Little Boy Blues (20 page)

“Hurry, honey, don’t just sit there, we have to get going.”

“Was that her?” I asked, standing up. “Was that Eddie’s—”

“No, that was your father.” She called him that only when she was upset.

“Is he coming to visit?” Daddy had been living outside of Charlotte for several months, working in a drying-out sanatorium patronized mostly by wealthy businessmen. He had gone there as a patient and wound up working as an orderly or, as my mother described it to me, “a male nurse.” (This casual comment proved devastating several weeks later when I, ever the obedient parrot, carried my mother’s description to school one day. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d made a mistake. Later, I went through all the answers I could have given, any of them better, probably, than the one I gave. I could have said what my mother did for a living. She was the breadwinner in the family, after all, as she so often pointed out. I could have said I didn’t know what my father did or even where he was, which was as close to the truth as anything I did say. But as they went around the classroom, each child in turn saying what his or her father did for a living, I felt myself freeze up inside. Doctor. Doctor. Lawyer. Doctor. Office-supply salesman. Doctor. Newspaper editor. Lawyer. When my turn finally came, I didn’t pause. I just blurted out “Malenurse.” It came out too loud, but I didn’t have time to worry about that, because the whole class had erupted in laughter. “There’s no such thing as a male nurse,” someone said. I started to say something to defend myself—that’s what my mother had said the other day when I had asked her exactly what Daddy was doing down in Charlotte, where he’d been living for months: “He’s, well, a sort of male nurse,” she had said, and now, thinking back, I could hear the indecision in her voice when she said it. The laughter just went on
and on, and I could feel my face grow hot. I had transferred to a new school that year and only a few days into the first quarter, I hardly knew a soul, and I certainly didn’t have any friends. The teacher was saying something, trying to get the class under control. But all I could hear was the laughing. Which of course went on all day, at lunch, on the playground, any time the teacher turned away. The worst part was that I could see how funny it sounded. If it had been anyone else, I would have laughed, too.)

I tried again. “Is he coming home?”

“No,” Mother said, shaking her head and turning back into the apartment. She looked around like she had never set foot in the place, then shook her head again like she had water in her ear and walked over to the scrub bucket she had set down in the hall when she went for the phone. She headed into the bathroom and reached for the mop. I followed her.

“What did he want, then?”

“He just needed to talk to me about some things. Honey, really, get moving! Get out of those clothes. Did you finish sweeping?”

“Yes’m.”

“Clean the bird’s cage?”

“Mmm.”

“What?”

“Yes, ma’am. Do we still have to go shopping?”

“Unless you want to start your new school looking like a bum we certainly do. Somebody has to be responsible for something in this family,” she said with an urgency that baffled me. I knew my mother’s moods better than I knew my own, but I had never heard her sound like that before.

For weeks after that, it seemed that every phone call she received made her cry. She began closing her bedroom door before she even picked up the receiver. Sometimes it was Eddie’s girlfriend, and I knew enough about how those calls went to be able to piece the conversation together even with a closed door between us. But there were other calls. I didn’t know what they were about or even who my mother was talking to, and when I asked, she just said it was nothing I needed to worry about.

“We have to give oral reports on our countries.”

“What’s your country?”

“European Arabia.”

“Saudi Arabia?”

“I don’t know. Mr. Montague just said European Arabia. He wouldn’t tell me what that was.”

“That’s why your uncle bought you those Britannicas. So go find out.”

I decided that European Arabia meant all the little bits and pieces of the Middle East controlled by European countries, mostly protectorates like Aden and Kuwait. The encyclopedia entries on those countries were frighteningly thin.

I delivered my presentation in front of my mother the night before it was due. She watched and listened with a frown and seemed disturbed when I finished in under three minutes.

“You need to make it more dramatic,” she advised. I liked the sound of that. Mr. Montague had just cast us in a performance of
Robin Hood
, and I was the Sheriff of Nottingham. “Maybe you should wear a costume.”

