arm, palm up. “Touch me,” she whispered. “I am still alive, as real as you are.”
We drew back, horrified, yet again I felt that awful closeness, that familiarity I had felt when I saw her for the very first time, sitting on the rock. I started to cry.
“Fools!” Mrs. Fitzgerald spat at us. “Silly little fools!” She started laughing. She flung back her head, laughing.
“Come along now, we’ll give you a ride back, easy does it . . .” Suddenly Mr. Axelrod and Mr. Pugh were hustling Mrs. Fitzgerald along, one on either side of her, over to the food truck. Miss Tippin hugged me, wordlessly, stroking my hair. She held me like that while Henry and Johnson and some of the others doused the fire and scattered the ashes about. Mr. Axelrod returned to lead us off down the mountain immediately, single file, urging us to move along as rapidly as possible, to beat the lengthening shadows. Robert stumbled along somewhere ahead of me. The Maid of Cotton was crying. Nobody sang.
I GOT MY first and only glimpse of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s famous husband later that November, when Mrs. Hodges took me on a long-promised visit to the Grove Park Inn, where two of her daughters worked, one as a chambermaid and one as a hostess in the lobby. Moira, this one, was a big, buxom girl with a ready smile and a headful of carrot curls. She waved at us from her desk in the middle of the cavernous lobby, which took my breath away, as had the grand entrance out front.
“She’ll join us later for a bite, when things slow down,” Mrs. Hodges said. “Now what do you think, eh? Quite the spot, isn’t it?”
I was too overwhelmed to answer immediately. The Grove Park Inn had been built on a grand scale, as if it were a hotel for giants. The lobby in which we stood was by far the largest room I had ever been inside, as big as an athletic field, all wood and stone, with immense stone fireplaces blazing at either end. The rocking chairs lined up before the fireplaces were filled with people talking and sipping from cups or glasses, while uniformed waiters and waitresses moved about. Groups of comfortable furniture filled the lobby itself, as if there were many little living rooms, each with its own leather sofas and upholstered armchairs and tables and lamps, then a bar area over near the windows that featured tiny round tables, all of them occupied by chatting, gesticulating people. Beautiful people. A man with slicked-back hair, in a tuxedo, played tinkly jazz on a grand piano.
“I’ll bet you’d like to get your hands on that now, wouldn’t you?” Mrs. Hodges said as we crossed the lobby past the piano.
“Yes, I would,” I said sincerely, though I felt that I would never be able to play as well, or be so much at ease, as that smiling man.
We went through the tall, many-paned doors out onto the wide stone terrace that overlooked a pool area and a long golf course sloping down toward the bowl below that was Asheville. “There we are,” Mrs. Hodges announced, pointing over to the right, “that there’s the hospital,” as indeed it was, also overlooking Asheville from its different vantage point, its own mountain. I could see all the familiar buildings as if they were dollhouses, but we were too far away to spot any people. “Fore!” a man’s voice called out.
“They serve lunch and dinner out here on the terrace in the summertime,” Mrs. Hodges said. “Aah, it’s lovely then, the view. The sunset and the moon and the stars, don’t you know. Why, everybody has been here, everybody, politicians and movie stars . . .” Back inside, we looked at autographed pictures of Mae West, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Herbert Hoover, and many others hanging on the corridor walls.
Our lunch in the grand dining room, with its view out over the mountains, was by far the fanciest meal I had ever had, surpassing even my breakfast in the dining car on the train. An elegant older man—I thought he looked like a count!—handed us the heavy menus as Moira slipped into her chair.
“Lo, Mum.” She leaned over to kiss Mrs. Hodges on the cheek. “Hi, Evalina, don’t you look pretty!”
Did I? I was wearing a pink matched sweater set, shell and cardigan, the unexpected gift of Mrs. C. I fingered my pearl-tone buttons.
“Now, Miss, order anything you’d like,” Mrs. Hodges directed grandly. “It’s on her!” pointing at Moira.
“Sssh! Hush, Mom,” Moira said. “Or you’ll lose your privileges.” She winked at me.
I read the menu from start to finish, as if it were a novel. It contained many items that were entirely foreign to me, such as Welsh Rarebit and Tomato Aspic.
“I’ll take a nip of the sherry,” Mrs. Hodges said when the aristocratic waiter came back. “Against the cold, you know.”
“I’ll bet you’d like the hot chocolate,” Moira said to me. “It’s quite famous.”
