Little Boy Blues (23 page)

Long before I went off to college, Mother stopped going to the movies at all, preferring to stay home with her television, where she could watch the same characters week after week, good people who behaved predictably, who were, as she put it, “like family.” The last time we had a good time together at the movies sticks in my mind because we laughed about it for years—it was our one shared joke. The movie, weirdly enough, was
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, the John Huston film based on a novel by Carson McCullers and starring, ironically, Elizabeth Taylor.

We saw it at the Visulite, an old theater in Charlotte that was the closest thing to an art movie theater in the two Carolinas for many years. I’d read the novel and wanted to see what the movie was like. I’d read everything by McCullers at that point, because she was a Southern writer, and I was plowing through everything by Southerners that I could lay my hands on. I don’t remember liking her stuff all that much, but I was curious, and it was something to do to get us out of the house at my aunt and uncle’s, which seemed to shrink after we’d been there for a day or two.

This was one of many misguided moments where I took unwitting members of my family to hideously inappropriate movies for the simple reason that I needed a ride. (Hauling my uncle the Presbyterian preacher to see
Blow-Up
was by far the most memorable of these misadventures.) For once I took the precaution of
warning my mother that there might be some steamy scenes. What I probably told her was that it was “Southern Gothic,” a phrase I’d picked up from the backs of my Faulkner paperbacks without knowing what it meant. Both of us were more than a little taken aback once the movie got underway.

The action took place on an Army base in the South. Marlon Brando played a repressed homosexual colonel married to Elizabeth Taylor, who played a spoiled Southern Army brat who taunted his manhood at every opportunity while openly pursuing an affair with a neighboring officer, played by Brian Keith, who was married to the sickly Julie Harris. Highlights of this tortured marriage included a scene where Taylor takes off all her clothes and throws each item in Brando’s face before marching up the stairs buck naked. Mercifully, the scene where Julie Harris cut off her nipples with garden shears took place offscreen. But it got worse. Brando developed a crush on an enlisted man, played by Robert Forster, and began surreptitiously following him around the base after coming upon the soldier naked in the woods riding a horse bareback. In another scene, Brando tries to ride his wife’s spirited horse, loses control and winds up cut and bruised and weeping on the ground. Homosexuality was so taboo in the South in the sixties that I don’t think my mother or I knew what to make of any of this, but we both dimly understood that something shameful was taking place on the screen. Long before the halfway point, my mother was tut-tutting loudly.

The theater was all but empty for the matinee. There were maybe a dozen people, including us, in the audience, and we all sat there in some sort of collective trance while this overheated trauma unfolded across the enormous screen. After a while, you could hear people murmuring. But no one got up and left. It was
as though we were so mesmerized by all the weird stuff we were seeing that we couldn’t move. After a while, all I could think about was what might be coming next. Racking my brains for the plot elements of the book, I tried to steel myself for any surprises, and I watched every scene with a mounting dread.

And then one of our fellow patrons came to our rescue. He was sitting almost directly behind us, and he’d been muttering to his companion off and on for about half an hour before the scene where Brando fell off the horse. When the soldier appears, naked again, and leads the horse away while Brando lies there sobbing, the guy behind us let out a little whoop and exclaimed, “By God, there’s something in this movie for
every
body!”

My mother was right. Everything was changing. But I could never decide if we were dashing forward to a new life or falling back in full retreat. In the space of a year, starting when I was twelve, my parents divorced, we changed apartments and churches, and I enrolled in yet another new school for sixth grade. We were starting over, my mother and I, and this time it was just the two of us. As soon as he was divorced, my father had remarried and started another family; in a few years we would be reunited, but thereafter it was only for a day here and a weekend there, longdistance love—he was like a pleasant ghost with visitation rights, rights that, curiously, were canceled almost as soon as he died some thirty years later. My aunt and uncle were gone as well. They had moved again, this time from Lexington to Charlotte, which meant we couldn’t just throw the parakeet cage in the backseat of the car and make a thirty-minute drive to see them whenever we felt like it. Now it was a trip of more than two hours, and we saw them only at holidays and in the summer.

