The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (33 page)

“Your mom and I did that,” I said. “Mam and Paw tried to warn us, but it happened anyway. We were both at fault, but as time went by, something hardened. After a while, there was nothing I could do to cross the line between us. We couldn’t even talk about it. And now she’s gone. I so don’t want that to happen to you and Hannah.”

Claire sat in the leather armchair across from me, a tendril of hair falling out of her ponytail and over her forehead, watching me with wide eyes, listening intently.

“Hannah has not been doing right by you, and she needs to change,” I said. “But you need to try to understand what the past few years have been like for Hannah. She told me that she felt like an outsider and a misfit in the family sometimes. The things that come easy for you—feeling at ease with yourself and like you belong in this place—are hard for her.”

“Your mom and I weren’t as close as I wish we had been,” I said. “I was a jerk to her when we were young, and when we got older, she thought I was weird. We loved each other, but I’m not sure how much we liked each other. It’s too bad, because we can’t fix that now.”

Claire looked at me, blinking calmly.

“Your mom never knew that what she had, was what I wanted so much,” I said. “Your Mama knew who she was and where she was supposed to be. I’ve struggled all my life with that. I admired what she had and wanted to be like her. I really did. And I never told her that.”

Claire’s eyes widened.

“You wanted to be like Mama?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You
wanted
to be like Mama?!”

“Yes, I absolutely did.”

Relief flooded her face. I thought,
Maybe I’ve gotten somewhere tonight.

Reconciliation with my folks, my nieces, my town, and my past would not come quickly or without difficulty, but with patience it might. Though Ruthie’s death had the unanticipated effect of making this broader reconciliation possible, she and I would never be able to reach an understanding. She was gone, but I still strongly felt her presence, and not in a peaceable way.

We may have informally put aside our differences on her front porch that warm February morning in her first cancer week, but that did not explain why things were always so difficult between Ruthie and me. God knows I held no grudge against her, but I could not grasp why I was perhaps the only person on earth whom she didn’t treat with patience and understanding. As I had explained to Claire, at some point after our childhood, an invisible wall came up between her mother and me. We could talk over that wall, but could not breach it. I would have loved to have spoken intimately with Ruthie before the end, to have cleared things up between us, to make sure we were solid with each other. Ruthie wouldn’t have it. She wouldn’t talk about matters she found unpleasant, and after she fell ill, resisted having “serious” conversations, because that was the kind of thing a dying person
would do. What’s more, Ruthie had always been the sort who, having made up her mind about something, found it very difficult to question her own judgment.

So she died and I was left to wonder why I was such a bone in my sister’s throat. Now that I was home I was able to explore what wrong I might have done her, and why things went so wrong between us.

On a Sunday afternoon in early March Abby Temple sat in a leather armchair in my den. I poured her a glass of wine and we talked about her upcoming wedding to Doug Cochran. At a party in Abby’s honor a few weeks before, she had toasted Ruthie’s memory and gotten choked up talking about how much she would miss having at her wedding the best friend who had prayed so faithfully for her to meet someone. When she walked down the aisle later that month in the Methodist church to become Doug’s wife, she would carry in her wedding bouquet the photo of Ruthie and her dancing on the bar at Angelle’s Whiskey River Landing.

I took the chance to ask Abby why Ruthie had such a hard heart toward me. Abby took a deep swallow of her wine, set her glass down on the table between us, folded her hands in her lap, and said that yes, she was quite familiar with the tension between my sister and me. And yes, she said, I was the only person in the world Ruthie had no patience for.

“Remember how you said to me that you believed your dad saw your being so different as a rejection of him?” Abby said. “I think that’s how she felt. She never said that, but if you’d hear her talk, that’s the feeling you’d get.”

Because Ruthie took things so personally she never tried to understand things Julie and I would do that did not make sense to her, Abby explained. When Hannah came to visit us in Philly and we took her to the fancy French restaurant on Rittenhouse Square, Ruthie sniffed to Abby that our gesture to Hannah had been “extravagant.”

