Mississippi Sissy (37 page)

“Is that because you fear no evil?” Frank Dowsing asked her.

“I'm sitting at this table, aren't I?” she said.

Miss Capers laughed louder and again piped up. “Oh, come on, Eudora. I think ‘Maurice She-Valley' would be a good
nom de plume
for all that porno Henry Miller wanted you to write on the side.”

“Good God,” said Miss Welty, who had once welcomed Miller to Jackson when he was passing through but did not allow him in her home at her mother's insistence. “Let's not bring that man into the conversation. We're having fun.”

“And who are you?” I asked Jane Petty.

“We're having a hard time coming up with a pun for Eva Gabor,” she said. “And Louis Jourdan has us completely stumped.”

“I've got it!” exclaimed Miss Capers, and to the tune of “Shortnin' Bread” sang, “Mama's little baby loves Louis Jour Louis Jour, Mama's little baby loves Louis Jourdan.”

All the other women joined in: “Three little children layin' in the bed, two were sick and the other ‘most dead. Sent for the doctor, the doctor said, feed dem children some Louis Jourdan. Put on the skillet.
Put on the lid. Mama's little baby loves Louis Jourdan!” They raised their glasses and clinked them beneath the kitchen table's hanging lamp.

Frank reentered the room. “And what are they calling you?” I asked him.

“Well, since I'm the host, we thought I should have the director's name. So Charlotte suggested ‘Vincente Femmelli' instead of Vincente Minnelli. But I think it's simpler just to change the first name.”

“To what?” asked the other Frank.

“Liza!” he said and slightly struck a Fosse pose. Again glasses clinked.

On the table was a piece of paper with a long list of paired letters on it. “What's that?” I asked as soon as things had calmed down and more proper introductions had been rendered. Frank Hains found two extra chairs for Frank Dowsing and me and, attempting to be two of the girls, we pulled them up to the table.

“We were coming up with all the writers we could think of who went by their initials, then each of us was going to name our favorite,” said Liza, nee Frank. “Can you think of anymore?”

I looked at the list:

E.B

T.E.

P.D.

T.S.

A.E.

W.H.

H.G.

C.S.

e.e.

D.H.

V.S.

V.S.

E.M.

A.L.

A.A.

J.B.

G.K.

C.P.

J.D.

E.L.

P.G.

J.G.

“I can,” said Frank Dowsing. “Does Y. A. count?”

“Who?” asked Miss Welty.

“Y. A. Tittle?” asked Miss Capers.

“Yes, ma'am,” said Frank Dowsing. “I read a book of his once about being a quarterback I checked out of the Tupelo library.”

“Put him down,” said Karen.

Jane Petty picked up her pen:

Y.A.

“Are you from Tupelo?” asked Frank Hains.

“I'm really from a little town outside Tupelo,” said Frank Dowsing. “Palmetto. I'm sure you've never heard of it.”

“I have. I went to Palmetto once when I was working for the W.P.A.,” said Miss Welty. “Churchgoers.”

“Eudora's the only saint you'll ever meet that doesn't go to church,” Miss Capers told my friend.

“Hush, hush, sweet Charlotte,” said Miss Welty, tapping her finger on the rim of her glass as a signal for Miss Capers to top her off with a little more bourbon. “Hush up.”

Frank Hains said it was time to pick our favorite writer from the list. I studied it and have to admit I could only figure out who five or six of them were supposed to be. “Who's C. P.?” I asked.

“Cavafy. That's one I came up with,” said Frank Hains.

“Of course you did,” said Miss Capers.

“I have to go with T. S. Eliot as my favorite on here,” said Jane. “He at least wrote a play.”

Karen said, “I'm tempted to go with Y. A. But I think I'll pick J. D. Salinger. Not because of Holden, but because of Franny and because of Zooey.”

“I'm for D. H. Lawrence,” said Frank Hains. “For the censorship issues alone. Kevin?”

“A. E. Housman,” I said.

“That's an odd pick, son,” said Miss Capers. “I was thinking maybe you were more an e. e. kind of boy. Why'd you pick him?”

