Miss Dreamsville and the Lost Heiress of Collier County (24 page)

“So anyway I read them all,” I continued, “just because I thought it would be rude not to. I mean, who goes to visit a famous writer and hasn't read her books? I wasn't even sure I would get to talk to her, but it seemed respectful to be prepared.

“All this time I was working up my nerve. Finally, I decided that I was being a ninny. What was the worst thing that could happen? That she would turn me away? Everyone in town knew where she lived, so I went over there on the bus and walked back and forth on the sidewalk trying to work up my nerve. Then I realized Mama would not approve of me, a complete stranger, just knocking on Miss Welty's door. So I went back to Mrs. Conroy's and wrote a letter. I told Miss Welty that I was living in town temporarily to find out more about my late mother, whose name was Callie Francine Atwater of the Jackson Atwaters, and that Callie had married a man named Montgomery Witherspoon, known to all as Monty, and that I was their only child. And that I wouldn't be bothering her—with her being an important writer and all—except I believed she may have known my mother at one time, and that in fact my name is Eudora Welty Witherspoon and while it could be a coincidence it
seems highly unlikely in my most humble opinion. So I wrote this in a letter. And I mailed it.

“Of course, I hoped (and truth be told, prayed) that I would hear back from her if for no other reason than to clear up the mystery of my name. Three days later I received a letter. When I came home from my job at the library, Mrs. Conroy was standing on the porch waiting for me. The mailman had just been there. I'm still amazed Mrs. Conroy didn't steam it open because she can be nosy as a raccoon and not half as subtle, bless her heart.

“I went upstairs to open it. It was an invitation from Miss Welty to visit her at her home the following Sunday afternoon at three o'clock. That was all. Just a handwritten note, one sentence long.

“I was relieved and happy that she'd replied but as the days passed—slow as molasses, it seemed to me—I started dreading what she might tell me. I'm not sure why. I was prepared for her to say almost anything.

“Finally, Sunday arrived, and after church and Sunday dinner with Mrs. Conroy, it was time to go. I was so scared I'd be late that I got to Miss Welty's neighborhood a half-hour early. At five minutes till three, I knocked on her door. She answered herself. She's a plain little thing, but the type of person who has presence.

“ ‘Do you mind if we sit in the garden?' she asked me. ‘My mother is upstairs and feeling very poorly today.'

“And of course I said I was sorry to hear that, but the garden would be fine. So we sat in her garden—oh, what a garden!—and—”

“Wait—she has a lovely garden?” Mrs. Bailey White interrupted. Mrs. Bailey White had what Mama used to call “garden
envy.” Some folks have kitchen envy, some have porch envy. Mrs. Bailey White salivated over lush flower gardens.

“Let's not talk about that now—” Jackie said.

“Does she have climbing roses?” Mrs. Bailey White persisted. “I just love climbing roses.”

“Why, yes, Mrs. Bailey White, she does! She has Lady Banks, American Beauty, Mermaid, and some others I didn't recognize.”

“Oh, I wish I could see it!” Mrs. Bailey White said plaintively.

“Mrs. Bailey White, we all love gardens,” Plain Jane said gently, “but let's let Dora get back to her story.”

“Well,” I continued, “we talked about her books until finally she broached the subject by saying, ‘I was sad to learn from your letter that your mother has died. '

“Well, it all came tumbling out of her—this story from before I was born. Mama and Miss Welty had been friends in school, with both pledging they would remain independent, unmarried and childless, and pursue careers as writers.

“I never saw Mama write anything more than a grocery list. But Miss Welty said Mama had been a ‘grand writer' with ‘a lot of promise.' Then she said with a smile that Mama had been a ‘great beauty' who ‘had everything a person could dream of.'

“She went on to say that Mama was ‘the belle of the ball,' from a rich family, and then one day she turned everything upside-down: She ran away on the day of her wedding in 1931.”

“She
what
?” Mrs. Bailey White shrieked.

“She left her betrothed at the altar. And she took off with my daddy instead.” It was hard to push those words out of my mouth. But I did.

“How exciting!” Jackie declared, and lit another cigarette.