I nodded, then followed their lead in ordering the club sandwich as well, though I wasn’t sure what it was. I was delighted when it arrived in four triangular pieces with a fancy gold fringed toothpick stuck through each one, spearing all manner of meats and cheese within, curvy chips and tiny pickles to the side. “Oh my,” I said without meaning to. “And this hot chocolate is delicious, thank you so much,” I told Moira.
“She’s coming along now, isn’t she?” Mrs. Hodges said to her daughter as if I weren’t there. They launched into a long conversation about the financial problems and disastrous “love life” of yet another of Mrs. Hodges’s daughters while my attention wandered to the other tables, well-dressed and prosperous people such as I had never seen, really, except for our long-ago outings with Mr. Graves. But as I could not bear to think of that time, I began to make up scenarios in my mind for these other diners, their histories and personal lives.
She is an actual princess, that brunette, from Europe, and her husband is so much in love with her, look at him holding her hand across the table. Of course! They are on their honeymoon! While those awful crabby old lady sisters dripping with diamonds have nothing to say to each other, they have worn out all their topics, they are too mean to talk, just staring out hatefully at the rest of us. And that young man eating alone is so handsome, handsome beyond belief, maybe he is a movie star, though obviously he is heartbroken at the present time, perhaps because he has fallen in love with someone unsuitable, and knows he can never, ever have her . . . or maybe she has a wasting disease, or maybe she is crazy, maybe she is over at Highland Hospital right now, taking a rest cure . . . I ate my club sandwich as slowly as possible, savoring every bite, while Mrs. Hodges and her daughter talked on and on. The other diners conversed in hushed tones and the silverware shone and the glasses tinkled all around us and the waiters glided back and forth gracefully through the beautiful room like skaters until suddenly I realized that in fact I was staring straight at Mrs. Fitzgerald, and that man with her—that very man!—must be the famous Mr. Fitzgerald, the author, her husband. By then, I had heard all about him.
The Fitzgeralds sat together on a banquette next to a giant fern in a giant planter, both of their backs against the wall, looking out across their table at the vast dining room before them, and did not speak.
I touched Mrs. Hodges’s sleeve. When she did not respond, I grabbed it. “Isn’t that . . . ?” I started to ask, looking over at them.
“Hush now, Evalina, why yes it is, don’t stare. There’s a good girl.”
But I could not take my eyes off them for they seemed so odd, so unlike the others there in that lively, lovely company. He was much smaller than I had expected, and very pale, though he was undeniably good-looking, with sharp, fine features and glittering green eyes. She wore her stoic, secretive Cherokee face, and toyed with her food. He was drinking a beer directly from the bottle. While I watched, the waiter brought him another, taking that bottle away.
“Thirty a day, they say!” Moira leaned closer. “Thirty bottles a day, and that’s when he’s on the wagon, off the gin! Oh, it’s sad, sad. Such a talent, such a loss.”
“They look so unhappy,” I said inadvertently.
“I should imagine!” Mrs. Hodges snorted. “They’ve worn it all out, I daresay. What a life they’ve led! Dancing all night and jumping into fountains and drinking like fish all the while, mind you. Living in hotels and receiving guests in the bath. Frankly I don’t know what Himself is thinking, imagining that she should ever get well again, and make a proper wife! Who would want her, after all this?”
“Well, who would want him?” Moira asked. “Look at him. He’s up all night, can’t sleep, he’s got the insomnia, you know. Sick as a dog, never eats a thing but a bit of rice or potatoes and gravy, no wonder, imagine the shape his stomach is in! And that room, Lord, Lord. A pigsty!”
“But I heard he has a lady friend . . .” Mrs. Hodges scooted nearer her daughter.
“Oh he does, he does. She’s real nice, a young married woman from Memphis that comes up here by herself, rich as Croesus. She’s mad for him, you can tell. God knows what she thinks she’s doing. It will end in a disaster, of course. But that’s not all. Why, he’s even had fancy ladies up to his room, right here in the Inn, I am not kidding you, Mum”—in answer to her look of disbelief. “You just ask Ruthie, if you don’t believe me. Why, Ruthie’s passed them in the stairwell, close as you and me! And there’s one in particular that’s been up there visiting numerous times. You know that girl down at the Biltmore, the one that gets so dolled up and tells the fortunes, Lottie Stephens her name is, well they say she’s a mulatto . . .”
The red heads merged—the one dulled by grey, the other a riot of wild curls—as the conversation continued in whispers now, punctuated by Mrs. Hodges’s occasional “Why you don’t say!” or “Blessed saints in heaven preserve us!”
