Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Page 10

  How, then, could I be like Dominique?

  One hot spring night while the city seethed, I lay on my bed rereading the scene in which Dominique throws a marble statue out of her window because she cannot bear the thought that unworthy people might gaze upon it. A thrill coursed through my fat-slabbed body. Maybe if I threw something out of my window …

  I looked around the room. I did not have a marble statue but I did have a Shmoo, an armless blob of a doll popular at the time that bore a striking resemblance to me. Granny had won it in a raffle. I picked it up and went to the window.

  “I do this as an act of scorn,” I intoned, and let fly the Shmoo.

  A few minutes later I heard an uproar in the hallway, followed by a violent knocking at our door. Peeking out of the bedroom, I saw a hysterical Miss Inez hurl herself into Granny’s arms.

  “The colored are dropping bombs!”

  Seconds later Mr. Koustopolous lumbered in bearing the incriminating Shmoo.

  “Say, dissa fell out your winda,” he said, offering it to Granny while his puzzled eyes took in the distraught Miss Inez. When she saw the Shmoo she let out a scream.

  “Don’t touch it! It’ll go off!”

  “Hah? Dissa litt’l doll. My Helen, she got one same ding.” He wiped the dirt off the Shmoo with his apron and smiled. “I see litt’l girl here atta winda. She droppa doll.”

  “What?” Mama yelled in her crest-the-ridge voice. “Florence, come here!”

  I made the fatal error of trying to explain too much. The sensible thing to have done was to hide behind a semi-lie; own up to it, but say that I had accidentally knocked the Shmoo off the windowsill. Mr. Koustopolous had set it up for me by using “fell” and “drop.” There was no need to bring up the subject of throwing the Shmoo out the window, and God knows it was no time to go into the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Nonetheless, I panicked and did precisely that.

  “I had to do it because Dominique did it! She had to destroy everything she loved in case she felt herself weakening and getting like the others! They were second-handers but she was an individual! So was Howard Roark! That’s why he refused to build Greek columns!”

  “Hah?”

  “What is that child talking about?” Granny asked querulously.

  “Dominique and Howard are the only two people they’ve ever met who blend exaltation with degradation! She hates him because she loves him!”

  “Who the hell wrote that book, Evelyn Cunningham?”

  Miss Inez was still sobbing, Granny was still patting her, and Mr. Koustopolous was still holding the Shmoo. He turned it over and looked at it as though seeking the key to my free-form book report in its batty smile. We were posed in this tableau when Herb walked in.

  When he found out what had happened, he chided me gently for frightening Miss Inez.

  “She was acting out a scene in a novel,” he apologized for me. “It’s quite simple, actually. You see, the egoist and the compromiser—”

  “Don’t you start!” Mama yelled.

  The Central transfer went through despite J. Edgar Hoover. As a consolation prize the graduating ninth graders were given the choice of attending any Washington high school we wanted without regard to the zoning rules. I was on the verge of choosing Western, the alma mater of Helen Hayes, when something happened that rezoned our whole family.

  One of the poor souls died and left Granny a house.

  It was located far up 14th Street near the Colorado Avenue car barn in what Washingtonians call the “second alphabet.” It means out toward the Maryland line. It was a row house with three bedrooms, two baths, a glassed-in back porch, and a small bachelor apartment with shower bath and pullman kitchen in the cellar. The deed called this the maid’s room.

  The house alone was windfall enough in our modest experience, but we didn’t get the house alone. Mrs. Dabney’s will said “house and contents.”

  “It’s just a few things,” Granny said.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Mama when we walked in.

  It was a Victorian parlor maid’s nightmare, marked by the kind of decor involving the word “throw.” Throw pillows, throw covers, throw cloths; fringes, tassles, filigrees, fretwork, beaded curtains, silk screens, and a shredding tapestry illustrating the progress of a Japanese beheading from the victim’s farewell to his mistress to the dangling of the headless corpse from a palace window. Next to throw, the operative word was “occasional.” Occasional tables, occasional chairs, occasional lamps; footstools, hassocks, stacked trays, wheeled teacarts, and enough card tables to start a gambling den.