“Good heavens, Dora,” Plain Jane said sympathetically. “That's a lot to think about.”

“Well, I had no idea that Mama was ever engaged to someone other than Daddy. She always seemed like such a sensible person. I couldn't imagine her leaving a man at the altar, abandoning her family and friends, and disappearing. That's not the woman I knew my whole life.”

“I'm sorry, Dora,” Jackie said, furrowing her brow. “I didn't mean to make light of it.”

“Did Miss Welty tell you anything else?” Plain Jane asked gently.

“Well, I asked if she was there when Mama . . . well, when all that happened at the church, and she said, no, she missed the whole drama on account of it happened at the same time her daddy took sick and died from leukemia.”

“Oh, that's sad,” Mrs. Bailey White said. “What else did she say?”

“Well, I asked her, ‘Are Mama's parents still living?' and ‘Did Mama have any brothers or sisters?'

“Her answer, to both, was no. And I have to tell you, I was very disappointed. Somehow I had pictured Mama having a brother or sister. I would have loved having an aunt or uncle, or cousins. And another thing—Miss Welty was surprised to hear that Mama remained a nurse. She said, ‘I thought she was doing that just because her parents told her not to. I didn't realize she stayed with it. Maybe it was her true calling.' And then Miss Welty looked straight at me and with no warning at all, she said, ‘Well, Miss Witherspoon, what is
your
calling?'

“And that's when I told her about you—the Book Club, I mean—and how y'all have told me that you think I have a knack for storytelling. And while I didn't know if I had what
it takes to make a living as a writer, I had been trying my hand at it.”

“Did she read anything you wrote?” Jackie interrupted.

“Why, yes, she did,” I said. “She asked me to come back a week later and bring something I'd written.”

“Wow,” Jackie said, “and then what happened?”

“Oh, let Dora tell the story!” Plain Jane said.

“That's right,” Mrs. Bailey White said. “Just let her tell it.”

They all stared at me with excitement.

“Well,” I said slowly, “I brought her a short story and she read it.”

“But what did she
say
?” Jackie persisted.

“Do you want the truth?” I asked.

“Of course we want the truth,” Jackie said uneasily.

I thought it best to blurt it out. “She said it wasn't authentic.”

“Authentic?!” Mrs. Bailey White cried out. “What is that supposed to mean?”

My friends looked wounded, as indeed I had been at the time, until I admitted a simple truth to myself: Miss Welty was right.

“What it means is that I was trying too hard to write about something I didn't know anything about.”

“Well, what did you write about?” Plain Jane asked.

“A short story about a girl who has a love affair in Paris,” I replied.

“But you've never been to Paris,” Jackie said, stating the obvious.

“Miss Welty said the same thing,” I said. “She said it's possible to write about a place you've never been but you shouldn't ‘undervalue' your own experiences. She said something about Paris being overdone.”

“I don't see how Paris could ever be
overdone,
” Jackie said.

“I think she meant,
written about too often
, when there are other places that no one ever seems to write about,” I said. “She said that if I wrote about a love affair in Paris, maybe, at least, one of the characters could be visiting from Collier County, just to make it fresh.”

“Ah, I see,” Plain Jane said approvingly.

“This will sound funny,” I added. “On my way back to my landlady's house a phrase kept popping into my head. I don't know where it came from. Maybe from Mama in the Spirit World. It was,
Listen to your own stories.
”

“Oh,” Jackie said. “I like that!”

“So you're going to keep writing, right, Dora?” Plain Jane asked. “Because we think you should, don't we?” Jackie and Mrs. Bailey White nodded in agreement.

“I'll tell you what, Dora, the part about your mother running off with another man on her wedding day—
ooooWEE
, that must have been something,” Mrs. Bailey White said.

“Now there's a story for you to tell,” Jackie added.

I felt something closing around my heart, like a protective shield, much like a turtle, I thought, as it withdraws into its shell. There was more to say but I was not ready to tell the rest.

T
his is what I kept to myself.

After my two meetings with Miss Welty, I did some research on my lunch hour at the library. I looked through old copies of the
Clarion-Ledger
, looking for stories about Mama.