Meanwhile I could not keep myself from staring at the Fitzgeralds, though I knew it was rude to stare. I also knew instinctively that they would never notice me anyway, just a skinny little girl in whom they could have no possible interest, lost in a sea of people. I was beneath their notice. Mrs. Fitzgerald wore a purplish coat and a gray cloche hat. She looked dull and almost ugly. He wore a tweed jacket and a white shirt and a red bowtie, incongruously jaunty. Neither one of them ever spoke. They sat like dolls in a window staring out upon the world beyond them, a world they no longer owned. She was smoking. Their waiter came with beer after beer.
“Pity, pity, pity!” Mrs. Hodges concluded with a certain relish, pushing back her chair. Our own waiter returned with the bill, which Moira signed in a fancy, definitive hand, and then we left, the three of us, as unlikely a trio as any in that elegant dining room that day—Moira back to her post in the lobby, Mrs. Hodges and I back to Highland Hospital in a taxicab. I craned my neck to view the stone arch at the entrance one more time as the taxi bore us rapidly down Sunset Mountain.
“Please, mam, can we come back at Christmas to see the tree?” I asked, and Mrs. Hodges said that we could, if I promised never to tell any of the other patients—my chums!—or anyone else about our lunchtime visit to the Grove Park Inn, since it was strictly against the rules. (Everything was strictly against the rules, unless Dr. C himself ordained it.) I gave my promise, of course, and I never told a soul—perhaps this is the reason that Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald, as I viewed them in the dining room that afternoon, made such an impression upon me; the scene would be permanently etched in my mind.
For there was the oddest thing about Mrs. Fitzgerald, then and always, and this is when I first realized it: she never looked the same, from one day to another. Truly she was like a salamander, or a lizard, shedding its skin, or like a chameleon, changing its color constantly. She never, ever looked the same. It was the oddest facility, almost as if she were empty, her face as blank as those paper dolls we made, that anyone could draw upon, giving them whatever features and expressions they desired . . . or like a lump of clay on the pottery table in the Art Room, that others could take and form to fit the shape of their dreams.
I have thought a lot about this, for even the photographs taken of her vary radically one from another; they appear to be photographs of different people. And in almost none of them can be seen her extraordinary beauty, that quality of intense and shimmering life that animated her when she was truly “on,” especially when she was dancing.
IN FACT, IN the clearest image I have of Mrs. Fitzgerald from this period, she is dancing—dancing, dancing, dancing ecstatically—in a performance at a masquerade ball held at Highland Hospital in 1938.
Not only had she choreographed the entire performance; she had also designed the costumes, such as they were, drawing feverishly in the black notebook she carried about everywhere that spring, when she was again more animated and talkative than anybody, urging all to help with the paper masks and hats, the net skirts and funny costumes that took over the Art Room during this period. Every patient able enough to participate was enlisted, and there we all sat for weeks, making paper moons to hang from the ceiling on strings, and cows to jump over them, for the theme was “Mother Goose.” A big old book of nursery rhymes had appeared in the Art Room for inspiration. I paged through it, fascinated, as I had never heard any of these odd and charming little poems. I don’t know who came up with the idea—Miss Malone perhaps, or perhaps Mrs. Fitzgerald herself—but it truly was inspired, as everyone except me, grown-ups and children alike, seemed to have some familiarity with Mother Goose, and this theme gave everybody the chance to dress up, to become somebody other than the broken, sick people we really were . . . or, at the very least, to put on a silly hat!
And we made silly hats by the dozen in the Art Room, colorful cones with puffy balls of cotton at the top and ribbons hanging down all around, or top hats created by making a black tube of construction paper, then setting it down on a hollow circle carefully cut from cardboard. The average person could never understand, I believe, how boring it is to be crazy—to be unable to live a regular life, unable to have a regular family or friends or a job, for instance, unable sometimes even to read or think or do anything except smoke, perhaps, on a veranda, staring into space. How wonderful it is, then, to make a cardboard hat, or a giant paper flower! To have, even for a moment, even if it’s all make-believe, a happy childhood.
Mrs. Fitzgerald herself chose to be “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.”
“I shouldn’t wonder! She’ll be grand at it!” Mrs. Hodges snorted when she heard this news.
Mrs. Fitzgerald chose a half-dozen others, young women and girls, to be the “silver bells and cockleshells and pretty maids all in a row” in “Mary’s” garden; each was fitted with a loose, silvery blouse and pink net skirt, worn over a leotard and tights. “Mary” was the soloist—prima ballerina—as well as choreographer and director of the grand finale, a “Flower Dance.”