  There was a five-foot mirror over the dining room sideboard but it was virtually hidden by that frondish extra touch no Christian old lady can resist: sheaves of Palm Sunday palm, enough to build a hut, were stuck behind the gilded frame. The magnificent black walnut sideboard was covered with souvenir cups and saucers, elephants in descending sizes, pug dogs, monkeys in sets of three, paperweights with snow scenes, and tiny glass artifacts—shoes, baskets, fans, swans—that could be held on a fingertip.

  “She was so feminine,” Granny sighed.

  Mama gave her a disgusted look. “I bet she was one of those women who goes around saying, ‘I like little things.’”

  The worst clutter was in the glassed back porch. It goes without saying that Mrs. Dabney had been the plant type. She had turned the porch into a jungle; the air was dank, heavy with rot and death and the yellowing white suits of Somerset Maugham’s remittance men. Herb took one look at it and said, “Gin and tonic.”

  The attic contained seventeen clocks: chime-and-pendulum stemwinders, a Seth Thomas banjo clock, some Swiss cuckoos, a Louis Quinze with enameled pictures of Fragonard swishes, and three or four of the kind with naked mechanisms enclosed in a glass bubble.

  “They don’t any of them work,” said Granny. “She had to dial time-of-day to make sure she didn’t miss ‘Stella Dallas.’”

  “It figures,” said Mama.

  “I’ll have a look at them and see if I can fix them,” said Herb.

  It took us three weeks to clear the place out so we could move in. Now that we had a whole house, Mama and Herb gave up all pretense of being married and took separate rooms. That left one bedroom for Granny and the basement apartment for me—or so I thought.

  “I want that apartment for Jensy,” Granny said. She tugged on her corset, a sure sign that a moral absolute was coming. “The way I see it, this is Jensy’s house as much as mine. She helped me nurse Mrs. Dabney.”

  “Won’t it cause trouble in the neighborhood?” asked Mama.

  “Why should it? The deed says ‘maid’s room.’ Now, whoever heard of a white maid?”

  We had all heard about Jensy’s housing problem. Sometimes it was hard to take her complaints seriously because her standards were so high that only a host of angels would have passed muster as neighbors. She was always telling us about the “trashy niggers” she had to live amongst. A product of the Booker T. Washington era when “Be a credit to your race” was the Eleventh Commandment, she found fault with everything black people did. Her tirades could have been lifted from Klan literature. To her, a “nigger” was any black person who owned a deck of cards, drank a beer on a hot day, or lingered on a street corner longer than it took a traffic light to change. She refused to stop and chat with anyone lest some white person see her and think she was lazing in the sun. She walked so fast it was almost impossible to keep up with her.

  She was now alone in the world, having disowned all her relatives. She threw her husband out when Mama was a child, and both daughters a few years before I was born. One of them wrote to her from Chicago but she marked the letter Return to Sinner and dropped it back in the box. Now she had only about four or five friends, all hard-core members of her Lily of the Valley church group, known along U Street as the “witchwomens” for their ceaseless efforts to purify the neighborhood.

  “I’m afraid she’s going to get hurt,” said Granny. “She runs around with those Bibleb
acks preaching to drunks and singing hymns in men’s ears while they’re trying to play poker. Last Sunday she kicked a checkerboard off some man’s lap. One of these days some dope fiend is going to cut her to ribbons if we don’t get her out of there.”

  Granny was an arch-segregationist but she was also an elitist. The two skeins came together in the Marian Anderson—Constitution Hall controversy. She felt that since some people are better than others, and since Marian Anderson was clearly one of the elect, she should be allowed to sing in Constitution Hall. As for the audience, any colored people who wanted to hear a superior person sing must themselves be superior, so it would be all right to sell them tickets provided the center aisle was used to segregate the entire hall down the middle.

