The Undertaker's Daughter (37 page)

Mrs. Flanders, tall and buxom, was known to be a little different herself. She was emotionally exuberant, and color spread easily across her face in moments of high flush. People used the word
unstable
to describe her. But like Totty, she was simply different. She invited me to her home the summer before I left for college. When I told my mother I was going, her sarcasm sparked my temper.

“That woman’s crazy. I don’t know why you want to go see her.”

“Why is it that everyone I like is crazy? Totty’s crazy, Mrs. Flanders is crazy, everyone that you don’t like for some reason is crazy. They like me—is
that
why they’re crazy?”

“You shut your mouth or I’ll tell your father.”

“Tell him!” I shouted. “What are you going to tell him? He’s not perfect. I know what he’s done! I know who he is!”

“You don’t know anything! Don’t you dare say a word about your father! Don’t you dare! After all he’s done for us. You don’t appreciate anything. Don’t you dare say one word against your father!”

Baffled and numb, I drove to Mrs. Flanders’s house. Why my mother had defended him was beyond my comprehension. I
could only assume that she had some kind of crazy love for him that was so great and so unconditional that she would endure almost anything.

Mrs. Flanders and her husband lived in a lovely, old farmhouse on the edge of the county. I drove down a winding gravel road, and from a quarter mile away I could see the skirt of her bright, flowered dress billowing in the breeze. I was calmer now.

Mrs. Flanders’s dark hair and open face had none of their usual teacherly seriousness about them, quite the opposite. Her house was sparkling and airy and filled with her “mother’s pieces.” To her good fortune her mother had had quite an eye for antique furniture. Mrs. Flanders served cake and iced tea on her veranda and told stories of her college days. She sat in an aged and weathered rocker and nearly toppled it over in her high spirits. Her humor was wild and irreverent, but completely innocent. She laughed with a throaty depth and spoke like a woman who might have lived farther South. I imagined that she would meld nicely with well-to-do women from Georgia. I felt that she wanted me to know that there was more to her than I’d witnessed for an hour a day between four concrete walls.

As I prepared to leave this woman who wove enchantment out of the written legacy of dead poets, she leaned against the post that supported the roof of her veranda and rested her head upon it. “I’m glad you’re going to college, but someday you’ve still got to go far away.”

I wondered if she was thinking of what might have been in her own life.

Her gentle command was perhaps also a caution to me. Go. Go while you can. Go while you’re young and have the world before you.

No other words passed between my mother and me about Mrs. Flanders or Viv. A few nights later I arrived home to find my father sitting alone on the sofa watching television.

“Where’s Mother?” I asked.

“I guess she’s upstairs packing. She says she’s moving back to Lanesboro.”

“What are you talking about?”

He turned back to the television and said no more. He wasn’t concerned, just annoyed.

I found her lying across the bed crying.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. She wasn’t a scene maker.

“Nothing.” She turned her face from me. She wouldn’t say what he had done this time to move her to tears. I’d rarely seen her cry. I backed out of the room, uncomfortable that I had invaded her privacy.

She wasn’t leaving. She would never leave.

I couldn’t wait to.

O
n my first day of college, the day hundreds of freshmen awkwardly milled around the gymnasium where we signed up for classes, I sat on a bleacher in an effort to make sense of my schedule. In a moment of insanity I had signed up for an 8:00 a.m. class called Agriculture. Pondering the wisdom of this, I had a feeling of dread that I was in the wrong place entirely. Mrs. Flanders’s advice lingered, fresh from our meeting, while I desperately sought to fill space in a curriculum that currently held only English and theater classes. Geology was next. Lord. What was I doing?

I chose the local university because it was known to have the best theater department in the state. I won a small theater
scholarship and thought I would be far enough away from Jubilee to lead my own life, whatever that was going to be, without the town gossips breathing down my neck. Instead, it was like moving to the suburbs of Jubilee. At every corner I turned, a face from home greeted me. I ran into them in the grocery stores and restaurants, and on the weekends my dorm was empty because everyone lived close enough to spend the weekends in their hometowns. Freshmen weren’t allowed to have cars on campus, so many weekends my father drove to college to pick me up. During one of those drives he spoke of his old nemesis Fletcher Hamilton, and how he had the feeling that the lawyer was going to cause trouble for him again.

From the moment we moved into Miss Agnes’s house an underlying, unspoken taint of disapproval always came from Fletcher. Whatever happiness or enjoyment any in our family received from living there was tainted by the niggling thought that the town’s kingpin didn’t approve of our good fortune. The gossip about our inheritance never died down. We had Fletcher to thank for that, as well as the editor of the local paper, who ran the same article on the history of our house, over and over. Fletcher was now Jubilee’s brilliant star attorney who dominated the local news with his championship of old buildings and lost causes. A controversial lawyer, he took up the plight of the Mennonites in the county who wanted to hold on to their ancient ways. He crusaded for the purchase of the buildings the Shakers had built in Beacon County. History and its preservation was the very air that he breathed. In his only murder case, he defended a man accused of killing a policeman and won him a surprisingly light sentence. If he was on your side, he was your hero; if not, he was a vulture who picked your bones clean and dry. He was reputed to be ferocious, sometimes insulting, and always quarrelsome, sarcastic,
and lacking in tact. He enjoyed being a local character, just as Miss Agnes had. Now he turned his attention to us, soon after we moved into Miss Agnes’s home, when so many “friends” knocked on our door demanding admission.

Fletcher phoned my father and asked him to open our home for tours. My father explained that he had two children who still lived at home and that while he was working full-time, it was not convenient. He further explained that someone had to act as a “tour guide” and he was not in a position to be that person at this time.

