Charms for the Easy Life (13 page)

A few months later I graduated first in my class. Writing my valedictory address was somewhat of a challenge, because I felt I couldn’t talk about embracing the future when I was so committed to keeping my life just the way it was. I ended up quoting heavily from The Way of All Flesh, which was not at all pertinent but was fresh in my mind, as I had just finished reading it. The speech went as well as it could have, if you consider that the audience was hot and squirmy, trying to keep cool using the cardboard fans somebody from a funeral home had handed out at the door. My grandmother went completely out of herself to stand and clap when the superintendent introduced me and then announced that I had won a countywide award given each year in the memory of the valedictorian of 1920, who, unlike me, exercised her potential immediately upon graduation and attended Wellesley College, where she contracted German measles and died in her first semester. After a few seconds of looking up at my grandmother and then all around to realize she was the only person up on her feet, Mr. Baines and my mother also stood. The other people didn’t know exactly what to do. Some stood. Some halfway stood and applauded sort of hunched over. They weren’t sure what the rules were. My grandmother didn’t care what they were. She felt moved to rise, so that’s what she did. And then she sat back down with my mother and Mr. Baines in the first row of the parents’ section, nodding whenever she heard a line she had given me the night before. I remember the closing lines she gave me: “You will remember 1940 as the year before your life changed. For many of you, this may be your last good year for a long time, unless you’re lucky enough to have flat feet.”

I
NDEED, 1940 would be the last normal year for all of us. Everybody I knew spent the next year wondering when Mr. Roosevelt would do what we knew he was dying to do. Our house was so full of worry over what seemed to be ahead. My grandmother would listen to the radio and make horrible predictions. Sometimes I felt as if I were looking out at a pink sky and sensing the air pressure drop, the way it does before a tornado. That’s what kept me from enrolling in college for the fall term of 1941, that feeling of waiting for something terrible to happen, not wanting to leave the house and get caught in what the sky, and my grandmother, told me was coming. Maybe it was nothing more than another excuse, but what an excellent one. Now I could wait out a war. I wouldn’t have to leave home until the millions of people who my grandmother said would die had died.

I gained weight those two years, leading a contemplative life on our sofa, reading things like Sophocles, Euripides, Homer, and Aeschylus, and listening to the war news on the radio and plotting troop movements on a large
National
Geographic map my mother had pinned to the living room wall. Also, she, my grandmother, and I became addicted to quiz programs, particularly Dr.
I.Q.
The two of them talked back to the show’s host as if he could hear them, as if they expected him to respond. Wanting him to be rougher on contestants who didn’t know answers, they yelled things like, “Don’t give the man another chance! He’s a
doofus!
Anybody who doesn’t know who won at Bull Run is a
doofus!”
Mr. Baines, being such a kind and gentle person, would try to defend the host, but they would run over him. Any answers they didn’t know, and there were few, they would dismiss as superfluous detail. My grandmother was all but unbeatable on questions pertaining to history, geography, medicine, and literature. My mother also excelled at questions about literature, but her main strengths were in the areas of popular music, movies, sentimental poetry, true crime, famous murders, how much Mr. Roosevelt weighed, how he ate only scrambled eggs on election nights, when his little dog Fala’s birthday was.

Books and troop movements and the radio filled the time we had been spending on house calls. They were becoming more and more infrequent, for several reasons: health care at the county clinics improved, particularly with the broader use of sulfa drugs; more people were able to afford cars to take them there; and more muddy paths into the backwoods were blacktopped. My grandmother went for almost a year with no major case. This caused her to snipe at my mother more than usual, and this, in turn, raised my mother’s level of backchat.