  Something that used to happen regularly in Washington brought out another aspect of her tangled credo. An African diplomat in a daishiki would try to buy a ticket to a first-run movie on F Street, be refused admission, and end up on the front page of the newspaper. Since the diplomat’s ancestresses had been at a safe remove from Southern gentlemen, he was always much darker than most American blacks, but to Granny it made no nevermind.

  “They ought to sell him a ticket,” she ruled.

  “But he’s colored,” said Mama.

  “Yes, but he’s not really colored because he’s a foreigner.”

  “Mother, sometimes I think you re a little touched.”

  “Be that as it may.”

  Granny decided not to say anything to Jensy about the apartment until she was sure she was on solid legal ground. It would have been a clear-cut matter in any other part of the South in 1950, but Washington’s system of segregation was as full of contradictions as Granny herself, a crazy quilt of law and custom complicated by the fact that the city was Federal territory. Concerts at the National Gallery of Art were integrated because it was a Federal building; otherwise the rule was “Where there’s a roof, there’s segregation.” Thus public parks and the drinking fountains therein were open to all.

  Some District buildings came under the roof rule and some did not. Public libraries were integrated and Granny the book-hater approved.

  “Only nice colored people would want to spend their time in the library, so they won’t cause any trouble.”

  “Karl Marx invented communism in the reading room of the British Museum,” Herb cautioned.

  “That’s different, he was a foreigner.”

  D.C. public transit was integrated, but any black making a transfer trip to Virginia had to get off an integrated city vehicle and board a segregated Virginia bus at the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Blacks who wished to make a point were technically free to sit anywhere they liked as long as the Virginia bus was traveling through Washington, but since this would only mean having to change seats when it crossed the Potomac, black passengers seated themselves in the back at the start of the trip.

  Some of this mess was straightened out in 1948 when theaters and restaurants were integrated, but schools remained segregated until 1954. The big puzzle was housing. Classified ads listed rentals under “White” and “Colored,” but property ownership was somewhat different. There was a black family in one of the houses on Park Road when I was a toddler. If a black person able to buy could find a white person willing to sell, the deal could go through providing there were no restrictive covenants in the deed.

  It was all so byzantine that Granny decided to consult a lawyer. Mrs. Halloway of the Daughters had a niece who had a fiancé whose uncle practiced law in an old established family firm in Fairfax. The uncle’s name was Richard Pinckney Farnsworth, Jr., or as Mrs. Halloway called him, “Little Dick.” She arranged an appointment for Granny and off we went.

  “You want a lawyer who’s been called Little Dick all his life?” Mama asked as we drove across the Key Bridge. “I bet he doesn’t have any self-confidence.”

  “Louise, the child is listening.”

  Mama read the situation perfectly. We never met Little Dick. When we arrived at the eighteenth-century mews that housed the Farnsworth legal practice, we were greeted by none other than Big Dick, still hale and hearty and very much alive at eighty.

  “I’m retired from practice,” he explained, “but I come down to the office every day to make sure that damn fool son of mine doesn’t do anything simpleminded. When I heard about your problem, I told him I’d take care of it. I sent him down to the drugstore to buy himself a soda. ‘Sides, be a shame to waste such a bevy of feminine pulchritude on him. That’s a veritable flower garden of a hat, Mrs. Ruding, never saw anything so fetching. You are Primavera! How you, little lady? You grow up to be half as pretty as your mama and grandma and you’ll be the belle of the ball. Come on in my office—no, not that one, that’s Little Dick’s. I gave him the one without any windows ’cause he stares at the wall anyhow. Mine’s over here.”

  “Preston and Daddy,” Mama murmured under her breath.