“The preacher read a poem of his at my daddy's funeral when I was about six or seven years old,” I told them all. “My aunt Vena Mae made a fuss about how beautiful it was afterwards and insisted the family all get copies of it. The preacher obliged and my grandmother kept her copy in a drawer all these years. She gave it to me when I moved here to go to Millsaps. ‘To an Athlete Dying Young.'“

“I know that poem,” said Miss Welty. “There's a beautiful, simple line in it, if I'm recalling it correctly, describing the pallbearers at the young athlete's funeral: ‘townsmen of a stiller town.'“

“Yes, ma'am,” I said. “That's it.”

“You know Housman doesn't have an e in it,” she told me. “People are always making that mistake when they spell his name.”

“Jean Harlow once met Noël Coward,” said Frank Hains, getting out a carton of Seal-Lilly vanilla from the refrigerator's freezer compartment. “‘Oh,
Noël
!
Noël
!' she exclaimed,” he continued, pronouncing the name as if it were the French term for Christmas. “ ‘It's such an honor to meet you,
Noël!
' Noël Coward looked at her with not a little disdain and said, ‘Dear girl, the e is silent like the
t
in Harlow.' ” We laughed and all raised our hands when Frank asked who wanted ice cream.

“I saw your daddy play basketball once or twice, Kevin,” said Karen. “Have I ever told you that? I was at Millsaps at the same time he was at Mississippi College. Has he informed you that his father was also a sports star, Frank?” she asked my guest. Frank Dowsing shook his head and looked at me with a cocked eyebrow. He touched my leg beneath the table. “I came to see you, too, in a play at the Christian Center,” she told me, using the name for the auditorium at Millsaps that the students there preferred to shorten to the CC. “It was that infernal
Infernal Machine
by Cocteau that Lance Goss loves so much,” she said, naming the head of the theater department at Millsaps. “You were great, though.” She turned again to Frank Dowsing. “He played Anubis, the Jackal, the Egyptian God of Death, and wore this skimpy little costume that showed off his body. But I'm sure you've seen even more of the little jackal by now. I was in that damn play back when I went to school up the hill there. Back in ‘fifty-three or ‘fifty-four. I played Queen Jocasta.”

“Honey, you're still playin' her,” said Miss Capers. “Let's get back to this list. I was about to choose E. B. White because y'all all know how ol' Char can weave a web. But I think I have to go with P. D. James. Somebody's got to stick up for us women. She's the only dame on the list, as far as I can tell. Now
that's
a mystery. Mr. Dowsing?”

“May I choose someone not listed?” he asked, studying the page of initials.

“Sure,” said Miss Capers. “You've come up with yet another one we've missed?”

“W.E.B. DuBois,” he said.

“Well, if we're going to allow three initials then I'm going to have to go with that S.O.B. Henry Miller,” said Miss Welty. She and Miss Capers clinked their glasses. Miss Welty then turned the page of initials her way. She slumped deeper in her seat. “This is much too difficult. It really depends on what night I'm looking at such a list for me to come up with an answer for my favorite.”

“Try Sunday,” said Miss Capers. “It's Sunday.”

“Hush up,” said Miss Welty, still studying the list. “V. S. would kill me if he knew I were about to make this choice,” she said.

“Pritchett, not Naipaul,” Jane whispered to me, though I had no idea who either was at that point in my life.

“Sorry, Victor,” Miss Welty continued. “I have to go with E. M. Forster. A
Passage to India
tips the balance on Sundays. Have you started reading that, like I asked you to, Kevin?” she asked.
“Maurice
is not first-rate Forster, even though I understand the reasons why it would be the only work of his you've read,” she said, finally eyeing Frank Dowsing with the interest that the rest of her friends had been eyeing him all night. “Promise me—A
Passage to India.”

“Yes, ma'am. I'm writing a paper right now on
The Red Badge of Courage,”
I said.

Miss Capers moaned, “Ugggh,
college . . .”