I liked the sound of that even more. As an only child, I was, to
put it mildly, indulged. I did not have more toys than other children. What I did have was the undivided attention of nearly every adult in my life, and all of them, except my father, seemed endlessly willing to play along with my fantasies, however bizarre. When I was seven, I decided that I wanted to be Santa Claus. So someone made me a little suit and a beard. My red wagon became my sleigh, and my aunt would pull me around her yard while I delivered presents to my imaginary friends and the occasional squirrel. Content and innocent inside this impermeable bubble of indulgence, I lived until adolescence like a pint-sized Robinson Crusoe, stranded on my own island of make-believe. Adults dropped in to deliver supplies—marionettes, magic tricks, drawing materials—but otherwise I survived without much of a clue as to how the rest of the world got along. My mother, who I would later discover lived on a similar island of her own, was my chief enabler in these endeavors.

“A costume? You mean like Lawrence of Arabia?”

“Something like that.”

I went back to my room and in no time, I had turned the entire report into the story of Lawrence, who I took pains to point out did not die as soon as he got back to England, as you might think from watching the movie, but in fact had lived for many more years, joining and rejoining the army, writing books and riding not one but five motorcycles. Lawrence was one of the Englishmen who, in a treaty with the French, carved up the Middle East into protectorates. When I came out and delivered the second presentation, this time attired in two bedsheets, my mother burst into applause when I finished. “Just do it that way when you get to school and you’ll be the best one.” When I received a C for the project, the first C I’d ever received, I went to see my teacher
after school. He said the reports were supposed to be about a country, not a person, and that I had been instructed to report on Arabia, not a lot of little colonies. I did a makeup presentation on Finland, which I delivered dressed in my normal clothes. It didn’t occur to me to blame my mother for the way the first presentation went, but the next time she made a suggestion on how I could jazz up a report in class, I listened politely and then ignored everything she said.

Almost every memory I have of my mother is of a woman in motion moving at top speed. Only at the very end of her life, really only during her last year, did she slow down considerably. That was the clearest sign, even to those who barely knew her, that she wasn’t herself any longer: my mother at rest was not my mother. “Why aren’t you ready?” was the sentence I heard the most as a child, and my most familiar sight was my mother’s back as she rushed to get somewhere. She hurried off to teach school at the crack of dawn. She hurried home to pick me up so that we could run errands before the stores closed (“Why aren’t you ready?”). We hurried off to supper and then rushed through that so that she could get home and start the evening’s work of grading papers. She moved like someone being chased. I don’t know if she was like that before her marriage, or if she developed her manias for speed and order as barricades against the chaos that constantly threatened to overwhelm our lives. Photographs of my mother as a young woman show someone who looks a lot more carefree than the mother I knew. Snapshots taken when I was growing up show a woman forcing a smile in every shot.

Our life together was one of unvarying routines, tightly scripted
with no room for improvisation. The first Christmas after I learned to read and write in school, Mother wrote out thank-you notes to everyone who had given me a present and then had me copy them. When I grew old enough to compose the notes myself, she proofread every one before sealing the envelopes. She subjected herself to the same discipline. A great greeting-card giver—she kept a complete file, constantly updated, of the birthdays and anniversaries of everyone she knew—she rarely sent a card that did not include a personal message, sometimes covering the inside and back of the card. She composed each of these messages on a legal pad, writing and rewriting before she transferred the finished product to the card, then she kept the rough drafts from one year to the next to ensure that she conveyed a different sentiment with each succeeding year. It never occurred to her that other people might not keep all the cards they received, as she did, bundling them in a rubber band and stashing them in a drawer, to be pulled out and read again and again.

Every day of the week had its apportioned chores and duties. There was a day for grocery shopping and a day for the laundromat. Saturday morning we cleaned the apartment together (and the parakeet got a morning out of his cage, until the day I forgot that the bird was out and opened the front door to sweep out the dust and watched Pretty Boy soar away forever). Saturday nights we spent eating Chef Boyardee spaghetti with my mother’s friend Ethel. Sunday morning Mother got us to church, and in the afternoon we climbed back in the car and went visiting. Monday night was Boy Scouts. Wednesday night was her choir practice. On Thursday afternoon, she took me along with her to the beauty parlor.