Fletcher knew well how Miss Agnes had felt about tours through her home. Item twelve of her last will and testament clearly expressed her wishes: “I demand that NOBODY be permitted to come into my house after my death and paw over my belongings.”

During her lifetime Miss Agnes herself conducted a handful of tours through her house, always for small groups of invited guests. She held only one tour during the thirteen years my father knew her, and even with both Miss Agnes and him present and watchful, at least one of the fine ladies of Kentucky slipped several valuable items into her large handbag. Miss Agnes had remained intensely bitter toward the people whose families had abandoned her in her time of trial and regularly reeled off names of those whom my father should never allow in the home after her death. One of these was Fletcher Hamilton’s mother.

“Don’t you ever let old Mrs. Hamilton into my house after I’m gone.”

But Fletcher Hamilton was not interested in the needs of our family or the wishes of a dead lady. He had a bee in his bonnet about the historic house and regularly phoned to ask us to open our home to the public. My father always said no. He’d walked
this path before with Fletcher and had the uneasy feeling that his refusal to comply with this pesky man’s wishes wasn’t the end of things: Fletcher was even more powerful now, and this matter concerned something dearer to him than a few concrete vaults.

The summer after my freshman year in college, four years after the death of Miss Agnes, my father’s bank filed a friendly suit against him to receive the court’s interpretation of Miss Agnes’s will. The bank and my father wished to clear the cloud that hung over the title of the mansion, upon which the bank held first mortgage rights. Confident that this action was a formality, in reply to the suit my father also asked for the court’s guidance in interpreting Miss Agnes’s will. In the same month that the bank filed the friendly suit, Fletcher Hamilton contacted Miss Agnes’s closest living relative, a nephew who lived in another part of the state—a man Fletcher had never even met.

“Frank Mayfield has that house,” Fletcher told the nephew. “If you’re not going to get it, don’t you think it should go to the Historical Society? Don’t you think we should put a stop to this?”

At the time of her death, Miss Agnes had not spoken to her nephew in over ten years. Her will attests to her dislike for him: “My nephew is my closest relative. It is with ample and adequate reason that I eliminate him from participating in my estate or the proceeds thereof, and he shall take no part of my real, personal or residuary estate or property of any nature or description. He has been extremely rude to me and has annoyed me in many ways. He was a cruel and ungrateful son of his deceased father. I have the right to dispose of my property as I wish, and it is my express and long-considered desire that he have none of it.”

On behalf of Miss Agnes’s nephew, George Davis, Fletcher Hamilton filed a motion to intervene in the bank’s friendly suit. The battle began.

Jemma made a few unwelcome discoveries while I was away at school. She was outside feeding her pet skunk one day when she saw a gin bottle nestled within one of the big, decorative urns. She thought it belonged to the gardener. Like a temperance evangelist, she emptied it and threw the bottle away. Another bottle appeared. Jemma thought the gardener was playing a game. She threw it out. Another one appeared. This time as a joke, she filled the bottle with tea. She had a grand old time playing the game with the gardener until one afternoon when our father was present and watched, stunned as she fished out the next bottle.

“You little shit! It was you all this time?”

“These are yours?”

“That’s none of your damn business!”

“I’m going to throw them away if I find them again. You have to stop this.”

Jemma was adamant about cruelty to animals and her father’s drinking habit.

Meanwhile he quashed the outrage and distress he felt about the legal proceedings until the end of each day, when he tried to drink himself oblivious. He, Rex, and Fount, this trio of morticians, shared a thousand private cocktail hours, relocated from Main Street to the new funeral home. For years Rex had watched over his mentor and friend and thought that he handled his booze fine. But when the litigation began, Rex noticed that what had once been a couple of drinks after work became three or four, and then more and more. One night, after my father had already knocked back a few, he returned to the funeral home after supper. Rex was still there that evening, a concerned witness as his friend poured gin down his throat with abandon.

“Frank, you just need to go home now. Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

In the ensuing months my father lost himself to bottles and bottles of gin. He waited for the evening and found excuses to return to the funeral home or concocted reasons to stay late. He never appeared as a bibulous sort of drunk. Rather, he was deeply ashamed and made a gigantic effort to hide his dependence from everyone except Rex and Fount. As painful as it must have been to witness, Rex became even closer to my father, the way loyal friends do who remain by your side when things are at their worst.

Sometimes my father didn’t hide it well and the anger burst through, as I had found to my cost. He was lost in some subterranean realm of pain we could not fathom, though we lived with its effect. He couldn’t help it or be helped. There was nowhere to go. He had witnessed Fount’s wife’s rapid descent. Martha’s doctor occasionally sent her to the state mental hospital to dry out. Each time she came back a little less the woman she had been. No thanks. Not for Frank Mayfield.

One weekend I brought my friend Jack home with me from college—I borrowed him from all the boys in the theater department who were in love with him. He was well dressed and extremely congenial and polite. His dark good looks, which included a meticulously trimmed, thick mustache and black, curly lashes, lent him an air of old-fashioned masculinity. Only when he settled into a chair and began a good gossip session did the old woman in him come to the fore. When he crossed his legs, the leg on top swung furiously, he lit a cigarette with a limp wrist, and he suddenly became an old broad.

“Well, Miss Mayfield?” He never addressed me by my first name. “Tell me what to expect. Is your daddy gonna string me up by the gonads and tickle me with a feather so I’ll tell him all of your deep, dark secrets?” He chain-smoked and poured all his energy into lighting fresh cigarettes.

“No, but he may want to know what your secrets are.”