Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady_A Memoir Page 8

  Just then the phone rang. It was Aunt Charlotte with a peace offering.

  “I just talked to Bud,” she said, “and he’s willing to give you the lamb.” She giggled. “I pretended to cry and he gave in,” she explained proudly. “We’ll pay to have the lamb taken off the stone and Florence can keep it.”

  “Oh, Louise,” Granny said happily, putting her hand over the mouthpiece, “it’s all settled. Botetourt is going to give us the lamb.”

  “Give!” Mama bellowed. “Who the hell does that shitass bastard think he is? He’s not giving us anything—I’m going to take it!”

  She stormed over to the hall closet, yanked her coat off a hanger, and tossed mine to me.

  “Louise, what are you going to do?” Granny cried.

  “He’s not going to chop that lamb off and toss it to Florence like some old bone you give a dog. I’m going over to that goddamn graveyard and take the whole friggin’ slab!”

  “Louise—”

  “Don’t Louise me! Get out of the way!”

  She borrowed a pickax and shovel from the janitor and tossed them in the back of the car. It was eleven in the morning on a rainy February weekday; the cemetery was deserted. I carried four Lansburgh’s shopping bags, one inside the other, and Mama brought the tools.

  The little tombstone moved when she leaned hard against it. She grunted with satisfaction. After about ten minutes of hacking and digging she got it out. We shoved it into the shopping bags and hurried back to the car, looking for all the world like Burke and Hare. When we got home, Granny was lying on the sofa with an icebag on her head. She looked at the muddy shopping bags and groaned.

  “Louise, how could you? You stole it! How could you?”

  “It runs in the family,” Mama replied. “All those ancestors you’re always bragging about were nothing but a bunch of thieves—that’s why they were sent here.”

  My parfit ungentil knight-mother … How I wish Chaucer could have known her. Years later when I read This Side of Paradise, I underlined a passage that reminded me of her: “She had that coarse streak usually found in natures that are both fine and big.”

  »six«

  MY first adult book was Gone With the Wind, which I read when I was eight. My favorite character was Ashley because he reminded me of Herb. I saw Melanie through a bedpan, darkly, and Scarlett disappointed me when I came to the sentence: She had not willingly opened a book since leaving the Fayetteville Female Academy the year before. Thanks to Granny’s fallen woman songs, my favorite female character was Belle Watling.

  A book that proved to be a great comfort to me was plugged inadvertently during Traffic Safety Week assembly when Washington’s chief of police came to our school to give us a lecture on how to cross the street.

  “The red light means STOP!” he boomed congenially, tapping his chart smartly with his pointer. “The green light means GO, and the amber—”

  The audience dissolved in hysteria. Girls shrieked, boys yelled “hubba-hubba,” and the teachers blushed furiously as they ran up and down the aisles trying to quiet us down.

  Herb was probably the only person in America who bought a copy of Forever Amber for its descriptions of Restoration London. Amber was an illegitimate daughter of the nobility who was farmed out to rustics and raised among people who sensed something “different” about her. The adults disliked her, the village girls envied her, the boys were afraid of her, and everybody called her stuck up. She had peer problems long before she met Lord Carleton, so I identified with her at once.

  I did not understand the sex scenes so I asked Peg for clarification. As the youngest in a large family, she was in a position to receive a wealth of trickle-down information not available to an only child. We had the “intercourse is when” conversation that passed for dirty talk in 1944. Her description of the beast with two backs puzzled me.

  “Where does the lady put her feet?”

  “In the air.”

  There was no air in Anthony Adverse. Compared to Hervey Allen’s water symbolism, Granny’s sexual euphemisms were models of clarity. Anthony copulated in oceans, whirlpools, waterfalls, and once, I was certain, in a giant copper vat. I could not understand what kept him from drowning, or, given the logistics of the missionary position as described by Peg, why the lady didn’t drown first.

  “Get your nose out of that book!” Granny cried. “That’s the biggest book I ever saw! I don’t know how you can pick it up, much less read it. I have told you and told you that a lady is accomplished but never bookish.”