Of all the places I went with my mother, the beauty parlor was
my favorite. I even liked that sinus-clearing chemical smell that permeated the air when someone was getting a permanent. Marinza was the hairdresser’s name—it burned in bright neon red against the twilight right over the front door—and until I was ten or eleven, I thought Marinza was one of those people with just one name, like Liberace or Popeye. I was crushed when I found out she was Marinza Sellers (by day, maybe, but by night—Marinza!). The romance ended with her name, though. Tall and thin, she was no-nonsense and plainspoken and she never smiled. “That woman always says just what she thinks!” my mother often exclaimed with a shake of her freshly coiffed head as we drove away. I never knew quite what to think of that. Did she mean that you shouldn’t say what you thought? What happened to always telling the truth, even when it hurt, a sentiment of my mother’s with which I was painfully familiar? I decided that she meant that Marinza was saying things about my mother’s friends that offended my mother. When I asked one time, she switched gears effortlessly—another familiar tactic—and said I should always be honest, but that I should keep my own counsel. When I ask what that meant, she started talking about Robert E. Lee. General Lee was a saint in our house, along with Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart, although Stuart, with his flying locks and pink-lined cape and his way with the ladies, was rarely held up as a role model. General Lee, though, was, if not perfect, then certainly right up there with the apostles. He always did what his mother asked. He loved the Union, but he was loyal to his home state. And he always took responsibility for everything, even when it hurt.

“What did Lee say after Gettysburg?” Mother asked.

“I know.”

“I know you know, but let’s hear it.”

“This is all my fault.”

“That’s right. Just remember, sugar, the South had the best generals, and if they’d had the equipment they needed, like the North did, they would have won that war.”

I was eight when the Civil War centennial began in 1960. This was big news in our household, at least for my mother and me. That war, which Mother always called the War Between the States, was our war. “Your great-grandfather rode with Wade Hampton,” she taught me, and sometimes she would bring out the quilt that had been buried when our ancestors thought that General Sherman was on his way (he turned northeast instead, sparing the Floyds and Joneses and their belongings). My father, having been in a war of his own, viewed all this excitement with wry silence. The only time I ever heard him say anything about the Civil War came one night at supper after we’d listened to my mother run through her usual litany about Wade Hampton and the quilt and what a good Presbyterian Stonewall Jackson had been. He leaned over to me conspiratorially and said, “You know what Nathan Bedford Forrest always said, don’t you? Get there fustest with the mostest.” That convulsed me, much to the irritation of my mother.

I have sometimes wondered if the centennial was celebrated purely for the benefit of toymakers, at least in our part of the country, where they did a thriving business in Civil War flags, kepis (those weird little caps with the round, flat tops) and replicas of muskets and sidearms used in the war. I remember getting one of the muskets, complete with cork balls that the manufacturer claimed could be fired with the propulsion of a Greenie
Stickem Cap (caps—paper loaded with a tiny gunpowder charge—usually came in rolls that were inserted in cowboy revolvers, but the stick-on kind were unitary, with one side having enough adhesive to stick to a toy gun right under a hammer). The cork balls never went anywhere, but they made good-looking pretend ammo. The high-water mark of my place in the pecking order of our neighborhood came one summer when I returned from vacation with my aunt and uncle, who had taken me to Gettysburg, where they bought me a little cotton-lined plastic case that held a minié ball, which I still own, and a rifled bullet taken from the battlefield. But the neighbor kid we all envied the most had a Civil War cannon made of black plastic. It stood about two feet tall and had wheels that rolled, and the barrel had some kind of spring device that, when you yanked the lanyard, actually shot a plastic cannonball about ten feet.

All of this was mere preamble to what I, under my mother’s tutelage, believed to be the climax of the centennial celebration: the re-release of
Gone with the Wind
. This, she convinced me, was the greatest movie ever made, and Scarlett O’Hara was the symbol of the South. Years later, Scarlett and Vivien Leigh would become interchangeable in my mother’s mind, and she inveighed mightily against the actress, who was said, according to Mother, to have had “sexual relations with tradesmen,” thereby besmirching the reputation of Southerners everywhere.