Milking the Moon (5 page)

So these four grandparents were highly interesting. Perhaps the reason that I have basic good humor and a healthy liver is that I’m just a little ole League of Nations, I’m just a little ole United Nations without any wars.

Life was rather European, and I did not realize to what extent until I went to live in Europe. Now, I was raised with this idea that you were American. Fourth of July was red, white, and blue—eat your watermelon and behave. But somehow, everything looked toward Europe; we were always aware of Europe. Part of it was that quality came from Europe. The china, the porcelain, the silver, the crystal on the table, the damask, the good furniture. The good china, the good crystal, came from France. A certain amount of books, the Christmas magazines, came from London. It was just the idea that certain things of fineness came from over there. There was no belittling of the United States at all. It was just the idea that we don’t make that—it was made over there. Well, naturally I felt I had to get over there and see what it was all about. I grew up thinking:
When
I am in Paris…
When
I am in London… Not
if
.
When. So that when I got off the train at the Gare du Nord in Paris, I was at home. Same in Rome. I mean, I just was at home. The only place on this earth where when I first arrived I was absolutely an alien was New York City. It was an alien land, another planet. I never, never was able to adjust to it. Whereas when I went to Europe, that was just like going home.

*

My grandfather Walter owned an import-export house in the old port of Mobile—F. Walter and Company—which brought mangoes, guavas, plantains, and bananas from Central America and the Caribe, to ship to the northern United States, bringing Jonathan apples and Concord grapes from up there to send to the Gulf of Mexico. He had a three-story building with the front on Water Street, where there was a railroad track and the freight cars could pull right up in front to be loaded. On the other side of the building was the wharf where the freighters pulled in from the Caribe. So my grandfather would get the bananas and the guava and all that and just run straight through his place and get them into the ice cars on the train so they would go right away to New England. Then they would come back loaded with Jonathan apples and Concord grapes, which were sold all through the Gulf Coast.

F. Walter and Company was this wonderful place with old-fashioned—like in Dickens—high desks with high stools where the clerks were scratching with pens in big ledgers. At five o’clock they slammed them. Bang! Set out for wherever they could get a drink. What I loved to do was to sit at one of those high stools and write checks for millions of dollars. I would have been three or four, and that was like Saturday.

Then there was this huge, high-ceilinged darkened storage room filled with huge bags of onions. Sitting in the middle of these tons of onions was a throne. An enormous Renaissance-type throne with antelope-colored velvet plush, carved for the visit of the crown prince of Norway—a naval cadet—to the port of Mobile, where he was fêted. My grandfather had been the chairman of a committee of downtown merchants who welcomed the prince. So here was this beautiful throne that was made for the occasion. Some fifteen or so cats who guarded the produce house against rats occupied this throne, and curiously enough, they never clawed it. I used to love to go and sit on that throne and be the king of cats and onions.

Little Gene

As a small child I lived on Bienville Avenue near Mohawk, in a bungalow of the twenties. My father worked for his father as a purchasing agent. He went to farms all around this part of the world to buy the things my grandfather shipped, either to Central America or New England. My mother was highly educated mathematically. Her father wanted her to have mathematics because all the females in this Norwegian clan had languages and mathematics, unlike Southern belles. So my mother began as a bookkeeper at the Cawthon Hotel, which was a very elegant hotel built about 1898, right across from Bienville Square, where there’s a parking lot now, of course. It had a rooftop restaurant called the Vineyard with some of the first art nouveau chandeliers. They were honey-colored glass and had glass grapes climbing on them. My mother was one of the chief bookkeepers there and later became the registry clerk. She met all kinds of fascinating creatures like Billie Burke and James O’Neill, father of Eugene, who came every year playing the Count of Monte Cristo. I believe Sarah Bernhardt stayed there once.

I think that is where my parents met. In Mobile, everybody went to the Cawthon Hotel sooner or later. It was like a meeting place. It was a restaurant and it was new and it was fashionable, and people when they went downtown would meet there, to lunch or have dinner on the top floor at the Vineyard.

