Flannery (48 page)

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving? —.

On Saturday, June 21, Flannery was once again home at Andalusia, where Regina set up a table and electric typewriter by her bedside. “I can get out & get at it,” she wrote Cudden Ward Dorrance, “work an hour & rest an hour, etc. That’s all I ask.” Within these hour-long reprieves, she secured the last pieces of her book. “I look like a bull frog but I can work,” she guaranteed Tom Stritch, thanking him for her favorite music of the month, liking “the 4-hand piano Chopin thing best; there is a point in it where the peafowls join in.” Feeling tentatively emboldened, she arranged to push back the book’s publication date until spring 1965, so that she could do some rewriting on “The Enduring Chill,” decide whether to include “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead,” let “Judgment Day” sit “a few weeks longer,” finish “Parker’s Back.” She counted nine or ten options for inclusion in the book.

The stories Flannery finished in this hospital-like setting shared with “Revelation” both maturity of tone and ambitious scope. In the midst of “Judgment Day,” old Tanner remembers being down South, whittling a pair of eyeglasses from wood and fitting them onto the face of the black worker Coleman Parrum — Jim to his Huck Finn — while asking, “What you see through those glasses?” “See a man,” answers Coleman. The point is their spiritual kinship. In “Parker’s Back,” when O. E. Parker unveils the image of God on his back to his pregnant wife, she beats the blasphemous tattoo bloody with a broom. The story ends in a flood of emotion, with Sarah, at dawn, peering through a window at her husband, “leaning against the tree, crying like a baby.” As the O’Connor critic Frederick Asals has written, these last stories were growing somehow “mellower.”

Her dosage of prednisone having been ordered cut in half by Dr. Merrill, at the beginning of July, due to a rise in the nitrogen content of her blood, Flannery was now deprived even of “nervous energy.” Yet, as she reported to Maryat, she was at least not experiencing some of the more ethereal side effects she had recorded before the hospitalization and transfusions: “hearing the celestial chorus — ‘Clementine’ is what it renders when I am weak enough to hear it. Over & over. ‘Wooden boxes without topses, They were shoes for Clementine.’” Punning on the Latin “lupus,” she ruefully wrote Sister Mariella Gable of her disease, “The wolf, I’m afraid, is inside tearing up the place. I’ve been in the hospital 50 days already this year.” In an attempt to restore some of her energy, the doctor adjusted her medication to more frequent but smaller doses of prednisone.

On July 8, Flannery wrote to Janet McKane, apologizing for the “fancy” stationery. She documented an amusing catalog of get-well cards, decorated with chickens, Bugs Bunny, and the “funny” kind with “Get the hell out of that bed” messages, and she bragged that while she tossed the cards in the trash, saying “a prayer for the soul of the sender,” she economically kept any stationery to reuse. Included in this hilarious letter, though, was somber news, shared only with Janet, that when the priest brought her Communion the day before, “I also had him give me the now-called Sacrament of the Sick. Once known as Extreme Unction.” Flannery knew that this sacrament of “final anointing,” renamed by the Second Vatican Council, did not presume death. Yet her special request indicated that she saw herself as dangerously ill.

For the next three weeks, Flannery devoted every inch of her consciousness to her two stories, climbing out of bed “into the typewriter about 2 hours every morning.” Catharine Carver returned “Judgment Day,” with a few queries, but mainly praise for the story. So Flannery then sent “Parker’s Back” to her, which she also mailed to Caroline Gordon and Betty Hester. This time around, her “first reader” advanced a very theological theory, suggesting that the story illustrated, in Sarah’s puritanical horror at an iconic tattoo of Christ, the Docetist heresy that Jesus had only a spiritual body, not a physical one. She also sent a heady telegram: “Congratulations on having succeeded where the great Flaubert failed!” But Flannery grumbled to Betty, of “a lot of advice” she was ignoring from Gordon. “I did well to write it at all.” She focused instead on well-timed news about “Revelation”: “We can worry about the in-terpitations of Revelation but not its fortunes. I had a letter from the O. Henry prize people & it got first.”