I could have done this when I first came to Jackson, but I didn't. I guess I just wasn't ready then.

I worked my way through each massive index of the newspaper for the time frame Mama lived in Jackson, checking for her name year after year until I found three separate news stories in which she was said to be mentioned. I filled out a microfilm request, trying to look nonchalant while the staff at the research desk went to look for them. The rolls of microfilm, once they were retrieved, had to be threaded into a machine in order to read them, a difficult task when your hands are trembling.

I scrolled too fast and had to back up the machine to see the first news story. Suddenly there she was, Miss Callie Francine Atwater, along with Miss Eudora Welty, in a news photograph
of the two of them sharing a prize for a spelling bee. Miss Welty hadn't mentioned that. Perhaps it wasn't important.

More shocking was seeing Mama in the social pages as a debutante at a cotillion, looking fancy in a special gown ordered from a store in New York City called Bergdorf Goodman's, according to the article. I stared at the photograph. No question about it. This was my mama. The same person who never spent money on clothes and hadn't seemed to care about fashion one bit.

Then I found the wedding announcement.
MISS ATWATER TO MARRY MR. JENKINS TODAY IN GREENWOOD
, said the headline. I could scarcely breathe as I read the story. “Miss Callie Francine Atwater, daughter of local bank president James T. Atwater and his wife, Jane, is to be married at 11 o'clock today to Mr. Harold Jenkins of Lake Charles, Louisiana . . .” How strange to be reading the announcement of a wedding that never came to be. The article went on to describe her dress and mentioned a bridesmaid, Miss Alice B. Johnson.

I felt someone's presence behind me, a little shadow over my right shoulder. It was the head librarian, Mrs. LaCroix. “I see you're digging up the past,” she said, trying, but failing, to sound lighthearted. She spoke in a soft, hushed tone out of respect for the silence-only rule which librarians alone were allowed to break, and only in the quietest murmurs. “I wondered how long before you'd start looking in these old newspapers. Ah,” she added, “I see you've found the society pages.”

“Did you know my mother?” I asked pointedly—and a little too loud. When I'd been interviewed for my job, I'd mentioned that Mama grew up in Jackson. When I said Mama's name at the time, several of the librarians—including Mrs. LaCroix—had acted a little funny but I wasn't sure if it meant anything.

“Everyone knew your mother, dear,” she whispered. “She was the star of her generation around here.”

“And do you know what happened to her?”

Mrs. LaCroix looked at me, surprised. “Don't you?”

“I only know that she didn't marry this man,” I said, trying to keep my voice low and pointing to the microfilm page with the account of the wedding. “On that same day she married my daddy, whose name was Montgomery Witherspoon, and they went to Florida, where Daddy was from, and they had me.” My mind was spinning like a little wind-up toy Mama had given me as a child and which I still had, despite the fact that it was broken. “What has happened to Mr. Harold Jenkins?” I asked. “Do you know?”

Mrs. LaCroix pulled up a chair and sat next to me. “He died in the war,” she said. “After what happened—with your mama and all—he had a broken heart and went back to Louisiana. That's what I've heard for years. And even though he was a little old to serve in World War Two, he enlisted. And he was killed. I'm not sure when or where. We could look that up if you want to. Or I could write to the librarian in Lake Charles . . . ”

“It seems like everyone is dead,” I said sadly. “Everyone who could give me real answers, anyway.”

“Not everyone has passed away,” Mrs. LaCroix said. “The bridesmaid. She's sitting right over there.”

I jerked my head in the direction Mrs. LaCroix was pointing. A gray-haired lady sat half hidden behind a broadsheet newspaper. I had noticed her before. She was what we called a “regular.”

The next thing I knew I was being introduced, in library-appropriate hushed tones, to my mother's long-ago bridesmaid. While I could not have been more surprised, she seemed to have
been expecting this moment to occur. Perhaps, I realized, even waiting for the right moment to speak to me, these last several months.

•  •  •

MISS ALICE B. JOHNSON WAS
a lifelong Jackson resident from a neighborhood I recognized as a poor white part of town. She had never married, she said, and still lived at home with her mother. To support herself, she worked nights as a telephone operator.