And I—I was directly involved in this ambitious project, too, for Mrs. Carroll had pushed me into playing the piano for the entire production: first, the march of all the nursery-rhyme characters into the ballroom, then an appropriate musical interlude between each performance, then the “Waltz of the Flowers,” from the Nutcracker.
Our few rehearsals of the “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” dance were disastrous, as one or another of the “flowers” always burst into tears or ran offstage in a fury, though really all they had to do was kneel in artful positions upon the stage while Mrs. Fitzgerald recited her own poem and danced, after which they were to rise and “bloom” in turn, finishing up with a simple step in unison before their twirling finale. But my goodness, the fireworks!
“She kicked me, on purpose!” Virginia cried out on the very afternoon of the ball. “That little bitch!” flailing out at Grace Barker, a new girl, who doubled up and fell forward weeping onto the stage.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Lily muttered.
“Get up now, dear, this won’t do,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “No temperament. You don’t have time for it. You have a performance tonight.”
Miraculously, Grace obeyed her.
We all marveled at this new, calm Mrs. Fitzgerald with her black notebook—“Cool as a cucumber, she is!” Mrs. Hodges pronounced.
As for myself, I was more excited than I had ever been; anticipation was not an emotion I had had much cause to feel. Apprehension, yes, even fear—but not anticipation.
“HOLD STILL,” MRS. Carroll said, buttoning up the back of my blue silk frock herself, a hand-me-down from her grown daughter. Mrs. Hodges stood by with her needle and pincushion, prepared to alter the fit if need be, but “Perfect!” Mrs. Carroll breathed, smoothing the liquid silk down over my nonexistent hips. “Look now.” She led me to the long mirror on the back of the door that opened into her own private dressing room, where I had never been before, and suddenly there I stood, a thin, unrecognizable girl in fashionable new shoes called “French heels” and a long shiny dress as blue as the sky, with flyaway curls down to her shoulders and big blue eyes and rosy red dots on her cheeks that looked like rouge, though I wore none. Mrs. Carroll grabbed my chin and tilted it up to the light. She smoothed pink lipstick on my lips. It felt good, and tasted delicious, like strawberries. “There now. What do you think?”
“I think I look beautiful,” I said sincerely.
They both burst into laughter, though Mrs. Hodges dabbed at her eyes.
“Don’t you get nervous out there now,” she said as she helped me into my old coat.
“You don’t have to worry. Evalina will not be nervous,” Mrs. Carroll announced grandly, arranging her own evening cape around her shoulders just so. “Why, Evalina doesn’t have a nervous bone in her body, isn’t that right, honey?” She smiled at me. “She is already a professional, Mrs. Hodges, with a brilliant career ahead of her. I knew it the moment I first heard her play. She’s the real thing.” I was to repeat this phrase, doggedly and sometimes desperately, over and over in my mind in the years to come.
But in all truth, she was right. I was not nervous at all, despite the fact that we had not had a dress rehearsal. I seated myself at the grand piano onstage and warmed up the crowd by playing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and “Mighty Lak’ a Rose” by ear while viewing the Great Hall, now hung with glittering suns and moons, while cows, dogs, cats, fiddles, and real spoons borrowed from the dining hall dangled at the ends of their strings. These decorations came from my favorite nonsense rhyme of all:
Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
Such silliness astonished me—I had had no chance at silliness, so I had not much aptitude for it, either. Still, I was delighted.
The Great Hall was transformed utterly, as were the partygoers, all in fancy dress, patients and staff and townspeople alike. Looking out upon this crowd from my perfect vantage point at the piano onstage, I really couldn’t make any distinction among them. They mingled and chatted, a vibrant sea of color beneath me. I played “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “Moonlight Bay.” Unobtrusively the flowers and maids slipped out onstage and knelt or sat and bowed their heads in their dormant positions—all nine of them! even the obstreperous Grace.
I hit five stirring major chords—the prearranged signal—and the golden curtains parted as the Grand Parade began. Here they all came, the characters from the nursery rhymes marching in ragged step as I played “The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers.” They crossed the stage, came down the steps, and made a full tour of the ballroom, to continuing applause, then tramped back up on stage to form a semicircle behind the still motionless flowers. I finished with a commanding flourish as Mr. Pugh himself stepped forward first—a surprise to all of us, even the other performers!—elegant in a top hat, wearing a suit with an enormous flowing purple silk tie and a yellow waistcoat stuffed with a pillow as he declaimed:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
And all the King’s horses, and all the King’s men
Could not put Humpty together again.
