Where We Are Now (9 page)

“Marianne, you need to stay around here. We want to be able to see you now and then.” Uncle George was good humored at first. His hair had gone totally white, a contrast to his middle-aged face. Ironically it made him look younger.

“I want … I was thinking about going to California … to Stanford maybe.” It was the only college I could think of at the time.

“You can wander later, young lady. Plenty of time for that. Your mother thought you should be looked after a while, and I can't do that any place but Tennessee.”

“I know, Uncle George. You think I don't know anything?”

“Your grandmother and I think it's best for you to stay here. Now Lucy, you know Lucy likes California and she doesn't like telling people what to do. Never did.”

“I wish the rest of you didn't.”

“You could go to Vanderbilt.”

“In Nashville?”

“I don't think the school has moved, honey.”

I escaped by going to Vanderbilt, meeting Marshall McNeil from Texas, marrying, and fleeing west as soon as I graduated. Miss Kate sent sporadic family news along with admonitions about church attendance and the necessity of prayer. She told me that George, driving Jean home from a party, wrecked his car and broke both his legs when he ran into his own stone gatepost. “Perhaps he'll give up drinking,” she wrote, desperately trying for cheer.

“Fergus's marriage to Dorothy has lasted just two years,” she lamented in another letter. “I pray he'll find someone more suitable soon.”

We both knew Fergus was as partial to a variety of women as Uncle George had been, but there was no need, in her view, to admit that in writing.

Aunt Lucy remained the chief worrier in the family. There was little news of Jean or Uncle Phillip. They were the ones who seemed to live their days in a reliable fashion. I could call Jean at her house or Uncle Phillip at his insurance office at nine o'clock any morning, and they would be there. I seldom did. I was having babies. For four or five years I was lost in the welter of that sweet confusion. Fergus drove Miss Kate out for the christening of her first great-granddaughter who was also called Kate. Three years after she returned to Tennessee, Grandmother had a cerebral hemorrhage, and George put her in a nursing home. I had to go back.

By the time I arrived, Miss Kate had apparently given up everything. George sold her car and rented her house. She was living on the edge of her life, and I thought she
knew it. Though the nursing home was functional, it was a depressing old house with a lot of ramps and dark—sometimes peeling—wall paper. It smelled of urine, some indefinable vegetable boiling, and hopelessness. Was my grandmother who had always been a particular woman—proud of her house and the order she'd created in it—to spend her last days here?

I drove to Uncle George's office without calling first and found he had a ramp of his own. Lucias Atkinson was pushing his wheelchair up it while Jean waited in the car. When everybody cleared out, I said, “Miss Kate's in a horrible place.”

He shrugged slightly; the movement of his shoulders brought liveliness to his body, then he slumped again.

“I'd take her home if I could. Jean's got enough on her plate just looking after me. And Lucy … you know she's too nervous, too fragile, to take anybody on. Mother's temper's so bad she runs people off, and she won't curb her tongue. I don't think she can anymore. If there's a better place, it isn't here. I've looked.” His lips settled into a decided line.

“But it's so dark and smelly. I don't think it's clean either.” His apparent disregard for Grandmother's needs infuriated me.

“You should have seen Miss Kate's house before I moved her. She got so she didn't care about anything, left her clothes where they fell, never washed a dish.”

“What about Maggie?”

“Maggie died a couple of years ago. Before she did Mother accused her of drinking all the sherry. Everybody I sent over afterward gave up. She said they were stealing the spoons, her change, her clothes.”

“She wants to go back to her own house.”

“I know. That's a dream … just a dream. Old people have to have them.”

For a moment I hated Uncle George. He was so at ease with the irremediable. Sitting there all broken, living his own dream, coming to the office every day, piling up his mountains of paper, refusing to throw out a single contract, doing business as usual except doing more now on the phone. His inability to change, my own inability to change him, made me despise us both.

What could I do for my grandmother? Take her to Texas? Could she make the trip? I had a husband, two little girls, the house and a job at the university press. Marshall and I relied on that income. Who would look after a difficult old lady? My mother and I had lived with Grandmother, but I couldn't let her die with me.

I had nothing more to say to Uncle George. I could only glare at him. He and I could manage our lives and other people's. We couldn't take care of Miss Kate as well as she deserved. He could look after a whole family including a retarded child who lived at his farm. He didn't have to help with Jean's children from her previous marriage. When he asked about my daughters, as he always did, I saw he intended to look to the future, and was, by example, directing me to do the same. I walked out of his office sighing.

Somebody in town had decided to prettify the square. They had hauled in dirt and laid grass around the foot of the Confederate veterans' monument and cannons on the corners. Franklin had become a bedroom community for Nashville and for my family. Miss Kate spent most of the day in hers. Jean would pick George up, and when lunch was over, he'd take a long nap in his.

After seeing Miss Kate in the nursing home for the first time, I made more frequent trips to Tennessee, sometimes with my husband and children. I began to realize that Uncle George was sentimental about children in general yet had no real desire to understand them. Miss Kate couldn't remember
who they were. Of course her forgetfulness was, in part, the effect of her hemorrhage. In part she wasn't interested in great-grandchildren. Sally and Kate were too many generations removed and lived too far away. She'd never had to tell them, “Stay out of Uncle George's room.”

