Charms for the Easy Life (3 page)

My mother was drawn to wickedly handsome boys who could not marry her because of constraints placed on them by their social class and their mothers, boys who lacked the will to override either in favor of my mother, no matter how refreshing and spirited they considered her to be. She showed no interest at all in the young man my grandmother handpicked for her, and he showed none in her, the chief reason being that he was seven years her senior. Even with such an obstacle, my grandmother’s inability to bring the two together must have made her doubt the magnetic capabilities of her enormous will. He was a remarkable person, and for days after I heard about him, I was mad at my mother for not having allowed me the emotional, intellectual, and financial rewards of being his daughter. His name was Charles Nutter, and he was reared on the far side of the Pasquotank. When my grandmother returned there periodically to care for the boy’s pathetically lunatic and tubercular mother, who wouldn’t let any other person treat her, she noticed what she always referred to as his light and wit, and she made sure he had money to buy schoolbooks and studying materials. It was during this time that my grandmother began to see him as the perfect son-in-law. On weekend trips she would collect my mother from Miss Nash’s School and talk of this brilliant young man all the way to Pasquotank County. He always seemed more concerned with books my grandmother brought him than he seemed with her little daughter, but I know my grandmother believed this would change in time, and so for three years she contented herself with exposing these two young people to each other.

Charles Nutter studied incessantly and accumulated a treasury of knowledge, much in the manner of a young Lincoln, with whom he was later to be compared. By his tenth year in school the superintendent was the only person in Pasquotank County who was not too intimidated to teach him. While his backwater peers were ciphering naughts and double-naughts on chipped slates, their grubby hands no doubt rubbing out errors at every turn, Charles was reading Horace and Virgil under plantation fans in the county office building, the portly superintendent marking his rhythms with a metronome. (Think of what a sleepy-making time that must have been!) Charles worked nights and summers collecting pond specimens for Carolina Biological Supply, a job my grandmother got for him by writing to the company and announcing when he could start. On many Saturday afternoons my grandmother sat on the riverbank and watched him and my mother wading about in the shallow waters, my mother with her skirt tied into her belt, helping him skim for tadpoles and insect larvae. I imagine my grandmother wondering when he would notice my mother’s trim ankles, pretty calves and knees, when he would look at her and realize she might grow up quite nicely. I imagine him too preoccupied with his specimens and his future to notice.

He graduated from high school in 1914 with a superb record and was begged to attend several colleges, although as my grandmother put it, none of them begged to pay his way. And there was more begging, that of his mother, who threatened to die if he left her. My grandmother interceded, as she often did in needy lives, first by packing the mother off for a rest cure in Asheville and then by sending the boy’s high school records to the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with a deposit for his first semester of enrollment. She believed he was a better investment than Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea, so she sold enough of this company’s stock to send him to both undergraduate and medical school at Chapel Hill.

So Charles was educated thanks to my grandmother. He completed the undergraduate program in just two years, and by his second year of medical school, her investment began paying off. I do not mean paying off in the sense that he made her proud, made his community proud, or dutifully repaid his loan at a trudging-along rate of a quarter a week. Nothing of that nature. Instead, something spectacular, at least for the time and place and for one so young. In 1918 he patented the design for a much-needed and humane prosthetic device for returning World War I soldiers, a well-fitting vulcanized rubber and metal contraption that made the young men feel less like Captain Hook. He was commended not only by President Wilson but by the French and British governments as well. He sold the patent to a New York firm, and while it was never clear exactly how much money he made, it was enough to build a new one-room Pasquotank Normal School and hire a teacher whose literacy was not in constant doubt.

My grandmother believed that with medical school behind Charles Nutter and puberty behind my mother, things could finally start to happen between the two. But despite her urging, neither of them could be talked into carrying the relationship forward. They enjoyed each other’s company, but as my mother later told me, “We were not what we were looking for. I needed a boy and he needed a woman. Both of us wanted her to stop playing Cupid.”

