Flannery (8 page)

During the summers the Cline Mansion grew livelier with the annual visits of Aunt Agnes and her four daughters — distant models for the two visiting Catholic schoolgirl (second) cousins of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” Agnes Cline had met her husband, Frank Florencourt, a signal designer for Central of Georgia Railroad, in Savannah, where she and Regina moved after high school. In 1924, the Florencourts even lived briefly with the O’Connors in their Charlton Street town house, before the birth of their first daughter. Having moved up North, near Boston, Agnes, who spoke with a Southern accent her entire life, brought her daughters to Georgia each summer for refreshment in their heritage. Greatly amplified for weeks at a time by these four girls — Margaret, Louise, Catherine, and Frances — the large Cline household sometimes included, as well, Cousins Betty and Peter Cline, from Atlanta, and Frank Cline, from Louisiana.

“They played better,” remembers Peabody classmate Charlotte Conn Ferris, of the Florencourt girls. “Being in a family of four they knew better how to interact with other children.” Elizabeth Shreve Ryan recalls, “I was always interested in listening to them because we didn’t hear many Northern people speak. It was like listening to a foreign language.” Mary Flannery mostly sat on the porch with the two oldest sisters, while the littler ones played in the yard. “I think the times I saw her talk the most was when the cousins were visiting,” said Kitty Smith Kellam. “You didn’t hear her laugh very often except when they were there. They would sit on that porch and rock
all
day long and I used to think how horrible that would be — just watching the world go by and rocking.” Peter Cline says, “We had a running Monopoly game set up on the landing, and Mary Flannery was very much a part of it. She was a very sweet girl, very funny, with a keen wit.”

While Edward O’Connor remained “the invisible man” to many children and young people in the neighborhood who never met him, he did visit during the summer. He would not have stayed away long from the daughter who was the single great joy and consolation in his life. “I remember sitting on the front porch at Greene Street in the middle of the day,” says Frances Florencourt. “They had a big dinner at noonday, and afterwards they would sit in these big white chairs on the front porch and slap mosquitoes and fan themselves. I was sitting in Edward O’Connor’s lap. He was playing that game, ‘I got your nose’ with me. I’d giggle. Then I said, ‘No, I’ve got your nose,’ and I pulled hard at his nose. I think I really must have really hurt him. He didn’t look at all sick at that time. Though I wonder how much a six- or seven-year-old could really perceive.”

A regular summertime destination for all of these cousins was Sorrel Farm, later called Andalusia, the 550-acre working dairy farm owned by their uncle, Dr. Bernard Cline, from Atlanta, and named for the sorrel-colored horses he kept there. Off Eatonton Road, two miles outside town, the former Stovall Place plantation was their pastoral playground, complete with white farmhouse, cow barn, horse stables, milk shed, fishing ponds, and fields for riding. One of Dr. Cline’s hobbies was raising prizewinning show horses, including Rocky Barrymore and Jim Dandy, a Tennessee walker. “To this day I have bowlegs and I think it was from riding horses all over that farm when I was seven,” says Jack Tarleton. The girl cousins, dressed alike in brown jodhpurs, pale yellow shirts, and shiny brown boots, rode Shetland ponies they named Shirley Temple, Devonshire Duke, Lady Luck, or Brownie. A snippet of home-movie color footage exists of Mary Flannery, in jodhpurs as well, looking quite assured in the saddle.

Yet she never simply became one of the gang of girls. She often held back, or acted in an off-putting manner. She would give inexperienced riders “wild horses” and then “laugh if you fell off,” complained Loretta Feuger Hoynes, a childhood friend from Savannah. Like the three little bullies in “The River,” she got a kick out of luring unsuspecting victims into a pigpen. Lucia Bonn Corse remembered being a guest at a summer party given for the Florencourt cousins during which “Mary Flannery spent the evening in a corner by herself.” One Milledgeville resident has recalled that her own mother once invited the visiting Florencourt cousins to enjoy a fresh harvest of black cherries. While the girls were off riding horses, Mary Flannery, an “obligatory” guest, sat unhappily on the back porch spitting out cherry pits while muttering, “I didn’t want to come.”

E
DWARD
O’C
ONNOR DID
eventually secure a short-term home for his family on the outskirts of Atlanta in the Peachtree Heights neighborhood of Buckhead, still a small town of ten thousand residents, with upscale housing developments interspersed among its wooded areas. The rental at 2525 Potomac Avenue, quite a change from the Cline Mansion, was a one-story brown-frame foursquare, built in 1920. Like most of the homes in the planned “garden suburb” of curved streets, lush landscaping, and mature willow trees, the square bungalow fit a type of quintessential American construction provided by mail-order companies such as Aladdin and Sears, Roebuck, including complete plans and materials, and money-back offers of a dollar for each knot found in the lumber. In choosing the modest home on hilly ground, Ed O’Connor would have been aware of an appealing feature for his daughter: its porch fronted over the duck pond of the community park.