  Big Dick’s office looked like a Shinto temple. A huge oil portrait of the first Farnsworth in America covered most of one wall; except for the Restoration wig and the Van Dyke beard, the Ancestor was the very spit of Big Dick. The rest of the wall space was taken up by membership scrolls in genealogical orders. Big Dick was Jamestown Society, First Families of Virginia, Sons of the American Revolution, and Society of the Cincinnati, i.e., descendants of George Washington’s officers. In a corner of the room well away from the sunlight stood a glass case containing a faded and torn Confederate flag and a daguerrotype of another Big Dick look-alike in a gray uniform.

  This was the man Granny turned to for help in installing Jensy in a white neighborhood. She could not have made a wiser choice. As he listened to her story, it was obvious that he had had a Jensy in his life, too. There was no need for Granny to explain her labyrinthine prejudices; he shared them. There was no need for her to explain the many exceptions to her many ironclad rules; he made the same exceptions. He and she were so much alike that they did not even have to converse in a conventional fashion. They spoke in a verbal shorthand that is impossible to reproduce in print. It was a classic example of what psychologists call “consciousness of kind.”

  The actual advice Big Dick gave us was nothing much more than a confirmation of Granny’s commonsense analysis of the deed’s wording, but he put it in such a gallant way that I could almost hear her toes curling inside her Enna Jetticks.

  “You are a veritable Portia, Mrs. Ruding! I couldn’t have put it better myself! Yes, indeed, Portia walks among us again.”

  I could also hear Mama thinking “Portia Who?” I could straighten that out on the drive home, but they would have to consult Herb on Primavera.

  Big Dick walked us to the door and out to the car, holding Granny’s arm like the flower of chivalry. As we were about to drive off, he stuck his head in the window for a last bit of Southern chitchat.

  “Next time you’re out this way, be sure and come by the house and I’ll show you the rope one of my ancestors was hanged with. It’s silk,” he said proudly. “He was a viscount. Privilege of the nobility to be hanged with a silk rope.”

  Granny’s attitude about the apartment and the visit to Big Dick stayed with me. Never had she made it clearer what being a lady meant. She fought for civil rights differently, but she fought.

  There was no trouble in the neighborhood about Jensy, but having another member of his fan club in residence did nothing to spur Herb’s flagging ambition.

  He had been drifting for several years. Since the end of the war, his engagements, whether music or bartending, had become fewer and seedier and his income had shrunk accordingly. If Granny had not had what ladies of her vintage called “a little something,” we would have been on our uppers.

  One of the reasons for his lack of drive came out when Granny suggested a way to improve his sagging career.

  “Why don’t you organize your own band, Mr. King? Play for the rich crowd and the higher-ups in government. You’d fit in so well with people like that. Get
a copy of the Washington Social Register and solicit engagements from it. Once you play at one of those parties, the hostess spreads the word to all of her friends. Those women don’t want the trashy type of musician in their homes. As refined as you are, you’d be a great success, I know it.”

  Granny knew nothing about music but she was on the right track. In a field that all too often runs to greasy-haired gum-chewers and worse, Herb stood out like a rose among thorns. Now that his black-cherry hair had grayed at the temples, he looked more like a casting office Englishman than ever. He could have been another Lester Lanin.

  “That’s good of you, Mrs. Ruding, but I couldn’t put myself forward to people like that. It would be …” He trailed off, shaking his head.

  “Why not?” Mama demanded. “You’re as good as they are.”

  He winced. “Oh, Louise …”

  There was an ocean between them—literally. Although he had been an American citizen for almost thirty years, he was still the psychological property of Edwardian England. His self-improvement contained no trace of status seeking; he had remained acutely aware of the uncrossable line between himself and his “betters.” The idea of thumbing through the Social Register for likely prospects filled him with horror.

  The other reason for his lack of drive was his American experience. Unlike other immigrants, the Englishman is sublimely unaware of the existence of those privileged beings known as “real” Americans. Anglo-Saxon blood and easily pronounced names have no power to intimidate him, and so he never develops the inferiority complex that spurs other immigrants to pursue success. When he arrives in America he is neither tired nor poor nor huddled, but simply here. Not only is he excused from proving himself, but the “real” Americans look up to him.