Everybody clapped, and I played a little interlude as he bowed and went back to his place. Though improvised, it was easy, easy, my fingers filled with a power I didn’t know I possessed.
The Gould twins followed, skittering out in bright polka-dot sacklike dresses, each carrying a pail, to recite “Jack and Jill.” They blinked in the stage lights and seemed totally surprised by the applause.
Enormously fat Mr. Lewinski stepped forward with a pie to proclaim, in his funny accent, “Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, eating his Christmas pie . . .” He gave a big wink as he held up his plum, and left the stage in a funny skedaddle walk.
Mean, bossy, and universally despised Mrs. Aston Archer came out as Little Bo Peep wearing a long green silk dressing gown and a ruffled cap that, I knew, had been made in Art, from one of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s sketches. The idea that this pompous lady could be “little” anything was extremely amusing.
But I was unaccountably upset by one of the nurses, pretty Miss White, who cradled a big glassy-eyed baby doll in her arms as she sang,
Rockabye baby, in the treetop
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.
We all gasped when she dropped the baby, catching it just as it hit the floor. Perhaps it was because she wore her own real nursing uniform, but this performance was entirely too realistic for me, calling back certain nightmares from which I still suffered.
Three young men wearing big mouse ears and whiskers and sunglasses—two patients, one staff—began running around the stage in circles while Mr. Axelrod, in his accustomed cowboy hat and kerchief, brandished an enormous knife. He shouted out “Three Blind Mice,” before chasing the others off the stage and right out through the crowd, overturning several chairs and creating a hubbub.
The “garden” stirred restively, complaining. I didn’t blame them one bit, realizing how hard it must be to hold one position for so long. Virginia, in fact, sat up. But there were a few more performers—a black sheep, a baker—and then, finally, here came Robert, moving forward in somebody’s big flannel nightgown to generous applause, for he was a favorite of all, having actually lived at Highland Hospital for three years by then.
Robert went out to center stage and froze, his huge white forehead glistening with sweat. Was he supposed to be Wee Willie Winkie? Or Diddle Diddle Dumpling, my son John? We were never to know. Robert took his glasses off and mopped his face with his sleeve, then put his glasses back on and grinned a big goofy grin at the assembly before shambling offstage, waving good-bye, to laughter and friendly cheers.
Now only Mrs. Fitzgerald was left for the Finale, perfectly poised in a graceful attitude, utterly still. She seemed to swell up, growing larger before our very eyes as she waited for silence and attention. Alone among the participants, Mrs. Fitzgerald was clearly a real performer, every inch the prima ballerina in her flowing costume and her pink satin toe shoes, carrying a gauzy silver wand with streamers. A hush fell upon the hall.
I begin to play softly, almost tentatively, as “Mary” wanders out into her garden—bending, peeping, searching for her flowers, then whirling across the front of the stage in a pique because she cannot find them. Now the music sounds vexed as well, glissandos and arpeggios, and “Mary” is contrary indeed, stamping, leaping, whirling, searching furiously everywhere, to no avail . . . I play more softly now. She stops, still as marble. She is not even out of breath, holding a ballet position to recite, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?”
I play a tinkly harp-chords introduction to the “Waltz of the Flowers” as she touches the “silver bells and cockleshells” one by one with her wand. They stretch and rise, then leap up to “bloom” vigorously. Finally the “pretty maids all in a row” jump up, too, executing their funny little jig step in perfect synchronicity. Now the music is happy and jubilant, the major chords of springtime in a floating melody over the three-four time, as Mrs. Fitzgerald leads her ensemble in a “flower dance” similar to the one that she performed herself as a young girl in Alabama, where she grew up.
“Oh I was the prima ballerina of Montgomery,” she had told us. “I could have gone anywhere, and done anything. But then my husband saw me perform a solo at the Beauty Ball for officers during the war, and could not take his eyes off me, and that was that. He fell in love with me at first sight. So that was the end of it, or the beginning. He looked so handsome in his uniform. I was not yet eighteen. We danced all night and then walked out into the moonlight together, among the honeysuckle.” Her eyes had looked through us, past us, as she remembered.