By moving to Buckhead, the O’Connors were also moving closer to other members of the Cline and O’Connor clans. Just a mile and a half away in Peachtree Park, another suburban development from the twenties, lived Regina’s brother, the real estate agent Herbert Aloysius Cline, his wife, Edward O’Connor’s sister Nan, and their two children, Peter and Betty, the regular summertime visitors to Milledgeville. Also in Peachtree Park, three blocks south of the Clines, was John Tarleton, an auditor at a building supply company, married to Regina’s sister Helen Cleo Cline, and their horseback-riding son, Jack. Of the divvying up of this matriarchal world, O’Connor later explained to a friend that her mother had three main sisters, “Miss Mary, Miss Cleo, and Miss Agnes. Miss Cleo’s domain is Atlanta and Miss Agnes’ Boston.”

All three families attended the same church, and sent their children to the same public school. Although Regina and her sister Cleo had a testy relationship, Jack Tarleton recalls that “My mother and I went once or twice to the O’Connors’ house on Potomac Avenue to see them, or to pick them up.” He remembers a party at the time at the Tarleton home at 3061 Piedmont Road: “Flannery was there, and the Florencourt cousins. They were all dressed in hoop skirts. Sometime during the afternoon, Flannery got caught outside on the porch and couldn’t get in. So she simply went through the little window, hoop skirt and all. I was a little boy, standing there watching her. She was going to get into that house one way or another. Convention didn’t mean anything to her.”

Christ the King Cathedral was a three-block walk from the O’Connors’ home. Dedicated in January 1939 as a sister church to St. John the Baptist in Savannah, marking the cohering of a Savannah-Atlanta diocese, this Gothic Revival cathedral, built of Indiana limestone, stood on four acres on Peachtree Road that had belonged a few years earlier to the Ku Klux Klan. The shadow history of Buckhead throughout the twenties and early thirties included lots of Klan activity. The Buckhead robe factory pumped millions of dollars into the city’s economy, attracting such firms as Coca-Cola and Studebaker to advertise in the Klan newspaper. Christ the King was actually built on the site of the Klan’s former national headquarters, the antebellum “Imperial Palace.” As Jews and Catholics had both been targets of the Klan, the foreclosure of the property by a Jewish banker, and its subsequent sale to the Catholic Church, was a bit of revenge.

During the academic year 1939–40, Mary Flannery was enrolled at North Fulton High School, a segregated public school built in 1932 to serve the white children on this expanding edge of northern Atlanta. Designed by the neoclassicist architect Philip Trammell Schutze, North Fulton was a quintessential high school, a classical Georgian Revival brick building, trimmed in white wood, with towering Ionic pillars, through which more than a thousand students and nearly fifty teachers passed daily. “Mary Flannery and I were there at the same time,” recalls Dr. Peter Cline, “but not in the same classes. You could be in the same grade, and take the same courses, but have different teachers. It was a relatively large school. . . . I used to walk to North Fulton every day. People didn’t have two cars back then. It was still the Depression.” Also at North Fulton, unknown to her, was O’Connor’s future poet friend James Dickey, then a football player.

Every bit as progressive as Peabody, North Fulton’s up-to-date layout included twenty-three classrooms, two lecture halls, seven science labs, an auditorium, cafeteria, gym, armory, shooting gallery, the newly opened W. F. Dykes Stadium, named for the school’s first principal, and an industrial arts building with house-drawing, electrical, and woodworking studios. Of the young girl’s uneasy reaction to this cutting-edge display case of learning, her friend Caroline Gordon later reported, “She once described her early education to me as a vacillation between the convent school and what she called ‘the life of Riley.’ The nuns whom she had for teachers in Savannah stressed discipline, as nuns do. The ‘progressive’ schools which she attended in Atlanta and later in Milledgeville offered an eclecticism which the convent-bred child evidently found bewildering.”