I remember how relieved my mother and I were when my grandmother’s lawyer called upon her to offer a second opinion at a commitment hearing. The son of one of his clients suffered from what would later be known as Tourette’s syndrome. The lawyer thought the boy should not be committed, but he couldn’t tell his client this, since he wanted to keep the family’s very considerable business. So he asked that my grandmother examine the boy and testify the following week, knowing, as he did, that the judge scheduled to preside at the hearing was an old friend of hers. This judge remarked to me once that he found her, of all things, charming. They had served together on the War Orphan Board as well as the State Committee on Inter-racial Cooperation. Although my grandmother could offer no official credentials, the judge was inclined to agree with anything she had to say. I went with her to the family’s home to examine the boy. He stood in the center of the living room and did jumping jacks and cursed violently and could not be coaxed into submission. My grandmother sat and watched him, saying nothing. On the way home all she told me was that the boy needed to be seen by a specialist, and although she pitied his parents, she did not plan to recommend commitment.

The following week at the hearing, the boy was even wilder than he had been at his home. His father wept when he described how caring for him had become such a strain, how his other children had been ignored, and so forth. When my grandmother was asked to speak, she told the judge what she had told me, and she went on to prophesy that the boy would die a lonely, ignoble death in the asylum. She recommended, instead, that he be evaluated for treatment at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka. A doctor there had written several articles on this sort of neurological disorder. She had called the medical school at Chapel Hill and gotten this information. But counterbalancing her arguments was the boy himself, shouting, raging. The judge favored commitment, and before he announced his decision, he apologized to my grandmother and thanked her for her concern. The boy was taken to Dorothea Dix asylum and put on one of those crowded wards that were organized not by illness but by the patient’s county of birth. A week later, he broke into the janitor’s closet and ate drain crystals. My grandmother could not be consoled.

My mother insisted that my grandmother and I do Red Cross work with her, saying our mental health would deteriorate with so much time spent inside the house. We went with her a few times and helped pack boxes that were sent to Allied POWs. My mother read the very detailed list of instructions from the War Department. The contents of the boxes had to be packed a certain way. There could be no mistakes. I remember that the shaving soap, the cigarettes, and Hershey bars had to be upright, since deviations could be interpreted as codes. If the enemy found anything amiss with even one box, they would refuse the entire shipment or torture a soldier, whichever they pleased. My grandmother drove the other women at her table mad by checking and rechecking her boxes, repeating the contents aloud each time. One woman finally spoke up. She asked if my grandmother would please not repeat things so loudly. She was confusing the other workers. My grandmother said, “That is not my responsibility.” Then she started again: “Zippo, upper right corner. Hershey bar, right side up, bottom right-hand corner. Two handkerchiefs, folded, rectangular, over the cigarettes, also right side up.”

After my first day of packing these boxes, my nerves were shattered. I woke up screaming from a sweaty nightmare vision of some GI who looked like General Wainwright starving in a dark hole in the ground all because I had inserted a Hershey bar upside down in his package. It distressed me so greatly that I went into my mother’s room and asked to be given the keys to the Red Cross storage building. I meant to check all the boxes. She talked me out of this by reminding me of all the ways and times I had been conscientious, and then she brewed me a calming tea of lemon balm and evening primrose and put me back to bed. The next time I went with her to the Red Cross and packed the boxes, I took each one I packed to her table and let her check behind me. She was very patient. She’d touch each item and say I’d placed it exactly right, her voice at the same calm level it had been at when I was a child bringing her my spelling homework to check.

For one three- or four-month stretch, about the only times I left the house were to go to the movies or the Red Cross with my mother and grandmother. I was finding that the less I left home, the easier it was to stay there. I knew how Thoreau felt in his little cabin, not to mention the Hermit Willoughby. And then my mother came up with another plan to get me out into the world. She began hounding me to go on blind dates with young men from Mr. Baines’s office. I finally consented to going along on a double date with her and Mr. Baines, mainly because she wouldn’t leave me alone, and partially because both she and Mr. Baines talked incessantly about how smart the young man was. I asked her where he had gone to college, and she lowered her voice what seemed like three octaves, touched my hand, and said, “Yale.” Then she pulled her head back, pursed her lips, and waited for me to say something like, “Well, sign me up!” My grandmother walked in as my mother was dragging out “Yale” in her sonorous two-syllable drawl. She asked what was wrong with him: What was the catch? Why wasn’t he fighting?