Now arranged in two lines upon the stage, her pretty maids sway in unison to and fro, to and fro, to and fro—one can easily imagine a springtime breeze wafting through this “garden.” They dissolve into groups of three to dance a charming step, my favorite, holding hands and prancing round like little children in a game. Led by Mrs. Fitzgerald, they form up into a line across the front of the stage again, twirling one by one and then all together before joining hands to sink to the floor in a graceful bow . . . somewhat ahead of my final chord, but I make do. They rise and bow again, now in delight and disarray, as the applause swells.
Suddenly Mrs. Carroll appeared at the edge of the stage and gestured to me—me, Evalina!—and I came out from the piano to curtsy deeply, instinctively, though I had never done this before, and did not know that I could do it.
Then we all melted into the crowd as a professional dance band took the stage. Chairs were cleared away. Couples began to foxtrot. We had been learning to dance, too, all those who would agree to participate—in exercise class, instead of basketball or volleyball. Most of us did not dance that evening, however; we sat in folding chairs and drank the red fruit punch and ate the usually forbidden cupcakes and looked at each other, and at the dancers.
“EVALINA?” SOMEONE TOUCHED my bare back. I jumped a mile, but it was only Robert. I had been looking about for him in vain, but he had rushed off into the darkness after his appearance. Now he had taken off the nightgown, but he looked ridiculous anyhow, in some sort of black suit at least a size too small.
“Do you want to dance?” He made a crazy little bow.
“I don’t know how,” I said honestly, for I had been too timid to try it. “Do you know how?”
“Oh, I had to take lessons,” he said.
I kept forgetting about Robert’s privileged childhood.
“Well . . .” I began.
He held his elbow out at an angle and I grabbed on to it and stood up, then pitched forward to fall flat upon the floor. Somehow I had forgotten to take my new French heels off the rung on my folding chair. There was a nervous hush, then a titter, and finally a smatter of applause as I finally got up off the floor, my face burning.
“Let’s go outside,” Robert said with utter tact, leading me out the diamond-paned door and onto the cold stone porch. Globe lamps made pools of light all down the sidewalk; partygoers were already leaving.
“I didn’t know you could play the piano like that.” His voice came out of the dark.
“I didn’t either,” I said. Actually I felt wonderful, glowing, every nerve on fire, in spite of—or maybe because of—my embarrassment. Out beyond the slope of the mountain, the whole dark sky was filled with stars, the Milky Way in a huge arch, the clearest I have ever seen it.
Robert came up behind me in the dark and lifted my hair from my neck and put his lips there, a kiss that ran all the way down my body, creating a shimmering, lovely sensation that I have never forgotten in all these intervening years . . . if not passion, then the promise of passion: the salamander, twisting and shining in the sunlight.
“Ev-a-lina! Ev-a-lina!” my chums burst out the door—Lily and Virginia and Melissa—and Robert stepped back. In fact, he disappeared, and it was over. The moment, my triumph . . . it was all over.
IT WAS AS if we were in a turning kaleidoscope—everything changed. Everybody went back to being sad, or crazy, or got better and went home . . . Mrs. Fitzgerald to Montgomery for a visit, Lily to Mississippi, Robert to Cap d’Antibes where his mother was getting married for the fourth time.
I made a new friend, Ella Jean Bascomb, one of the cooks’ daughters, who came to work with her mother when school was out. She surprised me one day by singing along when I was playing “Blue Moon” in the music room at Homewood. Ella Jean had a high, thin, pitch-perfect mountain voice, and she knew lots of songs. Soon she was seated on the piano bench beside me. She taught me all the sad verses of “Barbara Allen” and other ballads they sang up in Madison County, north of Asheville, where she came from, and I began teaching her to play piano. In no time at all we could play a duet on “Heart and Soul,” belting the words out over and over, as loud as possible, until we collapsed in laughter. I taught her “Shenandoah,” which she sang beautifully, even Mrs. Carroll agreed, though she disapproved of this friendship because Ella Jean “did not come from a nice family,” by which Mrs. Carroll meant a family in town.
And actually, Mrs. Carroll didn’t know the half of it.
For Ella Jean was a tomboy through and through. She thought it was silly to hike, unable to imagine why anybody would want to just walk through these mountains she’d been walking in all her life. Instead, she taught me to swing on grapevines in the deep forest up above the hospital, climb the rocky cliffs (which she called “clifts”), find caves and old Indian graves, and strike fire from two rocks.
“I’m part Cherokee,” she declared one time.
“Which part?” I asked. “Your hiney?”
