Charms for the Easy Life (14 page)

My mother told me I was not giving up after one try. I told her I was. We yanked that around the rest of the way home, and then into and all through the house, long past midnight. The debate ended with my mother’s stating her theory on why I lacked all the normal feminine interests. She said, “I know what’s at the heart of all this business of your not wanting to date. It’s your grandmother.” Then she warned me to watch out or I’d get what I wanted. I’d grow old abnormal.

I told her that this was ridiculous and that I refused to talk about it anymore. However, when she went to bed I told my grandmother what had been said. She asked me whether I thought she was normal or abnormal.

She wasn’t
abnormal.
That word described the old man who roamed about downtown, grabbing people by the sleeve, telling them the time, temperature, and current world news that had no connection to reality. Or the little girl we had just read about in the paper who wasn’t sure of her age or name but could do fantastically long sums in her head. They were abnormal. My grandmother was certainly nothing like these two, but she wasn’t normal in the sense of being like other people who worked in banks or stores, women with permanent waves and moisturized skin. But all the same, in the strangest sort of way, I considered her normal for herself. It was normal for her to eat two cloves of raw garlic every morning, wear her late mother’s seventy-five-year-old shoes, preserve the laces in linseed oil, and sit up all night laughing uproariously over
Tristram
Shandy. I thought of all these things, and more, and said, “Well, you’re not what I’d call abnormal, but you have done some things people might call odd.”

“Yes, this is true,” she said. “I have picked up a habit or two along the way. If I hadn’t, I’d bore myself into the grave in about two days.”

I did something very dangerous. I asked her whether she thought I’d be a spinster. “If I stay at home for another year or two and then get to college and compete with younger girls who’ve been raised in a more normal manner, will I lose out?”

She said, “Don’t worry over it. You’ll find your one-in-a-million, but you’re sharp enough to know there’s no point in sludging through the first nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine to get to him. It may take you a while, but this isn’t 1850. Your mother’s not going turn you over to the workhouse or sell you to some man with a high starched collar and a whip.” And then she said what she always said on those nights when she sat up in her bed sorting out my life for me: “Go to sleep.”

M
y MOTHER had been right in one regard, when she said to me all those times,
“Every
young person is getting married, or just got married, or is looking to be married.” After Pearl Harbor, Raleigh seemed like a huge pocket turned inside out, shaking thousands of draftees and enlistees and their giddy brides out onto the train platform at the Seaboard Coast Line station. If I had cared to, all I would’ve had to do was walk out into the world with my hand out, ring finger ready. These were the years for standoffish wallflowers to step out from the wall and for the too heavy and the too thin to take a chance and put their feet forward as well. A sort of rabbity girl I had gone to school with stood absolutely no chance of marriage until she moved in with her sister in Norfolk and met a Navy enlistee who happened to go for her skittish type, and they were married quickly. They have enjoyed a long and happy life, or so it would seem from their holiday cards. In a port town such as Norfolk or Pensacola, shy stay-at-homes who closed their eyes and stepped out into the rush and thick of life probably found it all but impossible to stay single. Even the most mediocre seamstresses in port towns must have made mints overhauling Easter dresses, adding shoulder trains, and scalloping hemlines. Every magazine taught how to dye pumps and attach veils and Prince of Wales feathers to hats. The bottom requirement was that the couple like each other just a tad more than average. Prolonged court-ships were generally chopped off and pared down, so that a couple engaged on the first furlough was expected to be married on the second. As I overheard someone say, the world had never seen such marriages and multiplyings.

In October of 1942, I met Dr. Charles Nutter, whom I might have paid a nice sum to marry me had he not been twenty-seven years older and already married to a bright and truly kind woman whom he adored, pampered, and deserved. This idea aside, I more or less tortured myself with thoughts of how fine a father he would’ve been. He had just been appointed administrator of the Veterans Hospital in Durham when he called and invited my grandmother to volunteer for whatever nursing task suited her, promising her a highly coveted C gasoline ration card, free meals in the cafeteria, a uniform and orthopedic shoes. She didn’t want to accept any of these things, but my mother finally persuaded her to take the priority card. She told her, “Senators’ wives are scratching each other’s eyes out over C cards. You should get it.”

