Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (34 page)

The day is mild, 21 December, and dark falls early. The shortest day. I’ll start my own swing toward the light with a belated thank-you to Daddy Jack, the boy on the boat with the sack of apples and the gumption to succeed that he must have owned as a child. Already that kernel of determination and drive was sprouting as he balled his fist in the baby photo, and later as he boarded the boat to America. He could add a three-digit column of numbers in his head. He was kind to the people who worked for him. Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

Holding Daddy’s photograph to the light at the window, I sense something frail in the handsome, wary face. Because he died at forty-eight, my memories of him are both sharp and vague. If I had died so fatally young, I would not have had the chance to write my books. All his possibilities remain unfurled. He willed to me the fatalism that is the lot of those who lose a parent when young. I’m phobically frightened that I will lose someone I love, that I will be left at the rest stop, and that the man next to me on the plane is the terrorist. When Rena’s son drowned, I found out the worst that can happen to a parent. Other losses have been literally unbearable, but one bears them. You become sessile and keep small visitation rooms in your mind where those you lost still live. In one of those Daddy opens his coat and shows it lined with doves he’s brought home for dinner. In another, he leaps in his white suit into the mill sewer to save me. His curse words still turn the air blue. I’ve recently seen where he was born in Mayesworth, North Carolina (now Cramerton), on a hill called Maymont.
I’ve found his
grandfather’s big shingle house, he who exiled Daddy Jack to Fitzgerald, still standing in Charlotte. These threads, tendrils, let me travel way back to where he, Mother Mayes, and Daddy Jack launched, and to those people he came from, layers I never knew about.

From a recently found distant relative, I even have a poem written by Mother Mayes’s father in Gastonia, North Carolina. John Laban Smith, a writer in this family! The house he built still stands. My sisters and I found it from an address on an old photo. Above the door, a stained glass panel was similar to the one in the house he built for his daughter, Frances, my Mother Mayes, in Fitzgerald. We have lists of cousins, grave sites, obituaries of relatives. The state of North Carolina is all over my DNA and somehow I was pulled here without knowing anything of that.

Tracing Daddy’s family mysteriously realigned him in my mind. He has a context that has nothing to do with me. Recently, my sister came across several letters Garbert wrote to Frankye, full of passion and signed
I love you with worship
. For that, he has from me a red ribbon and gold medal around his neck.

Sometimes a dream offers a gift. I am near The House. The oak tree stands no taller than the porch. A stranger looks over the lattice fence and tells me, “You know it is 1922.” In the garden, I see Daddy Jack. Young! Smiling. His hair parted, not the bald man I knew. “Where are the others?” I ask the stranger. “They are playing inside.” I hear a faint few bars of a saxophone and I want them to come running out the back door, clattering
down the steps, Daddy at sixteen, my uncles and aunt. I almost see them and although the dream stops short, I’m thrilled to have taken this dip behind time, when I was still out in oblivion and they were who they were, all possibility.

Forty-eight—a cruel age to die. My nephew hunts birds with Garbert’s guns. Surely he would have tamed eventually. From him, I take my love of beaches. He liked to joke. In any grand situation—in a fancy car or restaurant—he’d lean over to me and say, “Wonder what the po’ folks are doing, Bud?” He had sweetness, too, which I remember more as a feeling than an instance. Still, I was right to turn on him the hard spurt.

For Frankye, oddly enough, the word “munificence” comes to mind. Not that I ever forget her halo of negative ions. In the years since she’s been gone, I’ve not had the wild rash on my arm. I’ve learned to relax when I shampoo my hair. Forever, when I poured on the shampoo, I’d feel my shoulders seize and my eyes squeeze tightly shut. One day I suddenly thought
relax
and I physically recalled Frankye’s red nails scratching and digging into my scalp when she washed my hair over the sink. How much longer than memory the body reenacts what happened to it.

But from her, a shower of gifts. When I was at camp or in college, she constantly mailed boxes of cheese straws and peanut butter cookies. From her I inherited my gusto for food and the table it’s set on—who’s there, what’s talked about, what’s for dessert, the old linens and silver, the flowers, the ritual. The
premise that you go all out for a guest. And from her, the impetus to
go
. Even if it were only to Fernandina, or St. Simons, or Atlanta, she was quick to yank her bag from under the bed. I’m on a quest to see everything I want to see, which is everything she never saw. Before her long fall, she had about her every day an air of possibility, as though she were riding in on the crest of a wave, there, balancing just where the wave starts to curl, always expecting something fantastic, ready to be delivered to shore.

From her fate, I know that friends and loves can take over if the abyss of family drops off. Her attitude toward money sank in. Nothing convinces me that it’s not to spend and give away. And,
grazie mille
, for her force of life that propelled her to age ninety-two, against all odds. Her lit fuse. From her I have fierce currents of energy, a river in full tilt that I have reveled in all my life. She—and not only by negative examples—gave my sisters and me the fervor to thrive.

I’ve kept with me the feel of Willie Bell’s strong fingers clutching my arm as we crossed a street. Her hand holding mine tight as she rubbed cut walnuts on the ringworm between my fingers. She had a big, toothy smile and I watched for the glints on her gold fillings. “You got wings back here,” she said, tapping my shoulder blades. “You gon’ fly, little girl.” We never saw Willie Bell again. My sisters and I still miss her. “Swallowed by the North,” Frankye maintained. “Swallowed whole.”