“It
was
extravagant!” I protested. “It was one of the most expensive
meals of my life, and the only time in two years in Philly that we went to a really nice restaurant. But we love Hannah and wanted to give her something she’d dreamed of. It was worth the money. I can’t for the life of me understand why Ruthie was against that.”

Abby moved to the edge of her chair and leaned forward.

“Rod, here’s something you probably don’t know about your sister,” Abby said. “Ruthie was the kindest, most accepting person, but she had something against wealth, and people with wealth. Anything having to do with wealth turned her off.”

Ah. That was news to me, and strange, too, because I have never been wealthy. True, I’ve always made more money than Ruthie, but I’ve also lived in far more expensive cities. I traveled for pleasure in Europe a fair bit, but I always did so cheaply, adding a leg onto a business trip, or traveling in the off-season and staying with friends. For Ruthie going to Europe was something rich people did. I could have spent twice as much to vacation in Florida, one of Ruthie’s favorite spots, and she wouldn’t have noticed.

“Ruthie couldn’t see how things could be different,” Abby said. “In her mind there was absolutely a right way and a wrong way. She couldn’t accept that the things you loved and wanted were different but also valid. There was right, and there was wrong. She was a lot like your daddy in that way.”

I had to agree with that. Because Ruthie was a public school teacher she took our decision to homeschool our children as a rejection. I can’t blame her for being naturally skeptical. Over the years, however, I explained to her on several occasions why we chose to do this, given Matthew’s Asperger’s and his intense emotional struggles. She listened politely, but refused to take me seriously, or engage beyond a level I found patronizing. I didn’t expect her to agree with me, necessarily, but I hoped to help her see that our decision was reasonable. She could not, or would not, do it—and judged us harshly.

A few days later I was having a cup of coffee with Mike in his
kitchen, and shared Abby’s take with Mike. Did he agree with Abby? He nodded his head yes.

“It hurt Ruthie that you left,” he said. “She just had the sense that family was everything, and we all stay here on the ridge together. Nobody ever leaves. And she never could understand how you could make a living as a writer.” My sister was a math person who hardly ever looked at the newspaper; she had no idea how hard I worked, or why my work was valuable. And she never asked. The fact that I could make a living by writing looked to her like a continuation of a pattern she had seen back in college when I wouldn’t go to class but still did well on a test.

It was frustrating to hear all this, and to think about how much closer Ruthie and I could have been if she had only been able to approach me, her brother, with the same empathy she relied on to help her understand and embrace the children in her classroom. Mike and Ruthie’s friends wanted me to know, though, that despite this sibling tension, Ruthie loved me fiercely and was proud of me, even though she wouldn’t admit it.

That she loved me I could accept—but that didn’t prove much. Ruthie would not have shirked what she would have seen as her familial duty to love her brother. My concern had to do with whether or not Ruthie thought I was sound; that is, if she believed that beneath all my cosmopolitan vices, I was a man of integrity. Despite her all-too-human flaws, I really believed my sister was a saint, and it kind of broke my heart that I could not share in the uncomplicated love and adoration the whole town felt for her. “It’s a sibling thing,” Abby said, trying to console me. Maybe so, but it stinks being the only guy in town who could tick off a saint.

All I wanted was a sign that even though she didn’t understand me or accept my ways, she at least thought I was good. If I could not be at peace with Ruthie’s memory, could I ever really be reconciled to my home? Ruthie, Paw, and the Land: the years had tangled them thickly
together in my imagination, like the ropy old vines that cling inseparably to the trunks of old oak trees deep in the swamp. Again I turned to Benedict, who had encouraged his monks to “not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

One’s Destination Is Never a Place

A few years back, feeling the generous uncle, I promised Hannah, “When you finish high school, I’ll take you to Paris.” It took a year past her graduation date, but I finally made good on my vow.