I saw my parents in the morning when they set out. Then I had these two attendants. One was a black nurse who had raised my father—her name was Rebecca. She was a highly intelligent, charming person. She and my grandmother were great friends. My grandmother gave her up for a couple of years for her to be my nurse. Then there was this dog named Michael, this huge golden yellow Airedale. Michael would not let me out of his sight. If I went too near the curb on the sidewalk—even if Rebecca was right next to me—Michael would come and nose me back, nose me back. So these were my two guardian angels.

After we moved to the house on Old Shell Road, my grandmother Layfield, who was until the end of her life quite dotty, lived with us. She had one side of the house with an old bathroom and bedroom. And she just wandered about in there quite dotty. She used to have these long conversations with the mirror about life in Milton, Florida, where she was born. And she never forgot that her brother, Hillary, went home drunk from some champagne party and froze to death in the woods. He was distinguished as being one of the few people ever to freeze to death on the Gulf Coast in Florida. My grandmother Layfield would look in the mirror and say, “Hillary, poor Hillary. They found him, but he was frozen.” In moments of lucidity she had some crazy stories to tell about the Layfield family. A distant relative from England who wanted to study the wildlife of the Gulf Coast was allergic to mosquitoes, and he just couldn’t go into the swamp. He almost died because of the bites. So he made this merry-go-round. He had a big English bicycle that he rode to make this central axis go around to turn the platform which had these four wooden animals. If children would bring him frogs, snails, and birds, he would give them a ride. That’s how he conducted his naturalist studies.

There was another black servant who took care of my grandmother. Not very bright but good-natured and sweet, and she took good care of my grandmother and Rebecca took good care of me. Because, you see, my parents worked.

*

My mother obviously adored me—I was her only child, and I adored her. But our relationship was Norwegian. In Europe, you see, the sons are not mothered. The sons are always raised by the fathers, the uncles. In America it’s different. There is the heavy mama. You know: “Randall, you certainly
are
going to Sunday school today. Now get up and get yourself ready. Wash your face. Comb your hair. Where are your shoes? You certainly
are
going, and if you don’t behave and get yourself ready, I’m going to call your father. You know what he does when you don’t behave.” That’s a heavy mama. Well, see, my mother would say to my father: “I don’t know what’s eating on little Gene today, but he wouldn’t touch his breakfast.” Then my father would come to me and say: “What ails you, son?” It was like that. Nobody ever said brush your teeth, do your homework, get up, go to bed. It was done in a kind of offhanded way. They would say, “Well, isn’t little Gene sleepy by now?” And I would say,
“No!”
And they would say, “Well, maybe he will be sleepy in twenty minutes.”

Being Scandinavian, my mother knew how to handle men. Scandinavians know. When the guy comes in the door at the end of the day, they never say, “Oh, you won’t believe what’s happened today. Oh, God, it’s been so terrible.” They say, “Hello, darling, come in. We’re having something you like for supper.” And a long time after, when the wife sits in front of her mirror brushing her hair one hundred times, she says, “Incidentally, the sheriff was here today.” That’s the style.

I think so many Anglo-Saxon American mothers came as frontier women, and they didn’t know what they were getting into. How many miles they would have to travel, that they were going to have to cut the umbilical cords themselves, on a bumpy wagon going west or in some smoke-filled cabin, with nobody else, no woman around. And of course, thousands of men who were unmarried and living alone who might do anything to a child. He could roast it and eat it. You know. So I think these women became furiously protective, and a certain kind of bulldozer female developed in America. In America, where there’s a mother there’s a bulldozer.

With a Bavarian grandfather, a Norwegian grandfather, a French-Swiss grandmother, and another grandmother from England by way of France, I escaped so much that is typically American. I just wasn’t put through it. I didn’t have the heavy mama. I think in my case, since my grandparents came to a basically civilized city—much more civilized then than now, of course—they were able to be more relaxed and maintain a certain formality from the European tradition. The French-Swiss grandmother had another idea about relations of mothers and sons because she was more Latin. Mother was the matriarch. Never pried into the private life of the son, but she was the matriarch, and if she said, “I want you here for Sunday dinner,” he’d be there. We went every Sunday to Bayou Street. And we usually went every night for supper, because the house on Bayou Street was like the family seat.

