The Heaven of Mercury (29 page)

THE HEAVEN OF MERCURY

Brad Watson

READING GROUP GUIDE

PHOTOGRAPH OF MY GRANDMOTHER

My maternal grandmother, Margaret Maria (Maggie) Wells Watson, known to her grandchildren as Mimi, was married at sixteen—too young to know any better, according to her lights. My grandfather, a determined and persuasive young shoe salesman, had almost bullied her into marrying him, she said. A year into the marriage, this girl, who'd never been more than kissed on the cheek before her wedding night, was pregnant with her first child, my aunt Marjory. Mimi used to say her childhood just vanished.

I was always fascinated by Mimi, who lived to be ninety-three, and her hilarious stories. She told them in a disjointed, lighthearted, rambling fashion, punctuating them with gems such as the time I asked how she felt about my grandfather's infidelity (like his father, apparently, he got around), and she replied, “Well, it hurt, you know. But at least it kept him off of me.”

She hadn't really wanted to marry at all, didn't want to have children, not as young as she did, anyway. She couldn't stand the Watsons, her in-laws. Earl's father, an insurance salesman, was a reputed womanizer who'd killed his brother-in-law in a fight many years past; he spent two years in the penitentiary for manslaughter. He carried a little pearl-handled pistol in his jacket pocket until the day he died. Earl's siblings were always envious of him, especially his brother Klein, with whom Earl fought all the time, sometimes in the house. Mimi said Klein would storm in, raging, and Earl would leap up from the table, and they'd be whaling at each other in the living room. Her sisters-in-law were catty to her and insulted her all the time, took advantage of her, disparaged her character behind her back. According to Mimi, she was plagued by these people. Sometime late in her life, Earl's sister Myrtle wrote a novel (unpublished), a good portion of which was devoted to disparaging her sister-in-law, Mimi.

When Earl died of a heart attack in 1955, he left a wholly dependent wife who'd never worked a job, and a son (my father) he hadn't bothered to teach the business. Then someone began to mail her letters made of words cut from magazine headlines, accusing her of poisoning Earl. The letters threatened an exhumation and autopsy. “THE TRUTH WILL OUT!” one said. Mimi knew these letters came from Klein and his wife because Klein was furious that Earl hadn't left him a share in his two shoe stores. She was traumatized and embarrassed by these things, but nothing ever came of them. “Well, you know they're just crazy, Maggie!” her friends would say.

Only after Mimi's death in 1995 did I see this photograph, taken sometime in the mid-to late 1920s. I was trying to begin work on a novel that would become
The Heaven of Mercury
, and I had a vague idea that my grandmother could be the model for a main character, Birdie Wells Urquhart. But the book gave me fits, and I wrote the rough drafts of two other books in the meantime, just trying to avoid this one. I was finding it almost impossible to invent a story about someone who had been such a strong presence in my life, and so much herself, as an old person. I struggled to see her as a girl, flirting with boys, being desired by boys and men. This photograph, showing my grandmother in something like a flapper's dress, looking quite flirtatious as she leans coyly against the fancy car (no doubt my grandfather's—he had a weakness for new automobiles), allowed something of her old lady veneer to crack a little, and I began to imagine her life in a way I hadn't been able to before. And I began to weave some of her stories into a narrative, to elaborate upon them, and to invent others.

I also began more freely inventing things about characters based on other people in her life. I knew little about Mimi's housemaid of some fifty years, Velma Hubbard, but the woman was very sweet and kind, generous of spirit, and very rooted in the old ways of the racist South; I never could get her to stop calling me Mr. Brad. She and my grandmother were always arguing, bickering over little household things—they both got cantankerous in their old age. My grandmother fired Velma several times; Velma would simply let herself in the next morning with her key.