Hannah had never been overseas before. When I broke the news to her after dinner at our place one night that she would have a taste of April in Paris, she could hardly contain her excitement. I was pretty jazzed myself. After spending what should have been a joyous time in her life watching her mother die, Hannah deserved to have a fantastic trip, to have fun, and to be reminded that the world is a good and beautiful place, despite it all.

“One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things,” said Henry Miller, the expatriate American writer who lived in Paris. This is what Paris had long been for me, and what I hoped it would be for Hannah. Maybe I could pass down the love of France to the first generation of our family who never had the chance to know Aunt Lois and Aunt Hilda.

In my mind Paris stood for cosmopolitan beauty—art, the Gothic cathedral, the grand boulevards, the elegant food and wine—lightness,
liberty, and imagination. To me Starhill always meant natural beauty—which left me, an avid indoorsman, largely unmoved—everydayness, obligation, and a closed-mindedness that scorned imagination as artifice and the assertion of personal freedom as an abdication of duty. To be sure, that was
my
interpretation, not Hannah’s. Still I knew that her experience had been close enough to my own that she would gain a certain perspective from seeing Paris.

“Be careful,” Julie warned me. “Remember, Hannah’s Paris is not necessarily going to be your Paris. You don’t want to make her feel like she has to see things your way.” The message was clear: she’s your niece, not your acolyte. True, and important to keep in mind. It would do my young niece no good to cast off the burden of her late mother’s worldview, only to be shackled by her overbearing uncle’s.

We landed at Charles de Gaulle airport on the Saturday morning of Easter weekend, and found our way into the city, and to our little hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on the Rue de Lille, one block off the River Seine. I had chosen this neighborhood because it had been in Hemingway’s Paris, and I knew Hannah would recognize some of the place names. On the flight over she said that she wanted to go dancing, and to hear the music that Hemingway did. You really can’t, I said; Cole Porter and Josephine Baker are long dead. She looked disappointed.

“I’m just hoping that I’m a different person in Paris,” she said.

“You won’t be, not at first,” I said. “If you think you’re going to get off the plane and all the things you don’t like about yourself are gone, well, it’s not going to happen. Paris will change you, if you let it, but you’re not going to be able to tell how for a long time.”

After storing our suitcases in our rooms, we ambled around the corner and up the street to Le Voltaire, a homey Parisian café directly across the Seine from the Louvre. It was lunchtime, and we took a booth near the door. The sound of tinkling glasses, clattering silverware, and lilting French voices sounded like a cantata for flute and wind chime. In my halting French I ordered two glasses of red wine, a
bottle of water, and a
plat de fromage.
The server brought the cheese, and Hannah took a bite of raw-milk Camembert. Her face lit up.

“Oh my God, Uncle Rod, this is so good!” she said. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I’m finally in Paris!”

After lunch we crossed the Pont Royal and wandered past the Louvre. We walked to the Marais and met an old Parisian friend and her family for tea at Mariage Fréres. Then we walked over to the Place des Vosges, Henri IV’s seventeenth-century garden, and standing under the linden trees, waited for my friends Philippe and Beatrice Delansay to drive by to pick us up.

My friendship with the Delansays is the happy fruit of my long loneliness as a teenager in St. Francisville. I wrote to a pen-pal agency, which matched me with Beatrice’s sister Miriam, from Valkenswaard, a small town in the southern part of the Netherlands. We struck up a terrific epistolary friendship, and on my first trip to Europe, at seventeen, I visited Miriam and her family. In the years that followed I came to know the family and others in the Netherlands well, and visited many times. In 1996 I took Mam and Paw to Holland, and we all had a great time. When I became engaged to Julie it was important for the people I had come to think of as my Dutch family to meet her before we married, which occasioned another trip. In 1998 Beatrice and her fiancé, Philippe, a native Parisian, invited Julie and me to their wedding in the Loire Valley, which turned into one of the great adventures of our married life. I counted it a privilege to share these dear friends with Hannah.