*

My mother worked very hard, and toward the end she was really having an awful time because she was female in an all-male office. Then, at a given moment, she went down to City Hall and spoke her mind to some people there about the state of things in Mobile. Then she was put into the psychiatric ward in Tuscaloosa.

She had written some letters to the city officials about how schoolchildren should be fed lunches. She had seen starving children at school who had no lunch, so she made some terrible scenes and got my father in trouble. People who owned restaurants and shops didn’t like the wives of their produce salesmen telling them what to do. She
had
been ill, but she did not have psychiatric problems. She had a moment of desperation. The doctor in Tuscaloosa realized she was not at all mad and put her in charge of the archives at the hospital. She was a very intelligent, efficient lady. She was definitely a liberated lady, but of course, the Scandinavian ladies were raised in that fashion. She had all the latest books, and she was a great reader. After a time she was quietly released. They hated it when she left because she was a very amusing, weird lady.

When she came out of there she moved to New Orleans where she had friends and cousins. She had a very happy life in New Orleans with the bohemian set, and that’s the last I heard of her. She may still be alive, for all I know. I thought, This lady is doing what she wants, I do not wish to bother her. She did not bother me, I did not bother her. Nobody can understand that unless you can understand the European perspective. And my father was often out of town because he traveled all over this part of the world as a purchasing agent for my grandfather’s business. So I was raised by the family at large, you might say. Truman Capote, whom I knew as Bulldog Persons from Monroeville, and I have that in common. We were both raised by grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins.

The Minuet of Daily Life

My grandparents’ house at 50 South Bayou Street was a single-story Victorian cottage with high ceilings, a wide hall down the middle, and a lot of Victorian froufrou on the front porch. Lots of little finials and little knobs. A lot of old Mobile had that more delicate gingerbread style. Lots of little knobs and finials. The house was pale gray with some white and darker gray trim, and there were flower beds all along the front. Cut flowers for the altar at St. Joseph’s and for the dining table. My grandmother was a passionate gardener.

On one side of the house there was a little chicken run where we always had a few chickens. The little girl across the street and I used to love to sit on the back steps when Rebecca was going to kill a chicken. She’d go get it and wring its neck. She’d cut the neck off and it would walk around for a while, you know, with its head off, as chickens do. That’s how you know they’re brainless, because they keep on walking after their head’s cut off. With the natural bloodthirstiness of children, we used to love to see that.

On the other side of the house was a big lawn with flower beds and a little path that led through a gate into the backyard where the garden was. Across the back of the yard was a series of little sheds. There was my uncle’s little mechanical shop, which was this extraordinary place with lathes and grinders and tools and a work counter. My uncle Francis lived with us until he was married, and he could do anything. (If he’d been as clever with patents as he was with inventing, I’d have my white grand piano by now.) Then there was a wood and coal deposit, then there was a storage area, and then a stable. My uncle parked his Model T in there. There hadn’t been any horses since World War I, but there was still straw in the mangers, and mice. I loved to run around that empty stable because of the acoustics. To scream and make horse noises, dog noises, and cat noises.

Right next to this little row of buildings was a courtyard paved with flagstones. It had a wooden counter with slats, and this faucet came up out of the ground and leaned over it. That’s where they cleaned fish and plucked chickens. Underneath was a kind of miniature pond where all the mess went. It had a filter and a runoff so the water went alongside the house and out to the street in a little ground gutter. When they finished cleaning the chickens or the whatever, they would wash it all off and clean up the blood. After the water had run off, they’d take up this filter and wrap the mess in newspaper and put it in the garbage and put the little filter back. There was a whole life in that courtyard. Almost every house had some form of that. And some still had outside johns, wooden toilets with holes underneath in the ground. We forget how young our country is. We’ve gone from privies in the backyard to perfumed toilet paper in a very short space of time.