The character invented to become Birdie Urquhart's unrequited lover (Finus Bates) in the novel has no model, aside from sharing certain crotchety characteristics with me (I am not such an old man but act like one). So I was surprised when, after the book was done, my mother said there was a man who used to visit Mimi, and who cared enough about her to sit by her bedside when she was ill with various ailments. Mom didn't know if the man was in love with Mimi or not, but she wondered, even suspected he was. I was astounded: It almost seemed like life imitating fiction.

I don't think Mimi would mind my using her life as inspiration for a novel. She might tell me I got some things wrong, but she'd understand I was making those things up. She'd say she didn't want the facts, they were so awful, or that things weren't really so awful as that. Most likely she'd just repeat what she said after reading my first published story, when I was twenty-three: “Well, I know you're a good boy, anyway.” Meaning in spite of the awful things I wrote.

Q & A WITH BRAD WATSON

Where, or what, is “The Heaven of Mercury”?

The title of the novel comes from Dante's
Divine Comedy
, in “Paradiso.” I'm no Dante scholar, and I don't know the “Purgatorio” or “Paradiso” books as well as I know “Inferno,” and I don't know it as well as I used to. But early on in writing this book, when I was working with the idea of communion between the living and the dead, it occurred to me that Dante could be a model of sorts. Reading the books again I came across “The Heaven of Mercury” in “Paradiso” I thought it a lovely and fitting title for my story, and as it had to do with betrayal, all the better. The parallels, as it turned out, are a little vague, though Finus Bates is guided, in a sense, by Birdie Urquhart's spirit in his search for answers.

It's also everywhere in the book. In the characters' minds, their memories, in the presence of the dead in their waking and dreaming lives, in their communion with spirits, real or imagined, and in their ability to survive grief, loss, and rage with dignity and compassion for one another—for the most part. It is in a sense a real heaven, where those dead wander, which is near, what the character Finus Bates describes as their “presence in distorted slips of air that revealed, like the thin and vertical flaws in a lens, the always nearby regions of the dead.”

Is Mercury a real place, or a mythic one, like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpa County?

I don't want to compare myself to Faulkner, but Mercury is like Yoknapatawpa in the sense that it is modeled after my hometown, Meridian, Mississippi, with many liberties taken. Mythic to the degree that certain elements are broadened or simplified, yes.

Your descriptions of Mercury cover the better part of a century—from about 1906 to 1989. How have times changed or not changed in that kind of Southern town?

They've changed a lot, even though in appearance many small Southern cities and towns seem not to have changed much. Demographics, economics, social cauldrons, these have all been modified by changes from the civil rights movements to increasing urbanization and the death of small farms, and the move away from cheap-labor manufacturing (it's moved on to more fertile fields in developing countries).

Like the rest of the country, small towns and small cities in the South are being overrun with shopping malls, strip malls, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, and new supermarkets. The family-run hardware and lumber stores struggle or are forced out of business by Home Depot and Lowes. Restaurants fail often because people would rather eat at the chains, such as Western Sizzlin', Applebee's, Pizza Hut, or McDonalds.

In Meridian, many of the family cleaning businesses, paint stores, clothing stores, barber shops, lumber yards, scrap yards, bakeries, and specialty shops survive. The plumbers, builders, Peavey Electronics. I believe the newspaper,
The Meridian Star
, is still privately owned, though I may be mistaken. There has been a largely successful effort to revive the historic vaudeville theater downtown, though the little movie theaters (and the monumental Temple Theater, now used for special events) have given way to the chains around the downtown's perimeter. The churches thrive, of course; the South is still largely a region that respects and practices its religion. Meridian, for one, is not without an eclectic representation, with all manner of Protestant churches, an old and respected Catholic church, and a long-established synagogue that survived a Klan bombing in 1968; there may even be a mosque there now, for all I know. I moved years ago.

One thing that's changed, obviously, is race relations. How did that affect your portrayal of the book's African American characters, Creasie and Frank, and their relation to their white employers?