My mother snapped, “I’ve already asked. He has a punctured eardrum.”

My grandmother said, “That’s just what you need, Margaret, a man with a real excuse not to listen to you.”

They spent the next ten minutes arguing about this remark, and when Mr. Baines arrived for dinner that evening, my mother met him at the door. I could hear her out on the porch, whispering to him as he straightened his tie in the utility mirror. “Can you believe her? Yale, for goodness’ sakes. Can you believe her? She’ll turn into one of these women like Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein and my mother.” The problem was that she felt that in rejecting the offer, I was also rejecting her, or a piece of her, and the only way to persuade her to believe otherwise would’ve been to date the young man immediately and marry him the next morning.

His name escapes me, plowed under, I suppose, by the mind’s ability to dismantle and hide pieces of unsavory experiences. But I do remember that the dinner was in the dining room of the Andrew Johnson Hotel and the harpist was too close to the table. My date was certainly intelligent enough, but in a grating, pompous sort of way. I remember his saying that he didn’t believe in the novel as a form of literature, especially as the form was practiced by Faulkner. That’s how he put it: “I don’t believe his novels qualify as literature.” He took particular issue with The Hamlet, quoting catchphrases from reviews he was sure I hadn’t read, such as those by Clifton Fadiman and other critics who had missed the point of the novel. In fact, I had read Mr. Fadiman’s derogatory review in The New
Yorker
while waiting for my grandmother to examine her string of patients at City News and Candy. I knew that if it disturbed me, it would cause my grandmother to have a stroke of paralysis, so I quickly hid all the New
Yorkers
underneath a stack of newspapers and kept my eyes on my shoes when she chastised the store owner for selling out of her favorite magazine. My bet was that my date hadn’t read the book itself, but I didn’t challenge him, more out of respect for Mr. Baines than anything else. He knew most of the people in the dining room, and they were all looking at us enough as it was. My mother drew their attention. She was dressed in clingy black crepe and stacked platform shoes. I contented myself with saying to my date, “That’s your prerogative.”

Then my mother did something that made things worse. She tried to change the subject, but in a way that would let my date know, indirectly, that he wasn’t dealing with a yokel. Smiling sweetly at the young man, she said, “You know, Margaret’s planning to attend Wellesley next term.”

Although I was dying to ask her how she had narrowed the list down for me, I stayed quiet to wait for his response. He looked right at me, no shame at all, and asked whether I thought that was appropriate.

My mother, sweetly again, asked, “You mean because of the war?”

In a sneering, condescending sort of way he said, “No, not really.” He wouldn’t explain himself. He went back to his dessert.

What he meant was clear to my mother and me. He was asking whether it was appropriate for a middle-class Southern girl with no pedigree and no private tutelage to aspire to such a thing. If the conversation had continued, it would have deteriorated rapidly, punctuated by mean-spirited allusions to the fact that I had not made my debut, had not taken a European tour, had not mastered the gentle art of tea-pouring. I felt ill. My mother looked ill. Neither one of us could speak. Mr. Baines more or less defended my honor, going overboard in describing my abilities, and though I thought it ludicrous to be justified in such a manner, I felt relieved that someone was taking my part. I think that had I done it myself, I would’ve cried. I know my mother would’ve. When Mr. Baines finished quoting from the letter that had actually been sent to me by the admissions officer at Wellesley, the young man’s face hadn’t changed at all. There was still that arrogant smile of the sort Edward G. Robinson would’ve offered to wipe off his face.

My mother blurted out that it was late, we were tired, we needed the check and our coats, and the car pulled around front. The young man understood it was time to go. On the way home, my mother quizzed Mr. Baines on why he had set me up with this person. He agreed that the young man had shown himself, and he allowed that he must not be such a hot judge of character. My mother told him that she demanded to inspect my dates beforehand next time, and as the two of them discussed the particulars of how she’d meet the candidates for lunch and so on, I sat up, put my head between them, and said I’d had my last blind date.