Then along came my father, who turned my mother’s head completely around in her collar. His family had recently made so much money so quickly in land speculation that they had torn their old house down to the foundation and built a replica of their plantation ideal in its place. Being members of the emerging class of newly rich, they didn’t know any better than to accept happily the bold daughter of an even bolder self-proclaimed doctor. She was beautiful and quick, and they loved her like a daughter right away. My father courted her against my grandmother’s wishes for a year. He proposed to her the day she was awarded her diploma from Miss Nash’s School. His family gave her fifty acres of land outright as a wedding gift, more than any of their children owned, and then during a Sunday supper they asked her to sketch her dream house on a linen napkin. It was built immediately, and then furnished with the best of everything that could be shipped from New Orleans, Savannah, New York, and Boston. This was completed weeks before the wedding. My mother would go sit in the new house that was so full of all her new things and think of her future, and then she’d go back to her mother’s house and go to sleep hearing her mother rap on her bedroom door, saying things like, “Time is ticking, but it’s not too late to change your mind.”

She would not change her mind. The week before my parents were married, my father graduated from the North Carolina Agricultural Institute and was made the Wake County extension agent, a position he held until his death. (Let it be known that he was given the job because of his wealthy father’s influence and stayed there as long as he did because of his pretty secretary’s desires.) My mother used his responsible position to defend him, but this was batted back by my grandmother, who sat her down and explained that marrying a man who didn’t need to work would make her miserable within six months. She said he would wear the new off my mother and then grow bored, the same way an overly bright child becomes bored in a classroom and makes trouble to excite his day and titillate his spirit. He would range around seeking his pleasures, looking right through my mother as if she were invisible. My grandmother said, “All these things will happen. I’ll hide and watch them.”

My mother refused to acknowledge her fear that any of the predictions would come true, although I can see her as the petulant childlike beauty she could be, shifting about in her seat, her lips poked out, arms crossed, breathing in quick little pants as the horror of her mistake was revealed to her. She would’ve tried to pass her squirming off as exasperation with her mother’s meddling, but her anxiety had nothing to do with her mother. She was too bright not to have known everything her mother said was true, but she would’ve stuck her hands in a fan or swallowed lye before admitting this. My grandmother’s final words were, “Marry him, and I will not set foot in your house until you beg me.” She was fully aware that she had not raised the kind of child who would beg for anything, not water in the desert, not bread in a famine, and my mother was aware that her mother’s famous will would keep her out of a house that was only two miles from her own, even on holidays, even on the occasion of my birth in 1924.

On the other hand, my mother and I
were
allowed to go to my grandmother’s house, and so we visited there every weekend, and left my father early Christmas mornings, and every Easter and New Year’s Day. But we never spoke of him in her presence. We never mentioned our house, new furniture, new wallpaper or carpeting, and there was never any discussion of when or whether the curse of absence would be lifted. It was as if we walked from nowhere and appeared at my grandmother’s door, but this did not in any way diminish the grand time we had there. We made beignets and drank chickory and played nurse when patients appeared at my grandmother’s door. My mother and grandmother would sit at the kitchen table and discuss investments, studying a company prospectus spread out in front of them the way other women would’ve pointed out new fashions in a department store advertisement. When they reached a decision, we would all ride to town and meet with my grandmother’s broker at Wheat First Securities, who praised her as an intrepid investor in spite of the fact that she would never buy anything on margin.