The children were too young to bring to her funeral two years later. They wouldn't have understood why a solemn quartet waited behind her coffin until one blew a single note on the pitch pipe before the two men and two women sang over Miss Kate while yellow and white chrysanthemums ordered from a careless florist fell in clumps from sprays and pall. Nor would they have understood why Uncle Phillip arrived at his beloved mother-in-law's funeral so drunk that my cousin Fergus had to lead him inside.

Before the ceremony began we'd all viewed the body. Remembering my mother's service—all funerals seemed to roll into one—I was on the verge of tears when Aunt Lucy said, “Mother doesn't look like herself at all.”

In the midst of the primitive necessity of looking at the body, I had to keep myself from laughing. Who looks like themselves when they're dead? Uncle George, dutifully wheeled in, was helped to a semi-standing position by Jean and Dave, the retarded child who had grown up to serve him. He peered down at Miss Kate.

“They put her teeth in, Lucy. Mother hasn't worn teeth in years.”

Marshall whispered to me, “Why is Fergus propping Uncle Phillip up?”

“He drinks before funerals. It's the way he gets through them, I guess. Fergus told me he was drunk at Mother's. I was too numb to notice.”

After the brief ceremony, we left for the cemetery, chrysanthemum petals whirling around the pallbearers. While Fergus took Uncle Phillip home, the rest of us stood
on cold, rain-sodden ground to see Grandmother buried next to Grandpa. The empty looking space on the other side of him, Fergus said, was probably Uncle Howard's. Wind blew mist through generations of the Moores' gray stones. When we gathered at Jean's and George's to warm ourselves afterward, Uncle George was still angry with Uncle Phillip.

“Miss Kate wasn't his mother. Why did he have to get drunk?”

“Brother, he just can't…. He can't help himself,” Aunt Lucy said quietly.

“Oh George!” Jean remonstrated, “Phillip is one of the sweetest men in the world. You know he drinks before everybody's funeral.”

“If he's going to do it, he ought to hold his liquor better.”

“I guess that's just it, honey. He doesn't want to hold anything back.”

Jean, so adept at peace keeping, looked over at me. I raised my drink in her honor.

“I hope he's not the chief mourner at my funeral.”

“That's my part, George.” She smiled at the rest of us and went on talking. George, I felt then, had finally met the right woman.

Marshall and I were in England when Jean died. She seemed to stumble just before she fell in the middle of her kitchen where she and Aunt Lucy were drinking coffee. This was the only information I could get from Aunt Lucy, still in shock when I tried to talk to her.

Uncle Phillip got on the phone. “Marianne, a heart attack killed Jean. She never mentioned it, but she had high blood pressure and a lot of other problems.”

“I'm sorry I missed the funeral.” I wasn't. I was sick of funerals.

“It was a big one. Half the town was there. Filled up the church. Jean had a lot of friends in Franklin.”

I didn't ask him for any more of the details, but he went on talking about her children coming out to the farm and carting all her things away. Jean's former husbands and children were largely mysteries to me. She married into the family at the same time Mother and I began trying to escape. Uncle Phillip and Aunt Lucy were her friends. I admired her from a distance.

“How is Uncle George?”

“He's taking it hard.”

“I'll be up there sometime.”

“All right, honey.”

Uncle Phillip never said, “You ought to…” or, “Why don't you…?” He was such a benign person I couldn't understand how Fergus got to be so rebellious. What could have provoked him? Was it partially his father's mild nature? Whatever the cause, he seemed to feel a need for constant action. When he was a teenager he rode his bicycle off the high diving board into the pool where he was supposed to be working as a lifeguard. Before they vanished to California his parents sent him to a famous military school. For rolling the school's decorative pile of cannon balls down a steep hill thereby shattering several glass storefronts, they expelled him. The air force took Fergus in during the lucky years—after Korea, before Vietnam—and transferred him to a remote base near Amarillo. More than six hundred miles from the border of Mexico, Fergus got caught smuggling wetbacks through the state to work in the Panhandle's fields.

I asked him later how he found the time, and he said, “There wasn't anything to do on weekends.”

After finishing his two years of service, he wanted to settle down. Maybe he'd start a restaurant. Would Uncle George back him? Uncle George, though generous with fifty-cent pieces, wasn't in the habit of betting on bad risks. Fergus went to Miss Kate's brother Gaylord, who was more adventurous. In nine or ten years the restaurant became such a success Fergus was worn out with it.

Eventually he turned to promoting country music. Without a wife or children, Fergus, like me, still had the habit of family, so with no great fondness for Uncle George, he continued to keep up with him. In March when our uncle went to the hospital, Fergus called.

“I'm not sure what's wrong. He goes in and comes out, treats it like a hotel. You know, Marianne, Miss Kate looked after him for years, then Jean did. Now there's nobody but Mother and Lucias Atkinson, and he's not about to move in with either of them.”