The local patriarch of the Cline family was Dr. Bernard Cline, presiding in Atlanta as Aunt Mary did in Milledgeville. At holiday dinners at the Cline Mansion, Uncle Bernard would sit across from Aunt Mary in the place of his deceased father. A single gentleman, tall and handsome, nearly sixty, with fine silver hair, light blue eyes, and a dignified bearing, he was an ear, nose, and throat specialist, a graduate of Emory Medical School, with further medical studies in New York City and Vienna. “Our uncle Bernard footed the bills for a lot of things,” explains Dr. Peter Cline. Uncle Bernard’s best friend was Louis Cline, his affable, low-key, younger brother. While Mary Flannery was in school in Atlanta, Uncle Louis was selling used cars, perhaps giving her a special angle on Haze Motes’s purchase of his old Essex at Slade’s used-car lot in
Wise Blood.
“He’s never mentioned my father to me,” she later wrote, of Louis, to Betty Hester. “If he did, he’d say something like, ‘He was a nice fellow,’ and wag his head.”

Bernard and Louis lived together at Bell House, Atlanta’s elite boardinghouse for confirmed bachelors and a few widowers. Housed in a Victorian mansion, with four Tiffany stained-glass windows, on the northeast corner of Peachtree and Third streets, Bell House required that residents be recommended by three members in good standing. The house rules were no drinking; coats worn downstairs and on the veranda; no smoking in the dining room. In exchange, the men were well attended by a staff of cooks, waiters, and housekeepers. As Elinor Hiller wrote in the
Atlanta Journal Magazine
in 1929, “Being an ex–Bell House boy is something like Roman citizenship, a thing to be proud of, a thing with just a touch of distinction in it.” Of visits to his uncles, Jack Tarleton recalls, with less mythology, “Bell House was musty, with high ceilings, leather furniture, and big magnolia trees out front. It was a fancy men’s club that had begun to age a bit.”

Dr. Bernard Cline was quite the gentleman-about-town. His social portfolio included not only Bell House, but also the Piedmont Driving Club, boasting the city’s first golf course, and the Capital City Club. Both of these exclusive clubs were “restricted” to the wealthiest of Atlanta’s white society — meaning, closed to Jews and blacks. Even before moving to Atlanta, Mary Flannery and her Florencourt cousins were accustomed to fetes in their honor at the Piedmont Club, or on the front lawn of Bell House, where the main event featured black men in white coats driving up in ice cream trucks full of fancy desserts. The
Atlanta Journal
covered one of Uncle Bernard’s “old-fashioned” lawn parties for eighty-five guests at Bell House, under the heading “Dr. Cline Hosts Affair Feting Nieces”: the girls pinned the tail on Mickey Mouse, and released colorful balloons into the air.

Yet for the fourteen-year-old Mary Flannery, Atlanta was less a lawn party than a perfect storm of yet only dimly understood troubles. Even as an adult, she held on to a juvenile animus for the place. “My idea about Atlanta,” she wrote Ted Spivey, “is to get in, get it over with and get out before dark.” The sources of these negative feelings were her experiences in 1939 and 1940. During that unsettled period, her father was ill, even if temporarily asymptomatic. Every weekday he would put on a jacket and tie and travel downtown to the FHA offices on the fifth floor of the Austell Building at 10 Forsyth Street, working at one of Roosevelt’s many “alphabet agencies” to help ease the city’s housing crisis. As adjustment to the city was proving difficult for the family, his daughter would spend these same hours, ill at ease, in the corridors of her modern high school.

Given the extra stress, tensions between Regina Cline and the O’Connor family resurfaced. “Regina and my mother did not see eye to eye at all,” reports Dr. Peter Cline of relations between Regina and her sister-in-law Nan, at whose wedding she met her husband. “All the other in-laws called my Grandmother and Grandfather O’Connor, ‘Mother’ and ‘Father.’ Regina never called them anything except ‘Mr. and Mrs. O’Connor.’ That gives a little clue as to what she was like. . . . Edward O’Connor was a sweet, charming man. He was tall, good-looking, very warm, the total opposite of his wife. The O’Connors were warm, loving people, very loving, very outgoing.” As O’Connor herself later summed up these dynamics, especially on the Cline side, “I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”

The Atlanta that O’Connor knew, growing up in the thirties, suffered even more than most cities from the poverty and distress caused by the Great Depression. The South had already experienced an economic turnaround brought about by the destruction of King Cotton by the boll weevil, described by stunned cotton farmers in the 1920s as “a cross between a termite and a tank.” The region was the hardest hit in the nation when the stock market crashed. Even in bucolic Buckhead, in 1932 six hundred families were considered “destitute.” A year later, only half the workforce of Atlanta was employed. Although by 1939, relief from the destitution was finally evident, O’Connor was familiar with streets thick with panhandlers and apple sellers, long “hunger marches” and breadlines. On either side of Bell House, where she visited her uncles, half the stores were boarded shut on Peachtree Street — a decade earlier, the city’s most fashionable stretch of boutiques.