Also on those weekends and holidays at my grandmother’s, I listened to many discussions of what my mother was going to do with her life besides read, listen to the radio, volunteer at the Red Cross office, and manage a tidy and efficient household, which amounted to sitting at the breakfast table with Maveen, our combination housekeeper, cook, laundress, and gardener, and listing the daily chores. To most middle-class Southern women of the day, this was more than enough, but to my grandmother it amounted to no more than passing time, waiting for the brittle bones and palsy of old age. The only thing my mother did that my grandmother approved of, besides reading, was teaching me beyond my daily school lessons. On Saturdays my grandmother would ask right away what I had learned that week, and if I said my fourth-grade class was reading “Rip Van Winkle,” she would squint and push her face forward to ask my mother if she had gotten “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” from the library yet. It gave my mother a world’s worth of satisfaction to answer, “Yes, and we’re already halfway through it.” My grandmother had spent her childhood receiving parcels of books from the Olivia Raney Library in Raleigh. She told me once, with great assurance, “I have read two books a week for thirty years. I am satisfied that I know everything.”

Many times my mother and I rode with my grandmother to nurse her family in Pasquotank County. I spent most of my time there playing with cousins, but in 1928 my mother and grandmother took me along on a mission that my mother later characterized as bizarre. I was four years old, and thus the memory cannot be presented as my own. My mother and grandmother told me the story. The three of us drove to Pasquotank County to pick up my grandmother’s oldest sister, and then took her on to Richmond, where her son had just shot himself after having spent two miserable years grieving over the death of Rudolph Valentino. This was the last in the family’s cluster of suicides. We were taking my great-aunt to collect her son’s belongings from a gentlemen’s boardinghouse and make arrangements for his body to be brought back to North Carolina. She sat by my grandmother in the front seat, kneading her hands, screaming, “How did it come to this?” She would lean forward every now and then and pound her fists on the dashboard, and my grandmother would snap, “This is a new automobile ! Don’t ruin it!” My great-aunt’s son had escaped Pasquotank and gone to Richmond when he was thirteen, and by twenty he was working as a doorman at a swank hotel. The few sightings of him that made their way back home had him prancing up and down in front of the hotel between patrons, checking his bearing and demeanor in the big brass doors, hissing at people who stopped to stare at him. My grandmother had to trick his mother into leaving the room while she bagged the sad scrapings of a depraved and lonely life and flushed them down the toilet. “Drugs and pills of every nature,” she told me. When his mother came in and opened a dresser drawer that my grandmother had somehow skipped, she said, “Oh, Charlie Kate. He had a girlfriend. Look at all her things here. I always knew what people said about him wasn’t so.” Think of this! Think of a mother so desperate for a normal son that in 1928 she was not only ready but eager to excuse his dalliance outside the bounds of marriage. My grandmother had read journal articles pertaining to “aberrant behavior,” and while his mother sat on his bed and successfully wished herself into seeing her son row some pretty girl across a moonlit lake, my grandmother stuffed the dreamland girlfriend’s things into a paper sack and marveled that a man could cram his feet into shoes so high and narrow.

On Saturdays when no patients showed up, when no calls came in, when the three of us didn’t drive to Pasquotank, my mother and grandmother would write and send out birthday cards to children in Wake County. Once a week, my grandmother called the office where birth certificates were registered, and thus her wooden file box was always up-to-date. Names of children she had delivered were denoted with stars, and she would tape a nickel inside their cards, and children who were turning thirteen received another gift, instruction in sexual hygiene that a legislative committee had praised as the true reason for Wake County’s modest rate of illegitimacy.

For the boys, she ordered ready-made pamphlets from a distributor, and then wrote at the top of the cover page: “On the occasion of your thirteenth birthday. Read and hide from Mama, Papa, Sister, and Brother.” Inside, she would correct the hygienic instruction however she saw fit, as with the scalding condemnation of what was called “self-love.” She would type out her own warning and paste it over the original. Hers read: “Better to handle yourself than some girl. You do not know where she’s been. You will not become a blind lunatic nor a rabid dog-boy. In fact, it may improve your attitude and render you less likely to get in scrapes at recess. You may be a more pleasant fellow all around for following your instincts in the PRIVACY of your room.” All but one of the county’s seventh-grade teachers were thoughtful and alert enough to ask boys who were poor readers to bring their pamphlets to school, and they would keep the boys inside during recess and read my grandmother’s instruction aloud.