Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir (29 page)

Frankye in white sits on the bottom step, a little flame. Later the house will burn. The matriarch, Big Mama’s mother, Catherine, looks stony. I’ve wondered if she, too, was capable of a rant or two. Why all the fire? My aunt Mary said the burning house in Vidalia was the last thing Big Mama saw clearly before her eyesight dimmed. Did she start the fire, too?

Do we have an inheritance of fire, the same way we all got her waxy skin? In winter our too-white legs turn the pale green of cut turnips. Frankye’s identity is housebound. Never able to convince Daddy to buy the big house she wanted, she coveted The House. Not, as for me, hills, pines, streams, rivers, but for
her wax, silk, canopies, silver, paint. She likes a gardenia, as I do, beside her bed. (
Baked from the same flour
.) For every drapery a cornice; for every plate a mat. A paper napkin never touches our lips.
Not as long as I’m in the mill business
. She draws patterns for needlepoint chair bottoms, serves quail with grits soufflé. When I was little she monogrammed my dimity doll dresses with the tiny cursive initials of the dolls’ names, Amanda Anne Mayes, Baby Girl Mayes. She has a sofa that looks as though Napoléon should perch on it, covered and re-covered. She collects hand-painted
Gone with the Wind
lamps, even though we all tell her they’re corny. Turn the doll upside down and the other pops out. It stands to reason that she’d want to destroy The House.

We cross into Georgia. The leaning oaks and pines trailing their moss in swamp water are romantic from a distance. Up close
the exposed branches twist out like arms and legs. Frankye, a floating island, roots dangling. Bald cypress stumps look like burned people standing in black water, with sun-polished knees sticking up. Trees rising on their own reflections. They are wrong and beautiful at once.

As soon as we’re home, I ask Frankye if she set the house on fire. She laughs but will not answer. My grandfather always said he would leave us my father’s fourth of his estate. So, my sisters also believe, Mother can begin her life again. She’ll go to Charleston for bridge tournaments, move to Atlanta and meet someone fascinating. I will go to Paris and write poetry. We feel the enormous lift of this Dickensian presence from our lives, a feeling that will prove to be temporary when his lawyer reveals the will to the whole assembled family.

Daddy Jack’s will was read in the lawyer’s office. As promised, my father’s share came to Frankye, but with a hitch. My mother will have only the small income on her portion of the estate during her lifetime; my sisters and I will inherit the bundle of money upon her death. Diabolically, or shrewdly, he put my mother in the same position he had been in:
We
, he thought, would be waiting for her to die so we could collect.

There was a good-bye to me, too. A list of subtractions from our inheritance was read out in detail—expenditures Daddy Jack made that he did not approve of. Among them, my telephone calls to boys at several fraternity houses at Emory, Tulane, and Florida State. “$2.37, call to Jimbo Taylor, $3.11 to Carter
Thibodaux, $6.80 to David Willcox.” He’d listed the minutes and time of day. My casual use of the telephone always drove Daddy Jack mad. I squeezed my hands together to keep from laughing. No one among the gathered relatives in black smiled, not even my aunt Mary Helen, who had Daddy Jack’s number.

No math whiz, Frankye knew right away that interest on one-fourth of the estate was not going to support us, much less send her on bridge cruises to the Caribbean. He had far less money than anyone thought, and everything was invested in the most conservative stocks. No provision was made for my “worthless” college expenses. Hey, Daddy, so much for taking a bullet for him! Larkin has a poem in which someone realizes he is ugly, unappealing, and no one ever will love him. “Useful to get that learned,” he concludes. Daddy Jack’s retort from the grave remains: You never know what someone silently stores up against you. Useful to get that learned.

D.J. the D.J., with that annoying habit of the dead, took a long time to cool off.

My father’s sister and one brother both have endless money but no one offers any help. My other uncle, always financed by Daddy Jack, recently has cleaned up his life and become a teetotaler, although he maintains that he “hasn’t had a lick of fun since.”

Clearly Mother could do the same, according to Hazel.
“Moral failure,” she murmurs. “Really, she’s an embarrassment and should get control of herself.” Yes, that’s rational. Rational doesn’t count with Frankye, but no one sees that. I’ve been smoldering mad at her for years. But I am whacked by her helpless bad luck. “Your parents owe you nothing,” my rich uncle says. Yes, not even love. Family. Those who hang you out to dry.