She chased me through the trees. We built a fort and painted Indian signs on our arms and legs with pokeberry juice, then smoked rabbit tobacco she’d brought tied up in a rag from home. Unfortunately I got sick after this escapade, which caused Mrs. Hodges to declare Ella Jean “too rambunctious!” and limit our activities to the hospital grounds. Mrs. Hodges seemed relieved as, increasingly, Ella Jean had to stay home to take care of the younger children in her family.
After several false starts, spring finally came to North Carolina. Along with the rest, I spent long hours in the gardens under the direction of old Gerhardt Otto, weeding around the perennials as they popped up in the beds near the buildings, clearing dead brush away everywhere, planting early lettuce in the covered beds at Brushwood, then seeds and tomato plants in the garden. I came to love the smell of the soil itself; my arms grew strong and brown.
In June, a pool of scary red blood appeared without warning on my sheets, terrifying me. Nobody had ever told me that this would happen. Nurse White was dispatched to “show me the ropes,” as Mrs. Hodges put it, “the belt and pads and such.”
I was out in the garden again, wearing this apparatus as I separated irises at the edge of the forest late one afternoon, when I heard laughter back in the trees. I stood up and peered into the woods to glimpse Miss Quinn, our PE instructor, and my beloved old art teacher Miss Malone actually kissing each other, of all things! Miss Malone’s back was turned to me; her long gray braid swung back and forth, back and forth, like the metronome on my piano. Across her shoulder, Miss Quinn winked at me—I’m sure she did—but she said nothing, and neither did I.
Summer fled past, a beautiful summer. In June, Mrs. Carroll took me to Mrs. Grady’s Country Day School, all dressed up in a new dress with a sailor collar, for an interview. I played Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” on the piano for Mrs. Grady, who closed her eyes and swayed to the music. In July, my chums and I were taken out in boats on the French Broad River. Miss Quinn taught me to swim several different strokes in the Highland pool. Mrs. Hodges taught me to play bridge, which I was very good at. My period came and went again, twice more, my own bright blood, and I did not die. I learned a monologue, “To a Drunken Father,” though I had no father. Monologues were sweeping the country, said Phoebe Dean.
In August, the staff and patients of Highland put on an outdoor performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream that starred Dr. Carroll himself, in puff sleeves and embarrassing white tights. Everyone got lost in the forest and then came out with someone else, holding hands, and then got married. By that time, I was coming to understand that there are all kinds of love. And there is no telling whom we may love, or when or why, or vice versa—for love is the greatest mystery of all. The Kiss in the Garden, I thought, smiling to imagine this book among my other Nancy Drews on their special shelf in my room, as I remembered Miss Quinn and Miss Malone’s long kiss. I pictured Mrs. Carroll and Dr. Carroll in a similar embrace, surrounded by yellow roses; Miss Ella on the train platform with her twinkly old boyfriend and his bouquet; Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald waltzing all night long in Alabama when they were young; and my own beautiful young mother, how she brightened when Arthur Graves appeared at our door, back when he loved us so. Robert’s face rose before me unbidden, like the sun.
Finally, the good news came: I would attend Mrs. Grady’s Country Day School beginning in September. I would move into a room at Homewood, almost with the Carrolls! I counted the days, weeding the gardens and gathering tomatoes, ripe and warm from the sun.
“NOW THEN, EVALINA, I’d say you are finally on your way!” Mrs. Hodges announced with no small satisfaction as she drove me over to Mrs. Grady’s on that first day of school. It was early September, a bright blue blowing day. Leaves skittered about our feet as we got out of the car. “Hold still, now.” She yanked my collar, gave my blouse an extra tuck, smoothed back my hair, and then surprised me with a brisk, firm kiss on the cheek. “Pretty as a picture you are,” she said. “There’ll be none finer, not to worry.”
But I wasn’t worried, oddly enough. Nothing about school had ever alarmed me; I was good at school, placed a year ahead into ninth grade. I welcomed the regularity of Mrs. Grady’s, which was much calmer than our classes had been at Highland—no one ever burst into tears or fits or ran from the room crying or attacked anyone else. I loved the uniforms at Mrs. Grady’s, the bells and books and teams: everybody was on the Blue team or the Gold. I was to be a Gold. Now my time at Highland stood me in good stead, especially for athletics. Though I had never played some of these organized games, such as basketball or field hockey, I had grown strong walking up and down those hospital slopes, and I could run like the wind. I learned fast. The other girls had somehow gotten the idea that I was the Carrolls’ granddaughter, and I did nothing to enlighten them. Nor did Mrs. Grady herself, a formidable maiden lady who actually winked at me once when this came up. As a “new girl,” I was briefly the darling, courted by all. Everyone wanted to share her lunch with me, to be my partner in the relay races, to swing with me on the wicker swing in the arbor.
