Mississippi Sissy (42 page)

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For many years, however, the last church I ever set foot in was the one at which Frank's memorial service was held back in that July of
1975. The service had been quickly organized for the Tuesday afternoon after his death at Northminster Baptist Church, where Karen Gilfoy was the choir director. Carl and Jane Petty and Miss Welty and Miss Capers and I all had to be escorted into a side entrance of the church, away from the press, who were lying in wait to snap our pictures. We were seated behind the baptismal font in a single-file row of folding chairs. Northminster's preacher did not know Frank and the service was quite brief. I sat there on my folding chair, staring at Miss Welty's stooped shoulders, and, as I had when staring at the ceiling while Dr. Gallman masturbated me and ejaculated on my leg, completely let my mind go blank. There were no tears. There would be no tears for years. I was all cried out.

Frank's family arrived and took his body back to Parkersburg, West Virginia, where he was buried in a place called Big Tygart Cemetery. I still wanted to stay in Jackson for a week or two more to finish my job at Jeans West, but was getting scared—Bullock had yet to be caught—that whoever killed Frank was coming after me next. Local writer and publisher, Patti Carr Black, the junior member of Frank's cultural claque of “girls,” graciously offered me her house, around the corner from Miss Welty's, to live in for a few days while she and her twelve-year-old daughter moved in with Jane Petty. I accepted her kind offer, but each night I thought I heard noises outside the bedroom window and called my older Pike brother to come over to sleep in the house with me. Our sexual relationship was over but we were able to keep our friendship intact. For a night or two, Lynn came by and kept me company. Carl made sure to visit every day and offered to let me stay at his place so Patti and her child could have their house back. I decided instead to quit my job and head home to Forest, to spend my three remaining weeks with Mom and Pop and Kim and Karole before loading up a yellow rented Ryder truck and driving north to my new life in Manhattan.

On a Sunday afternoon, two weeks after Frank's murder, I told
Mom that I was going to drive over to Harperville to my parents' graves. We were washing dishes after we'd eaten our after-church lunch of roast beef and baked potatoes and fatbacked green beans and yeasty homemade buttered rolls. When Mom asked, “Want me to go with you, honey?” I told her that, no, I wanted to be alone with my parents, that it would be the last time I'd be seeing their graves for a while, once I'd moved to New York City. I cranked up my old Comet and pulled out of the drive. Instead of heading to Harperville, I found myself driving to Jackson. The emotional
nothingness
that had resurfaced at Frank's memorial service had settled inside me during the past few days in Forest. The feeling—the
lack
of feeling, really—would not budge. I couldn't even focus on packing for New York. I felt no excitement, none at all, at the prospect of my life completely changing in a matter of days. An hour later, I was parked not at my parents' cemetery but at that Jewish one across from Bleak House. I sat staring at the front porch and those old steep steps up which I had so often bounded before calling out “Frank!” to let him know I was home. I sat there for a long time. I kept looking from the Jewish headstones on one side of my Comet, back to Bleak House on the other. The Sunday
Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News
was on the seat next to me. I had stopped to buy a copy to check the movie ads in case I wanted to see a film later in the day. I opened up the arts section and spotted the very last “On Stage” column that would ever run. Frank Hains's byline was still beneath its heading. His carefully drawn likeness that ran above each of his columns was still there, too. But the title of that last column was “In Memoriam” and it was written by Eudora Welty. I knew that she and her friends had become angered by the press coverage of Frank's death before I left town, especially another “In Memoriam” column by a colleague of his at the
Daily News,
Charles B. Gordon, who had written about “the poor fellow who stood charged with Hains's slaying.” Gordon had
also written that although Frank had lived a life of “books, art, music, and literature,” it was also a life “slightly constricted and devoted to such a life's ramifications.” This is what Miss Welty, a few days later, wrote for everyone in Mississippi to read. I sat in my Comet, a Mississippian, and read it.

For all his years with us, Frank Hains wrote on the arts with perception and clarity, with wit and force of mind. And that mind was first-rate—informed, uncommonly quick and sensitive, keenly responsive. But Frank did more than write well on the arts. He cared. And he worked, worked, worked for their furtherance in this city and state. He was a doer and a maker and a giver. Talented and versatile to a rare degree, he lived with the arts, in their thick.

So it was by his own nature as a man as well as in the whole intent of his work that he was a positive critic, and never a defeating one. The professional standards he set for art, and kept, himself, as a critic, were impeccable and even austere. At the same time he was the kindest, most chivalrous defender of the amateur. And it was not only the amateurs—it was not artists at all—who knew this well: his busy life, as he went about his work and its throng of attendant interests, was made up of thousands of unrecorded kindnesses.

I speak as one working in the arts—and only one, of a very great number indeed—who came to know at first hand, and well, what ever-present perception and insight, warmth of sympathy, and care for the true meaning, Frank in his own work brought to a work of theirs. The many things he has done in behalf of my own books I wouldn't be able to even count; his dramatic productions of my stories are among the proudest and happiest events of my working life. He was a dear and admired friend for twenty years.

Frank gave many young talents their first hope, sometimes their first chance, and I am sure he never could have let any talent down. He didn't let any of us down, but was our constant and benevolent and thoroughgoing supporter, a refresher of our spirits, a celebrator along with us of what we all alike, in the best ways we were able, were devoting our lives to.

What his work contributed—the great sum—had an authority of a kind all its own. I wonder if it might not have had a double source: his lifelong enchantment with the world of art, and an unusual gift for communicating his pleasure in it to the rest of us. Plus the blessed wish to do it.

We are grateful.

I read that line one more time: We are grateful. I turned the page. I looked at the movie ads. Suddenly, vividly, a memory surfaced. I looked up at Bleak House. In that closet where Frank had hidden his locked trunk of pornography, he had also kept a framed copy of his very first “On Stage” column. “I had it hanging in the house for a while,” he told me when he showed it to me once, when he was digging around in that closet trying to find something else. “But I finally thought it a bit tacky and self-aggrandizing,” he said. He handed it to me to read. For the very first paragraph of that very first column, he had chosen to quote from
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:
“‘Where shall I begin, please your majesty?' he asked. ‘Begin at the beginning,' the king said gravely, ‘and go on until you come to the end: then stop.'“

Parked in that Comet that day, I shook my head bemusedly, just as Frank would so often shake his head at me. The
nothingness
was lifting. I did not go to a movie that afternoon. I waited until I arrived in New York City two weeks later and on my first day there bought a ticket to a matinee. Sitting alone, beginning at the beginning, I watched
Love and Death.