  “Be that as it may,” I replied.

  Granny wasn’t the only person nagging on this subject now. The moment the war ended, GIs came home singing the praises of the European woman’s perfect femininity.

  “Bullshit, they said that the last time,” Mama snorted.

  She seemed to be the only person in the entire country willing to stand up for the home team. Newspapers and magazines picked up the scent and inundated the reading public with articles on “What’s Wrong With the American Woman?”

  “This fellow Henry Adams answered that at the turn of the century,” said Herb. Opening The Dynamo and the Virgin, he read aloud: “An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” asked Mama.

  “America is a Protestant country and a puritanical country. There’s no female ideal in America, never has been. Therefore, it’s culturally impossible for the American woman to be feminine because she has no defining goddesses.”

  “What about all those Catholic foreigners we’ve let in?” Granny demanded. “Seems to me like they’re trying to Mary us to death.”

  Herb shook his head.

  “Their chief ambition has been to Americanize themselves. And to that end,” he added ruefully, “they’ve weakened their goddess heritage. The American Catholic doesn’t see the Virgin as the figure of commanding womanliness that the medieval world worshipped. She’s been turned into a long-suffering Irish mother. American women who copy that kind of femininity will end up as martyrs.”

  Granny looked discomfited. I wondered if she was thinking about her missions of mercy. Though she would never consciously pattern herself on a Catholic figure, she had opted for goodness instead of badness.

  “The soldiers in that article were talking about Dutch women,” I countered. “Holland is a Protestant country.”

  “Yeah,” Mama agreed. “How come they’re such goody-goodies?”

  “European countries that are Protestant now were Catholic for many centuries, and pagan before that. The Protestant women of Europe have race memory on their side,” Herb replied.

  “What’s race memory?” I asked.

  “An instinct that remains in people from something their ancestors did.”

  “Race memory runs in our family,” Granny said with a pleased smile.

  Mama squared her shoulders and lifted her head.

  “We don’t need any goddamn goddesses from over there. They called Jean Harlow the American Venus and now they’re saying the same thing about Jane Russell. Americans can invent anything,” she said proudly.

  “Ah, you’ve hit on the key to all this, Louise,” Herb said eagerly. “American women do have to invent their own female ideals—that’s why there are so many counterfeit versions of femininity, like the Southern belle.”

  “This is the silliest conversation I ever did hear,” Granny huffed. “American womanhood is as constant as the tides. That Henry Adams is just some old foreigner who doesn’t understand our ways.”

  For once Herb’s poker face deserted him.

  “Mrs. Ruding, he was the great-grandson of President John Adams and the grandson of President John Quincy Adams.”

  “Be that as it may.”

  The articles got worse when the Japanese occupation began. Writers poured invective on American women for not washing men’s backs. A few desperate women took up back-washing; “Why I Washed My Husband
’s Back” appeared, but the practice did not catch on. Another one did. Rosie the Riveter succumbed to journalistic bullying, quit her job, and scurried back to the home. Pleased by her obedience, the magazines called off their dogs and began praising American women for their good sense. The feminine mystique had begun.

  Characteristically, Mama picked this time to drop her bomb.

  “I’m going back to work.”

  “Oh, Louise!” Granny cried. “You’re a married woman with a child!”

  “The child is ten going on forty and I’m going back to work.”

  “I wish Mr. King would keep his theories to himself,” Granny sighed. “He’s put ideas in your head, and he’s going to put them in that child’s head, you wait and see,” she added ominously.

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with that John Quincy Shitass stuff,” Mama said quickly. “It’s because I don’t have a goddamn thing to do around here. You do the cooking, Jensy does the cleaning—all I do is go to the friggin’ grocery store! I’ll be as crazy as Evelyn if I don’t get out of this apartment.”

  She would not be dissuaded. Granny gave in, but before turning Mama loose she delivered a lecture on the proper way to apprise a husband of such unwarranted intentions.

  “Mr. King is very sensitive. You must make him think that your getting a job is his idea.”