The church in Charlotte would be Uncle Tom’s last pastorate, and even at twelve, I knew enough to know that he was coming
down in the world. The church in Lexington had been about half the size of the church in Winston-Salem, and this new church seemed about as big as a living room—in the vastness of Charlotte, a metropolis with a quarter of a million people, it seemed even more impossibly tiny, like the world’s largest dollhouse church. Every time we entered the doors, I felt embarrassed for my uncle. No one else in the family remarked on this, but I think my mother felt like I did, because I noticed that she made up excuses not to attend services on Sunday if she could help it. Usually we were packed and on the road home by the time Sunday school would have convened. And missing church was something that my mother did not do. These moves from church to church, each one like a nesting doll to the one before, were explained to me in church language: my uncle had received a new calling. This meant that another church had sent a committee to observe my uncle and then prayed about it and decided that God had meant for the preacher to come to their church. It never sounded like the preacher had much say, and so I constantly had visions of my uncle’s being whisked away by another church, whose committee could descend at any time and sit in secret in the back pew.

When we moved across town to the new apartment, I switched Scout troops, which proved, unexpectedly, far more wrenching than changing schools the year before. Changing schools had been mere misery, but going to a new Scout troop made me deeply sad. Maybe it was the first thing of my own, the first thing I belonged to outside of my family, the first thing I had to leave, or felt like I was leaving a piece of myself. The new troop didn’t help. The meetings were dull. There was no tight-knit feeling in the groups—it was my introduction to life by committee. Advancement was all, climbing the ranks, notching as many Stars, Lifes
and Eagles as possible. The troop had an excellent record of achievement. I dropped out within six months of joining.

In my old troop, there was one Eagle and we were very proud of him, but that kind of success was almost beyond imagining for the rest of us. (In my three years of enlistment in the Boy Scouts, I climbed to the indifferent rank of First Class the same way I managed to get as far as John Thompson’s third book of piano instruction: mostly by showing up.) This was a troop of lower-middle-class kids, from families where the dads were firemen and gas-station owners. It was an easygoing bunch, but the dads who served as scoutmasters and assistants all knew stuff that seemed worth knowing about: how to build a good fire, how to repair a car engine, how to tie knots—the secret handshakes of manhood. They weren’t autocratic about what they knew, either. They didn’t hoard. They wanted you to know this stuff. And they made it fun. When we learned about treating wounds in first aid, one of the scoutmasters got hold of some mortician’s wax, mixed it with Karo syrup and red food coloring and then molded the still-wet wax to a kid’s bare arm or leg. He could make puncture wounds, lacerations—anything short of an amputation—all gaping and dripping, gruesome enough to make you flinch. The sooner we learned the proper way to apply a pressure bandage, the quicker he would conjure up a new horror. I never had better teachers.

But the biggest change, not least because it was so sudden and unexpected, was the loss of the piano. Our new apartment complex, much bigger than the old one, sprawled over several blocks, and each building contained four apartments. Ours was on the second floor, and when the movers ferried our stuff across town, they took one look at the bend in the staircase and declared that no piano, certainly not one as big as ours, was going to make it to the second floor.

I don’t know what happened to the piano; maybe Mother gave it to our new church, which was only a block away. I only remember her standing there in the chaos of unpacked boxes and misaligned furniture, crying, “What else can they take from me?” She sounded furious, although I wasn’t sure who she was angry with. I wasn’t even sure what she meant. It would take me a long time to understand that she and I, though we were closer then than ever, already saw the world in different ways. To me, we lived in a world where the tide had always been going out. But she could remember better times, when she was happy, when the world went her way and she was the apple of everyone’s eye and if she wanted to talk Mack Jones into marrying, who would stop her? Now, “I should never have married Mack” would be a constant refrain for the rest of her life. That’s where the trouble started. Now she was trapped in a world not of her making and not to her liking. But I think losing the piano hit her harder than almost anything else. If she could lose the piano—not just the very symbol of everything she was good at but her last physical tie to her home in South Carolina, the place she had been happy—this easily, on the spur of the moment, at the whim of some moving-van driver, then anything could happen. When she saw me staring at her, she caught herself and smiled. “I haven’t lost everything, have I, precious?”

It is a measure of my mother’s mental state around the time of her divorce that when her lawyer told her she was entitled to ask for child support—would, in fact, almost automatically be granted such support—she refused to ask for it. I discovered this only years later while going through some of her old correspondence—she
had the habit, whenever she cleaned out a drawer, of sending the contents, if it was letters or old newspaper clippings, along to me with no comment. The correspondence detailing the issue of alimony turned up in one of those thick envelopes out of the blue. The lawyer’s letter acknowledging receipt of her decision was cast in a tone of puzzlement bordering on outrage that someone would so willfully flout—not the law, certainly, but clearly any notion of common sense. I could see his point. So it was mostly out of incredulous curiosity that I asked her later why she had never asked for child support. The answer she gave left part of me wishing I’d left well enough alone. “I don’t know,” she said in a languid, noncommittal voice that I could not remember ever having heard. “I just didn’t.” For a split second, it was like looking straight back into that deadest time of her life, and understanding that some of that deadness was still in her.