It didn't. 1950 is 1950, and the changes that have come since then have no bearing on the way things were then. I tried to write honestly about it. It was more difficult and risky, of course, to write from Creasie's point of view, to write about her and Frank from their perspective. I did the best I could, as any fiction writer would, to put myself in their place when I was writing about them. If 1950 is 1950, human beings are human beings; fundamentally, we are all alike in love, loss, disappointment, greed, desire, sympathy, and so on. Of course Creasie, like the character Birdie, is modeled after a person I knew, whereas Frank was entirely invented. So it was actually a little more difficult to write about Creasie, since I had to allow her character to go beyond or transcend the limited knowledge I had about the woman who inspired her.

Race relations are of course much better in the South these days, as they are in most of the country, but like elsewhere they're still far from perfect. There's a residual racism that lingers in this country, and small to mid-sized Southern towns and cities are no exception to that, though it may be more obvious there because racism is more of a tradition in the South. I say that ironically, but it's true.

The celebrated Southern tendency toward politeness has come to include racism; that is, it is there but it is not spoken of, mostly.

Faulkner's great novel
Absalom, Absalom!
famously ends with Quentin Compson in a cold dorm room at Harvard protesting to his roommate, “I don't hate the South! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!” You also left the deep South for Harvard—to teach there, after your first collection of stories,
Last Days of the Dog-Men,
was published. What were your own feelings about the South, looking back at it from Cambridge? Did you also feel you had to defend it?

Occasionally, the need or opportunity arose. Once at a dinner party, someone mentioned hunting, and all eyes swung to me, as the token Southerner who must obviously be the resident expert on such a barbaric topic. Of course, I was, even though I'm not a very good hunter.

I do think living here has given me a broader perspective on my home region. It helps sometimes to get some distance and look back. Mostly, it helps you to understand yourself a little better through seeing your home from a different place. When you go home to visit, you see and hear things you may not have noticed before, cultural tics you took for granted, and it gives you a different perspective on yourself. That's always good. I go home, and for the first few days I'm chafed by the Southerners I run into, their accents and manners or lack of them, their taste, their music, their cars, their big manicured lawns, the heat and humidity, the lack of things to do. But then I settle in and I love it again. I go back to New England, to Boston, and I am appalled by their particular nasal accents (some Southern accents are quite nasal, too), their gruff manners, the traffic, the noise, the crowded sidewalks, the parking nightmares, the sense that they really don't care if you come there or not and would prefer you didn't. But after a few days I settle in, begin to like the sense of anonymity, that my neighbors don't know or care what I'm up to, that there are several good coffee shops, pubs, and restaurants to choose from in walking distance, and I begin to pick up on the occasional presence of a certain real Yankee charm. There are things I love and hate about both places, depending on my mood.

We've already referred to Faulkner twice in this discussion. Other readers compare you to Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, saying your work is funnier than O'Connor's but darker than Welty's. Is the great Southern literary tradition a legacy or a burden? How did it influence your writing? Who would you like most to be compared to?

If those things have been said, I'm flattered, though I'd never consider myself a better writer than either of those two, in any sense. Harder to be funnier (or darker, for that matter) than “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” or “Good Country People” or “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” If I'm darker than Miss Welty, maybe I'm just more crude. I love the lovely darkness of “The Hitchhikers,” “No Place for You, My Love,” “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” the comic darkness of something like “June Recital.” I really don't believe I'm worthy of comparison to either writer, but I'd love to believe I've learned some things from them, and certainly both writers have influenced my own writing. The way Welty's stories plumb the mysteries without simplifying them—she leaves the mystery and the wonder intact, doesn't violate it but enhances it. O'Connor—I just wish I was nearly as smart as she was, as she is in her stories. She and Welty both, what beautiful minds. I have discovered that it is very hard to be funny in the way that O'Connor is funny; I've failed at trying a few times. But I do love her black humor, and the merciless way she exposes the truth in her stories. Who could not love the moment when the Misfit says the grandmother would've been a good woman if she'd had someone to shoot her every day of her life?