  They rehearsed, with Granny playing Herb’s part, until she felt Mama had it all down pat. The performance opened at the dinner table after Granny had served the coffee (her motto was “Feed him first”). She gave the cue and it began.

  “A full nest knows no rest till fledglings take to wing,” Mama recited rotely.

  Herb’s spoon stopped in mid-stir.

  “Time hangs heavy on empty hands. Cares grow … days grow long when cares grow short.”

  It was vintage Granny, but Herb was too agape to be concerned with sources. He must have thought she wanted to have another baby.

  After waiting through a trenchant pause, which I’m certain she was counting, Mama gave him a look of such determined submissiveness that he flinched.

  “I was thinking of going back to work,” she murmured with unprecedented equivocation. “Do you mind?”

  He recommenced his stirring.

  “It’s up to you, Louise.”

  “Okay, that’s what I wanted to hear. I’m going back to work.”

  Granny shook her head in despair. Later on after Herb had left, she took Mama to task.

  “Louise, I’ve told you and told you that you must think of male pride. Men have to be—”

  “Oh, Mother, I can’t fart around with that Southern stuff, it takes too long. I gave it a try like I promised, now stop fussing.”

  She returned to her old job as a telephone operator. Some of the seniority she had collected before she married was still good, so she advanced quickly. The murderous pace and tension of the work suited her temperament perfectly and even seemed to relax her; forbidden to smoke on the job, she got used to fewer cigarettes and managed to cut down to two packs a day with no trouble.

  However vehemently she might deny it, her decision to go back to work had everything to do with that John Quincy Shitass stuff. In his quiet, sardonic way Herb had saved me from the destructive aspects of Granny’s ladysmithery, and now he had saved Mama from herself.

  Granny was right about one thing: his Henry Adams theory did put ideas in my head. The approach of puberty was beginning to add another dimension to my peer problems, making me wonder what kind of a woman I would be and what my adult life would be like. At ten my powers of speculation were still extremely limited, but I had a feeling that I was destined for the kind of tumultuous situation that Mama called a “beaut.” Seeking some sort of answer, I read The Dynamo and the Virgin and turned Henry Adams into a household oracle. Ignoring Granny’s laments (“If I hear that name one more time …”), I pursued the subject of America’s goddess shortage with Herb.

  “Take, for example, the Southern woman’s obsession with maiden names,” he said. “Have you ever heard anyone refer to Evelyn Bosworth?”

  “No, it’s always Evelyn Cunningham.”

  He nodded. “What other examples can you think of?”

  “When we go to see Aunt Nana, all the old ladies call me ‘Louise Ruding’s girl.’ Some of them call Mama ‘Lura Upton’s girl.’”

  “Quite right. You probably don’t remember this, but there used to be a very old lady of ninety-five or so who remembered Mrs. Ruding’s mother. I actually heard your grandmother referred to as ‘Mary Codrick’s girl.’”

  “Aunt Nana even does it with her own name!” I said, warming to the subject. “Like when she says, ‘Never let it be said that Nana Cunningham deserted a friend in need.’”

  Herb crossed his legs and smiled an almost catlike smile of immense intellectual satisfaction.

  “Genealogy in the service of perpetual virginity,” he purred. “The land of the clinging vine is actually the land of the clinging maiden name, isn’t it?”

  I graduated from elementary school that spring. Near the end of the sixth grade we were given an IQ test without being told what it was. The teacher, a huggybear, became so unhinged by the mere thought of a sabot being tossed into her leveling machine that she spent most of the morning praising the forthcoming test in an Aeschylean speech that sounded like Clytemnestra compulsively telling everyone who would listen that she had never, no never, committed adultery.

  “I have some good news! You’re going to take the most wonderful test tomorrow. It’s going to be fun! I’ll bet you think that’s too good to be true, don’t you? Well, it is true—how about that? Now, it’s a leetle bit different from what you’re used to. You have to use a special pencil, and you’ll be timed. But it has lots of pictures of things like, oh, slices of pie and circles and squares and such. And best of all—oh, I know you’ll be happy to hear this—you won’t get a grade on it!”