Of the time in which the lawyer’s letter was written, I could recall nothing that corresponds to this sleepwalking image of my mother. Was she upset? When was she not? I could not remember that far back. And being accustomed to my mother’s unhappiness, I had in time become oblivious to it. Several years later, our neighbor from the apartment across the landing said to me, “Your mother certainly has come a long way since you all moved in.” I just stood there staring, baffled to silence by what she’d said. Clearly, I had adjusted to my mother on the verge of a nervous collapse and then adjusted to whatever had taken its place. Clearly, there was a lot I wasn’t telling myself.
After the divorce, after we had moved and resettled and life was just the two of us, Mother took up what would turn out to be a lifelong habit of quoting the dead and other living family members not present as though they were there in the room with her. She had always filled her conversation with references to the past, but now the line between past and present was erased altogether. She never went so far as to speak directly to her mother or father, but she invoked their authority as though she were merely translating. “Daddy said Mack’s daddy—I think he inquired about this—was supposed to be no’count. He didn’t approve of me marrying Mack.” Whenever I asked for a Coke, she wouldn’t say no. Instead, she said, “I’d stand there at the fountain in Daddy’s drugstore and ask for a drink, and he’d always say, ‘How about a nice cold glass of water?’” Even the living became stuck in time. Whenever we ate at the K&W cafeteria and ran into a couple who had once, decades earlier, been parishioners at Uncle Tom’s church, she’d look at me while they approached with their trays and say, “You know what Uncle Tom would say: here comes old Skip-to-My-Lou.” That was Charlie Holt, who hadn’t called a square dance in twenty years. Gradually, imperceptibly, the past became our present. The details with which she furnished this shadow life were often inconsequential, and while some of them gave her solace—”I can just see Daddy now, coming down that sidewalk from the store”—others were brought out in a litany of complaint that never varied, as though she could change the past by railing against it if she just did it often enough and furiously enough—”Melita would stand at that sink all night, doing I don’t know what. You couldn’t get her out of there for love or money.” Sometimes she seemed to want to invoke the missing simply in order to underscore that they were no longer there.

Even my father got a mention now and then. “If Mack were here, he’d have that tree in that stand faster than you could say Jack Robinson.” “If Leenie were here, she’d gnaw that chicken bone until there wasn’t anything left.” But even there, the past was the standard by which all else was judged, and found lacking.

We always had a full house, even though there was never anyone there but my mother and me. Officially, we lived at 2321 Ardmore Terrace, Apt. C, but our real address, as far as we were concerned, was that rambling old one-story house shaded by live oaks on Cleveland Street in Kershaw, South Carolina, where she had grown up. She was so happy in that world, and I was happy there with her. So, without a qualm, I became her willing accomplice. We dined with the dead. “We’ll have our hot meal at noon, and something cold for supper. Tina would always set the food out for supper in the dining room last thing before going home.” My grandparents’ church routines were the standard by which ours were judged. “Mama and Daddy were the first ones there every Sunday. They opened the doors.” Our apartment lacked anything so grand as a front porch, but almost every night we sat in the twilight with Mother’s daddy, rocking in the porch swing. “If there was a boxing match on the radio, I’d listen with him. Mama couldn’t stand it, but I loved the fights as much as he did.” Even if Mother had not been such a persuasive fantasist, I would have bought into her vision, because the picture she conjured of her youth—of hayrides and ukulele serenades and a town so small that everyone addressed you by name when you passed on the street—was so seductive, so much more vivid than our pale life in an apartment where nothing ever happened: “It was Melita, if you can believe that, who took me out on the back porch and taught me how to dance the Charleston.” When she
evoked these scenes—and sometimes it was only a mention, a sentence or two, no more—her face would light up with the memory so fiercely that I was convinced that I, too, could see the little girl with her big sister on a porch that had, years before I was born, been closed in when the kitchen and back bedroom were added on to the house. “I don’t know why Daddy never just bought a new house instead of tacking rooms on that old place that never was much to begin with.”