It was a heady, sunny time for me, which somewhat offset my greatest disappointment: for Robert Liebnitz did not return to us. Mrs. Hodges and I sat side by side on the horsehair loveseat in the Carrolls’ apartment while Mrs. Carroll read his mother’s letter aloud to us. She wrote informing the Carrolls that her new husband, named Dr. Jerome Livingston, was an internationally acclaimed professor, a don of philosophy.
“That’s rich!” snorted Mrs. Hodges. “He’ll need some philosophy, he will, dealing with the likes of that woman! She’ll run him ragged in no time, that she will. Mark my words.”
Mrs. Carroll raised an elegant eyebrow at Mrs. Hodges, then continued. Apparently Dr. Livingston was also a famous educator who was very interested in Robert’s “case,” and had “taken him on.”
“It’s about time, I’d say!” Mrs. Hodges seemed mollified. “Nothing wrong with the child, I always said. Just too smart, that’s all. Too in-tell-i-gent.” She made it sound like a curse, or an illness.
Robert’s mother had bought a grand house for Dr. Livingston, a widower with several daughters of his own, in Cornwall, England. I was immediately jealous when I heard this news. Robert was already attending Oxford University under some sort of special dispensation arranged for him by his new stepfather. He was said to be “adjusting well” to all these arrangements. In fact, he was “in his element,” according to all.
Mrs. Carroll put the fluttery avion letter down on the porcelain back of the elephant table next to her chair. “So we shall all miss him, yes?” She touched my hand.
“I daresay,” answered Mrs. Hodges, while I nodded, unable to speak.
“And yet, it is what we hope for above all things, Dr. Carroll and myself,” Mrs. Carroll continued quite seriously, leaning forward to cross her thin ankles. “That all our children shall be healed and strengthened, and go on to live successful real lives of their own, beyond our beloved mountain.”
I nodded and tried to smile, though tears were running down my face. I understood that her words were meant for me, too, that the kaleidoscope was taking yet another turn, and I had better adjust to this new pattern.
Of course I continued my music lessons with Mrs. Carroll, sometimes along with several other town students, including a black girl named Eunice Kathleen Waymon who would later be known as Nina Simone. Mrs. Carroll had first heard her sing at a gospel service downtown. Now Mrs. Carroll was very interested in Eunice Waymon, more interested in her than she was in me, I felt. I was jealous of Eunice in the same way I had always been jealous of Mrs. Fitzgerald, who had sometimes been taken on trips with the Carrolls, once to Sarasota, Florida, for instance, where she studied art and they all went to the circus. I had been terribly upset about this; I would have given anything to see the circus! And now Mrs. Carroll was giving Eunice Waymon private singing lessons. Still, Eunice was very sweet to me and to everyone, and I was pleased to accompany her at the Carrolls’ afternoon soirees, when Eunice leaned up against the piano to sing “Night and Day” with all the assurance of a born performer. It was funny to see such a little girl with such a big voice, and to hear her sing those grown-up songs.
“Pizzazz!” Mrs. Hodges crowed. “That girl has got it!” Everyone clapped and shouted “Bravo!” when we were done, and Mrs. Carroll gave us cupcakes and little cucumber sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off, and fruit punch in tiny green glasses from Italy.
My old chums had dispersed over the summer, along with Robert. It was as if they had all walked into the forest as in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Lily had stayed on in Mississippi, where she liked living with her Aunt Dee Dee in a big house brimming over with smaller cousins, four of them. I wrote to her, worried that she might be like Cinderella in this situation, but Lily wrote back saying no, there was plenty of help, and she was very excited because she was going to make her debut in two years’ time. Lily wrote to me on pink stationery with her name engraved on it in raised rose lettering.
Miss Lily Ponder
Summerlin Grove
Greenville, Mississippi
Virginia Day had gotten better and had gone to a boarding school named Chatham Hall, though Mrs. Hodges told me privately that she wasn’t sure Virginia was quite ready for this, and she was quite sure that Chatham Hall was not ready for Virginia. Melissa had been transferred to another hospital back home in Tennessee. “Cheaper,” Mrs. Hodges said succinctly. Always discouraged by Mrs. Carroll, my friendship with Ella Jean Bascomb had now become nonexistent. An occasional hurried wave across the hospital grounds was about it, now that my activities at Mrs. Grady’s kept me so busy. Before I knew it, Ella Jean had disappeared from my life.