In the future, I plan to be braiding the garlic, reaching up to cut leaves from the tall holly that is right now waist high, harvesting bushels of heritage apples, gathering the last roses of the year. The garden will be burgeoning, and my dream realized of a pond below the parterre garden, just large enough for a blue canoe. We’ll long since have remodeled the barn into—what? Exhibition space, guest quarters, or a library, adding a long screen porch for summer dining.

At that table, may Frankye be invisible to everyone but me, though the blue of her eyes looks straight at all of us from my daughter’s and grandson Wills’s sunnier glances.

From her, I understand in the marrow Yeats’s line
A pity beyond all telling / Is hid in the heart of love
.

Frankye, who didn’t raise me in that direction, would be shocked that work—starting with the high school yearbook—directs my days. Books, house restoration, vast gardening schemes, language, food, literacy projects, and a complex life in two countries. What would she say? And, where would she have gone, if she’d been lucky enough to make a midcourse correction?

Often in Tuscany, when I’m rolling out pizza dough, setting the table for twenty, poking an armful of hydrangeas in a pitcher, I think,
She would have loved this
.

Then, I know—her life blossomed into mine.

Too bad I don’t believe she’s beaming down from heaven, flapping feathery wings and sighing
At least she did it
. Ever since my faraway courses in astronomy and world religion, when I learned that even the solar system amounts to no more than a
fleck in space, I cannot, unlike the majority of my fellow Southerners, take consolation from on high. All I’ve ever been able to figure out as my religion is to love the world and the people in it. Help those you can and relish the moment as it flies. I find strength in making grand plans for the future, and at the same time, in memory. In writing a life, you search for the white pebbles you didn’t know you dropped to define your way. When they disappear, you instinctively follow the glimmer of swamp fire to the deep woods where time and event collapse, to the original source where love flourishes still.

As to the creation of the universe and our purpose on this blue spinning mote in space: Bow down before the mystery because you are not going to know. In that, I have faith.

My good fortune is to have Vanessa Mobley as the editor of this book. She gave me thoughtful and useful responses and has understood from the start the vicissitudes and volatility of the memoir in my hands. My great thanks to her, to Miriam Chotiner-Gardner and Claire Potter, who steered so well, and to my excellent publicist, Rachel Rokicki. Elizabeth Rendfleisch was the book designer; I appreciate her fine work. Many thanks to: Julie Cepler, Jay Sones, Danielle Crabtree, Tricia Wygal, Rachel Meier, Luisa Francavilla, and to the whole team at Crown Publishing Group. Special gratitude to president Maya Mavjee and to publisher Molly Stern.

Peter Ginsberg of Curtis Brown Ltd. has lavished his attention on me ever since I showed up at his office with my memoir of Tuscany in a box and said, “Will you represent me?” I count on his perspective, astute ideas, and his humor. Also, my friends at Curtis Brown Ltd.,
mille grazie
Jonathan Lyons, Holly Fredericks, Kerry D’Agostino, and Sarah Perillo.

Charlie Conrad was my editor for eight books, and although
he has moved on to new work, he continues to send encouragement my way. We’ve raised many toasts in Italy, and long may that continue.

At HarperCollins Australia, my gratitude to Katie Stackhouse and Shona Martyn, my editors, and to Fiona Inglis of Curtis Brown Ltd., Australia.

It’s a pleasure to work with the Steven Barclay Agency for speaking engagements. Everyone there is a friend, and they are tops.
Amici per sempre!

I’m grateful to the editors of the following magazines where parts (in early versions) of this book originally were published:
The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ironwood, The Gettysburg Review, Frontiers, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review
, and
The American Scholar
.

Closer to home, I hope the book itself acknowledges my indebtedness to my family. Edward Mayes, my husband, shares the joys of writing and the celebration of living, as well as provides the correction of tenses (I tend toward the continuous present). He must have memorized these chapters by now. My daughter, Ashley King, insisted that this book be written. If not for that, probably the flowered folders still would be in a storage box in the attic. She and her husband, Peter Leousis, sustained me with cheer good times, and constant firing up of the grill. Many thanks to my dear tribes: the Davis, Jackson, and Willcoxon families. And to my grandson, Wills, who, at ten, dove into the manuscript with enthusiasm.

I am lucky to live among generous friends who read and write, live large, love to talk and to celebrate. A coffee, a walk,
a dinner, these everyday and communal pleasures remind me that a rising tide lifts all boats.
Grazie
, Lori Carlson, Hal Crowther, Anne and Walter Dellinger, Nancy and Steven Demorest, Nancy and Craufurd Goodwin, Allan Gurganus, Eric Hallman, Michael Malone, Elizabeth Matheson, Jill McCorkle, Ippy and Neil Patterson, Maureen Quilligan, Tom Rankin, Randall Roden, Lee Smith, Ann Stewart, Sharon Wheeler, Elizabeth Woodman, Susan Wyler, and all the Revelers Club. Oscar Hijuelos is mourned and missed.

Not nearby, but always close, and in touch with the evolution of this book: Todd Alden, Alberto Alfonso, Robert Draper, Shotsy Faust, Steve Harrison, Toni Mirosevich, Daniel Orozco, Steven Rothfeld, Kim Sunée, Audrey Wells, and Rena Williams.
Cari
, you know who you are to me!