  “Then why are we taking it?” I asked.

  I got the look all Cassandras get. “To help you get used to grownup tests,” the huggybear replied, forcing a laugh. “You’re growing up and going to junior high.”

  After the test, Peg and I compared notes. Considering our long-standing mutual aid pact wherein I copied her math and she copied my spelling, our reactions were not surprising.

  “I finished the pies way ahead of time,” she said, “but I only got halfway through the part with the story and the list of words.”

  “I was the other way around. The story and words were easy but the pies got on my nerves.”

  “You were supposed to figure out which pieces made a whole circle and which were the extra ones that didn’t fit.”

  “I know. That’s why they got on my nerves.”

  “I bet they’re trying to find out what we’re good at.”

  “But they already know.”

  A voice behind us spoke.

  “They’re trying to find out who’s smart and who’s dumb so they’ll know what track to put us in when we get to junior high.”

  It was Ann Hopkins, the only girl in the sixth grade able to wear a skirt without suspenders to hold it up. She was what Granny called “overdeveloped.”

  “What’s a track?” I asked.

  “There’s 7A1, 7A2, 7A3, and 7A4. Four is smartest, three is next-to-smartest, two is average, and one is dumb. I want to be in 7A2 so I can be popular. Average kids are always the most popular.” Her eyes widened. “It’s even more important for girls to be average. Boys don’t like smart girls but you have to be smart enough to ask the right questions when a boy is explaining something to you, so that’s why I want to be average. You get the most dates.”

  On a hot rainy September morning, Peg, Helen, and I walked to Powell Junior High just above 14th and Park Road. My New Look transparent plastic raincoat, the last word in postwar fashion, was so long that water dripped off the hem directly into the top of my socks. We squished into the building and followed the signs to the auditorium and to
ok seats. At nine the principal entered, followed by four women teachers. He mounted the podium and unfolded some papers.

  “I will call the names of those of you assigned to 7A4. When you hear your name, rise and stand by the wall until the group is complete.”

  Our three names were not among the ones he called. When the intellectual plutocrats had left with their new homeroom teacher, the principal began on the 7A3s. We were in it, and so was Ann Hopkins. As we made our way to the wall, Peg and I exchanged a resigned glance.

  “Words,” she said.

  “Pies,” I replied.

  Ann groaned at the thought of being next-to-smartest instead of average.

  A pretty blond teacher named Miss Ogilvy beckoned us to follow her. As I squished moistly behind her I admired the way her New Look skirt swirled glamourously in undulating waves near her ankles. It also stayed up on her hips, while mine was pinned to my undershirt. To complete the contrast, she looked as fresh as a daisy and I was beginning to smell. It was the plastic raincoat. Some amazing new synthetic chemical, as yet unperfected, was wafting from it like vapor from a cesspool. I sniffed at my forearm and nearly gagged. Whatever it was, it had clung tenaciously to me.

  In homeroom, Miss Ogilvy arranged us alphabetically, made a seating chart, assigned lockers, gave us our class schedules, and asked for someone to act as class chaplain for the daily Bible reading. I scrunched down and concealed my face in my stinking arms, terrified that she would pick me because I looked—yes, looked—like a class chaplain. Ann Hopkins volunteered for the job and I breathed again.

  When the first period bell rang we remained seated because our first class was English and Miss Ogilvy was also our English teacher. After issuing us our books, she passed out composition paper and told us to write a theme on one of the topics she listed on the blackboard. They were: “What I Did This Summer,” “What I Want To Be When I Grow Up,” and “My Family.”

  I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. Ann Hopkins did. I glanced over and saw her scrawling “Wife and mother” in her purple ink and circling the dot over the i in her customary way. She and I had already clashed over her ambitions. For all I had heard about ancestors, I had no wish to be one. The idea of having children so they could have children so they could have children frightened me. It seemed so pointless, like that blissful measure of time in Heaven that so comforted the devout: “If a bird transferred every grain of sand on every beach, grain by grain, and dropped them in the ocean, that is the beginning of eternity.”