Although Flannery was now devoting twenty-two hours a day to resting up for writing, over the last two weeks in July she was forced to return to the doctor’s office and the Baldwin County Hospital several times. Having suffered three coronary arrests, Dr. Fulghum was no longer making house calls. When Flannery’s symptoms of kidney infection returned, he put her on a double dose of antibiotics again and withdrew the cortisone. Bringing along a Günter Grass novel,
The Tin Drum,
sent by Maryat, O’Connor went once more to the hospital for a blood transfusion to lift her hemoglobin count, again below eight. “It’s six of one and a half dozen of the other,” she decided. As she had once written, “Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.” Among those mercies was evidently acceptance. “They expect me to improve,” she had written Cecil Dawkins. “I expect anything that happens.”

On July 28, Flannery penned her last letter, a card, in a shaky, nearly illegible hand, addressed to “Dear Raybat.” Adopting a big-sister tone, she worried about an anonymous crank call that Maryat told her of receiving. “Cowards can be just as vicious as those who declare themselves — more so,” Flannery warned. “Dont take any romantic attitude toward that call. Be properly scared and go on doing what you have to do, but take the necessary precautions. And call the police. That might be a lead for them.” She then apologized, “Don’t know when I’ll send those stories. I’ve felt too bad to type them.” Her sign-off: “Cheers, Tarfunk.” When her mother discovered the card a few weeks later, left at the bedside, she sent it on to Maryat, with a note, “Mary Flannery enjoyed your visit to her and I’m so glad you came. The enclosed was on her table.”

Mary Jo Thompson and Fannie White, of Sanford House, stopped by Andalusia on the evening of Saturday, July 25, on their way to dinner in Macon. They had brought with them some food from the restaurant to drop off with Regina. Over the past decade, the pair had continued to spend nights at the farm once a week; closer to Regina than to Flannery, they remained important members in the O’Connors’ support network, made up mostly of single women. “We had not dreamed we would see Flannery,” recalls Mary Jo Thompson. “But she told her mother to tell us not to leave. And she dressed, even though I know she didn’t have the strength. She came out onto the porch and sat in the rocking chair and visited with us. And that was good-bye, because we never saw her again.”

The following Wednesday, Flannery was once again extremely ill. Her cousin Catherine called an ambulance early in the morning, and she was rushed to the hospital. On Sunday, August 2, many of her close, local friends received calls, alerting them. “A friend, Mary Jo Thompson, has called to tell that Flannery is critically ill,” remembered Louise Abbot. “The end could come at any moment. My impulse is to drive over there, but I’m told she would not know me.” Flannery received the Eucharist, and at some point during a very hot, very still Sunday, as her kidneys began to fail, was administered last rites by Abbot Augustine More of Conyers. Shortly before midnight, she slipped into a coma, and was pronounced dead, at the age of thirty-nine, on August 3, at 12:40 a.m.

A
LOW REQUIEM
funeral mass was held for Flannery O’Connor the following day, August 4, at 11:00 a.m., at Sacred Heart Church. It was a sunny Tuesday, with temperatures in the low nineties. A sizable number of cars were parked that morning on Hancock and Jefferson streets, bordering the little redbrick church that stood on land given by Flannery’s great-grandmother. The building’s brown shutters were closed against the August heat. “There was a lot of people there,” recalls Alfred Maty-siak, the son of the Polish farm worker. “It was a good crowd. I remember that.” Louise Abbot, informed of the details by Uncle Louis, had driven to Milledgeville with a group of friends from Louisville, and remembered the sanctuary as “full but not crowded.”

Music was playing on the small church organ as mourners filed in, including those nuns and priests who were scattered throughout the congregation. Among them was Monsignor Patrick O’Connor, a cousin from Savannah. Seated to the left of the altar, inside the rail, were Abbot Augustine, Father Paul Bourne, and Brother Pius, all from the Trappist monastery. Flannery’s family members were seated to the left of the altar, at the front of the congregation. Her casket rested in the center aisle. The walls had recently been painted a color that Flannery ruefully described as “nursery pink,” a decision of her rector, Father John Ware, which was rivaled in her disapproval only by his removal of painted statues of the Virgin and saints, given by the Cline family. But on this occasion, the celebrant was Monsignor Joseph Cassidy, pastor of the Cathedral of Christ the King in Atlanta.