My mother has been the chief hostess of the family. What galls her most is all the times these aunts and uncles, who now look at us as though we exist at a great distance, over-ate at our laden table. The whole family had made fun of Hazel, who inquired at dinner what’s for supper that night. My uncle buys an immense chandelier for the Presbyterian church. He sometimes invites us to use his houses at Highlands and Daytona Beach. Hazel keeps her kitchen as a storeroom and eats out at every meal, though that has become difficult for her since integration started to hit Miami. She keeps a warehouse for her clothes. Charity begins somewhere else, not at home. My mother and I are two flies in amber. Hazel buys The House, what’s left of it, for almost nothing, and that little windfall from our one quarter sustains Frankye and me for the moment.

No one seemed to want it, so I drove back to Gainesville in Daddy Jack’s green Oldsmobile ’98. I collected forty-seven parking tickets.

Money or not, Daddy Jack’s removal blesses the air. I can breathe. Gertrude Stein said, “As everybody knows, fathers are depressing but our family had one.” Mine had two and both in their mildest forms were depressing. My father was maddening and unpredictable and violent but he was hospitable, wry (
Fitzgerald should be named “I heard”
), and generous with love and money. Daddy Jack was stingy and rigid. As a nine-year-old boy he sailed alone from England. His mother had died, his father gone ahead to America to manage a cotton mill. His aunt waved him off. A small boy with a satchel and a bag of apples. In the only early photo of him, his mother, Elizabeth Repton Mayes, gazes fondly down at him as he glares at the camera, mouth turned down, his tiny fists already clenched.

The story always touches me. Now and then he recalled being met by a redheaded stepmother who disliked him before he disembarked and proceeded to make his life miserable by criticizing every breath he took. Point of definition: one foot on the boat from England, other foot on the wharf in America. And, ah! How we learn.

“What’s on the agenda today?” he asked every morning. His route for the day did not vary. Derail him and he’d have to start over, beginning with his liquid egg and bourbon breakfast.

With both Daddy and Daddy Jack gone to the same plot of dirt at Evergreen Cemetery, my mother was at last free. She was fifty-one—attractive and vivacious, until the point each night when every little bottle said Drink Me. Down the rabbit hole, she’s Alice and she’s the Red Queen.

All junior year I take five courses a semester to atone for my sins. Dr. Folger is the first man I’ve ever met who is “a queer.” A small man in a large brown suit and gold glasses, he minces and gestures, rising to his tiptoes when he makes a salient point. His lectures are brilliant and I’m deep in love with his modern poetry course. At a conference on my Wallace Stevens paper, he asks, “Where are you from, Miss Mayes?” When I tell him Fitzgerald, Georgia, he says, “My God, isn’t that a bit much?”

In French class, we translate
Les Misérables
and
Lettres de Mon Moulin
. The instructor, whose accent is not that great, smirks that I speak French with a southern accent. After that I hide in the back row. I devour all the texts for world religion
and a double door swings open: Other religions are on a par with Christianity! Buddhism makes sense. Astronomy, which serves as a math requirement, collides with world religion. On nights of insomnia when I half-expect Frankye to materialize in the doorway and perform her sorcery, the unimagined vastness of the universe swirls through my brain. Every page in the astronomy text proves that I am merely a speck on a speck, so how to reconcile the importance of every sparrow that falls? Christianity, I fear, just isn’t up to a satisfactory explanation of little planet Earth spinning in a minor galaxy. Does Jesus on the cross for our redemption reach all the way out to where space bends and black mass, black holes, and endless other galaxies begin? In the planetarium, the moving pointer across the sky map works like a Ouija board, searching for an answer. The big question, it seems to me, is the one posed by Leibniz:
Why is there something rather than nothing
? And here the Buddhists beg off by offering only a belief in the motion of birth and death cycles, a kind of thermodynamic principle: What’s put in motion stays in motion; or, as I envision, the universe as a giant hoop snake. Aristotle seems to believe in the state of motion, too, except a force sets the motion in action. I like the idea of that unmoved mover. For first cause, the Bible offers a charming literal story that frankly begins to look quaint. But then, it is not that far from the unmoved mover.
Head in the clouds. Come down from the clouds
.

Religion becomes my minor. Except for architecture, which I don’t dare go near, English is the only major I can imagine. Look how James Joyce illuminates a defining moment, and what
an exact word for it: epiphany. Leap over to Virginia Woolf’s
moment of being
: the private distilled instant caught, a cup scooping running water. T. S. Eliot’s
Four Quartets
: My notebook fills with quotes about time past, time present. I’m whirling with the pleasure of so much to learn. My black-speckled composition books fill with quotes, questions, thoughts, ideas, fragments of poems.

The breakthrough class is the required logic.
Ad hominem, ad bellum, ad ignorantiam, post hoc ergo propter hoc—
ways to name what I know! Inductive, deductive. Up the ladder, down the ladder. How to think suddenly makes sense when you have precise language. How to analyze. In my family, we leap from A to D to F. We are walking fallacies. Ah!
Reductio ad absurdum
.