My grandmother called Dr. Nutter back and agreed to work three days a week, and then, without consulting me, she said, “And I’ll be bringing my granddaughter. Give her something to do, too.” He was happy to have me, he said; he had heard regular reports of my academic work from my grandmother since I had been in first grade. He told her he would refer me to the hospital’s Welfare and Recreation Office, which was run by his wife, Louise. I would be assigned to read and write letters for men who, for one sad reason or another, could not.

The next day I went to the hospital with my grandmother. Dr. and Mrs. Nutter met us at the front desk and offered a personal tour of the facility. My immediate thought was that my mother must have been out of her mind. The fact that she was a child was no excuse. She should’ve grabbed this man, tossed his larva buckets to the shore, and held his head underwater until he agreed to marry her. The idea that I had missed being his daughter was as devastating as if someone had told me, “You’ve heard of Henry James? Well, if your mother had played her cards right, she could’ve had him. Same thing with his brother, William. And you’ve heard of Emerson? Him, too. Same thing.” Dr. Nutter seemed to have no flaws. He carried himself the way Franklin Roosevelt would have if it had not been for the polio. And somehow his voice had lost the odd Gullah quality common to people brought up on the far side of the Pasquotank. He sounded like the boy I knew who had gone to school at Lawrenceville Academy. They passed through the same sieve and came out sounding like Lowell Thomas.

He was respectful to my grandmother to the point of doting, as was his wife, who said in so many words, “Miss Charlie Kate, if you’d not made him what he is, I wouldn’t have met him. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Her family name was Battle. They were a very clannish group, more a tribe than a family, who were well-known in Raleigh for having descended from a proud and patriotic bunch of ancestors. But Louise was different. She had gone to New York to visit a college classmate, who introduced her around to women who were smoking, drinking straight liquor, and bobbing their hair, the sort of women who threatened to blow up the White House if that’s what it took to get the vote. She came back South with a mission, being a new and avid member of the Transcendental Educational Society, the Women’s Suffrage League, the Child Labor Law Association, and any other group that would improve the world and shock her parents simultaneously. In 1920 she traveled to San Francisco, unescorted, to the Democratic National Convention, and when she returned home she was hired by the State Board of Education to reduce North Carolina’s thirty-percent illiteracy rate. From what my grandmother said, she was expected to do this single-handedly.

Louise met Dr. Nutter when he asked her to review the Dark Ages curriculum at his newly built Pasquotank Normal School. Almost immediately she felt a religious calling to move to Pasquotank County and lead its deprived children out of ignorance herself. Dr. Nutter was thrilled. So she moved into the back room of the school and spent the next two years marching dumbfounded students through Greek and Roman history, teaching boys the rudiments of home economics and girls the principles of hydraulics and chemistry. She spent her nights corresponding with her employer. Her proud and patriotic relatives were so horrified when she bypassed her debut to teach Pasquotank riffraff, trash, white niggers, and whatever else the children were called in supposedly good company, that they disowned her and had her name removed from the family pew at the Church of the Good Shepherd. Dr. Nutter learned about this and immediately increased Louise’s salary. The episode strengthened their friendship, and soon they married, had twin boys, a girl, and more happiness and money and local fame than the local society pages could cover in their weekly updates on this family’s life. They had three more children and adopted two migrant children, and bought a house as large as an orphanage and hosted an annual Easter Egg Roll on the front lawn in the manner of the President and First Lady.

It is worthwhile, cautionary, and simply interesting to report that Louise’s parents lost every dime they had during the Depression. Charles bought the church pew for five hundred dollars, thereby allowing his in-laws to keep their house and automobile and thus some dignity. It is equally tragic to report that these scoundrels berated him when he restored their daughter’s name to the brass plaque.

Two weeks before he called my grandmother, Dr. Nutter had been appointed hospital administrator, and his Horatio Alger story was told in newspapers from Richmond to Savannah. Not the entire story, of course, of the lunatic tubercular mother, or the disowned wife and the Episcopal pew, but enough to let the public know that its war-wounded were in extraordinary hands. He gave my grandmother a generous share of the credit for his rise, and he continued to do this as he introduced her around the hospital. This annoyed her greatly. “Stop slobbering over me,” she told him. He did.