Seated at the rear of the chapel, Louise Abbot found herself distracted from the somber atmosphere as she glanced out a nearby window at “a crape myrtle in full fuchsia bloom . . . tossing and blowing in a sudden breeze, catching the sunlight and sending shadows rippling down the louvered blinds.” Her attention was captured, too, by the woman sitting in front of her, whom she believes was Betty Hester: “She sits like a child being punished, her head down as far as it will go, her shoulders sagging, her hands heavy on her lap. An aura of the solitary surrounds her. Her grief exerts an almost magnetic force. . . . During the service the monks have a look of joyous detachment. The woman in front of us shakes with sobs. She tries and is unable to control herself.”

Although Monsignor Cassidy had been rector at Sacred Heart during Flannery’s first year of college, when she was a member of the Newman Club that he advised, the family inexplicably requested that he give no eulogy. Chafing a bit under the restriction, he made a few general remarks in tribute, including the phrase, “When a person has been and has done what can never be forgotten . . .” At the conclusion, flanked by acolytes, he processed around the gray casket, an incense vessel swinging from his left hand, thick smoke swirling up in a large cloud. The casket was then moved slowly up the aisle. Regina rose, genuflected, and followed close behind, as she and her daughter had once walked behind Edward’s casket. The rest of the family paused to allow her space before following. Privately, Regina spoke of not blaming God for her daughter’s early death, but of being grateful for their extra years together. She had lived much longer than expected.

The burial service immediately afterward at Memory Hill Cemetery was brief. A prayer was offered by the elegant, white-haired orator Monsignor Patrick O’Connor, who was a stage actor before entering the seminary and whom Flannery had seen for the first time in thirty years at Conyers. She had been happy to know again this cousin of her father’s, with whom she had a rapport, and they had talked enthusiastically of his memories of the family. The prayer that he offered at her graveside included the words “and if by reason of sin she may have forfeited eternal life in heaven,” yet he rendered the word “may” with such lack of conviction as to make the phrase superfluous. Flannery O’Connor was then laid to rest beside her beloved father, the gravel spot eventually marked with a flat stone of Georgia marble, like the cover of a book, engraved with a cross.

B
ECAUSE THE
F
UNERAL
had taken place within a single day of her dying, in her hometown, none of Flannery’s friends up north had even a chance to attend. Most of them found out the news when they opened the
New York Times
that Tuesday morning and felt the shock of seeing her picture staring out at them, the obituary cautiously labeling her as “one of the nation’s most promising writers.” With
Everything That Rises Must Converge
still in piles on her editor’s desk, the newspaper revived some of the controversies over
The Violent Bear It Away.
For friends closer to home, the
Atlanta Constitution
told of a writer “most highly regarded in Europe . . . so quietly did she live among us.”

Her old roommate from Iowa City, Barbara Tunnicliff Hamilton, did not learn of O’Connor’s death until her eyes fell on the “Milestones” page of
Time
magazine the following week. “Flannery had made it,” she wrote, of her first reaction. “The people who knew about such things valued her as those of us who lived with her and cared about her when she was young had hoped they would.” As one of those who cared about her early on, as well as a prime example of “people who knew about such things,” Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop immediately on hearing the news, “I think the cards seemed heavily stacked against her, and her fates must have felt that they had so thoroughly hemmed her in that they could forget, and all would [have] happened as planned, but really she did what she had decided on and was less passive and dependent than anyone I can think of.”

The man most in a position to know just how independent from some extraordinarily constricting outward circumstances O’Connor could be was her editor Robert Giroux, now in possession of the completed manuscript for her final book. Like many others, though, he felt at loose ends about how to mark his personal grief. So he seized an opportunity when a postal card came in to the Farrar, Straus and Giroux offices, from an unknown friend of Flannery’s, Janet McKane, announcing a memorial mass to be held in the Byzantine rite at a church on Third Avenue. “I went and found only two people present, myself and Miss McKane, and it was a
high
mass!” he reported to Caroline Gordon. “Behind the altar was a towering mosaic of Christ, and when I read Flannery’s story, I realized that Parker’s choice of tattoo was of course this figure. (Miss McKane told me afterwards that Flannery had always been fascinated by the Byzantine rite.)”