Frank Hains served us all our bowls of Seal-Lilly ice cream. Karen Gilfoy poured the remaining bourbon in her glass over her two scoops of vanilla. The discussion turned to politics and the state's old warhorse senators up in Washington, John Stennis and James Eastland, and whether they were about to retire. Governor William Waller was roundly hailed for having the courage to honor slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers by proclaiming a Medgar Evers Day. Miss Welty, an early integrationist, was especially moved by Waller's actions since she had stayed up late the night of Evers's assassination in 1963 to write one of her most talked-about short stories for
The New Yorker,
“Where Is the Voice Coming From?,” a harrowing account of that assassination from the point of view of the killer. It meant a lot to her, that proclamation. The ladies also went on and on about how lovely Waller's wife was and what a great job she was doing restoring the governor's mansion. The list of initials on the table led to a discussion of writers who went by three names, and I told everyone that my mother used to read to me from
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
and
Sex and the Single Girl
as bedtime stories. “Katherine Anne Porter and Helen
Gurley Brown—well, that explains a lot,” said Miss Capers. Porter was one of Miss Welty's first champions and the two of them had a complicated friendship. I tried to get her to tell me some stories about Porter but she turned the conversation to Robert Penn Warren and the night she and Miss Capers had gotten blind drunk with him when he looked them up in Jackson.

Frank then put one of Ethel Waters's early 78-rpm recordings on the stereo, and again insisted she was one of the great geniuses of the twentieth century, though he hated that she had ended up appearing on Billy Graham crusades and “singing about that goddamn sparrow every chance she got.” In fact, the one time that Frank's publisher at the
Daily News
made him retract a column was when he ranted in print about Billy Graham preempting a broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera on a local television station. He had pictures of Ethel Waters framed in the house and had collected every one of her records he was able to find, storing them in their alphabetized place in the room that housed his extensive record library. “Waters is the Welty of my collection,” he said one night when he was showing me some of her prized LPs down in the “W” section. He always called her the Black Swan because that was the name of her first record label. “They all stole from the Black Swan,” he said that night when we were gathered around his kitchen table. “Mildred Bailey. Ivie Anderson. Connie Boswell. Even Ella. Did any of you ever see her on that episode of
Route 66
she did? One of her great performances. Better than
The Member of the Wedding.
Maybe even better than
Pinky.”
The Black Swan began to sing “Suppertime,” from the 1933 Irving Berlin and Moss Hart revue As
Thousands Cheer.
It's a song, Frank Hains pointed out when he first played it for me, about how a woman is going to tell her children that their father has been lynched. We all sat in silence and listened to her sing it.

“How've y'all been able to stand livin' in Miss'sippi all these years?” I asked when none of the raconteurs around the table seemed
to know exactly what to say at the end of the song, especially in the presence of the new person I had brought into their sphere.

Frank Hains got up to put a more upbeat Ethel Waters song on the stereo. “How about some ‘Heat Wave'?” he asked. “Eudora!” he shouted as he headed for his record library. “Didn't William F. Buckley ask you something like our resident little smart-ass there just had the audacity to ask us all, back when you were on
Firing Line?”

“Heavens to Betsy! Must we invoke that man's name tonight?” huffed Miss Capers, pushing her chair back and grabbing the empty bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken to throw in the trash. “I warned Eudora about going on that show,” she said, alluding to the
Firing Line
episode filmed at Mississippi's ETV studios that Miss Welty had agreed to appear on with Walker Percy because it was being filmed at ETV. Frank had directed for the station his own highly praised adaptation of several of her short stories, A
Season of Dreams,
and hosted a program there called
In Conversation with. . . .
Buckley, moreover, had himself agreed beforehand that politics would not be discussed, only literature. “Heavens to Betsy!” said Miss Capers again when she plopped back down.

“Betsy—that's a good name for him,” said Frank, reentering the kitchen as Ethel Waters began singing in calypso-like rhythms. “Henceforth at Bleak House he will forever be spoken of as Betsy Buckley. So . . . ,” he said, putting a hand on one of Frank Dowsing's shoulders and leaning against him, “when Eudora got on the set with Betsy he sandbagged her with a series of political questions. One of which, if I'm recalling this correctly, was something like, How can you as a person of
sensitivity
have lived in Mississippi during the time you've lived here? To which Eudora replied, in essence, ‘How could one not have?'“