As we walked through the hospital wards, I saw a hundred or more men my age with nothing on but their pajamas, and in many cases just the bottoms. They seemed as shaken by my presence as I was by theirs. If hands had actually been roaming all over me, I could not have felt any more, what a thing to say, felt. I flushed from all the eyes on me. The wax fruit on my hat could very well have ripened.

Walking by one bed, my grandmother noticed the poor drainage of a young man’s leg. She reached down and pressed the area around the wound and chastised Dr. Nutter for tempting gangrene or at the very least phlebitis. Then she took the chart off the foot of the young man’s bed and noted that a morphine drip had been running continuously since he was admitted. “Charles,” she said, “this is gracious of you not to let him suffer while you kill him.”

Dr. Nutter blushed scarlet, saying he had not been aware of the problem and that he would speak to the intern in charge of this case immediately. Then he asked my grandmother if she thought the morphine should be discontinued. She reached up and twisted the valve shut herself. She told him to apply chaparral to the wound—a preparation he would have to acquire from her famous herbalist friend downtown. She gave him a list of other things she would want available in the hospital pharmacy, all specific for wounds: comfrey, echinacea, Saint-John’s-wort, and aloe. He copied down the names of everything she needed, took five dollars out of his wallet, and sent an orderly on the errand downtown right away. Then he had iodine and bandages fetched so he could insert a proper drainage tube in the patient’s leg himself, and he did so with his poplin suit on and trembling hands. He had the look of a child trying to tie his shoes correctly in spite of his mother’s glaring-down eyes. And when he announced that he was finished, I turned around to see him searching my grandmother’s face for approval, which she gave with a little grunt and a nod. It is not too much to suppose that he would have had a lousy rest of the day had her gesture not been forthcoming.

After he excused himself, a nurse got my grandmother started on her tasks, and Mrs. Nutter explained my duties to me. They didn’t sound very complicated. I was to read the patients’ mail, take their dictation, and then type the letters when I returned home and mail them the next morning. She told me it would be best not to pry into their affairs, as some of the volunteers had done. I was to remain friendly yet professional, keeping in mind that the men had had limited exposure to women for some time. I assured her that I knew how to handle myself, though had she known of my own limited exposure to young men she would have sent me home.

I was assigned two patients that morning, both injured when they were pitched onto the deck of their ships. One had been a gunner on a minesweeper that had been torpedoed, and up he went, fifteen feet in the air and then straight down onto the deck. His last clear memory was of other men being literally roasted to the deck, their skin hanging in shreds. He was very depressed and had been suffering blind spells which had been growing longer in duration; and if this wasn’t grim enough, both his arms had been in plaster casts for three months and he wasn’t sure he’d ever regain the full use of either. He was having intense psychological problems and was due to be evaluated for transfer to what Louise Nutter called the neuro ward.

She took me over to his bedside and introduced me. He would not talk or move or acknowledge my presence in any way. Before I could ask her what I was supposed to do, she said I’d find a pad and a pencil in his nightstand drawer, and she left. Do not think I’m heartless when I convey my honest reaction. It was: What am I supposed to do with this thing here? He lay on his side with his knees pulled up into his chest, his two plaster casts lying like snowy logs on top of his blanket. While I was trying to figure out what to say, I heard him.

“Open the goddamn drawer and read the letters,” he said. His corrosive tone suggested that I had already offended him to the bone.

Through my grandmother I had met a fair sampling of pained individuals: alcoholics ranting with delirium tremens; women in labor shouting profanities at God and everybody; fevered people greeting dead relatives; and that one teenage boy who cursed violently and continuously, the one my grandmother had tried to spare from commitment to the asylum. All this is to say that I understood that people in pain could not be counted on to behave as if they were on a Sunday-afternoon stroll through the park. However, I didn’t believe this patient was speaking to me entirely out of pain, and I wondered if he considered his pitiable condition a license to talk in this manner. I didn’t expect deference, but I did expect civility. Also, there was the shock of being cursed by a stranger, and one I had come to help. It was then I realized that I had inherited my mother’s and my grandmother’s repugnance for people who will take incessantly, with ingratitude as their only returned favor. As at so many other times in my life, I thought about what my grandmother would say.